INTRODUCTION TO THE CAPTIVES; OR, THE LOST RECOVERED.
In Sir Henry Herbert's MS. Office-Book, under date Sept. 3rd, 1624, is the entry:—"for the Cock-pit Company[44] a new play called the Captive [sic] or the Lost Recovered, written by Hayward," i.e., Heywood. The lost recovered! Lost for two centuries and a half was this comedy of dear Tom Heywood, until I recovered it from Egerton MS. 1994. I am proud to have rendered this service to a gentle poet who has given me many hours of delight.
The play is without title or author's name in the MS. After reading the first page I judged that the author was Heywood, and this impression was soon confirmed beyond all doubt. In the MS. the present play is immediately followed by a piece called Calisto, which consists of scenes from Heywood's Golden Age and Silver Age. I have elsewhere mentioned (Vol. ii. p. 419) that Calisto and The Captives are written in the same desperately difficult handwriting,—peculiar to these two plays, and not found in any other part of the volume. There can be no doubt that whoever transcribed Calisto transcribed also The Captives. But from internal evidence alone—putting aside the testimony afforded by the handwriting, and ignoring the entry in Sir Henry Herbert's Office-Book—any competent reader could plainly perceive that the play is Heywood's. In the very first scene—in the conversation between Treadway and Raphael—we feel at once the charm of that hearty "Christianism" which is never absent from Heywood's work. There is no affectation in Heywood; he is always natural and simple, though occasionally the writing sprawls.
Everybody knows the droll description in Heywood's English Traveller of the "Shipwreck by Drink,"[45]—how some unthrift youths, carousing deeply, chanced to turn their talk on ships and storms at sea; whereupon one giddy member of the company suddenly conceived that the room was a pinnace, that the sounds of revelry were the bawlings of sailors, and that his unsteady footing was due to the wildness of the tempest; the illusion spread among his companions, and a scene of whimsical confusion followed. In The Captives, ii. 2, we have a similar conceit suggested:—
Scrib. Such was the grace heaven sent us, who from perill,
Danger of lyfe, the extreamest of all extreames
Hathe brought us to the happy patronage
Of this most reverent abbott.
Clowne. What dangers? what extreames?
Scrib. From the sea's fury, drowneing; for last night Our shipp was splitt, wee cast upon these rocks.
Clowne. Sayd in a jest, in deede! Shipwreck by land! I perceive you tooke the woodden waggen for a ship and the violent rayne for the sea, and by cause some one of the wheels broake and you cast into some water plashe, you thought the shipp had splitt and you had bene in danger of drowneinge.
The main story of The Captives is borrowed from Plautus's Rudens, many passages being translated almost word for word. It will be remembered that in the English Traveller Heywood was indebted to another of Plautus's plays—the Mostellaria. I have not been able to discover the source of the very curious underplot of The Captives.
The MS. from which the play is printed bears every appearance of being a play-house copy. Numerous passages have been cancelled, seemingly (for the most part) by the hand of some reviser. In most instances I have restored the cancelled passages to the text—though the task of deciphering them has been cruelly difficult.