Page:The Elizabethan stage (Volume 3).pdf/357

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were unauthorized issues; from 1608 onwards, he himself published five with prefatory epistles. About this date, perhaps in the enforced leisure of plague-time, he also began to produce non-dramatic works, both in prose and verse, of which the Apology for Actors, published in 1612, but written some years earlier (cf. App. C, No. lvii), is the most important. The loss of his Lives of All the Poets, apparently begun c. 1614 and never finished, is irreparable. After 1619 Heywood is not traceable at all as an actor; nor for a good many years, with the exception of one play, The Captives, for the Lady Elizabeth's in 1624, as a playwright, either on the stage or in print. In 1623 a Thomas Heywarde lived near Clerkenwell Hill (Sh.-Jahrbuch, xlvi. 345) and is probably the dramatist. In 1624 he claims in the Epistle to Gynaikeion the renewed patronage of the Earl of Worcester, since 'I was your creature, and amongst other your servants, you bestowed me upon the excellent princesse Q. Anne . . . but by her lamented death, your gift is returned againe into your hands'. But about 1630 he emerges again. Old plays of his were revived and new ones produced both by Queen Henrietta's men at the Cockpit and the King's at the Globe and Blackfriars. He wrote the Lord Mayor's pageants for a series of years. He sent ten more plays to the press, and included a number of prologues, epilogues, and complimentary speeches of recent composition in his Pleasant Dialogues and Dramas of 1637. This period lies outside my survey. I have dealt with all plays in which there is a reasonable prospect of finding early work, but have not thought it necessary to discuss The English Traveller, or A Maidenhead Well Lost, merely because of tenuous attempts by Fleay to connect them with lost plays written for Worcester's or still earlier anonymous work for the Admiral's, any more than The Fair Maid of the West, The Late Lancashire Witches, or A Challenge for Beauty, with regard to which no such suggestion is made. As to Love's Mistress, see the note on Pleasant Dialogues and Dramas. The Epistle to The English Traveller (1633) is worth quoting. Heywood describes the play as 'one reserued amongst two hundred and twenty, in which I haue had either an entire hand, or at the least a maine finger', and goes on to explain why his pieces have not appeared as Works. 'One reason is, that many of them by shifting and change of Companies, haue beene negligently lost, Others of them are still retained in the hands of some Actors, who thinke it against their peculiar profit to haue them come in Print, and a third, That it neuer was any great ambition in me, to bee in this kind Volumniously read.' Heywood's statement would give him an average of over five plays a year throughout a forty years' career, and even if we assume that he included every piece which he revised or supplied with a prologue, it is obvious that the score or so plays that we have and the dozen or so others of which we know the names must fall very short of his total output. 'Tho. Heywood, Poet', was buried at St. James's, Clerkenwell, on 16 Aug. 1641 (Harl. Soc. Reg. xvii. 248), and therefore the alleged mention of him as still alive in The Satire against Separatists (1648) must rest on a misunderstanding.