Thomas Heywood and the classical tradition

By Manchester University Press

This volume offers the first in-depth investigation of Thomas Heywood’s engagement with the classics. Its introduction and twelve essays trace how the classics shaped Heywood’s work in a variety of genres across a writing career of over forty years, ranging from drama, epic and epyllion, to translations, compendia and the design of a warship for Charles I. Close readings demonstrate the influence of a capaciously conceived classical tradition that included continental editions and translations of Latin and Greek texts, early modern mythographies and the medieval tradition of Troy. They attend to Heywood’s thought-provoking imitations and juxtapositions of these sources, his use of myth to interrogate gender and heroism, and his turn to antiquity to celebrate and defamiliarise the theatrical or political present. Heywood’s better-known works are discussed alongside critically neglected ones, making the collection valuable for undergraduates and researchers alike.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Mar 9, 2021
• ISBN: 9781526140258

Book preview

Introduction: Thomas Heywood and ‘the antique world’

Janice Valls-Russell and Tania Demetriou

Heywood's women: a classical angle

‘Look for no glorious state; our muse is bent / Upon a barren subject’.¹

Expect no grandiose spectacle, no ‘divine’ poetry, Thomas Heywood tells his audience in his prologue to A Woman Killed with Kindness, first performed in 1603, with the first quarto published in 1607. Still less, perhaps, a dazzling display of classical references. Certainly, a cursory reading of the play would seem to suggest this, for explicit mythological or other classical allusions are few and far between. This may seem unsurprising, if one opts for a restrictive view of the play as a ‘domestic tragedy’. Yet recent reassessments of a ‘genre’ that was unknown to Heywood, since it was invented in the nineteenth century, invite us to take a closer, more questioning look at its classicism as well.² This prologue is probably, as Muriel C. Bradbrook has suggested, an instance of the rhetorical self-deprecation Heywood employs elsewhere in his paratexts.³ Diana E. Henderson is equally unconvinced by Heywood’s claims about the ‘barrenness’ of his subject, foregrounding instead his ability as ‘a skilled artist to craft a shapely narrative or symbolic allegory out of the facts of life’.⁴ Throughout his long career, as this volume shows, Heywood turned out generically porous writings for the stage and for print, many of which resist attempts at taxonomy. This ‘domestic tragedy’ is no different in this respect, we believe. And as with the majority of his oeuvre, one of the things its porousness productively draws in is the depth of its author’s classicism. At the heart of what John Webster termed his ‘right happy and copious industry’ – equal, in Webster’s view, to that of William Shakespeare or Thomas Dekker – lies an intimate and versatile familiarity with the classics.⁵ Algernon Charles Swinburne paid tribute to this in a sonnet to Heywood that ends with the lines from Shakespeare’s As You Like It that supply the title of our introduction: ‘how well in thee appears / The constant service of the antique world!’⁶ As David M. Bergeron notes in his study of Heywood’s civic pageants, ‘his assimilation of the materials of antiquity is admirable, and the whole subject of his classicism begs for a very full study’.⁷ Yet Heywood’s classicism has hitherto received scant attention. It is the aim of this volume to remedy this neglect and open up this area for more investigation.

Figure 1 Peter Lely (1618–80), ‘Peter Pett and the Sovereign of the Seas’, c. 1645–50 (oil on canvas).

In the introduction to her edition of Woman Killed, Margaret Jane Kidnie draws attention to the way its central theme may relate the play to another of Heywood’s tragedies, The Rape of Lucrece, which was first published in 1608 and may have been performed a year earlier.⁸ Both explore a host–hostess–seducer triangle in the intimacy of a domestic setting: a Yorkshire gentleman’s home in Woman Killed, a Roman patrician’s in Lucrece. Shared structural, rhetorical and staging devices add up to something resembling a template. Like Collatine, Frankford boasts about his wife Anne’s qualities: ‘I have a fair, a chaste, and loving wife: / Perfection all, all truth, all ornament’ (iv.11–12). Unlike Collatine, he expresses his self-satisfaction in private, but both husbands publicise before a packed playhouse what belongs to the world of intimacy, exhibiting and thereby exposing their wives’ virtues like wealthy possessions. What Collatine brings upon himself, dramatic irony inflicts on Frankford as, a couple of scenes later, the seducer, Wendoll, reveals his lust for Anne. He muses: ‘I’ll drive away this passion with a song. / A song? Ha, ha, a song!’ (vi.4–5); the reference to singing, in the context of a game of seduction with fatal consequences for the victim, looks forward to the songs that frame Tarquin’s assault on Lucrece, in an instance of what Bradbrook described as an absence of ‘compelled decorum’ which serves to critique male insensitivity to sexual aggression.⁹

At the end of the same scene, Wendoll invokes Jupiter in his brief attempt to resist temptation, casting himself as a potential villain:

Thou god of thunder,

Stay in thy thoughts of vengeance and of wrath

Thy great almighty and all-judging hand

From speedy execution on a villain –

A villain, and a traitor to his friend.

(Woman Killed, vi.21–5)

If this glances back at Tarquin’s longer, tepidly self-deprecatory speech in Shakespeare’s Rape of Lucrece, it also anticipates Heywood’s own briefer version of the speech, just before the rapist enters Lucrece’s chamber and carries her offstage:

SEXTUS: Lucrece, th’art mine:

In spight of Jove and all the powers divine.

He beares her out.

(Lucrece, lines 2061–2)¹⁰

Strikingly, both plays map a domestic ‘cartography’ of seduction. The staging of the home is materialised through references to keys, doors and halls,¹¹ with a stress laid on the nuptial chamber at the epicentre of the household, what Frankford feverishly calls ‘my polluted bedchamber’. The bed is a central prop, an inset stage to which a traumatised Lucrece draws the attention of her husband and his friends:

LUC: Stain’d, polluted, and defil’d.

Strange steps are found in my adulterate bed.

(Lucrece, lines 2431–2)

Tragedy is the result of adultery in Woman Killed, rape in Lucrece. Yet Wendoll the seducer is not unlike Sextus the rapist in convincing, if not forcing, Anne to allow him into the marital chamber. Moreover, his cynicism at the end of the play, when he hopes to return in grace at court even as he himself says of Anne, ‘she’s gone to death’ (xvi.126), may recall Sextus’ callous leave-taking of Lucrece:

Nay, weepe not, sweet, what’s done is past recall,

…

… what hath past

Is hid from the worlds eye, and onely private

Twixt us, faire Lucrece.

(Lucrece, lines 2090, 2093–4)

But there is an even more disturbing parallel, as Kidnie notes. The staging of Frankford’s return to his house, ‘simultaneously householder and intruder’, conveys a sense of threat, and his progress towards the bedchamber in the dead of night powerfully resembles that of Sextus Tarquin: ‘Heywood structures Sextus Tarquin’s approach towards the sleeping Lucrece in Rape in a near identical manner to Frankford’s journey through the silent home’, a moment that is preceded in both plays by a scene between servants who ‘discuss the odd goings-on’ before being ordered off to bed.¹² Heywood’s mapping of the rapist onto both the seducer and the wronged husband suggests a view of gender in which women are above all at risk, a risk that is analogous whether the aggressor is an unconscionable rapist, a reckless seducer or a kind-killing husband. This troubling analogy chimes with the queasy subplot of Woman Killed, in which Charles tries to persuade his sister Susan to yield, effectively, to being raped by Acton. The domestic environment turns out to be as liable to put women in danger of violence as those who intrude on it.

As emerges from several contributions to this volume, women are often at the centre of Heywood’s traffic with the classics, in his plays, narrative poems (Oenone and Paris, Troia Britanica), translations, prose works such as Gynaikeion or the short poetic compositions within it. Heywood was not averse to erotic, especially Ovidian, playfulness, as in Troia or in the Ages dramatic cycle, but this was not incompatible with empathy towards women, and M. L. Stapleton shows in chapter 2 how, as a translator, Heywood ‘reconstructed [Ovid’s] Ars amatoria so that it was less unfavourable to women’. ‘In his depiction of women’, Bradbrook notes, ‘Heywood was not only sympathetic but subtle’.¹³ Though he does not wholly escape misogynist representations (he cites Helen as an instance of ‘turbulent and combustious women’),¹⁴ when he reports such discourses from classical authors, it is often, as he says in the opening chapter of A Curtaine Lecture (1637), all the better to unpick the arguments of ‘these satyrists against women’.¹⁵ His portrayal of Helen herself in 2 Iron Age shows her willing to embrace death and pass herself off as Polyxena to avoid the young girl being killed by Pyrrhus.¹⁶ From Heywood’s epyllion Oenone and Paris (1594) to his last works, his view of women for the most part reflects what he writes in his preface to The Exemplary Lives … of Nine The Most Worthy Women (1640): ‘that it is a kinde of duty in all that have had mothers, as far as they can to dignifie the sex, which in my γυναικείον or history of women, I have strived to doe with my utmost minerva’.¹⁷ In his Marriage Triumphe, which he published in 1613 to celebrate the wedding of Princess Elizabeth and Prince Frederick, Elector Palatine, he radically rewrites agency in the myth of Pygmalion, in order to celebrate the mutual, life-giving power of marriage:

… his faire hand he extends

To ceaze her ivory palm, which as he warmes,

She breathes into him many thousand charmes

Of loves, affections, zeale, cordiall desires,

Chast wishes, pleasures, mixt with deep suspires,

Passions, distractions, ecstasies, amazes,

All these he feels, when on her eies he gazes.¹⁸

Heywood was interested in famous women whose stories could be culled either directly from classical, biblical or historical sources, or from compendia of such sources. He gives prominence to those versions that enable him to recover, or invent, a voice for these women, even when the course of literary history may have silenced or relegated them to the margins. One such figure is Oenone, discussed by Katherine Heavey in chapter 1. Indeed, it is from the outset, with Heywood’s epyllion and his translation of Ovid, that this revisionary attitude to women may be traced. As Stapleton writes in chapter 2, by translating and ‘incorporating Loves Schoole into his subsequent polemical and dramatic work, Heywood strove to present an Ovid relieved of his misogynist reputation, reconfigured into the kind of man Heywood desired him to be’.

This attitude goes together with a probing of masculine identity and male interactions, as Heavey has studied elsewhere:¹⁹ whether through the heroic and mythical feats of figures such as Achilles and Hector, in descriptions of battles in Troia and their staging in The Iron Age, or the mythologised celebration of young men such as Prince Henry of Wales and Frederick, the Elector Palatine.²⁰ Heywood’s fascination with mythological stories often went hand in hand with a distanced, tongue-in-cheek tone in the writing, that could nevertheless simultaneously invite empathy. Gently ironic rather than outright satirical, Heywood took pleasure in staging intertextual in-jokes with his readers, as Heavey shows in her study of Oenone and Paris, in chapter 1; for example, he critiques Paris’ valour by importing Venus’s martial metaphor from Shakespeare’s poem, and exposes his subject’s duplicity when Paris recycles his letter to Helen when trying to appease Oenone. Heywood’s male heroes frequently emerge as anti-heroes, vulnerable, unreliable or violent. As Kathleen E. McLuskie notes, ‘the Age plays … seem to move from the confidence of The Golden Age to the sense of decline from heroism evident in the final play [The Iron Age]’.²¹ In chapters 5 and 7 respectively, Richard Rowland and Yves Peyré trace the genesis of Hercules’ anti-heroic features in The Brazen Age while in chapter 6 Charlotte Coffin shows how Heywood draws attention to the contradictory features of Paris or Achilles in The Iron Age by playing on the disjunctions between the author’s sources and leaving them deliberately apparent: these ‘clashes’, she argues, ‘are deliberate – both a self-conscious highlighting of multiple versions, and an invitation to adopt a critical viewpoint on heroism’.

Through an interplay of multiple voices and the variety of perspectives they offer, Heywood questions received views around gender, whether they concern heroism or chastity. He emphasises contradictions between versions rather than downplaying them, enriches his characters’ psychology and range of emotional expression by inviting into his text echoes of other voices his audiences may have read or heard, and thereby invites a wide range of responses. In the case of Woman Killed, a similar effect is realised by inviting classical echoes into the Yorkshire setting of his ‘barren subject’. The voice of Chaucer’s Criseyde may be heard behind that of Anne casting herself as a counter-exemplum of faithfulness:²² ‘O women, women, you that have yet kept / Your holy matrimonial vow unstained, / Make me your instance’ (xiii.136–8); one might hear, too, Shakespeare’s Troilus at the agonised moment of discovering that Cressida could be unfaithful: ‘Instance, O instance!’ (xvii[V.ii].148).²³ The moment confirms the fears Anne had voiced, as she yielded to Wendoll: ‘This maze I am in / I fear will prove the labyrinth of sin’ (vi.161–2). The duplication of the classical topos of the labyrinth links her to Seneca’s Phaedra, another tragic, potentially adulterous, wife who, in John Studley’s translation, connects her desire for Hippolytus with the ‘crooked compast labyrinth’ and the ‘maze and dungeon blind’.²⁴ The implications burst upon Anne when she realises that her children are to be removed from her. And when Frankford banishes her to his country manor, through his resolve ‘with usage / Of more humility [to] torment thy soul, / And kill thee, even with kindness’ (xiii.149–51), another Senecan classical paradigm seems to resurface in this ‘torment’ he is inflicting upon her, that is the domestic equivalent to the ‘caeco carcere et saxo’ or ‘unlit, rocky dungeon’ (line 988)²⁵ to which Clytemnestra banishes Electra at the end of Seneca’s Agamemnon. Both Electra – whose last words in the play are ‘concede mortem’, ‘grant me death’ (line 994) – and Anne call upon death as the ultimate form of release.

The Senecan darkness of doom-laden genealogies thus overhangs the discovery scene in an otherwise banal Yorkshire household where spectators may simultaneously enjoy ludicrous moments, as when Wendoll emerges in his nightshirt and runs off the stage – to escape being run through with Frankford’s sword:

Enter WENDOLL, running over the stage in a nightgown, he [FRANKFORD] after him with his sword drawn; the Maid in her smock stays his hand and clasps hold on him. He pauses awhile.

FRANKFORD: I thank thee, maid; thou, like the angel’s hand,

Hast stay’d me from a bloody sacrifice.

(Woman Killed, xiii.sd, 62–3)

As Alan C. Dessen points out, the issue here is not an attempt at ‘realism’, domestic or otherwise: instead, Heywood conflates the conventions of comedy and moral allegory to ‘produce a striking theatrical effect that calls attention to a decision at the centre of the play’, namely ‘to leave Wendoll to his guilty conscience and to kill his wife with kindness’.²⁶ This is enriched by classical undertones. Wishing unrevealed what he has been at pains to uncover, Frankford perceives his home as a microcosm of the universe. In what T. S. Eliot, no admirer of Heywood, grudgingly acknowledges as a ‘fine speech’,²⁷ Frankford would have the sun ‘draw his coach backward’ (xiii.52) and the ‘seasons call’d again’ (54) – yet another Senecan topos, which conveys the disorder of the world in tragedies like Thyestes, Agamemnon and Phaedra, where adultery, incest and murder are rife. Frankford’s analogy, disproportionate as it might seem in a ‘domestic’ setting, reveals genuine distress (‘O Nan, O Nan’ (xiii.111)), while at the same time bringing into the play the universe of classical tragedy, in which agency is always more complicated than characters are willing to acknowledge. That tragic framework makes more salient the fact that he had a part (unwittingly or not) in his wife’s unfaithfulness, and that his decision to banish her is his own, and not a vagary of Fortune. Indeed, his attempt to sidestep his responsibility establishes a kinship with his rival Wendoll, who abandons any pretence to morality in his pursuit of Anne: ‘Some Fury pricks me on; / The swift Fates drag me at their chariot wheel’ (vi.101–2). Classical references thus become a moral screen behind which both men seek to hide. But when Wendoll invokes Orpheus as he observes Anne’s banishment from afar, his classical culture reveals a greater awareness of his situation than he would consciously acknowledge:

WENDOLL. So poets write that Orpheus made the trees

 And stones to dance to his melodious harp,

 Meaning the rustic and the barbarous hinds

 That had no understanding part in them,

 So she from these rude carters tears extracts,

 Making their flinty hearts with grief to rise,

 And draw down rivers from their rocky eyes.

(Woman Killed, xvi.53–9)

Wendoll’s opening lines closely follow Ovid’s Metamorphoses (XI.1–2), and his ensuing parallel between the carters’ empathetic response to Anne, and Orpheus’ ‘rustic’ audience, turns to the practice of glossing Ovid. What Wendoll does not comment on, is his choice to liken Anne, a distraught, adulterous wife separated from her husband and family, to Orpheus mourning Eurydice, an exemplum of mutual, faithful love. By giving him those lines, Heywood creates a poignantly discordant perspective. If the parallel to Orpheus produces in the spectator and the reader a sense of an ampler empathy with Anne, Wendoll’s callously distant words are contrastingly revealing. He expresses no personal sorrow, remaining a removed, uninvolved onlooker. The insight offered by the classical reference thus reflects in troubling ways on the character who introduces it. Strikingly, then, the classical knowledge displayed by the two men in the seduction triangle is equally inappropriate: both seek to deflect attention away from their role in this domestic tragedy, revealing, even as they map their own situation onto that of mythical others, a lack of empathy and a singular disinclination for introspection.

Woman Killed offers a rich case study of how to read Heywood’s non-classical plays through a classical lens, and how a non-classical play may in turn shape the ambience and characters of a classical play. Heywood was well aware that classical stories could provide patterns and tropes for non-classical plays or narratives; and he could fashion his classical drama by drawing on dramaturgical practices worked out in his other plays. He gives Lucrece’s story, taken from Livy and Ovid, an immediacy that creates a kinship with Anne Frankford, through the hauntingly achieved household setting and its props. Indeed, Lucrece may also be viewed as killed with kindness – her own, as Holaday notes:

[B]y clever, persistent emphasis on Lucrece’s kindness to Sextus, Heywood again accentuates the brutality of the Tarquins. The betrayal of the wife of his friend and kinsman would have made Sextus a villain; but the betrayal of a Lucrece who is so solicitous for his comfort and so unsuspecting banishes him completely from our sympathy.²⁸

Here is a picture of ‘perfect’, conventional womanhood that is unnervingly vulnerable to violence. Holaday does not suggest a kinship with Anne Frankford, but the way Sextus dramaturgically absorbs the fatal danger to Anne from both seducer and ‘kind’ husband might do. In the resonance between these two plays we find not so much a common ‘template’, as a process of parallel thought in which nothing less than an ethics of gender becomes subtly sculpted. The role of parallel in Heywood’s classicism is one to which we shall return.

Prolific yet ‘conspicuously neglected’

This volume thinks across the range of Heywood’s works from the perspective of his engagement with the classics, building on recent critical work on diverse aspects of his prolific output, and inspired by the exciting developments in the study of early modern classical reception and translation over the past couple of decades. The classics, as we have seen, relate in an intimate and defining way to Heywood’s responses to genre, at the same time as providing us with insights into the laboratory of his imaginative process. They enable us to probe his approach to his varied audiences and his self-presentation as a poet, playwright and designer. By focusing on Heywood’s multifaceted reception of the classics, we therefore hope to contribute to making a definitive break with dismissive portrayals of Heywood like T. S. Eliot’s, for whom he was ‘a typical literary jack-of-all trades of the epoch’, not to mention ‘gifted with very little sense of humour’.²⁹ Heywood was, precisely, atypical in the diversity and sheer quantity of his output, and he was fascinatingly atypical in his classicism. As for humour, it is a staple of his engagements with classical myth.

Eliot’s attitude to Heywood was not uncommon in its time: L. C. Knights, for instance, described his imagery as veering between the ‘inept’ and the ‘commonplace’.³⁰ But others, like Swinburne and Arthur Melville Clark, were more sympathetic, as Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt had been.³¹ Bradbrook returned, in a fragmentary yet constructive fashion, to Heywood in her several studies of Elizabethan drama.³² More recent, revisionary critical studies of Heywood have tended to focus on his non-classical works, and even this has very often been piecemeal.³³ A handful of individual plays has tended to get the lion’s share of critical attention. There has, nevertheless, been a notable enlivening of interest in Heywood since the 1990s, especially from the point of view of gender, as witnessed by essays, sections on Heywood within broader studies and editions of his works.³⁴ Richard Rowland’s landmark volume, Thomas Heywood’s Theatre, 1599–1639: Locations, Translations and Conflicts (2010) has significantly enriched our understanding of Heywood’s drama. Rowland has also attended to the role of the classics in Heywood’s work, suggestively arguing, for example, that his appropriation of Plautus in The Captives is a response not simply to the ancient dramatist, who famously discusses the topic of tragicomedy, but also, simultaneously, to the new mode of tragicomedy instantiated in Pericles by Heywood’s close contemporaries, Shakespeare and George Wilkins.³⁵

Rowland’s study of Heywood’s theatre has come at a time of renewed interest in companies and playhouses, including research into Heywood’s favourite playhouse, the Red Bull.³⁶ His monograph includes a discussion of Heywood’s pageants, an area that has also received attention from others. In particular, Bergeron’s research into the seven pageants Heywood designed for the Lord Mayor’s Shows between 1631 and 1639 has brought to light the variety he achieved even within an established format. Importantly, from our point of view, Bergeron attributes this largely to Heywood’s ‘intense interest in and use of mythology and ancient traditions’.³⁷ Last but not least, Heywood’s activity as a translator of Ovid has been studied by Stapleton, who has broken new ground by establishing Heywood’s authorship of Art of Love and Remedy of Love, unattributed to him in his lifetime.³⁸ But his other translations of Latin and neo-Latin texts deserve further study, as do his more indirect forms of engagement with Greek. Heywood does not seem to have translated Greek texts directly, accessing them rather through Latin translations and bilingual Latin-Greek editions, as Camilla Temple’s contribution (chapter 9) shows in her discussion of Lucian, and Tania Demetriou and Janice Valls-Russell show in chapters 8 and 12, in relation to various prose authors like Athenaeus, Herodotus and Plutarch. Heywood also seems to have had access to Homer through vernacular translations and adaptations.³⁹ This volume’s consideration of Heywood benefits from research carried out in the reception of Greek, a ‘newly excavated realm’ during the Renaissance which, as Tanya Pollard notes in chapter 10, was ‘[s]imultaneously familiar and strange … [offering] both a corrective response to Roman models, and a point of origin for them’.

Out of the work, then, of that ‘[m]ost conspicuously neglected of Renaissance dramatists’, as Bradbrook termed him, his classical output has been particularly neglected.⁴⁰ Except for the studies mentioned, Heywood’s classically inspired or inflected writings have received scant attention: there exists to date no single volume on the subject, whether collective or by a single author, and no scholarly edition of the Ages plays outside Arlene W. Weiner’s edition of The Iron Age.⁴¹ His Apology for Actors has attracted interest not for its ubiquitous classicism, which Pollard and Chloe Kathleen Preedy discuss in chapters 10 and 11 respectively, but for its defence of the theatre, its first-hand account of the early modern stage and its discussion of dramatic empathy, especially as they relate to Hamlet.⁴² His classical compendium, Gynaikeion, the subject of Demetriou’s chapter 8, has not received a dedicated study for nearly a century. And his involvement in devising the iconological programme of the royal ship Sovereign of the Seas, which Valls-Russell unpacks in chapter 12, has hitherto been merely touched upon, mainly by naval historians. Such blanks may be linked in part to the fact that the first edition of his complete works is only in its initial stages. Texts such as Troia, Pleasant Dialogues and Dramma’s or Gynaikeion have never been readily available in scholarly editions. Heywood’s visibility on the stage, meanwhile, is limited to a small number of dramas, foremost of which are Woman Killed and The Fair Maid of the West: plays such as Lucrece or those in the Ages cycle have very rarely been performed since his own time.⁴³

Speaking at a conference in Paris in 1983, Bradbrook made a case for further research into Heywood’s work, striking a self-deprecatory note that he might have appreciated:

To my uninstructed mind, the fifty years of his dramatic career offer an unexplored field for the modern sophisticated resources of theatrical archaeology and sociology, knowledge of the technique of Renaissance printing which computer research supplies, and modern linguistic interests to unite for a joint exploration in depth.⁴⁴

A significant breakthrough in Bradbrook’s terms is the collaborative work which Yves Peyré has led over a decade, to produce the first scholarly edition of Troia.⁴⁵ The research that has gone into this edition and the workshops and conferences around it have contributed to making this collective volume possible. It has reshaped our knowledge of Heywood’s reading and working habits, uncovering, for example, how Heywood closely followed William Caxton’s Recuyell while simultaneously drawing directly on classical authors and finding much of his inspiration in mythographies and chronicles. When discussing Heywood, then, we need to take the classical tradition in its broadest sense: his perspective also includes a ‘not-so-classical tradition’ of ‘endless rewritings’, as Coffin notes in chapter 6. In line with the blueprint established by Peyré and his team, our discussion of Heywood’s classically inflected activity adopts this broader understanding of the classical, to explore the form of Heywood’s source-texts and the uses they enabled, questions of translation, interpretive traditions and their influence, and the writing processes this broadly conceived classicism inspired. What emerges is an intermingling of dramatic savvy, intellectual engagement and political opportunism, underwritten by a rare ability to combine the morally serious with the downright ludicrous.

Heywood’s classical agendas were multiple. His translations sought both to entertain and to instruct. His plays, poems and pageants offered textual and visual entertainment. His epics and compendia organised and inscribed classical material in broader historical chronologies that also provided entry-points into the present through context, contrast and the safe distance of myth and history. And his pageants and panegyrics celebrated and memorialised the present: they included funeral elegies for Prince Henry and James I; the epithalamium for the marriage of Princess Elizabeth, James’ daughter, and Prince Frederick, Elector Palatine; and a pamphlet on the Sovereign of the Seas (1637). But as the contributions in this volume make clear, these different areas of work are not sealed off from each other, and it is this combination of multiplicity and porousness in Heywood that makes him so fascinating and entertaining. Three illustrations encapsulate this. The first is the cover illustration chosen for this volume, a detail from ‘Peter Pett and the Sovereign of the Seas’, by Peter Lely, painted c. 1645–50 (Figure 1). This painting features the royal ship, launched in 1637, for which Heywood designed a complex iconographic programme that he described in a pamphlet – this is discussed in chapter 12. The second illustration is the title-page woodcut for The Iron Age (Figure 2), which has Hector and Ajax hurling (respectively) a boulder and an uprooted tree at each other, with the walls and roofs of Troy, and the triangular tents of the Greek camp in the background: its design is simultaneously comedic and suggestive of larger-than-life heroes not unlike the giants that once peopled Britain, whom only the descendants of Trojans like Hector could defeat. Finally, the frontispiece of 2 Iron Age (Figure 3) features a medieval-Tudor Troy, dominated by the Trojan horse out of which the Greeks are emerging: the broken gateway through which the horse has entered frames the top half and right-hand sides of the page, and suggests a ruined antique arch that brings to mind pageant imagery, or etchings of Roman monuments ‘[w]ith sodaine falling broken all to dust’.⁴⁶ Encompassing the sublime, the poignant and the ludicrous, these three illustrations offer visual representations of the richness of Heywood’s classical universe.

Heywood’s career: the classical perspective

The interest of Heywood (c. 1573–1641) in the classics is perceptible throughout a career that has impressed critics for ‘the extraordinary amount, and the hardly less extraordinary diversity, of his literary labours’.⁴⁷ This diversity has often been overshadowed by his prolific output as a playwright, Heywood having famously claimed to have had ‘either an entire hand, or at least a maine finger’ in the writing of more than 200 plays.⁴⁸ His life is viewed (reasonably enough) through the lens of his career as an actor-playwright with the Earl of Worcester’s Men, who played at Philip Henslowe’s Rose Theatre and later absorbed Oxford’s Men to reform as Queen Anne’s Men, performing mainly at the Red Bull Theatre.⁴⁹ Yet his story may also be viewed as a chronology of his engagement with the classics, the first surviving record of which would be his studies at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he matriculated in 1591. His period at Cambridge, which may have been cut short by his father’s death in 1593, was probably decisive for his future activities as classicist as well as dramatist: Heywood acknowledges in Apology for Actors (1612) that ‘[i]n the time of my residence in Cambridge, I have seene tragedyes, comedyes, historyes, pastorals and shewes, publickly acted, in which the graduates of good place and standing have bene specially parted’.⁵⁰

Figure 2 Hector and Ajax fighting before the walls of Troy. Frontispiece, The Iron Age (London: Nicholas Okes, 1632), [sig. Ar].

Figure 3 The horse enters Troy. Frontispiece, The Second Part of The Iron Age, from The Iron Age (London: Nicholas Okes, 1632), [sig. Ar].

He seems to have moved from Cambridge to London in 1593, just as the vogue for mythological epyllia was taking readers and printing houses by storm. His first published incursion into myth was the 1594 Oenone and Paris. And it may be in 1598 that Heywood completed his translation of Ovid’s Art of Love, even though no extant edition seems to predate the 1625 ones.⁵¹ We know very little about the subject-matter of his plays from this period.

His interest in myth and the classics becomes even more manifest a decade or so later. As the new century set in, Heywood began to enjoy considerable success as a printed playwright; by 1616, according to Lukas Erne, he was in this respect the most successful dramatist after Shakespeare and this held true up to the closure of the theatres in 1642.⁵² Clark speculates that ‘the success of several of his plays on the stage and after publication may have encouraged Heywood to work more definitely literary than in his own estimation he had yet undertaken’.⁵³ Turning to the classics appears to have been a way of doing that. Between 1607 and 1613, they were central to his production. Almost at the same time as he wrote Lucrece (1607, first published in 1608), he was translating Sallust’s Conspiracy of Catiline and Jugurthine War (1609), with an extensive ‘Epistle to the reader’, translated from Jean Bodin’s Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem (1566).⁵⁴ A cluster of publications relates to the Troy tradition and the rich web of myths surrounding it: his epic, Troia, appeared in 1609 and was followed by the Ages cycle on stage, between 1611 and 1613.⁵⁵ Also from this time, his Apology (1612) is not only packed with classical anecdotes, but discusses the architecture of the playhouse against the historical perspective of Greek drama, thereby establishing what Preedy calls ‘spatial markers of continuity’ (chapter 11). In addition, as Pollard discusses in chapter 10, Heywood ‘looks to Greece especially for the origins of acting, which he locates provocatively in the charged figure of Hercules’, who reperforms his father Jupiter’s ‘worthy and memorable acts’ (Apology, sig. B3r). A close relationship between Apology and the Ages plays thus comes through in the figure of Hercules, on which Rowland and Peyré elaborate in chapters 5 and 7 respectively. Though Apology differs from Troia in all kinds of ways, then, the two are linked as ambitious classical endeavours, and indeed both employ the epic convention of invoking the Muses for inspiration and legitimacy.

A decade later comes a third and quite different classical cluster, covering the period from the mid-1620s to the end of Heywood’s life. Several editions of a translation of Ovid’s Art of Love appeared in 1625 without acknowledging the translator – Stapleton has identified this as being by Heywood (mentioned in the previous section of this chapter). This creative period is marked by Heywood’s several large compendia, all of which draw on classical, biblical and historical material: Gynaikeion (1624), a collection of ‘Various History Concerninge Women’ organised in nine books, named after each of the Muses; The Hierarchie of The Blessed Angells (1635), a gathering of religious, astrological and allegorical knowledge, narratives and legends, also organised in nine books named after so many angels; and Heywood’s answer to the medieval tradition of the nine (male) worthies, The Exemplary Lives and Memorable Acts of Nine the Most Worthy Women (1640). During this period, he also wrote Pleasant Dialogues, published in 1637 but probably already completed in 1635. Here, Englishings of dialogues and plays by neo-Latin Renaissance authors appeared alongside additional material from his own earlier plays and translations of Lucian. As Temple discusses in chapter 9, the focus on Lucian is shared between this collection and Hierarchie, but also looks back to the Ages plays, offering yet another instance of the way classical interests forge telling connections across Heywood’s diverse writing modes and his different creative periods. Several indications suggest that his earlier classically themed plays continued to be popular. Lucrece, first printed in 1608, saw its fifth reprint in 1638, with additional songs. Between 1617 and 1622, The Golden Age ‘either in its original form or in the conflated adaptation entitled The Escapes of Jupiter’ (which combines scenes from it and Silver Age) seems to have been part of the Cockpit repertory; in 1623, Escapes was apparently performed by Prince Charles’s Men at the Red Bull.⁵⁶ The Iron Age was published in 1632 for the first time, potentially suggesting a revival, and certainly linked to a plan by Heywood to publish the entire Ages cycle in a single, ‘handsome volume’.⁵⁷ He wrote one last play, Loves Maistresse: or, The Queen’s Masque, which dramatises the story of Cupid and Psyche from Apuleius’s Golden Ass; it was first performed in 1634 and published in 1636.⁵⁸ By then, he had become known for a different area of work. Between 1631 and 1639, he devised pageants for seven of the annual Lord Mayor’s Shows, the 1639 one being the last staged in London before the execution of Charles I. As mentioned above, many of these were classically inspired, as was his design of the allegorical programme of Charles I’s warship, The Sovereign of the Seas (1637).

Attempts to establish a detailed chronology of Heywood’s writings have been complicated by critical debate that essentially concerns his classical output: Lucrece, the Ages plays and Ovid’s Art of Love. Of these, the plays, as we have seen, belong to the same central period of his career. Arguments seeking to trace their writing to an earlier period of juvenilia may in part reflect discomfort with productions that unsettle generic categorisations by playing up the comedic potential of classical material that is more conventionally associated with earnest tragedy. This would be analogous to the unease David Womersley has noted in critical discussions of If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody, Heywood’s two-part play on Elizabeth. Part 1 is more gravely historiographical and protestant in outlook, in the continuity of John Foxe’s Arts and Monuments; part 2 is a London ‘medley of materials and tones’ reminiscent of city comedy that closes with the victory over the Spanish Armada. Womersley argues that the differences in setting, emphasis and tone are to be understood as building up to a ‘troubled thoughtfulness’ about the monarchy, its relations with the city and the limited capacity of royal power to effect change.⁵⁹ Like Kidnie, Womersley invites scholars to resist the compartmentalisation of Heywood’s writings into convenient categories. Such a methodology proves equally apt for the investigation of classical influences in Heywood.

In his introduction to his edition of Lucrece, Holaday argues that the play belongs to the category of juvenilia, and was written much earlier than 1608, the year when the play was entered in the Stationers’ Registry and published, having possibly been performed in 1607. He advances what he considers to be a number of internal and external clues: an ‘extravagance in sentiment and speech’ (p. 8) that contrasts, in his view, with the mature dramatic technique developed in a play like Woman Killed; the likelihood of Heywood writing a near-immediate response to Shakespeare’s poem, first published in 1594; a reference to a Lucrece play in Michael Drayton’s Legend of Matilda, a poem also published in 1594; and a dramatisation of the Lucrece story performed in 1599 in Strasbourg, a city frequently visited by the English player Robert Browne. In 1607 Heywood, would have gone on to overhaul his earlier text, working from a manuscript owned by Browne, introducing an echo of Macbeth, which he may have seen performed a few months earlier.⁶⁰ However, there is to date no evidence that Drayton’s reference to a Lucrece play is to an ur-version of Heywood’s.

Revisiting old debates about the dating of the Ages plays, David Mann connects the props needed to stage The Silver Age and The Brazen Age with some of the flying equipment featured in the Admiral’s Men’s inventories of 1598, inviting connections with two lost plays that were revived that same year, 1 and 2 Hercules.⁶¹ Similarly, Douglas Arrell attempts to trace the genesis of four of the Ages to lost plays of the mid-1590s which Henslowe mentions in his Diary. In two articles, Arrell seeks to demonstrate that The Silver Age and The Brazen Age were an expansion of what he posits were Heywood’s earlier 1 and 2 Hercules, and that he was also the author of Troye, which grew into 1 and 2 Iron Age. Arrell’s theory leads him to an otherwise unsubstantiated and unconvincing early dating of George Chapman’s first translation of the Iliad, and the argument that Heywood saw a manuscript of it as early as the mid-1590s.⁶² Arrell’s argument in favour of an earlier Troye play by Heywood also inverts the chronology of influence between him and Shakespeare, with the latter borrowing features from Heywood rather than the other way round.⁶³

One stumbling block, of course, is the absence of those earlier texts. Arrell offers close readings of the extant plays and unravels their webs of influence, while acknowledging the speculative nature of his approach, that involves ‘clumping together a name and a text that otherwise would be considered two separate entities’.⁶⁴ In the absence of concrete evidence, the contributors to this volume have chosen not to go down those speculative paths in our assumed chronologies.⁶⁵ In fact, as some of the chapters show, an examination of Heywood’s engagement with the classics brings to the fore a knack for drawing the dramatic potential out of stories and incidents that was notably enriched by his scholarly interest in surveying, compiling and juxtaposing sources and texts. This, we feel, undermines Arrell’s argument in favour of earlier dating which would invite a reading of Troia as elaborating on dramatic material, rather than inspiring the plays’ condensed, tonally mixed dramatisations of rhetorically and visually effective passages from it.

The evidence does suggest that Heywood chose to print several of his Ages plays in 1611–13, soon after Troia. This seems to make them linked projects at this moment in his career, but in a different sense. We believe that his concern to leave traces in print became linked in great part to his self-awareness as a classicist. It seems almost mysteriously convenient that alongside these classical publications, at least one of which (The Golden Age) was, Heywood claimed, accidental, there appeared a pirated version of his translation of Ovid’s Ars amatoria under the title Loves Schoole. Certainly, this publication came in time for him to draw attention – in the preface to his Brazen Age (1613) – to his authorship of Art of Love and Remedy of Love, and to claim that these translations had been brazenly appropriated by ‘a pedant about this towne, who, when all trades fail’d, turn’d pedagogue’, one Henry Austin. Heywood had already used parts of his translation of Art of Love in Canto IX of Troia and in Apology.⁶⁶ Around the same period, he complained against William Jaggard, who had lifted his translation of the Ovidian Epistles from Paris to Helen and Helen to Paris