, those of the non-extant The Blind eats many a
Fly; Christmas comes but once a year; Joan and my Lady.
Fly; Christmas comes but once a year; Joan and my Lady.
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v06
287.
? By Fleay, who, I think, is successfully controverted by Greg, Henslowe's Diary,
vol. II, p. 173.
3 See bibliography.
- vol. I, pp. 282–3.
5 As to Churchyard's Shore's Wife in A Mirror for Magistrates, cf. vol. I,
pp. 182 and 198. It is open to question whether Chettle and Day's play of Shore
(“wherein Shore's wife is written'), acted in 1602, was an independent piece of work;
in Rowe's Jane Shore (1714), which, at a recent date, was still to be seen on the
stage, no trace of a connection with Heywood's play is apparent.
## p. 91 (#109) #############################################
If
you
know not me
91
explanation. Heywood's treatment of the figure of the erring
wife, whose goodness of heart is attested by her openness to
melting charity, and by her sorrow for her sin, as well as that of
the high-minded and forgiving husband, is full of fine feeling ;
and it is to be regretted that, near its close, the episode should
be marred by the unnecessary fool's play of Jockie and Jeffrey,
with which the dramatist thought it his duty to gratify his
patrons. The minor character of Mistress Blague, Jane Shore's
sunshine friend, is admirably drawn. As for the death of husband
and wife, it is sentimental drama of the purest water, but none
the less in its place for that.
As it stands, Heywood's other chronicle play, If you know not
me, You know no bodiel: Or, The troubles of Queene Elizabeth,
surreptitiously printed from a stenographic eopy in 1605, and
revived in 1631, near the time of the publication of the author's
England : Elizabeth, is, so far as Part I is concerned, little
better than a jumble of misprinted fragments. It is clear, at
the same time, that this portion of the work must, at best, have
been a crude ad captandum treatment of Elizabeth's experiences
before her accession, following its text-book, Heywood's own mono-
graph Englands Elizabeth, in depicting the martyr-like rectitude
of the Protestant princess, who suffered tanquam ovis in adversity,
and who, after her fortune had turned, received from the hands of
the lord mayor her prize and palladium-an English Bible. What
availed the doubledyed animosity of the ruthless Gardiner against
a fortitude so innocent that even king Philip was loth to be
unkind? Repeated dumb-shows and some very unsophisticated
clownery helps on the action. Part II, which is much better
preserved, was not better worth preserving. After a long and
tedious treatment of the magnificence of Sir Thomas Gresham,
and the reckless prodigality of his nephew Jack, we have, as a
sudden episode, the attempt against the queen's life by William
Parry (which was plotted in 1583—4)*; whereupon, a chorus, pro-
fessing to bridge the interval between 1558 and 1588, brings us to
1 The phrase, which the instincts of the publisher may be supposed to have suggested
as a title, seems to have been used proverbially; in Part I of Edward IV, Hobs the
tanner applies it to himself.
Queen Elizabeth also figures as the last of the three Women Worthies among
the Christians' in Heywood's Nine Most Worthy Women of the World. Englands
Elizabeth was not published till 1609, a date that may account for the freedom with
which certain actions of Henry VIII are narrated, though not, perhaps, for the
contrast drawn (s. a. 1547) between the sweet lady' Elizabeth's determination to
remain unmarried, and what may be said of women in general. '
* This episode is also treated by Dekker in The Whore of Babylon.
9
.
6
## p. 92 (#110) #############################################
92
Thomas Heywood
the year of the Armada But nothing follows except a rather
bald account of this climax of Elizabethan glories, finishing with a
succession of 'posts,' recalling with a difference, the äryyelor of the
Persae. No doubt the whole of this production was brought out
hurriedly soon after the death of the great queen, having to serve
its purpose tant bien que mal; and, though it is not without
details of interest and contains at least one passage of real poetic
feeling? , it bears the fatal mark of haste.
A third dramatic composition of the same class which has been
ascribed to Heywood is the play entitled No-Body, and Some-
Body. With the true Chronicle Historie of Elydure, which was
entered in the Stationers' register in 1606, and must have been
performed before 1604. But, though Heywood's authorship seemed
unquestionable to Fleay, stronger evidence than that which satisfied
him seems requisite before we burden the dramatist's reputation
with this ascription. The main plot, taken from Geoffrey of Mon-
mouth, of king Elidure's threefold accession to the British throne,
is of the antique cast of The True Chronicle History of King Leir;
the by-plot which gives its name to the play is an elaborate
development of the grim old jest of Ouris, which savours of the
personifications familiar to the moralities and, like them, has a
satirico-didactic aim .
To the same early period in his career in which Heywood pro-
duced examples of a species soon to become all but obsolete belongs
a series of plays from his hand which in subject seem to associate
themselves with the tastes of more learned audiences than those
for which he had thus early shown himself ready to cater. But,
in the preface to The Iron Age—the last of The Four Ages in
which he dramatised a long series of classical myths from Saturn
and Jupiter down to Ulysses, who, alone among the Greek kings
banded against Troy, survives to speak the epilogue—he expressly
tells us that these plays were
often (and not with the least applause) Publickely Acted by two Companies
appon one Stage at once, and have at sundry times thronged three severall
Theaters, with numerous and mighty Auditories.
There is every reason for believing that Parts I and II of Hercules,
* See Tawny-coat's apostrophe to the earth, out of which his spade is to procure
his sustenance, beginning
Hard world, when men dig living out of stones. (Para II. )
? Viz. the spelling ey for ay or I, which he had observed to be peculiar to Hey.
wood. It may be added that the references to games of cards (11. 1528 7. ) recall a
scene in A Woman Kilde with Kindnesse, and that the author of No-Body, and some-Kody
was evidently familiar with London.
3 See the bibliography as to this play.
## p. 93 (#111) #############################################
The Four Ages
93
performed by the Admiral's men as new plays from May 1595, are,
respectively, The Silver Age and The Brazen Age of Heywood's
series? ; but Fleay's daring identification of Selio and Olimpio
(Caelo et Olympo? ), performed by the same company in 1594,
with The Golden Age, and his conjecture that Troye, performed
by them in 1596, is Part 1, or an earlier and shorter edition of
both parts, of The Iron Age, must remain questionable. In any
case, these plays are more invertebrate than the most loosely
constructed of chronicle histories; and not only is the number of
characters very great, but it might seem as if, to any audience far
away from Cam or Isis, even the indefatigable exertions of old
Homer' as presenter and chorus, aided by occasional dumb-shows,
would have proved inadequate. There is, no doubt, a good deal of
life and stir in the action—the amorous scenes, indeed, are often
very highly coloured-quite apart from the stimulus of occasional
unexpected parallels and a large amount of clowning. But
it is incontestable that these plays offer a significant measure of
the imaginative powers on which an Elizabethan dramatist could
reckon in his audience. Homer might safely venture, in Hey-
wood's phrase, to unlock the casket of which the learned kept the
key; and there is something contagious in the opening boast of
the poet-magician, that he had 'raised out of the earth'the gods
who served the playwright as his puppets.
Proceeding in chronological sequence, we now arrive, among
Heywood's extant undoubted plays, at a group in which the
earliest in date is his acknowledged masterpiece, A Woman Kilde
with Kindnesse. It should, however, be noted that, on the strength
of the occurrence of some Latin ribaldry, both in The Wise-woman
Of Hogsdon, which is probably Heywood's, and in the popular
How a man may chuse a good Wife from a bad (published anony-
mously in 1602), Fleay confidently asserts that the two plays must
be by the same author. Some further indications of Heywood's
authorship of the second of the pair might be sought in its general
tendency and tone, and in at least one touch of true human kind-
ness in his best manner", as well as in the humour of Pipkin, which
See Greg's Henslowe, vol. 11, p. 175, and of. ibid. pp. 180 and 284.
2 Not only do Tytan and Saturn, in The Golden Age, irresistibly recall Esau and
Jacob; but, in The Silver age, the audience is apprised that the prolongation of
night, which favours Jupiter on his visit to Alcmena, also serves Joshua in his battle
against the Canaanites. In The Golden Age, the clown informs Jupiter (when in
search of a father) that the parish' ought not to be troubled with him.
* The courtesan's sense of shame in taking the wronged wife's place at table
(act 10, sc. 3). This play, which could not have been written without a knowledge of
the tomb scene in Romeo and Juliet, is printed in vol. ix of Hazlitt's Dodsley.
## p. 94 (#112) #############################################
94
Thomas Heywood
is very like that of Heywood's clowns and especially like Roger's in
The English Traveller; but such resemblances, and perhaps one
or two others which might be pointed out, are not evidence, and
there is more tirade in this piece than is usual with Heywood ;
for the rest, it is deftly constructed and contains a good deal of
humour,
In any case, when, in 1603 or earlier, Heywood produced A
Woman Kilde with Kindnesse, which was first printed in 1607, he
was not moving on untrodden ground! The germs of the species
which we call domestic drama, and to whose growth in English
dramatic literature incidental reference has already been made in
this volume and in its predecessor, are discernible in the realistic
scenes introduced into the mysteries as novelties by way of
relief, and in those interludes in which, as in the case of Inge-
lend's Disobedient Child, a serious treatment of a realistic situa-
tion or plot was essayed. In due course, however, the choice of
actions localised in English everyday life fell more or less into
disuse, as the regular drama developed itself, and as themes
derived from national history, on the one hand, or from classical
and Italian sources, on the other, found favour with an age
filled with high aspirations and eager for the glittering con-
tents of the newly opened treasurehouse. But a reaction was
not long in coming; as Heywood repeatedly hints, new subjects
were a necessity for the stage; and, soon after the beginning of
the last decade of the sixteenth century, and for several years in
the seventeenth, there was a constant flow of plays dealing with
actions taken from ordinary life, and coming home to men's
business and bosoms with a directness alien both to tragoedia
cothurnata and to half allegorical, half satirical comedy.
Nor was it a mere change of preference which accounts for
the impetus given to the dramatisation of experiences, sorrows and
consolations familiar to the country squires and town merchants
and their wives and children in contemporary England. In a
period of the national history when the middle classes were begin-
ning to assert themselves in the social system of the country,
a movement which it would be a mistake to regard as altogether
identical with the striving of puritanism for ascendancy-it could
1 On the subject of the domestic drama, compare the excellent chapter on the
subject, passim, in Schelling, vol. I, and Creizenach, vol. iv, part 1, pp. 237 fi.
See, also, Greg's Henslowe, vol. II, pp. 204 ff. , and Fleay, passim; and cf. a very striking
dissertation by Singer, H. W. , Das bürgerliche Trauerspiel in England, Leipzig, 1891,
and the opening remarks in Eloesser, A. , Das bürgerliche Drama, Berlin, 1898.
2 Cf. vol. v, chap. v,
## p. 95 (#113) #############################################
Elizabethan
Domestic Drama
95
hardly be but that room should have been found in the drama for
exposition of the middle class point of view, middle class morality
and middle class humanity, as distinct from the historic pretensions
of kings and nobles and prelates, from the easier social codes of
palaces and castles and, again, from the violent impulses and freer
ways of life habitual to an uninstructed populace. Shakespeare,
whose muse was at home on the throne of kings, in the strife
of battlefields, or in communion with nature in her moods of
elemental agitation or of woodland calm, and who (save in so
exceptional an excursion into a new field as The Merry Wives)
looked upon civic life in a satirical humour, was not responsive to
this movement, and, indeed, appears to have been very imperfectly
aware of it. When domestic troubles are his dramatic theme,
they are conflicts in heroic minds or tempests of romantic passion? .
Jonson, and his school—including Middleton-on the other hand,
treat such griefs and their agents or victims from the point of
view of critical superiority. The large majority of Elizabethan
plays which may be classed as domestic drama proper are anony-
mous; and, with the exception of Dekker, who produced powerful
work of the kind in The Honest Whore (assuredly his in the main)
and in many scenes ascribable to him in plays of joint authorship,
Heywood, in many ways specially attracted and suited to this
genre, is the only Elizabethan dramatist of note who attained to
eminence in it.
The currents which united in the flow of Elizabethan domestic
drama were of various origin: perhaps the largest in volume was
that which set in earliest, and which cannot be more succinctly
described than as that of the murder plays. The earliest of these
and the most effective
inasmuch as in no other Elizabethan
drama has realism of treatment so completely matched the terrors
of incident and situation—was Arden of Feversham, published in
1592, but probably brought on the stage some six or seven years
earlier? ; one of the latest of the series was A Yorkshire Tragedy,
acted and printed in 1608, and founded on a ballad commemorating
a murder committed in 1604. This is also, in its way, a remarkably
powerful piece; but, unlike Arden, it is tinged with the sentiment-
ality which had become almost inseparable from domestic drama.
1 The very accessories of the dramatic catastrophe, as Singer aptly remarks, are
lifted into an uncommon atmosphere, and Desdemona's handkerchief has a mysterious
history of its own,
dyed in mummy which the skilful
Conserved of maidens' hearts. .
See vol. v, chap. a.
3 See ibid.
## p. 96 (#114) #############################################
96
Thomas Heywood
The intervening murder plays include, with A warning for Faire
Women(printed in 1599) —a notable play of its kind, in which Shake-
speare has been confidently, but on no satisfactory grounds, held to
have had at least a finger'-a number of pieces which have perished,
and in which, among other dramatists, Chettle, Day, Haughton,
Dekker, Jonson and Samuel Rowley were in various combinations
concerned? To these should be added, as rather later in date
than the above-mentioned group, the extremely interesting Witch
of Edmonton (printed in 1658, but probably acted in 1621 or soon
afterwards), which was at first attributed to ‘Dekker, Ford, Rowley,
etc. ,' and in which the hands of the first two of the authors named
can almost certainly be recognised? All these murder plays are,
? .
in their surroundings, confined to English middle class life; but
this fact, of course, does not exclude the influence either of the
Italian domestic tragedies of real life which have been described
as 'more horrible than anything in Ford or Webster,' or of
Italian and other foreign fiction.
In occasional combination with the realistic appeal to the senti-
ment of terror which gives much direct force to the murder plays,
the Elizabethan and early Jacobean domestic drama also occupies
itself with other motives, the operation of which powerfully affects
the course of human life and is most clearly perceptible when
its conditions are least complicated and unusual. The faithful
observance of the marriage tie and the shameful neglect of it,
parental love and the pangs inflicted by filial ingratitude such
are the themes which frequently recur in the dramatic literature
of this period. The faithful wife appears in How a man may
chuse a good Wife from a bad, mentioned above, from which
The Faire Maide of Bristow, possibly by Day, printed in 1602, is
imitated, though the story of the latter play is thrown back into
1 Rptd in The School of Shakspere, ed. Simpson, R. , vol. 11, 1878.
? Chettle and Day wrote Black Bateman of the North (1598); Day and Haughton,
Cox of Collumpton (for date, cf. Greg, Henslowe's Diary, vol. II, p. 207) and Thomas
Merry, or Beech's I'ragedy (1599? ). This seems to have been combined with an Italian
version of the story of the Babes in the Wood (which, apparently, had been dramatised
by Chettle and Day as The Italian Tragedy, printed 1605, and thought by Greg (u. 8.
p. 210) to have possibly been identical with The Orphans' Tragedy) into a play printed
in 1601 under the title of Two Lamentable Tragedies, as by an unknown, and possibly
fictitious, Robert Yarington (rptd in Old Plays, ed. Bullen, A. H. , vol. iv, 1882).
Dekker and Jonson wrote Page of Plymouth (1599), as to the subject of which cf.
* Dramaticus' in Shakespeare Society Papers, vol. 11 (S. S. Publ. 1845); and Samuel
Rowley The Bristow Tragedy (1602), the identification of which with the comedy The
Faire Maide of Bristow is more than doubtful.
3 See below, chap. vill.
* Cf. Smith, P. L. , Life of Sir Henry Wottun (1907), vol. I, p. 22.
## p. 97 (#115) #############################################
A A Woman Kilde with Kindnesse
97
the reign of Richard Il. The Miseries of Inforet Mariage, by
George Wilkins, printed in 1607, in a measure varies the theme ;
but the pathos of the first two acts loses itself in a picture of
reckless despair which is neither probable nor pleasing, and, though
the sentimental element reappears, it is effectually submerged by
the most imbecile of 'happy endings? ' The graceless son plays
his part in The London Prodigall, noticed above among the plays
attributed to Shakespeares, where the figure of the faithful wife
also recurs in the person of Luce, one of the many reproductions
in the English drama of the Patient Grissel type, which Chettle,
Dekker and Haughton brought on the stage by their treatment of
the famous romantic theme. It seems unnecessary to pursue
further in this place the development of English domestic drama,
though, among the abnormally conceived and artificially con-
structed plays of the early Stewart period, there are not a few in
which the directness distinctive of the entire species asserts itself
either in the main action of the play or in particular scenes, even
when overspread by some rank exotic intrigue or driven into the
corner by the intrusion of some supernatural fancy.
A Woman Kilde with Kindnesse, which deservedly holds a
foremost rank among the classics of domestic drama, derived its
title, like several other of its author's plays, from a proverb or
proverbial phrase. The expression 'to kill a wife with kindness'
occurs in The Taming of the Shrews, which must have been pro-
duced on the stage some six or seven years before the performance,
by Worcester's men, early in 1603 (N. S. ), of Heywood's play? . It
was first printed, without having been entered in the register,
· Edited by Quin, A. H. (? ), Philadelphia, 1902. See Brereton, J. Le Gay, in The
Modern Language Review, vol. III, p. 74 (cf. ).
? Rptd in vol. IX of Hazlitt's Dodsley (1874).
3 See vol. v, chap. x.
* Cf. ante, chap. II. As to the “Griseldis-Motiv'in English drama, cf. Gothein, M. ,
"Die Frau im engl. Drama vor Shakespeare,' in Shakespeare Jahrbuch, vol. XL (1904),
PP. 40 ir.
5 Cf. Schelling, u. s. pp. 349 ff.
6 Act iv, 8o. 1, 192.
? See the entry in Henslowe's diary ap. Greg, vol. 11, p. 234. Later uses of the phrase
'to kill with kindness' are noted in the present writer's edition of Heywood's play in
the Temple Dramatists Series (1897). Other proverbial titles of plays by Heywood
are, besides If you know not me, etc.
, those of the non-extant The Blind eats many a
Fly; Christmas comes but once a year; Joan and my Lady. The following are some of
the proverbs or proverbial phrases to be found in the dialogue of his extant dramas:
in A Woman Kilde, etc. "comparisons are odious'; in The Royall King, etc. 'thou canst
have no more of the cat but his skin'; in The Fair Maid Of The West Base is the
man that paies'; in The Golden Age . cast your old cloak about ye'; in The Wise-
woman Of Hogsdon 'a cat may look at a king'; in The English Traveller ‘January
and May. '
E. L. VI. CH. IV.
7
>
>
2
9
## p. 98 (#116) #############################################
98
Thomas Heywood
in 1607; the third edition of the play, 'as it hath been oftentimes
acted by the Queen's' men, appeared in 1617. This popularity
was due to no adventitious attractions; and the author was
perfectly conscious of the simplicity of the means by which the
desired dramatic effect had been achieved; in the words of his
prologue it was
a barren subject, a bare scene
which he presented—nothing more than a sad experience of
everyday life, redeemed from the dreariness of its melancholy
only, so far as the erring wife is concerned, by the pity of it, and
by the nobility of soul which, in the very depth of his grief, the
wronged husband proves capable of revealing. In the strength of
its sentiment and the directness of its appeal to a more than
fleeting sympathy lie the main causes of the effect which this
play produces ; but the skill with which its action is constructed
and the chief situations are devised should not be overlooked.
While the seducer falters long on the threshold of his crime, but,
when he has once crossed it, drags on his victim relentlessly from
transgression to transgression, she is caught in the toils half un-
awares, and, with an 'O Master Wendoll 01,' is lost-to awake to
Sbitter remorse even before the hour of discovery has come. The
nocturnal return of the betrayed husband to his closed door is
(presented with admirable theatrical effect—it might, as has been
said, almost be described as a 'prose' reproduction of some of
the terrors of Macbeth. The magnanimity of the husband--pre-
figured by that of Master Shore in the chronicle play-might,
conceivably, have failed to come home to an Elizabethan audience,
but for the picture of the broken-hearted and penitent woman in
the last act, which wins over all hearts to an acknowledgment of
her husband's kindness, and of the Power which overrules both
human sorrow and human sin. The scene of the play is laid in
the midst of English country life, characteristic features of which
-fresh air and hawking in the morning, and a game at cards o
nights are reproduced without an effort, but with a realistic
effect which materially helps to bring home the story of the
tragedy enacted thus amidst familiar surroundings.
1 Compare with this electrical touch another, almost equal to it-Mistress Frank-
ford to her lute: "We both are out of tune, out of tune' (act iv, sc. 3).
? Heywood must be pardoned the allusive ingenuity of the card playing scene,
which probably pleased the taste of his patrons. Cf. the repeated allusions to the
game of Maw in Dekker's Match mee in London, which Fleay thought identifiable with
The Set at Maw, acted in 1594.
## p. 99 (#117) #############################################
Doubtful Plays
99
While a criticism of certain details in the main action of A
Woman Kilde with Kindnesse seems unnecessary here, it cannot
be ignored that, in this as in several other of his plays, Heywood
should have felt himself obliged to contrive a by-plot which,
instead of relieving tension, offends judgment. In the present
instance, though we would not willingly lose the hawking scene
out of which the subsidiary plot arises, we have to accept a
pedestrian version of the story of Measure for Measure, with a
solution such as might, possibly, have commended itself to the
author of Pamela'.
If Heywood wrote The Wise-woman Of Hogsdon, a comedy
which, though not printed, with his name, till 1638, cannot have
been produced at a date much later than 1604%, no more striking
instance is to be found of his versatility. It is true that this play
opens with a gambling scene as true to life as the hawking scene
in A Woman Kilde with Kindnesse, and that, later, it suddenly
changes its manner into that of domestic drama-of the comédie
larmoyante variety—so as to make the reckless young libertine
who is the hero of the action exclaim :
Here's such wetting of Handkerchers, hee weepes to thinke of his Wife,
shee weepes to see her Father cry. Peace foole, wee shall else bave thee
claime kindred of the Woman Kill'd with Kindnesse.
But Heywood is hardly likely to have introduced this half sarcastic
allusion into a play of his own, and the general character of this
comedy of manners is such as to make his authorship doubtful,
notwithstanding the mention in it, noted above, of his Cambridge
college. The Wise-woman Of Hogsdon is, at the same time, a
play full of life and spirit, with a plot very well managed in spite
of its complications, between the two Luces and a third young
lady and the gay Young Chartley who flutters round the trio,
depending on the services of the evil old intermediary, the avowed
rival of Mother Bombie, Mother Phillips of Bankside, and half
a dozen other wise women and procuresses.
Much fuller of
humorously grotesque characters than any known play of Hey-
wood's, this play, at the same time, exaggerates all the blemishes
which elsewhere he shows no similar eagerness to parade—a pro-
fusion of doggerel, of bad puns and equivoques and of unequivocal
obscenity.
The case is different with The Fayre Mayde of the Exchange.
1 As to Heywood's indebtedness to the queen of Navarre and Bandello for the
double plot of this play, see Creizenach, vol. 19, part 1, p. 264.
• See Fleay, vol. 1, p. 291,
7-2
## p. 100 (#118) ############################################
Іоо
Thomas Heywood
With The pleasaunt Humours of the Cripple of Fanchurch,
which, though printed anonymously in 1607 and later, has been
usually attributed to Heywood, and upon which, treating it as his,
Charles Lamb bestowed high praise. The present writer, without
accepting Fleay's conjecture that the play was written by Machin,
cannot persuade himself that Heywood was its author. Though
the comedy offers a very lively picture of the Royal Exchange
(from a shop front point of view), there is little else to convey
the sense of freshness and originality which few of Heywood's
dramatic productions fail, in some respect, to leave upon the
reader. The heroine Phillis fails to charm, and her repartees
exhibit her as a very secondrate Beatrice, while her passion for
the 'noble’ Cripple, who is magnanimous enough to reject it, is
not so much unpleasing as unconvincing. Apart from the Cripple's
loyalty to the city and the virtue of its shopwomen (a touch of
characteristic directness) there is little to suggest Heywood; the
wittiness of some of the passages of the play, and the cleverly
symmetrical construction of its plot', are merits not common in
his dramas.
In The Royall King, and The Loyall Subject, which, though not
printed till 1637, was, undoubtedly, of a relatively early date', we
have an indisputable piece of Heywood's workmanship. His muse
took a lofty flight on this occasion, seeking renown in romantic
drama. Like Fletcher's similarly named play, from which it
altogether differs in treatment, Heywood's is founded on a novel by
Bandello3; but the dramatist is clearly anxious that his localisation
of the story in England should be express and explicit ; so that it
is difficult—though useless—not to speculate on the possibility of
some personal application being intended. Yet the story of the
play is wildly improbable, and before the long-suffering fidelity of
the Marshal and his family even Patient Grissel's pales ; in short,
an impression of artificiality mars the total effect. Moreover, the
action, as it were, begins over again, after it had seemed to have
reached its height. In a word, though the diction, in the case of
1 In the actual close of the play, which leaves the arrest of Phillis's father for
felony without explanation or sequence, there must have been something wrong in
the stenography.
2 See the references to versification and costume in the epilogue. Fleay (vol. 1, p. 300)
insists that this play was an altered version of Marshal Osric, by Heywood and Went-
worth Smith (performed by Worcester's men in 1602), brought out, in consequence
of the success of Fletcher's Loyal Subject, soon after that play, probably at Christmas
1633.
3 Cf. Koeppel, E. , Quellenstudien zu den Dramen Ben Jonsons (1895), appendix,
pp. 133-5.
## p. 101 (#119) ############################################
The Fair Maid Of The West
IOI
a
the principal plot, maintains a level unusual with Heywood, the
conception is superior to its execution, and the by-plot, which
essays to illustrate the commonplace saying that clothes make the
man, is, as not unfrequently with Heywood, extravagant and in part
offensive. This play, which, very possibly, was earlier than A Woman
Kilde with Kindnesse, cannot claim to be ranked beside it.
The Rape of Lucrece, printed in 1609, but first produced
soon after the accession of James I', is, again, in a different style, if
style of any sort can be ascribed to this odd medley of tragedy and
vaudeville. As to the serious action, all that need be said is that
the dramatist has contrived to provoke a strange thrill of mixed
pity and terror by the picture of the house of Collatinus when the
morning dawns on Tarquin's crime. It is here that he introduces
the one exquisite lyric known to have come from his pen. The
other songs—a budget of what at the present day would be called
music hall ditties interspersed in the action of this 'true Roman
tragedy' by Valerius, 'the merry Lord among the Roman peers'-
are, in part, of antiquarian interest (such as the list of London
taverns, and that of the street cries of Rome); they reach the nadir
of shameless inappropriateness in the catch with which the merry
lord, Horatius Cocles and the clown 'follow on,' when the tragic
action is suspended at its height.
In The Fair Maid Of The West, printed in 1631, which is
undoubtedly and unmistakably Heywood's, we have another
romantic comedy, but one in which the patriotic note sounds
clearly and the salt breeze of the sea blows to and from our island
shores. Part I of this dramatic Odyssey (which must have been
founded on some popular tale unknown to us) begins with a
delightfully vivid picture of English seaport life, localised at
Plymouth and dated by a dumb-show as at the time of the ex-
pedition of Essex to the Azores. On the Hoe, the gallant Spencer
parts from the lovely Besse Bridges, the pride of the Castle inn-
he to sail for 'Fiall,' she to keep her faith and fortune for him at
Foy. Soon afterwards, we are transported into the land of eastern
romance, and, after divers marvellous adventures-all redounding
to the honour and glory of Elizabethan England and her sailors-
we leave the lovers reunited as the honoured guests of king
Mullisheg of Fesse. Part II completes the story in three stirring
acts, brimful of lust, courage, sensitive honour and royal magna-
nimity, enough in their combination to furnish forth an entire
i See Fleay, vol. I, p. 292.
'Packe cloudes away, and welcome day,' eto.
## p. 102 (#120) ############################################
102
Thomas Heywood
6
drama. But, as in The Royall King, the author cannot leave well
alone, and, in acts iv-v, adds a further series of adventures in
Italy, beginning with a shipwreck, which must have gone near to
surfeit even an Elizabethan audience. But the English 'spirit and
fire 1,' and kindly clowning of Clem, Besse's faithful ‘drawer'
and constant follower in east and west, hold out to the end.
The English Traveller, printed in 1633, was probably acted in
or about 1627 ; but the evidence on the subject is slight. The
story of Geraldine is told by Heywood in his History of Women?
as having 'lately happened within' his 'own knowledge’; but the
attempts which have been made to identify the hero remain
mere conjectures : The main plot with which the young
traveller is concerned turns on the idea which lies at the root of
Heywood's finest dramatic designs—that, if to err is human, to
forgive is what raises humanity beyond the earth. There is genius
in the twofold capacity for thinking nobly and beyond the range
of common minds, and for bringing home such thoughts to their
comprehension and sympathy. The by-plot of this drama is
derived from Plautus.
A few words will suffice as to the remaining extant plays of
which Heywood was sole author. Among these, The Captives, or
The Lost Recovered, which was not known to exist in print till
1883, when Mr Bullen found a copy of it in the British Museum, is,
by external evidence as well as by that of style and manner,
proved to be that entered as ‘by Hayward' in Sir Henry Herbert's
office book under the date 1634. This romantic comedy exhibits
the writer's patriotic spirit, as well as his love of the sea and its
ways. The main story is taken from the Rudens of Plautus,
several passages in which are translated in the play, but it seems
to have reached the author through the Italian hand of Masuccio
Salernitano. The underplot, which is derived from an old French
fabliau, translated into an English jest-book and retold by
1
These bold Englishmen
I think are all compos'd of spirit and fire,
The element of earth hath no part in them.
Part 11, act iv, ad fin,
2 Book iv, A Moderne History of an Adulteresse.
3 See Fleay's endeavour (vol. I, p. 297) to find the original of the young Levantine
traveller in George Sandys; and cf. the suggestion hazarded by Bang (Materialien,
etc. , vol. II, p. 376) that Young Geraldine was meant for Sir Peter Pindar, whom in
a distich (ibid. p. 266) Heywood couples with St Paul— both travel'd. '
• The Mostellaria. This part of the play introduces the celebrated fancy of
Naupagium joculare, to which Heywood recurs in less elaborate fashion in The Captives,
and which comes from the Deipnosophia of Athenaeus.
## p. 103 (#121) ############################################
Loves Maistresse
103
Heywood in his History of Women", recalls the scenes with the
friars in The Jew of Malta, a play which Heywood worked up for
representation before he published it in 1632, possibly himself
introducing into it these very scenes? . Another romantic drama,
A Mayden-Head well lost (printed in 1634, but acted some time
earlier-it contains dumb-shows, but little rime) has little or
nothing in it to redeem the offensiveness of its plot, one of the
numerous versions of the story of All's Well that Ends Well, relieved
by drollery very inferior to that of Parolles. A Challenge for
Beautie (printed in 1636, and probably produced on the stage only
a year or two earlier) is, in some respects, more characteristic of
Heywood, and is, in truth, written throughout in a vein of the most
blatant national self-consciousness. The main argument of the
piece, the pride of the Spanish-born queen who arrogantly sends
forth one of her courtiers to find her superior if he can of
course he finds her in England-resembles an Arabian night's
tale, but the loss of the fair Hellena's ring in a washhand-basin
is a trivial expedient. The by-plot of Ferars and Valladolid's
rivalry, which ends in the discovery that the lady adored by
both is the sister of the Englishman, is extremely theatrical but
not the least satisfactory. Finally, the latest of Heywood's plays
in date of production is, probably, Loves Maistresse: Or, The
Queens Masque, performed in 1633, and again in the following year
at Denmark house on the king's birthday, and printed in 1636.
This dramatic entertainment, into which Fleay has read the signs
of a theatrical quarrel between Apuleius (Heywood) and Midas
(Christopher Beeston), cannot have given much pleasure even to
the instructed except in some pretty passages“, especially in the
earlier scenes dealing with the story of Cupid and Psyche; to
the uninstructed, it must have seemed a shapeless jumble of
mythological learning. Heywood lacked the lyrical gift needed
to animate an effort of this nature; and Midas, who repeatedly
declines to see out the play, may be pardoned for finding con-
solation in the dances.
Thus, passing by Heywood's seven pageants (1631—9), to the
1 Cl. Book v, The Faire ladie of Norwich.
? Cf. Kittredge, G. L. , in The Journal of Germanic Philology, vol. 11, p. 13.
3. Of all the Christians this arme e'er stay'd,' says the Turkish captain, you come
the neerest men? What country? ' 'England,' replies Ferars, as if he could have
been mistaken for a • Diego' or a mounseer.
The fine lines
Oh griefe, that silver haires should crowne his head
By whom the Muses are dishonourëd
are, probably, a reminiscence of Spenser.
## p. 104 (#122) ############################################
104
Thomas Heywood
2
civic enthusiasm of which reference has already been made, we
come, in conclusion, to two plays in which he collaborated with
other writers. Of these, Fortune by Land and Sea was not
printed till 1655, as the joint production of Thomas Heywood
and William Rowley (both of whose names were mis-spelt on the
title-page); but it belongs to a far earlier date_possibly 1607—9,
when both dramatists were included in queen Anne's company?
The strong hand of William Rowley may be discernible in this
piece, which has a firmer texture than is usual with his fellow
playwright, and it may or may not) have been that hand
which gave dramatic form to the adventures and sentiments
of the pirates Clinton and Walton (the purser), apparently long-
lived favourites of the public—for pirates and patriots were not
so very far apart in that spacious age. In substance, however,
it is a domestic drama in Heywood's most characteristic manner,
while it bears witness once more to his love of the sea. The
admirable opening-a tavern brawl, the bloody ending of which
forms the starting point of the action resembles that of Heywood's
masterpiece; the troubles of Old Forrest are treated with gentle
pathos ; and the very humours of the clown are tinged with the
kindliness which can relieve even tomfoolery,
The late Lancashire Witches was printed in 1634 as the joint
work of Thomas Heywood and Richard Brome. But the story of
the play was based, in part, upon an account, published by T. Potts
in 1613, of the doings of certain Lancashire women, of whom twelve
had suffered death as witches in the previous year, and it is
possible that Heywood was the author of a play much earlier than
that put on the stage in 1634. In this year, another discovery' of
witches had attracted public attention, and the principal witness
in this case (who appears in the play as the boy) had been brought
up to London. This ingenuous creature afterwards confessed that
his evidence before the Lancashire magistrates had been suborned,
and the accused, unlike their unfortunate predecessors in 1612,
were pardoned. But the authors of The late Lancashire Witches
cannot be acquitted on the charge that they had, pendente lite,
done their utmost to intensify public feeling against 'witches'-
whether or not their play was furbished up from an earlier piece
1 Cf. Fleay, vol. 1, p. 294; where see, also, as to the verse account of the two pirates,
first entered in the Stationers' register in 1586. The form of the play, in which there is
a great deal of rime, favours the assumption of an early date.
? Barron Field, in his edition of the play, rightly points out that the degradation of
the disinherited eldest son and his wife to the position of farm labourers may not
have seemed unnatural to an Elizabethan audience.
## p. 105 (#123) ############################################
!
13
E
This
His Qualities as a Dramatist
105
written by one of them! This makes it difficult to peruse with
patience the reproduction in this drama of the superstitious fictions
which did twelve unhappy women to death-the 'ridings' through
the air and the unholy assemblies, together with the mischievous
interference at a wedding feast and other rites. Yet, in this
farrago of half realistic nonsense, it is possible to discern the
elements of effective domestic drama, and the touching scene in
which Master Generous seeks to redeem his misguided wife from
her evil practices breathes a spirit akin to that which animates
some of the finest passages in Heywood's dramatic work.
The above, necessarily compendious, review of the extant
writings of this dramatist may have gone some way to make good
the conclusion that the flexibility of his talent as well as his
indefatigable industry enabled him to hold his own in dramatic
species so diverse as the chronicle history, the romantic drama
and the comedy of manners. In addition, he achieved at least one
masterpiece in domestic drama—a species in which his sincerity
and directness, together with a pathetic power springing from a
manly, candid and generous nature, found their most congenial
expression; while several other of his plays may, at least in part,
be regarded as having contributed to this artistic growth. While
he possessed the gift of genuine pathos, he was incapable of
lending words to passion; his satiric gift was small, and he rarely
sought to exercise it, his wit and humour moving more or less
within conventional bounds, though his clowns are by no means
invariably tedious. He was not strong in the art of construction,
and the total effect of several of his plays suffers from the by-plots
with which he thought it incumbent on him to eke out their
main action; but he was singularly skilful both in devising
most effective dramatic situations, and in providing for his plays
a background-usually disclosed in an excellent opening—which
gave to them individuality and variety. He was devoid of any
lyric vein, though the popular sympathies by which he was stirred
might have seemed likely to move him to song—for patriotism,
both national and civic, was second nature to him. Few features
are more striking in him than the love of learning which he
had brought with him from Cambridge and which he nourished by
lifelong application. But from drying up into a pedant he was
-
13
See the present writer's account of the play in English Dramatic Literature, vol. 11,
p. 575; and cf. the late James Crossley's Introduction to Potts's Discoverie of Witches,
etc. (Chetham Society's Publications, vol. vi, 1845), where will be found much learning
on the subject.
## p. 106 (#124) ############################################
106
Thomas Heywood
preserved by the manysidedness of his intellectual interests, and
by the freshness of spirit that was in him.
A ‘prose Shakespeare' Heywood deserves to be called only
in so far as he, too, could, on occasion, probe the depths of
human nature, touching with the wand of poetic imagination what
seemed to him of interest in the homely figures and everyday
experiences of contemporary life. When he imitated Shakespeare,
as in passages of his plays he did more or less unconsciously? ,
this was only in the way of business. He was not the man to
dream of donning the armour of Achilles, any more than to aspire
to an enduring fame—though of such as is his due meed he is
not likely to be deprived.
* One or two of these passages may be noted here:
A horse! a horse! (Part II of If you know not me, etc. )
What seek ye from the throne ?
That in which Kings
Resemble most the Gods: Justice. (A Challenge for Beautie, act v. )
And hand to hand in single opposition. (Fortune by Land and Sea, act 11. )
## p. 107 (#125) ############################################
CHAPTER V
BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER
The collection of plays with which the names of Beaumont
and Fletcher are traditionally associated constitutes the most
important body of dramatic work which was produced by the
successors of the Elizabethans, that is to say, by those dramatists
whose activity belonged wholly to the Stewart period. With this
new generation, a new fashion had come in. The genuinely
national interest in the drama which especially characterised the
last fifteen years of Elizabeth had, to a great extent, passed
away, and the taste of the court had become gradually more and
more the prevailing influence. This tendency had outwardly ex-
pressed itself, nearly at the beginning of the reign of James I, in
the fact that all the companies of actors in London then came to
be directly under the patronage of the royal family, while the pro-
duction of plays was, at the same time, subjected to the control
of the master of the revels; and, as the older generation of
dramatists disappeared, the new fashion showed itself more
and more in the character of the plays produced. Ben Jonson's
inductions are full of protests against the taste of the day in
drama, and especially against the growing tyranny in the matter
of criticism exercised by gallants who occupied seats on the
stage and assumed the right to damn a play at their pleasure;
but he found himself helpless to modify the prevailing fashions.
The court of James I had lost the chivalrous aspirations of the earlier
time, and the moral corruption which had been held in check, at
least to some extent, by noble ideals, had become alarmingly
prominent in the life of the upper classes of society. Shallowness
and frivolity characterised the manners of the court, even where
these were not tinged with gross vices, and a certain superficial
brilliancy had taken the place of more estimable qualities. Such
a society was naturally disinclined to serious reflection upon the
## p. 108 (#126) ############################################
108
Beaumont and Fletcher
issues of human life, and Shakespearean tragedy was both too
wide and too deep for its sympathies. It was, perhaps, a per-
ception of this change of conditions, rather than any marked
change in his own genius or temperament, that led Shakespeare
to abandon tragedy during the latest years of his connection with
the stage, and to entertain his public with dramatic romances.
However this may be, a definite preference was manifested, in the
period which was then beginning, for that hybrid form of drama
which became specially characteristic of the English stage-
tragicomedy; in which serious matters are dealt with, but a tragic
solution is avoided. Closely connected with this want of moral
earnestness was the demand for theatrical entertainments which did
not make any serious appeal to the intellect; and, hence, on the one
hand, the exaggerated love of pageantry, which was gratified by
the magnificence of the masques presented at court, and, on the
other, the growing preference, even of the better portion of the
audiences at the playhouses, for plots full of interesting events and
surprising turns of fortune, rather than such as were developed
naturally from situations and characters: the result being a
comparative neglect of character interest, and a disregard for
the principle of artistic unity.
But, apart from the general relaxation of moral and intellectual
fibre which was indicated in these tendencies, there were far more
serious evidences of moral decadence. The manners of society
had not yet sunk to the prosaic level of profligacy which cha-
racterised the period of the Restoration, and the feeling for poetry
and romance had not altogether departed; but the court standard
of morals with regard to the relations of men and women was
decidedly low, and false notions of loyalty and honour, to a great
extent, had established themselves in the higher classes of society.
In these respects, there is no reason to doubt that the drama of
the period reflected the prevailing fashions. Themes of love and
honour are those in which an artificial society of this kind is
chiefly interested, and it is these which it desires to see dealt with
upon the stage. The moral standard of the drama is apt to be the
same as that of the community for which it is composed; and
where false ideals of conduct in regard to chastity and honour
prevail in a society, we may reasonably expect to find them
reflected in the drama which is patronised by it.
The tastes of the society which had its centre in the court
of James I were, in fact, very faithfully provided for in the series
of dramas which have come down to us under the names of
## p. 109 (#127) ############################################
Contemporary Estimate
109
Beaumont and Fletcher; and that these should have been better
liked upon the stage than those of Shakespeare ought not to be
matter for surprise. In the former, poetry and romance were found
in combination with the code of manners and the standard of morals
which prevailed among gentlemen; the spectator was entertained
by a lively succession of events, contrived with consummate stage-
craft to produce the most interesting situations and the most
pleasurable surprises, and by a considerable variety of characters,
for the most part well sustained, though very deficient in depth
and truth to nature when compared with Shakespeare's; while,
at the same time, the language was a model of lucidity and purity,
altogether free both from tasteless conceits and from the obscurity
to which a style either highly figurative or overloaded with
thought is liable. Moreover, in the comedies, the audience was
interested and delighted by a new style of wit in conversation,
which was recognised as just that kind of brilliancy which every
courtier would wish to display, and beside which the old Eliza-
beth way' seemed clumsy and oldfashioned.
Shakespeare to thee was dull, whose best wit lies
the ladies' questions and the fools' replies,
Old-fashion'd wit, which walk'd from town to town
In trunk-hose, which our fathers call'd the clown.
So William Cartwright, a fellow poet and dramatist, addressed
Fletcher; and Dryden was only repeating a commonplace when
he said, comparing Beaumont and Fletcher with Shakespeare, that
'they understood and imitated the conversation of gentlemen much
better, whose wild debaucheries and quickness of wit in repartees
no poet can ever paint as they have done. ' The morality of their
plays, bad as it may seem to us in some cases, was by no means
looked upon as a just ground of complaint by their contemporaries.
On the contrary, the moral improvement to be gained from them
is one of the points insisted upon by their panegyrists:
Vices which were
Manners abroad, did pass corrected there;
They who possessed a box and half-crown spent
To learn obsceneness, returned innocent.
We find here, fully developed for the first time, a species of stage
entertainment which is rather an acted romance than a drama
in the strict sense of the word; without the intensity of tragedy,
but with more emotional interest and a more poetical style of
expression than is proper to comedy. The poetical comedy of
Shakespeare's middle period had been, to some extent, of this
d
D
1
## p. 110 (#128) ############################################
IIO
Beaumont and Fletcher
kind; and the species was exemplified further in the work of his
latest period, in Cymbeline, Pericles, The Tempest and The
Winter's Tale.
? By Fleay, who, I think, is successfully controverted by Greg, Henslowe's Diary,
vol. II, p. 173.
3 See bibliography.
- vol. I, pp. 282–3.
5 As to Churchyard's Shore's Wife in A Mirror for Magistrates, cf. vol. I,
pp. 182 and 198. It is open to question whether Chettle and Day's play of Shore
(“wherein Shore's wife is written'), acted in 1602, was an independent piece of work;
in Rowe's Jane Shore (1714), which, at a recent date, was still to be seen on the
stage, no trace of a connection with Heywood's play is apparent.
## p. 91 (#109) #############################################
If
you
know not me
91
explanation. Heywood's treatment of the figure of the erring
wife, whose goodness of heart is attested by her openness to
melting charity, and by her sorrow for her sin, as well as that of
the high-minded and forgiving husband, is full of fine feeling ;
and it is to be regretted that, near its close, the episode should
be marred by the unnecessary fool's play of Jockie and Jeffrey,
with which the dramatist thought it his duty to gratify his
patrons. The minor character of Mistress Blague, Jane Shore's
sunshine friend, is admirably drawn. As for the death of husband
and wife, it is sentimental drama of the purest water, but none
the less in its place for that.
As it stands, Heywood's other chronicle play, If you know not
me, You know no bodiel: Or, The troubles of Queene Elizabeth,
surreptitiously printed from a stenographic eopy in 1605, and
revived in 1631, near the time of the publication of the author's
England : Elizabeth, is, so far as Part I is concerned, little
better than a jumble of misprinted fragments. It is clear, at
the same time, that this portion of the work must, at best, have
been a crude ad captandum treatment of Elizabeth's experiences
before her accession, following its text-book, Heywood's own mono-
graph Englands Elizabeth, in depicting the martyr-like rectitude
of the Protestant princess, who suffered tanquam ovis in adversity,
and who, after her fortune had turned, received from the hands of
the lord mayor her prize and palladium-an English Bible. What
availed the doubledyed animosity of the ruthless Gardiner against
a fortitude so innocent that even king Philip was loth to be
unkind? Repeated dumb-shows and some very unsophisticated
clownery helps on the action. Part II, which is much better
preserved, was not better worth preserving. After a long and
tedious treatment of the magnificence of Sir Thomas Gresham,
and the reckless prodigality of his nephew Jack, we have, as a
sudden episode, the attempt against the queen's life by William
Parry (which was plotted in 1583—4)*; whereupon, a chorus, pro-
fessing to bridge the interval between 1558 and 1588, brings us to
1 The phrase, which the instincts of the publisher may be supposed to have suggested
as a title, seems to have been used proverbially; in Part I of Edward IV, Hobs the
tanner applies it to himself.
Queen Elizabeth also figures as the last of the three Women Worthies among
the Christians' in Heywood's Nine Most Worthy Women of the World. Englands
Elizabeth was not published till 1609, a date that may account for the freedom with
which certain actions of Henry VIII are narrated, though not, perhaps, for the
contrast drawn (s. a. 1547) between the sweet lady' Elizabeth's determination to
remain unmarried, and what may be said of women in general. '
* This episode is also treated by Dekker in The Whore of Babylon.
9
.
6
## p. 92 (#110) #############################################
92
Thomas Heywood
the year of the Armada But nothing follows except a rather
bald account of this climax of Elizabethan glories, finishing with a
succession of 'posts,' recalling with a difference, the äryyelor of the
Persae. No doubt the whole of this production was brought out
hurriedly soon after the death of the great queen, having to serve
its purpose tant bien que mal; and, though it is not without
details of interest and contains at least one passage of real poetic
feeling? , it bears the fatal mark of haste.
A third dramatic composition of the same class which has been
ascribed to Heywood is the play entitled No-Body, and Some-
Body. With the true Chronicle Historie of Elydure, which was
entered in the Stationers' register in 1606, and must have been
performed before 1604. But, though Heywood's authorship seemed
unquestionable to Fleay, stronger evidence than that which satisfied
him seems requisite before we burden the dramatist's reputation
with this ascription. The main plot, taken from Geoffrey of Mon-
mouth, of king Elidure's threefold accession to the British throne,
is of the antique cast of The True Chronicle History of King Leir;
the by-plot which gives its name to the play is an elaborate
development of the grim old jest of Ouris, which savours of the
personifications familiar to the moralities and, like them, has a
satirico-didactic aim .
To the same early period in his career in which Heywood pro-
duced examples of a species soon to become all but obsolete belongs
a series of plays from his hand which in subject seem to associate
themselves with the tastes of more learned audiences than those
for which he had thus early shown himself ready to cater. But,
in the preface to The Iron Age—the last of The Four Ages in
which he dramatised a long series of classical myths from Saturn
and Jupiter down to Ulysses, who, alone among the Greek kings
banded against Troy, survives to speak the epilogue—he expressly
tells us that these plays were
often (and not with the least applause) Publickely Acted by two Companies
appon one Stage at once, and have at sundry times thronged three severall
Theaters, with numerous and mighty Auditories.
There is every reason for believing that Parts I and II of Hercules,
* See Tawny-coat's apostrophe to the earth, out of which his spade is to procure
his sustenance, beginning
Hard world, when men dig living out of stones. (Para II. )
? Viz. the spelling ey for ay or I, which he had observed to be peculiar to Hey.
wood. It may be added that the references to games of cards (11. 1528 7. ) recall a
scene in A Woman Kilde with Kindnesse, and that the author of No-Body, and some-Kody
was evidently familiar with London.
3 See the bibliography as to this play.
## p. 93 (#111) #############################################
The Four Ages
93
performed by the Admiral's men as new plays from May 1595, are,
respectively, The Silver Age and The Brazen Age of Heywood's
series? ; but Fleay's daring identification of Selio and Olimpio
(Caelo et Olympo? ), performed by the same company in 1594,
with The Golden Age, and his conjecture that Troye, performed
by them in 1596, is Part 1, or an earlier and shorter edition of
both parts, of The Iron Age, must remain questionable. In any
case, these plays are more invertebrate than the most loosely
constructed of chronicle histories; and not only is the number of
characters very great, but it might seem as if, to any audience far
away from Cam or Isis, even the indefatigable exertions of old
Homer' as presenter and chorus, aided by occasional dumb-shows,
would have proved inadequate. There is, no doubt, a good deal of
life and stir in the action—the amorous scenes, indeed, are often
very highly coloured-quite apart from the stimulus of occasional
unexpected parallels and a large amount of clowning. But
it is incontestable that these plays offer a significant measure of
the imaginative powers on which an Elizabethan dramatist could
reckon in his audience. Homer might safely venture, in Hey-
wood's phrase, to unlock the casket of which the learned kept the
key; and there is something contagious in the opening boast of
the poet-magician, that he had 'raised out of the earth'the gods
who served the playwright as his puppets.
Proceeding in chronological sequence, we now arrive, among
Heywood's extant undoubted plays, at a group in which the
earliest in date is his acknowledged masterpiece, A Woman Kilde
with Kindnesse. It should, however, be noted that, on the strength
of the occurrence of some Latin ribaldry, both in The Wise-woman
Of Hogsdon, which is probably Heywood's, and in the popular
How a man may chuse a good Wife from a bad (published anony-
mously in 1602), Fleay confidently asserts that the two plays must
be by the same author. Some further indications of Heywood's
authorship of the second of the pair might be sought in its general
tendency and tone, and in at least one touch of true human kind-
ness in his best manner", as well as in the humour of Pipkin, which
See Greg's Henslowe, vol. 11, p. 175, and of. ibid. pp. 180 and 284.
2 Not only do Tytan and Saturn, in The Golden Age, irresistibly recall Esau and
Jacob; but, in The Silver age, the audience is apprised that the prolongation of
night, which favours Jupiter on his visit to Alcmena, also serves Joshua in his battle
against the Canaanites. In The Golden Age, the clown informs Jupiter (when in
search of a father) that the parish' ought not to be troubled with him.
* The courtesan's sense of shame in taking the wronged wife's place at table
(act 10, sc. 3). This play, which could not have been written without a knowledge of
the tomb scene in Romeo and Juliet, is printed in vol. ix of Hazlitt's Dodsley.
## p. 94 (#112) #############################################
94
Thomas Heywood
is very like that of Heywood's clowns and especially like Roger's in
The English Traveller; but such resemblances, and perhaps one
or two others which might be pointed out, are not evidence, and
there is more tirade in this piece than is usual with Heywood ;
for the rest, it is deftly constructed and contains a good deal of
humour,
In any case, when, in 1603 or earlier, Heywood produced A
Woman Kilde with Kindnesse, which was first printed in 1607, he
was not moving on untrodden ground! The germs of the species
which we call domestic drama, and to whose growth in English
dramatic literature incidental reference has already been made in
this volume and in its predecessor, are discernible in the realistic
scenes introduced into the mysteries as novelties by way of
relief, and in those interludes in which, as in the case of Inge-
lend's Disobedient Child, a serious treatment of a realistic situa-
tion or plot was essayed. In due course, however, the choice of
actions localised in English everyday life fell more or less into
disuse, as the regular drama developed itself, and as themes
derived from national history, on the one hand, or from classical
and Italian sources, on the other, found favour with an age
filled with high aspirations and eager for the glittering con-
tents of the newly opened treasurehouse. But a reaction was
not long in coming; as Heywood repeatedly hints, new subjects
were a necessity for the stage; and, soon after the beginning of
the last decade of the sixteenth century, and for several years in
the seventeenth, there was a constant flow of plays dealing with
actions taken from ordinary life, and coming home to men's
business and bosoms with a directness alien both to tragoedia
cothurnata and to half allegorical, half satirical comedy.
Nor was it a mere change of preference which accounts for
the impetus given to the dramatisation of experiences, sorrows and
consolations familiar to the country squires and town merchants
and their wives and children in contemporary England. In a
period of the national history when the middle classes were begin-
ning to assert themselves in the social system of the country,
a movement which it would be a mistake to regard as altogether
identical with the striving of puritanism for ascendancy-it could
1 On the subject of the domestic drama, compare the excellent chapter on the
subject, passim, in Schelling, vol. I, and Creizenach, vol. iv, part 1, pp. 237 fi.
See, also, Greg's Henslowe, vol. II, pp. 204 ff. , and Fleay, passim; and cf. a very striking
dissertation by Singer, H. W. , Das bürgerliche Trauerspiel in England, Leipzig, 1891,
and the opening remarks in Eloesser, A. , Das bürgerliche Drama, Berlin, 1898.
2 Cf. vol. v, chap. v,
## p. 95 (#113) #############################################
Elizabethan
Domestic Drama
95
hardly be but that room should have been found in the drama for
exposition of the middle class point of view, middle class morality
and middle class humanity, as distinct from the historic pretensions
of kings and nobles and prelates, from the easier social codes of
palaces and castles and, again, from the violent impulses and freer
ways of life habitual to an uninstructed populace. Shakespeare,
whose muse was at home on the throne of kings, in the strife
of battlefields, or in communion with nature in her moods of
elemental agitation or of woodland calm, and who (save in so
exceptional an excursion into a new field as The Merry Wives)
looked upon civic life in a satirical humour, was not responsive to
this movement, and, indeed, appears to have been very imperfectly
aware of it. When domestic troubles are his dramatic theme,
they are conflicts in heroic minds or tempests of romantic passion? .
Jonson, and his school—including Middleton-on the other hand,
treat such griefs and their agents or victims from the point of
view of critical superiority. The large majority of Elizabethan
plays which may be classed as domestic drama proper are anony-
mous; and, with the exception of Dekker, who produced powerful
work of the kind in The Honest Whore (assuredly his in the main)
and in many scenes ascribable to him in plays of joint authorship,
Heywood, in many ways specially attracted and suited to this
genre, is the only Elizabethan dramatist of note who attained to
eminence in it.
The currents which united in the flow of Elizabethan domestic
drama were of various origin: perhaps the largest in volume was
that which set in earliest, and which cannot be more succinctly
described than as that of the murder plays. The earliest of these
and the most effective
inasmuch as in no other Elizabethan
drama has realism of treatment so completely matched the terrors
of incident and situation—was Arden of Feversham, published in
1592, but probably brought on the stage some six or seven years
earlier? ; one of the latest of the series was A Yorkshire Tragedy,
acted and printed in 1608, and founded on a ballad commemorating
a murder committed in 1604. This is also, in its way, a remarkably
powerful piece; but, unlike Arden, it is tinged with the sentiment-
ality which had become almost inseparable from domestic drama.
1 The very accessories of the dramatic catastrophe, as Singer aptly remarks, are
lifted into an uncommon atmosphere, and Desdemona's handkerchief has a mysterious
history of its own,
dyed in mummy which the skilful
Conserved of maidens' hearts. .
See vol. v, chap. a.
3 See ibid.
## p. 96 (#114) #############################################
96
Thomas Heywood
The intervening murder plays include, with A warning for Faire
Women(printed in 1599) —a notable play of its kind, in which Shake-
speare has been confidently, but on no satisfactory grounds, held to
have had at least a finger'-a number of pieces which have perished,
and in which, among other dramatists, Chettle, Day, Haughton,
Dekker, Jonson and Samuel Rowley were in various combinations
concerned? To these should be added, as rather later in date
than the above-mentioned group, the extremely interesting Witch
of Edmonton (printed in 1658, but probably acted in 1621 or soon
afterwards), which was at first attributed to ‘Dekker, Ford, Rowley,
etc. ,' and in which the hands of the first two of the authors named
can almost certainly be recognised? All these murder plays are,
? .
in their surroundings, confined to English middle class life; but
this fact, of course, does not exclude the influence either of the
Italian domestic tragedies of real life which have been described
as 'more horrible than anything in Ford or Webster,' or of
Italian and other foreign fiction.
In occasional combination with the realistic appeal to the senti-
ment of terror which gives much direct force to the murder plays,
the Elizabethan and early Jacobean domestic drama also occupies
itself with other motives, the operation of which powerfully affects
the course of human life and is most clearly perceptible when
its conditions are least complicated and unusual. The faithful
observance of the marriage tie and the shameful neglect of it,
parental love and the pangs inflicted by filial ingratitude such
are the themes which frequently recur in the dramatic literature
of this period. The faithful wife appears in How a man may
chuse a good Wife from a bad, mentioned above, from which
The Faire Maide of Bristow, possibly by Day, printed in 1602, is
imitated, though the story of the latter play is thrown back into
1 Rptd in The School of Shakspere, ed. Simpson, R. , vol. 11, 1878.
? Chettle and Day wrote Black Bateman of the North (1598); Day and Haughton,
Cox of Collumpton (for date, cf. Greg, Henslowe's Diary, vol. II, p. 207) and Thomas
Merry, or Beech's I'ragedy (1599? ). This seems to have been combined with an Italian
version of the story of the Babes in the Wood (which, apparently, had been dramatised
by Chettle and Day as The Italian Tragedy, printed 1605, and thought by Greg (u. 8.
p. 210) to have possibly been identical with The Orphans' Tragedy) into a play printed
in 1601 under the title of Two Lamentable Tragedies, as by an unknown, and possibly
fictitious, Robert Yarington (rptd in Old Plays, ed. Bullen, A. H. , vol. iv, 1882).
Dekker and Jonson wrote Page of Plymouth (1599), as to the subject of which cf.
* Dramaticus' in Shakespeare Society Papers, vol. 11 (S. S. Publ. 1845); and Samuel
Rowley The Bristow Tragedy (1602), the identification of which with the comedy The
Faire Maide of Bristow is more than doubtful.
3 See below, chap. vill.
* Cf. Smith, P. L. , Life of Sir Henry Wottun (1907), vol. I, p. 22.
## p. 97 (#115) #############################################
A A Woman Kilde with Kindnesse
97
the reign of Richard Il. The Miseries of Inforet Mariage, by
George Wilkins, printed in 1607, in a measure varies the theme ;
but the pathos of the first two acts loses itself in a picture of
reckless despair which is neither probable nor pleasing, and, though
the sentimental element reappears, it is effectually submerged by
the most imbecile of 'happy endings? ' The graceless son plays
his part in The London Prodigall, noticed above among the plays
attributed to Shakespeares, where the figure of the faithful wife
also recurs in the person of Luce, one of the many reproductions
in the English drama of the Patient Grissel type, which Chettle,
Dekker and Haughton brought on the stage by their treatment of
the famous romantic theme. It seems unnecessary to pursue
further in this place the development of English domestic drama,
though, among the abnormally conceived and artificially con-
structed plays of the early Stewart period, there are not a few in
which the directness distinctive of the entire species asserts itself
either in the main action of the play or in particular scenes, even
when overspread by some rank exotic intrigue or driven into the
corner by the intrusion of some supernatural fancy.
A Woman Kilde with Kindnesse, which deservedly holds a
foremost rank among the classics of domestic drama, derived its
title, like several other of its author's plays, from a proverb or
proverbial phrase. The expression 'to kill a wife with kindness'
occurs in The Taming of the Shrews, which must have been pro-
duced on the stage some six or seven years before the performance,
by Worcester's men, early in 1603 (N. S. ), of Heywood's play? . It
was first printed, without having been entered in the register,
· Edited by Quin, A. H. (? ), Philadelphia, 1902. See Brereton, J. Le Gay, in The
Modern Language Review, vol. III, p. 74 (cf. ).
? Rptd in vol. IX of Hazlitt's Dodsley (1874).
3 See vol. v, chap. x.
* Cf. ante, chap. II. As to the “Griseldis-Motiv'in English drama, cf. Gothein, M. ,
"Die Frau im engl. Drama vor Shakespeare,' in Shakespeare Jahrbuch, vol. XL (1904),
PP. 40 ir.
5 Cf. Schelling, u. s. pp. 349 ff.
6 Act iv, 8o. 1, 192.
? See the entry in Henslowe's diary ap. Greg, vol. 11, p. 234. Later uses of the phrase
'to kill with kindness' are noted in the present writer's edition of Heywood's play in
the Temple Dramatists Series (1897). Other proverbial titles of plays by Heywood
are, besides If you know not me, etc.
, those of the non-extant The Blind eats many a
Fly; Christmas comes but once a year; Joan and my Lady. The following are some of
the proverbs or proverbial phrases to be found in the dialogue of his extant dramas:
in A Woman Kilde, etc. "comparisons are odious'; in The Royall King, etc. 'thou canst
have no more of the cat but his skin'; in The Fair Maid Of The West Base is the
man that paies'; in The Golden Age . cast your old cloak about ye'; in The Wise-
woman Of Hogsdon 'a cat may look at a king'; in The English Traveller ‘January
and May. '
E. L. VI. CH. IV.
7
>
>
2
9
## p. 98 (#116) #############################################
98
Thomas Heywood
in 1607; the third edition of the play, 'as it hath been oftentimes
acted by the Queen's' men, appeared in 1617. This popularity
was due to no adventitious attractions; and the author was
perfectly conscious of the simplicity of the means by which the
desired dramatic effect had been achieved; in the words of his
prologue it was
a barren subject, a bare scene
which he presented—nothing more than a sad experience of
everyday life, redeemed from the dreariness of its melancholy
only, so far as the erring wife is concerned, by the pity of it, and
by the nobility of soul which, in the very depth of his grief, the
wronged husband proves capable of revealing. In the strength of
its sentiment and the directness of its appeal to a more than
fleeting sympathy lie the main causes of the effect which this
play produces ; but the skill with which its action is constructed
and the chief situations are devised should not be overlooked.
While the seducer falters long on the threshold of his crime, but,
when he has once crossed it, drags on his victim relentlessly from
transgression to transgression, she is caught in the toils half un-
awares, and, with an 'O Master Wendoll 01,' is lost-to awake to
Sbitter remorse even before the hour of discovery has come. The
nocturnal return of the betrayed husband to his closed door is
(presented with admirable theatrical effect—it might, as has been
said, almost be described as a 'prose' reproduction of some of
the terrors of Macbeth. The magnanimity of the husband--pre-
figured by that of Master Shore in the chronicle play-might,
conceivably, have failed to come home to an Elizabethan audience,
but for the picture of the broken-hearted and penitent woman in
the last act, which wins over all hearts to an acknowledgment of
her husband's kindness, and of the Power which overrules both
human sorrow and human sin. The scene of the play is laid in
the midst of English country life, characteristic features of which
-fresh air and hawking in the morning, and a game at cards o
nights are reproduced without an effort, but with a realistic
effect which materially helps to bring home the story of the
tragedy enacted thus amidst familiar surroundings.
1 Compare with this electrical touch another, almost equal to it-Mistress Frank-
ford to her lute: "We both are out of tune, out of tune' (act iv, sc. 3).
? Heywood must be pardoned the allusive ingenuity of the card playing scene,
which probably pleased the taste of his patrons. Cf. the repeated allusions to the
game of Maw in Dekker's Match mee in London, which Fleay thought identifiable with
The Set at Maw, acted in 1594.
## p. 99 (#117) #############################################
Doubtful Plays
99
While a criticism of certain details in the main action of A
Woman Kilde with Kindnesse seems unnecessary here, it cannot
be ignored that, in this as in several other of his plays, Heywood
should have felt himself obliged to contrive a by-plot which,
instead of relieving tension, offends judgment. In the present
instance, though we would not willingly lose the hawking scene
out of which the subsidiary plot arises, we have to accept a
pedestrian version of the story of Measure for Measure, with a
solution such as might, possibly, have commended itself to the
author of Pamela'.
If Heywood wrote The Wise-woman Of Hogsdon, a comedy
which, though not printed, with his name, till 1638, cannot have
been produced at a date much later than 1604%, no more striking
instance is to be found of his versatility. It is true that this play
opens with a gambling scene as true to life as the hawking scene
in A Woman Kilde with Kindnesse, and that, later, it suddenly
changes its manner into that of domestic drama-of the comédie
larmoyante variety—so as to make the reckless young libertine
who is the hero of the action exclaim :
Here's such wetting of Handkerchers, hee weepes to thinke of his Wife,
shee weepes to see her Father cry. Peace foole, wee shall else bave thee
claime kindred of the Woman Kill'd with Kindnesse.
But Heywood is hardly likely to have introduced this half sarcastic
allusion into a play of his own, and the general character of this
comedy of manners is such as to make his authorship doubtful,
notwithstanding the mention in it, noted above, of his Cambridge
college. The Wise-woman Of Hogsdon is, at the same time, a
play full of life and spirit, with a plot very well managed in spite
of its complications, between the two Luces and a third young
lady and the gay Young Chartley who flutters round the trio,
depending on the services of the evil old intermediary, the avowed
rival of Mother Bombie, Mother Phillips of Bankside, and half
a dozen other wise women and procuresses.
Much fuller of
humorously grotesque characters than any known play of Hey-
wood's, this play, at the same time, exaggerates all the blemishes
which elsewhere he shows no similar eagerness to parade—a pro-
fusion of doggerel, of bad puns and equivoques and of unequivocal
obscenity.
The case is different with The Fayre Mayde of the Exchange.
1 As to Heywood's indebtedness to the queen of Navarre and Bandello for the
double plot of this play, see Creizenach, vol. 19, part 1, p. 264.
• See Fleay, vol. 1, p. 291,
7-2
## p. 100 (#118) ############################################
Іоо
Thomas Heywood
With The pleasaunt Humours of the Cripple of Fanchurch,
which, though printed anonymously in 1607 and later, has been
usually attributed to Heywood, and upon which, treating it as his,
Charles Lamb bestowed high praise. The present writer, without
accepting Fleay's conjecture that the play was written by Machin,
cannot persuade himself that Heywood was its author. Though
the comedy offers a very lively picture of the Royal Exchange
(from a shop front point of view), there is little else to convey
the sense of freshness and originality which few of Heywood's
dramatic productions fail, in some respect, to leave upon the
reader. The heroine Phillis fails to charm, and her repartees
exhibit her as a very secondrate Beatrice, while her passion for
the 'noble’ Cripple, who is magnanimous enough to reject it, is
not so much unpleasing as unconvincing. Apart from the Cripple's
loyalty to the city and the virtue of its shopwomen (a touch of
characteristic directness) there is little to suggest Heywood; the
wittiness of some of the passages of the play, and the cleverly
symmetrical construction of its plot', are merits not common in
his dramas.
In The Royall King, and The Loyall Subject, which, though not
printed till 1637, was, undoubtedly, of a relatively early date', we
have an indisputable piece of Heywood's workmanship. His muse
took a lofty flight on this occasion, seeking renown in romantic
drama. Like Fletcher's similarly named play, from which it
altogether differs in treatment, Heywood's is founded on a novel by
Bandello3; but the dramatist is clearly anxious that his localisation
of the story in England should be express and explicit ; so that it
is difficult—though useless—not to speculate on the possibility of
some personal application being intended. Yet the story of the
play is wildly improbable, and before the long-suffering fidelity of
the Marshal and his family even Patient Grissel's pales ; in short,
an impression of artificiality mars the total effect. Moreover, the
action, as it were, begins over again, after it had seemed to have
reached its height. In a word, though the diction, in the case of
1 In the actual close of the play, which leaves the arrest of Phillis's father for
felony without explanation or sequence, there must have been something wrong in
the stenography.
2 See the references to versification and costume in the epilogue. Fleay (vol. 1, p. 300)
insists that this play was an altered version of Marshal Osric, by Heywood and Went-
worth Smith (performed by Worcester's men in 1602), brought out, in consequence
of the success of Fletcher's Loyal Subject, soon after that play, probably at Christmas
1633.
3 Cf. Koeppel, E. , Quellenstudien zu den Dramen Ben Jonsons (1895), appendix,
pp. 133-5.
## p. 101 (#119) ############################################
The Fair Maid Of The West
IOI
a
the principal plot, maintains a level unusual with Heywood, the
conception is superior to its execution, and the by-plot, which
essays to illustrate the commonplace saying that clothes make the
man, is, as not unfrequently with Heywood, extravagant and in part
offensive. This play, which, very possibly, was earlier than A Woman
Kilde with Kindnesse, cannot claim to be ranked beside it.
The Rape of Lucrece, printed in 1609, but first produced
soon after the accession of James I', is, again, in a different style, if
style of any sort can be ascribed to this odd medley of tragedy and
vaudeville. As to the serious action, all that need be said is that
the dramatist has contrived to provoke a strange thrill of mixed
pity and terror by the picture of the house of Collatinus when the
morning dawns on Tarquin's crime. It is here that he introduces
the one exquisite lyric known to have come from his pen. The
other songs—a budget of what at the present day would be called
music hall ditties interspersed in the action of this 'true Roman
tragedy' by Valerius, 'the merry Lord among the Roman peers'-
are, in part, of antiquarian interest (such as the list of London
taverns, and that of the street cries of Rome); they reach the nadir
of shameless inappropriateness in the catch with which the merry
lord, Horatius Cocles and the clown 'follow on,' when the tragic
action is suspended at its height.
In The Fair Maid Of The West, printed in 1631, which is
undoubtedly and unmistakably Heywood's, we have another
romantic comedy, but one in which the patriotic note sounds
clearly and the salt breeze of the sea blows to and from our island
shores. Part I of this dramatic Odyssey (which must have been
founded on some popular tale unknown to us) begins with a
delightfully vivid picture of English seaport life, localised at
Plymouth and dated by a dumb-show as at the time of the ex-
pedition of Essex to the Azores. On the Hoe, the gallant Spencer
parts from the lovely Besse Bridges, the pride of the Castle inn-
he to sail for 'Fiall,' she to keep her faith and fortune for him at
Foy. Soon afterwards, we are transported into the land of eastern
romance, and, after divers marvellous adventures-all redounding
to the honour and glory of Elizabethan England and her sailors-
we leave the lovers reunited as the honoured guests of king
Mullisheg of Fesse. Part II completes the story in three stirring
acts, brimful of lust, courage, sensitive honour and royal magna-
nimity, enough in their combination to furnish forth an entire
i See Fleay, vol. I, p. 292.
'Packe cloudes away, and welcome day,' eto.
## p. 102 (#120) ############################################
102
Thomas Heywood
6
drama. But, as in The Royall King, the author cannot leave well
alone, and, in acts iv-v, adds a further series of adventures in
Italy, beginning with a shipwreck, which must have gone near to
surfeit even an Elizabethan audience. But the English 'spirit and
fire 1,' and kindly clowning of Clem, Besse's faithful ‘drawer'
and constant follower in east and west, hold out to the end.
The English Traveller, printed in 1633, was probably acted in
or about 1627 ; but the evidence on the subject is slight. The
story of Geraldine is told by Heywood in his History of Women?
as having 'lately happened within' his 'own knowledge’; but the
attempts which have been made to identify the hero remain
mere conjectures : The main plot with which the young
traveller is concerned turns on the idea which lies at the root of
Heywood's finest dramatic designs—that, if to err is human, to
forgive is what raises humanity beyond the earth. There is genius
in the twofold capacity for thinking nobly and beyond the range
of common minds, and for bringing home such thoughts to their
comprehension and sympathy. The by-plot of this drama is
derived from Plautus.
A few words will suffice as to the remaining extant plays of
which Heywood was sole author. Among these, The Captives, or
The Lost Recovered, which was not known to exist in print till
1883, when Mr Bullen found a copy of it in the British Museum, is,
by external evidence as well as by that of style and manner,
proved to be that entered as ‘by Hayward' in Sir Henry Herbert's
office book under the date 1634. This romantic comedy exhibits
the writer's patriotic spirit, as well as his love of the sea and its
ways. The main story is taken from the Rudens of Plautus,
several passages in which are translated in the play, but it seems
to have reached the author through the Italian hand of Masuccio
Salernitano. The underplot, which is derived from an old French
fabliau, translated into an English jest-book and retold by
1
These bold Englishmen
I think are all compos'd of spirit and fire,
The element of earth hath no part in them.
Part 11, act iv, ad fin,
2 Book iv, A Moderne History of an Adulteresse.
3 See Fleay's endeavour (vol. I, p. 297) to find the original of the young Levantine
traveller in George Sandys; and cf. the suggestion hazarded by Bang (Materialien,
etc. , vol. II, p. 376) that Young Geraldine was meant for Sir Peter Pindar, whom in
a distich (ibid. p. 266) Heywood couples with St Paul— both travel'd. '
• The Mostellaria. This part of the play introduces the celebrated fancy of
Naupagium joculare, to which Heywood recurs in less elaborate fashion in The Captives,
and which comes from the Deipnosophia of Athenaeus.
## p. 103 (#121) ############################################
Loves Maistresse
103
Heywood in his History of Women", recalls the scenes with the
friars in The Jew of Malta, a play which Heywood worked up for
representation before he published it in 1632, possibly himself
introducing into it these very scenes? . Another romantic drama,
A Mayden-Head well lost (printed in 1634, but acted some time
earlier-it contains dumb-shows, but little rime) has little or
nothing in it to redeem the offensiveness of its plot, one of the
numerous versions of the story of All's Well that Ends Well, relieved
by drollery very inferior to that of Parolles. A Challenge for
Beautie (printed in 1636, and probably produced on the stage only
a year or two earlier) is, in some respects, more characteristic of
Heywood, and is, in truth, written throughout in a vein of the most
blatant national self-consciousness. The main argument of the
piece, the pride of the Spanish-born queen who arrogantly sends
forth one of her courtiers to find her superior if he can of
course he finds her in England-resembles an Arabian night's
tale, but the loss of the fair Hellena's ring in a washhand-basin
is a trivial expedient. The by-plot of Ferars and Valladolid's
rivalry, which ends in the discovery that the lady adored by
both is the sister of the Englishman, is extremely theatrical but
not the least satisfactory. Finally, the latest of Heywood's plays
in date of production is, probably, Loves Maistresse: Or, The
Queens Masque, performed in 1633, and again in the following year
at Denmark house on the king's birthday, and printed in 1636.
This dramatic entertainment, into which Fleay has read the signs
of a theatrical quarrel between Apuleius (Heywood) and Midas
(Christopher Beeston), cannot have given much pleasure even to
the instructed except in some pretty passages“, especially in the
earlier scenes dealing with the story of Cupid and Psyche; to
the uninstructed, it must have seemed a shapeless jumble of
mythological learning. Heywood lacked the lyrical gift needed
to animate an effort of this nature; and Midas, who repeatedly
declines to see out the play, may be pardoned for finding con-
solation in the dances.
Thus, passing by Heywood's seven pageants (1631—9), to the
1 Cl. Book v, The Faire ladie of Norwich.
? Cf. Kittredge, G. L. , in The Journal of Germanic Philology, vol. 11, p. 13.
3. Of all the Christians this arme e'er stay'd,' says the Turkish captain, you come
the neerest men? What country? ' 'England,' replies Ferars, as if he could have
been mistaken for a • Diego' or a mounseer.
The fine lines
Oh griefe, that silver haires should crowne his head
By whom the Muses are dishonourëd
are, probably, a reminiscence of Spenser.
## p. 104 (#122) ############################################
104
Thomas Heywood
2
civic enthusiasm of which reference has already been made, we
come, in conclusion, to two plays in which he collaborated with
other writers. Of these, Fortune by Land and Sea was not
printed till 1655, as the joint production of Thomas Heywood
and William Rowley (both of whose names were mis-spelt on the
title-page); but it belongs to a far earlier date_possibly 1607—9,
when both dramatists were included in queen Anne's company?
The strong hand of William Rowley may be discernible in this
piece, which has a firmer texture than is usual with his fellow
playwright, and it may or may not) have been that hand
which gave dramatic form to the adventures and sentiments
of the pirates Clinton and Walton (the purser), apparently long-
lived favourites of the public—for pirates and patriots were not
so very far apart in that spacious age. In substance, however,
it is a domestic drama in Heywood's most characteristic manner,
while it bears witness once more to his love of the sea. The
admirable opening-a tavern brawl, the bloody ending of which
forms the starting point of the action resembles that of Heywood's
masterpiece; the troubles of Old Forrest are treated with gentle
pathos ; and the very humours of the clown are tinged with the
kindliness which can relieve even tomfoolery,
The late Lancashire Witches was printed in 1634 as the joint
work of Thomas Heywood and Richard Brome. But the story of
the play was based, in part, upon an account, published by T. Potts
in 1613, of the doings of certain Lancashire women, of whom twelve
had suffered death as witches in the previous year, and it is
possible that Heywood was the author of a play much earlier than
that put on the stage in 1634. In this year, another discovery' of
witches had attracted public attention, and the principal witness
in this case (who appears in the play as the boy) had been brought
up to London. This ingenuous creature afterwards confessed that
his evidence before the Lancashire magistrates had been suborned,
and the accused, unlike their unfortunate predecessors in 1612,
were pardoned. But the authors of The late Lancashire Witches
cannot be acquitted on the charge that they had, pendente lite,
done their utmost to intensify public feeling against 'witches'-
whether or not their play was furbished up from an earlier piece
1 Cf. Fleay, vol. 1, p. 294; where see, also, as to the verse account of the two pirates,
first entered in the Stationers' register in 1586. The form of the play, in which there is
a great deal of rime, favours the assumption of an early date.
? Barron Field, in his edition of the play, rightly points out that the degradation of
the disinherited eldest son and his wife to the position of farm labourers may not
have seemed unnatural to an Elizabethan audience.
## p. 105 (#123) ############################################
!
13
E
This
His Qualities as a Dramatist
105
written by one of them! This makes it difficult to peruse with
patience the reproduction in this drama of the superstitious fictions
which did twelve unhappy women to death-the 'ridings' through
the air and the unholy assemblies, together with the mischievous
interference at a wedding feast and other rites. Yet, in this
farrago of half realistic nonsense, it is possible to discern the
elements of effective domestic drama, and the touching scene in
which Master Generous seeks to redeem his misguided wife from
her evil practices breathes a spirit akin to that which animates
some of the finest passages in Heywood's dramatic work.
The above, necessarily compendious, review of the extant
writings of this dramatist may have gone some way to make good
the conclusion that the flexibility of his talent as well as his
indefatigable industry enabled him to hold his own in dramatic
species so diverse as the chronicle history, the romantic drama
and the comedy of manners. In addition, he achieved at least one
masterpiece in domestic drama—a species in which his sincerity
and directness, together with a pathetic power springing from a
manly, candid and generous nature, found their most congenial
expression; while several other of his plays may, at least in part,
be regarded as having contributed to this artistic growth. While
he possessed the gift of genuine pathos, he was incapable of
lending words to passion; his satiric gift was small, and he rarely
sought to exercise it, his wit and humour moving more or less
within conventional bounds, though his clowns are by no means
invariably tedious. He was not strong in the art of construction,
and the total effect of several of his plays suffers from the by-plots
with which he thought it incumbent on him to eke out their
main action; but he was singularly skilful both in devising
most effective dramatic situations, and in providing for his plays
a background-usually disclosed in an excellent opening—which
gave to them individuality and variety. He was devoid of any
lyric vein, though the popular sympathies by which he was stirred
might have seemed likely to move him to song—for patriotism,
both national and civic, was second nature to him. Few features
are more striking in him than the love of learning which he
had brought with him from Cambridge and which he nourished by
lifelong application. But from drying up into a pedant he was
-
13
See the present writer's account of the play in English Dramatic Literature, vol. 11,
p. 575; and cf. the late James Crossley's Introduction to Potts's Discoverie of Witches,
etc. (Chetham Society's Publications, vol. vi, 1845), where will be found much learning
on the subject.
## p. 106 (#124) ############################################
106
Thomas Heywood
preserved by the manysidedness of his intellectual interests, and
by the freshness of spirit that was in him.
A ‘prose Shakespeare' Heywood deserves to be called only
in so far as he, too, could, on occasion, probe the depths of
human nature, touching with the wand of poetic imagination what
seemed to him of interest in the homely figures and everyday
experiences of contemporary life. When he imitated Shakespeare,
as in passages of his plays he did more or less unconsciously? ,
this was only in the way of business. He was not the man to
dream of donning the armour of Achilles, any more than to aspire
to an enduring fame—though of such as is his due meed he is
not likely to be deprived.
* One or two of these passages may be noted here:
A horse! a horse! (Part II of If you know not me, etc. )
What seek ye from the throne ?
That in which Kings
Resemble most the Gods: Justice. (A Challenge for Beautie, act v. )
And hand to hand in single opposition. (Fortune by Land and Sea, act 11. )
## p. 107 (#125) ############################################
CHAPTER V
BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER
The collection of plays with which the names of Beaumont
and Fletcher are traditionally associated constitutes the most
important body of dramatic work which was produced by the
successors of the Elizabethans, that is to say, by those dramatists
whose activity belonged wholly to the Stewart period. With this
new generation, a new fashion had come in. The genuinely
national interest in the drama which especially characterised the
last fifteen years of Elizabeth had, to a great extent, passed
away, and the taste of the court had become gradually more and
more the prevailing influence. This tendency had outwardly ex-
pressed itself, nearly at the beginning of the reign of James I, in
the fact that all the companies of actors in London then came to
be directly under the patronage of the royal family, while the pro-
duction of plays was, at the same time, subjected to the control
of the master of the revels; and, as the older generation of
dramatists disappeared, the new fashion showed itself more
and more in the character of the plays produced. Ben Jonson's
inductions are full of protests against the taste of the day in
drama, and especially against the growing tyranny in the matter
of criticism exercised by gallants who occupied seats on the
stage and assumed the right to damn a play at their pleasure;
but he found himself helpless to modify the prevailing fashions.
The court of James I had lost the chivalrous aspirations of the earlier
time, and the moral corruption which had been held in check, at
least to some extent, by noble ideals, had become alarmingly
prominent in the life of the upper classes of society. Shallowness
and frivolity characterised the manners of the court, even where
these were not tinged with gross vices, and a certain superficial
brilliancy had taken the place of more estimable qualities. Such
a society was naturally disinclined to serious reflection upon the
## p. 108 (#126) ############################################
108
Beaumont and Fletcher
issues of human life, and Shakespearean tragedy was both too
wide and too deep for its sympathies. It was, perhaps, a per-
ception of this change of conditions, rather than any marked
change in his own genius or temperament, that led Shakespeare
to abandon tragedy during the latest years of his connection with
the stage, and to entertain his public with dramatic romances.
However this may be, a definite preference was manifested, in the
period which was then beginning, for that hybrid form of drama
which became specially characteristic of the English stage-
tragicomedy; in which serious matters are dealt with, but a tragic
solution is avoided. Closely connected with this want of moral
earnestness was the demand for theatrical entertainments which did
not make any serious appeal to the intellect; and, hence, on the one
hand, the exaggerated love of pageantry, which was gratified by
the magnificence of the masques presented at court, and, on the
other, the growing preference, even of the better portion of the
audiences at the playhouses, for plots full of interesting events and
surprising turns of fortune, rather than such as were developed
naturally from situations and characters: the result being a
comparative neglect of character interest, and a disregard for
the principle of artistic unity.
But, apart from the general relaxation of moral and intellectual
fibre which was indicated in these tendencies, there were far more
serious evidences of moral decadence. The manners of society
had not yet sunk to the prosaic level of profligacy which cha-
racterised the period of the Restoration, and the feeling for poetry
and romance had not altogether departed; but the court standard
of morals with regard to the relations of men and women was
decidedly low, and false notions of loyalty and honour, to a great
extent, had established themselves in the higher classes of society.
In these respects, there is no reason to doubt that the drama of
the period reflected the prevailing fashions. Themes of love and
honour are those in which an artificial society of this kind is
chiefly interested, and it is these which it desires to see dealt with
upon the stage. The moral standard of the drama is apt to be the
same as that of the community for which it is composed; and
where false ideals of conduct in regard to chastity and honour
prevail in a society, we may reasonably expect to find them
reflected in the drama which is patronised by it.
The tastes of the society which had its centre in the court
of James I were, in fact, very faithfully provided for in the series
of dramas which have come down to us under the names of
## p. 109 (#127) ############################################
Contemporary Estimate
109
Beaumont and Fletcher; and that these should have been better
liked upon the stage than those of Shakespeare ought not to be
matter for surprise. In the former, poetry and romance were found
in combination with the code of manners and the standard of morals
which prevailed among gentlemen; the spectator was entertained
by a lively succession of events, contrived with consummate stage-
craft to produce the most interesting situations and the most
pleasurable surprises, and by a considerable variety of characters,
for the most part well sustained, though very deficient in depth
and truth to nature when compared with Shakespeare's; while,
at the same time, the language was a model of lucidity and purity,
altogether free both from tasteless conceits and from the obscurity
to which a style either highly figurative or overloaded with
thought is liable. Moreover, in the comedies, the audience was
interested and delighted by a new style of wit in conversation,
which was recognised as just that kind of brilliancy which every
courtier would wish to display, and beside which the old Eliza-
beth way' seemed clumsy and oldfashioned.
Shakespeare to thee was dull, whose best wit lies
the ladies' questions and the fools' replies,
Old-fashion'd wit, which walk'd from town to town
In trunk-hose, which our fathers call'd the clown.
So William Cartwright, a fellow poet and dramatist, addressed
Fletcher; and Dryden was only repeating a commonplace when
he said, comparing Beaumont and Fletcher with Shakespeare, that
'they understood and imitated the conversation of gentlemen much
better, whose wild debaucheries and quickness of wit in repartees
no poet can ever paint as they have done. ' The morality of their
plays, bad as it may seem to us in some cases, was by no means
looked upon as a just ground of complaint by their contemporaries.
On the contrary, the moral improvement to be gained from them
is one of the points insisted upon by their panegyrists:
Vices which were
Manners abroad, did pass corrected there;
They who possessed a box and half-crown spent
To learn obsceneness, returned innocent.
We find here, fully developed for the first time, a species of stage
entertainment which is rather an acted romance than a drama
in the strict sense of the word; without the intensity of tragedy,
but with more emotional interest and a more poetical style of
expression than is proper to comedy. The poetical comedy of
Shakespeare's middle period had been, to some extent, of this
d
D
1
## p. 110 (#128) ############################################
IIO
Beaumont and Fletcher
kind; and the species was exemplified further in the work of his
latest period, in Cymbeline, Pericles, The Tempest and The
Winter's Tale.
