The Elizabethan Stage, Vol. 3

by E. K. Chambers

ENTERTAINMENT

Astraea. 1592 (?)

In Davison’s Poetical Rapsody (1602, S. R. 28 May 1602) is ‘A Dialogue betweene two Shepheards, Thenot and Piers, in Praise of Astrea. Made by the excellent Lady the Lady Mary Countesse of Pembrook at the Queenes Maiesties being at her house at —— Anno 15—’.

S. Lee (D. N. B.) puts the visit at Wilton ‘late in 1599’. But there was no progress in 1599, and progresses to Wilts. planned in 1600, 1601, and 1602 were abandoned. Presumably the verses were written for the visit to Ramsbury of 27–9 Aug. 1592 (cf. App. A).

JASPER HEYWOOD (1535–98).

Translator of Seneca (q.v.).

THOMAS HEYWOOD (c. 1570–1641).

Heywood regarded Lincolnshire as his ‘country’ and had an uncle Edmund, who had a friend Sir Henry Appleton. K. L. Bates has found Edmund Heywood’s will of 7 Oct. 1624 in which Thomas Heywood and his wife are mentioned, and has shown it to be not improbable that Edmund was the son of Richard Heywood, a London barrister who had manors in Lincolnshire. If so, Thomas was probably the son of Edmund’s disinherited elder brother Christopher who was aged 30 in 1570. And if Richard Heywood is the same who appears in the circle of Sir Thomas More, a family connexion with the dramatist John Heywood may be conjectured. The date of Thomas’s birth is unknown, but he tells us that he was at Cambridge, although a tradition that he became Fellow of Peterhouse cannot be confirmed, and is therefore not likely to have begun his stage career before the age of 18 or thereabouts. Perhaps we may conjecture that he was born c. 1570, for a Thomas Heywood is traceable in the St. Saviour’s, Southwark, token-books from 1588 to 1607, and children of Thomas Heywood ‘player’ were baptized in the same parish from 28 June 1590 to 5 Sept. 1605 (Collier, in Bodl. MS. 29445). This is consistent with his knowledge (App. C, No. lvii) of Tarlton, but not of earlier actors. He may, therefore, so far as dates are concerned, easily have written The Four Prentices as early as 1592; but that he in fact did so, as well as his possible contributions to the Admiral’s repertory of 1594–7, are matters of inference (cf. Greg, Henslowe, ii. 284). The editors of the Apology for Actors (Introd. v) say that in his Funeral Elegy upon James I (1625) he claims to have been ‘the theatrical servant of the Earl of Southampton, the patron of Shakespeare’. I have never seen the Elegy. It is not in the B. M., but a copy passed from the Bindley to the Brown collection. There is no other evidence that Southampton ever had a company of players. The first dated notice of Heywood is in a payment of Oct. 1596 on behalf of the Admiral’s ‘for Hawodes bocke’. On 25 March 1598 he bound himself to Henslowe for two years as an actor, doubtless for the Admiral’s, then in process of reconstitution. Between Dec. 1598 and Feb. 1599 he wrote two plays for this company, and then disappears from their records. He was not yet out of his time with Henslowe, but if Edward IV is really his, he may have been enabled to transfer his services to Derby’s men, who seem to have established themselves in London in the course of 1599. By the autumn of 1602 he was a member of Worcester’s, for whom he had probably already written How a Man may Choose a Good Wife from a Bad. He now reappears in Henslowe’s diary both as actor and as playwright. On 1 Sept, he borrowed 2s. 6d. to buy garters, and between 4 Sept, and 6 March 1603 he wrote or collaborated in not less than seven plays for the company. During the same winter he also helped in one play for the Admiral’s. It seems probable that some of his earlier work was transferred to Worcester’s. He remained with them, and in succession to them Queen Anne’s, until the company broke up soon after the death of the Queen in 1619. Very little of his work got into print. Of the twelve plays at most which appeared before 1619, the first seven 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.

Collections

1842–51. B. Field and J. P. Collier, The Dramatic Works of Thomas Heywood. 2 vols. (Shakespeare Society). [Intended for a complete edition, although issued in single parts; a title-page for vol. i was issued in 1850 and the 10th Report of the Society treats the plays for 1851 as completing vol. ii. Twelve plays were issued, as cited infra.]