1874. The Dramatic Works of Thomas Heywood. 6 vols. (Pearson Reprints). [All the undoubted plays, with Edward IV and Fair Maid of the Exchange; also Lord Mayors’ Pageants and part of Pleasant Dialogues and Dramas.]
1888. A. W. Verity, The Best Plays of Thomas Heywood (Mermaid Series). [Woman Killed with Kindness, Fair Maid of the West, English Traveller, Wise Woman of Hogsdon, Rape of Lucrece.]
Dissertations: K. L. Bates, A Conjecture as to Thomas Heywood’s Family (1913, J. G. P. xii. 1); P. Aronstein, Thomas Heywood (1913, Anglia, xxxvii. 163).
The Four Prentices of London. 1592 (?)
S. R. 1594, June 19. ‘An enterlude entituled Godfrey of Bulloigne with the Conquest of Jerusalem.’ John Danter (Arber, ii. 654).
1615. The Foure Prentises of London. With the Conquest of Ierusalem. As it hath bene diuerse times Acted, at the Red Bull, by the Queenes Maiesties Seruants. Written by Thomas Heywood. For I. W. [Epistle to the Prentices, signed ‘Thomas Heywood’ and Prologue, really an Induction.]
1632.... Written and newly reuised by Thomas Heywood. Nicholas Okes.
Editions in Dodsley2, 3 (1780–1827) and by W. Scott (1810, A. B. D. iii).
The Prologue gives the title as True and Strange, or The Four Prentises of London. The Epistle speaks of the play as written ‘many yeares since, in my infancy of iudgment in this kinde of poetry, and my first practice’ and ‘some fifteene or sixteene yeares agoe’. This would, by itself, suggest a date shortly after the publication of Fairfax’s translation from Tasso under the title of Godfrey of Bulloigne, or The Recouerie of Ierusalem in 1600. But the Epistle also refers to a recent revival of ‘the commendable practice of long forgotten armes’ in ‘the Artillery Garden’. This, according to Stowe, Annales (1615), 906, was in 1610, which leads Fleay, i. 182, followed by Greg (Henslowe, ii. 166), to assume that the Epistle was written for an edition, now lost, of about that date. In support they cite Beaumont’s K. B. P. iv. 1 (dating it 1610 instead of 1607), ‘Read the play of the Foure Prentices of London, where they tosse their pikes so’. Then, calculating back sixteen years, they arrive at the anonymous Godfrey of Bulloigne produced by the Admiral’s on 19 July 1594, and identify this with The Four Prentices, in which Godfrey is a character. But this Godfrey of Bulloigne was a second part, and it is difficult to suppose that the first part was anything but the play entered on the S. R. earlier in 1594. This, from its title, clearly left no room for a second part covering the same ground as The Four Prentices, which ends with the capture of Jerusalem. If then Heywood’s play is as old as 1594 at all, it must be identified with the first part of Godfrey of Bulloigne. And is not this in its turn likely to be the Jerusalem played by Strange’s men on 22 March and 25 April 1592? If so, Heywood’s career began very early, and, as we can hardly put his Epistle earlier than the opening of the Artillery Garden in 1610, his ‘fifteene or sixteene yeares’ must be rather an understatement. There is of course nothing in the Epistle itself to suggest that the play had been previously printed, but we know from the Epistle to Lucrece that the earliest published plays by Heywood were surreptitious.
Greg, Henslowe, ii. 230, hesitatingly suggests that a purchase by Worcester’s of ‘iiij lances for the comody of Thomas Hewedes & Mr. Smythes’ on 3 Sept. 1602 may have been for a revival of The Four Prentices, ‘where they tosse their pikes so’, transferred from the Admiral’s. But I think his afterthought, that the comedy was Heywood and Smith’s Albere Galles, paid for on the next day, is sound.