Thomas Heywood
born 1574?, Lincolnshire, Eng.
died Aug. 16, 1641, London
English actor-playwright whose career spans the
peak periods of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama.
Heywood apparently attended the University of
Cambridge, though his attendance there remains
undocumented. After arriving in London sometime
before 1598, he joined Philip Henslowe’s
theatrical company, the Admiral’s Men, and was
subsequently active in London as a playwright
and actor for the rest of his life. He claimed
to have had “either an entire hand, or at least
a maine finger” in 220 plays. Of these, about 30
survive that are generally accepted as wholly or
partly his.
Most of Heywood’s plays are theatrical
mélanges employing two or more contrasted plots,
poorly unified and liberally laced with
clowning. They are sentimental in theme but
realistic in setting and reveal an affectionate
regard for all the daily sights, sounds, and
activities of London. He produced such romances
as The Captives and A Pleasant Comedy, Called a
Maidenhead Well Lost (both in 1634); such
adventure plays as The Fair Maid of the West
(1631); and seven lord mayor’s pageants,
completed between 1631 and 1639. He also wrote
masques, mythological cycles, and chronicle
plays. The most popular of his history plays, If
You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody (1605–06), is
about Elizabeth I.
Heywood’s art found its finest expression in
the field of domestic sentiment. His
masterpiece, A Woman Killed with Kindness
(1607), is one of the earliest middle-class
tragedies. His plays were so popular that they
were sometimes performed at two theatres
simultaneously. His charming masque Love’s
Mistress (1636) was seen by Charles I and his
queen three times in eight days.
Heywood also wrote many books and pamphlets
that are now of interest chiefly to students of
the period. His most important prose work was An
Apology for Actors (1612), an account of actors’
place and dignity and their role in society
since antiquity.
