No More Learning

It seems to be a late and only return
to the earlier manner of the farcical comedies of city life, with
shopkeeping scenes of the old random brilliance and the old
domestic fooleries. Even more matter is crammed into it, and
this even more hastily, and there is the old fierce vigour of
talk. But, in two plays, published together in 1657, we see what
seems to be almost the last mood of Middleton, after his
collaboration with Rowley was at an end, and the influence,
perhaps, not wholly evaporated. More dissemblers besides
Women, which is characteristic of Middleton in its tangle of
virtues and hypocrisies, its masquerade of serious meanings and
humorous disguises, is written in verse of a lovely and eager
quality, which bends with equal flexibility to the doings of those
dear gipsies' and to the good cardinal's concerns of conscience 'in
a creature that's so doubtful as a woman. ' It is a particoloured
thing, and has both beauty and oddity. But, in Women beware
Women, we find much of Middleton's finest and ripest work, together
with his most rancid comic relief'; a stern and pitiless criticism
''
'
of life' is interrupted by foul and foolish clowning; and a tragedy
of the finest comic savour ends in a mere heap of corpses, where
vengeance met vengeance
Like a set match, as if the plagues of sin
Had been agreed to meet here all together.
'I've lost myself in this quite,' Middleton might say with the duke,
and rarely has better material been more callously left to spoil.
There is no finer comedy of its kind in the whole of Elizabethan
drama than the scene between Livia, Bianca and the widow; and
the kind is a rare, bitter and partly tragic one. The human
casuistry is flawless; the irony is an illumination rather than a
correction of reality. And these vile people are alive, and the
vices in them work with a bewildering and convincing certainty.
The technique of such scenes as that in which husband and wife
flaunt their new finery at each other is not less than astonishing.
All the meaner passions are seen in probable action, speaking
without emphasis, in a language never too far from daily speech
a


## p. 79 (#97) ##############################################

A Game at Chesse
A
79
6
for the complete illusion of reality. There is not even the inter-
ruption of a mere splendour; no one speaks greatly or utters
irrelevant poetry ; here, poetry is the very slave and confidant of
drama, heroically obedient. But the heights of The Changeling,
the nobility of even what was evil in the passions of that play, are
no longer attained. Middleton, left to himself, has returned, with
new experience and new capacity, to his own level.
With one more experiment, and this a masterpiece of a
wholly new kind, 'the only work of English poetry,' says
Swinburne, 'which may properly be called Aristophanic,' the
career of Middleton comes, so far as we know, to an end. A
Game at Chesse is a satire, taking the popular side against Spain,
and it was the Spanish ambassador Gondomar, the 'Machiavel-
politician' and Black Knight of its chess-board, who caused the
suppression of the play, and the punishment of all concerned in it.
It is the most perfect of Middleton's works, and it carries some of
his most intimate qualities to a point they had not reached before.
Banter turns into a quite serious and clear and bitter satire;
burlesque becomes a severe and elegant thing; the verse, begin-
ning formally and always kept well within bounds, is fitted with
supreme technical skill to this new, outlandish matter; there are
straight confessions of sins and symbolic feasts of vices, in which
a manner acquired by the city chronologer for numbering the
feasts and fastings of the city is adapted by him to finer use.
We learn now how
fat cathedral bodies
Have very often but lean little soul,
and the imagery, already expressive, takes on a new colour of
solemn mockery.
From this leviathan-scandal that lies rolling
Upon the crystal waters of devotion,
is sometimes the language of the Black Knight, and sometimes
In the most fortunate angle of the world
The court hath held the city by the horns
Whilst I have milked her.
Technique, in drama and verse alike, never flags ; and the play is
a satire and criticism, no longer of city manners or of personal
vices, but of the nation's policy; and that it was accepted as such,
by the public and by the government of the time, is proved by the
fifteen hundred pounds taken by the actors in nine days, and by
the arrest of Middleton for what was really a form of patriotism.


## p. 80 (#98) ##############################################

80
Middleton and Rowley
We have no record of anything written by Middleton during
the three remaining years of his life. A Game at Chesse is the
culmination of those qualities which seem to have been most
natural and instinctive in him, in spite of the splendid work of
another kind which he did with Rowley in The Changeling. His
genius was varied and copious, and he showed his capacity to do
almost every kind of dramatic work with immense vigour. Life is
never long absent from the tangled scenes, in which a hetero-
geneous crowd hurries by, not stopping long enough to make us
familiar with most of the persons in it, but giving us an unmis-
takable human savour. Few of the plays are quite satisfactory
all through ; there is almost always some considerable flaw, in
construction, in characterisation, or in aesthetic taste; yet hardly
one of them can be neglected in our consideration of the drama-
tist's work as a whole. In single scenes of tragedy and of comedy
(romantic comedy, the comedy of manners, farce, and satire) he can
hold his own against any contemporary, and it is only in lyric verse
that he is never successful. He became a remarkable dramatic
poet; but he was not born to sing. Poetry came to him slowly,
and he had to disentangle it from more active growths of comic
energy. It came to him when he began to realise that there was
something in the world besides cheating shopkeepers and cozening
lawyers, and the bargains made between men and women for bodies,
not souls. With the heightening of emotion his style heightens,
and as his comedy refines itself his verse becomes subtler. In
Middleton's work, the cry of De Flores
Ha! what art thou that tak'st away the light
Betwixt that star and me? I dread thee not:
'Twas but a mist of conscience;
is almost unique in imagination. And it is drama even more than
it is poetry. His style is the most plausible of all styles in poetry,
and it has a probable beauty, giving an easy grace of form to
whatever asks to be expressed. It rarely steps aside to pick up
a jewel, nor do jewels drop naturally out of its mouth.


## p. 81 (#99) ##############################################

CHAPTER IV
THOMAS HEYWOOD
It is in writers of the second rank and of these, with his
abundant merit and attractive idiosyncrasy, Thomas Heywood un-
mistakably was—that we find it easiest to study the progress and
expansion of the form of art practised by them. In the brief
but often interesting addresses prefixed by Heywood to his plays,
he was fond of referring to the changes in public taste which play-
wrights had been called upon to consult in the course of his own
long experience; but he seems to care little about indicating his
own preference for either old style or new, being manifestly as
ready to fall in with the latter as he had been to put forth his best
endeavours in the former. When commending to favour a drama
depending for its effect entirely on character, situations and dia-
logue, and introducing
No Drum, nor Trumpet, nor Dambe show,
No Combate, Marriage, not so much Today
As Song, Dance, Masque, to bumbaste out our Play-
he hastens to add :
Yet these all good, and still in frequent use
With our best Poets 1.
And, as with matter, so with form : recalling the time when rime
was in fashion in plays and 'strong lines were not lookt after," he
takes occasion to observe that what is out of date now may come into
fashion again and sute well'—and, for himself, he is clearly quite
ready to stop or rime his lines with his fellows. He has no wish
to criticise or to theorise, or to set himself up as a representative
of any special class or select sort of English drama. Had he not,
at the beginning of his twoscore or more years of labours for the
stage, dramatised both history and historical romance in plays to
6
6
.
1 Prologue to The English Traveller.
? Epilogue (to the Reader) to The Royall King, and The Loyal Subject.
EL VI
6
CH. IV.


## p. 82 (#100) #############################################

82
Thomas Heywood
a
which no bold prentice could listen without breaking into rapturous
applause and no citizen's wife without dropping a sympathetic
tear; and, as for ‘song, dance and masque,' had not Homer and
Ovid and Apuleius been alike laid under contribution by him for
providing entertainments from which neither learned nor lewd
would
go home unsatisfied ? Even dramatic species to which he felt
no personal attraction such as that comedy of humours flash'd in
wit' which satirised types of humanity neither heroic nor attrac-
tive—he declined to depreciate, merely urging those who cultivated
them not to eschew the treatment of other and loftier subjects:
the deeds of great Patriots, Dukes and Kings,' for the memorising
of which the English drama (some plays of his own with the rest)
had hitherto been notably distinguished".
But, while Heywood, cheerfully suiting himself and his art to
a variety of dramatic genres, attained to virtuosity rather than
to supreme excellence in the chronicle history and the romantic
drama, and did as well as many others in the comedy of manners
and the mythological play, he associated his name after a more
intimate fashion with a species which had a character, and a future,
of its own. This was the domestic drama, which, on the background
of ordinary family life, presents an action of deep and commanding
moral interest. Heywood was not the inventor of the domestic
drama, which is as thoroughly English in its genesis and in a great
part of its development as the national historical drama itself,
justly held in high honour by him. Nor was it given to him, or to
any of his contemporaries, to realise in the Elizabethan age the
possibilities of this species with a fulness comparable to that
reached by others—the comedy of manners, for instance. But he
achieved memorable and enduring results in a field in which few
of his fellow dramatists whose names are known to us made more
than tentative efforts, and to which the greatest of them abstained
from turning his attention except, as it were, in passing. The
simplicity of these works cannot be held to detract from the
honour due to the art which produced them, or to impair the
recognition implied in the fact that, in the history of European
literature, the name of Thomas Heywood is linked to those of great
writers, to some of whom it was probably unknown—Steele and
Richardson, Diderot and Lessing.
Thomas Heywood was born, somewhere about the year 1572, in
Lincolnshire, where his family must have been of good standing
1 See the interesting prologue to A Challenge for Beautie, where the superiority of
English historical plays to the dramatic efforts of other nations is roundly asserted.


## p. 83 (#101) #############################################

83
<
Life
and repute. We have it on his own authority that he was at one
time a resident member of the university of Cambridge, where he
saw 'tragedyes, comedyes, historyes, pastorals and shewes, publicly
acted,' and 'the graduates of good place and reputation specially
parted’ in these performances'. The time-honoured tradition,
which unfortunately it is impossible to corroborate with the aid of
either college or university records, that he was a fellow of
Peterhouse, rests on an explicit statement made by the bookseller
and actor William Cartwright not more than ten years after
Heywood's death? But it is practically certain that he never
held a fellowship at Peterhouse, and, among the few incidental
references to Cambridge scattered through his writings, there is
but one which introduces the name of the college to which he is
said to have belonged-and that, it must be confessed, in no very
helpful way.
By 1596, Heywood is mentioned in Henslowe's diary as writing,
or having written, a play ; but as to the time and circumstances of
his taking up the twofold vocation of actor and playwright we know
nothing. No link of any sort can have existed between him and
the 'university wits,' whose academical experiences and entrance
into London life belong to the preceding decade, and from whose
arrogance and affectations he was equally free. He became con-
nected in turn with several companies of players—probably be-
ginning with the Admiral's men at the Rose, and, in 1634, becoming
a servant of the king (Charles I). While a sound patriot, Heywood
seems to have had no love for courts*; though he celebrated the
glories of the great queen in one of his early plays as well as in a
history of the trials of her youth, indited the praises of Anne of
Denmark five years after he had attended her funeral and hailed
queen Henrietta Maria's hopes of motherhood in more than one loyal
prologue. On the other hand, his attachment to the city of London,
though not, so far as we know, due to any official or hereditary tie,
was very strong and enduring, and comprehended both the town
and its inhabitants. He celebrated the erection of the Royal
· Apology for Actors (Shakespeare Society edition), p. 28.
2 In the dedication prefixed to his edition of the Apology, published in 1658 under
the title The Actor's Vindication.
3 In The Wise-woman Of Hogsdon, act iv, Sencer, disguised as a pedant, caps the
assertion of Sir Boniface that he was student in Brazennose' by · Petrus dormit
securus: I was Sir of Peeterhouse. ' Fleay promptly concluded that Heywood acted Sencer.
* Compare with the general tone of The Royall King, and The Loyall Subject,
Wendoll's words on making his exit in A Woman Kilde with Kindnesse.
5 Fleay's suggestion that Heywood was one of the Master Stationers is hardly
offered as more than a happy thought.
642


## p. 84 (#102) #############################################

84
Thomas Heywood
>
Exchange? , whose interior is admirably described in a comedy
generally attributed to him, and of ‘Crosbie House3'; he wrote, as
we shall see, a series of mayoralty pageants for divers city companies,
and immortalised their coats of arms as blazoned on the shields
borne at the siege of Jerusalem*; he commemorated the labours of
the docks. He held up to honour the name of a princely merchant
like Sir Thomas Gresham®, and, for the flos juventutis, the prentices
of the city, he always kept a warm corner in his heart? In short,
he was a Londoner every inch of him; and, though few of our
Elizabethan dramatists have better pictured the freshness of rural
life, and the jollity of its sports and pastimes, he recognised the
perennial superiority of the vicinity of St Paul's, and was capable
of contrasting, in a daring paradox,
the toil and travell of the country
And quiet gaine of cities blessednesse 8.
It may be added that the moral code of the citizens of London
was not one with which Heywood can have been naturally inclined
to quarrel; though, of course, in his latter days, he was obliged by
his 'quality’to retort upon 'that most horrible Histriomastix and
the bitter juice of that Coloquintida and Hemlocke, which can
neither relish the peace of the Church nor Common-weale '. '
There is little to be found in his plays against puritans or puri-
tanism 10, and even in his Apology he abstains from those Satirica
Dictaeria and Comica Scommata, which he declares to be contrary
to his practice"
Heywood's industry as a playwright was, beyond all doubt,
extraordinary, though far from unparalleled. His often quoted
statement, made in 1633", that he had 'either an entire hand, or
at the least a main finger' in two hundred and twenty plays,
Fleay, rather perversely, has sought to interpret in the sense which
6
1 Part II of If you know not me, etc. 2 The Fayre Mayde of the Exchange.
3 Part I of Edward IV.
* The Foure Prentises.
• His pamphlet on the royal ship The Sovereign of the Seas contains an account of
ship-building from Noah's Ark downwards.
6 Part II of If you know not me, etc.
? The Foure Prentises and Part I of Edward IV; in Loves Maistresse, Vulcan has
cyclops and prentices' in his smithy.
8 Part II of If you know not me, etc.
9 To the Reader,' prefixed to A Mayden-Head well lost.
10 In Part II of If you know not me, etc. , the dishonest factor Timothy Thinbeard is
said by his principal to have been so pure of life that I would have trusted him with
all I had. ' In A Woman Kilde with Kindnesse, Mrs Frankford's seducer comments on
her remorseful reflections: ‘Fiel fie! you talk too much like a puritan. '
11 To the Reader,' prefixed to The Iron Age.
12 . To the Reader,' prefixed to The English Traveller.


## p. 85 (#103) #############################################

His Point of View as a Playwright 85
the words assuredly will not bear, that this total included all the
plays in which Heywood had acted during the thirty years (or
thereabouts) in question-inasmuch as in most of these plays he
had, no doubt, inserted 'gag,' while many of them had been altered
by him. This, in Fleay's opinion, would warrant the conclusion
that only about two score plays were actually written by Heywood,
who is not known to have been a frequent collaborator with other
playwrights. In 1633, however, Heywood's connection with the
theatre had extended over at least thirty-seven years, and an
average of half-a-dozen plays per annum, in which he was con-
cerned as sole or joint author, or as reviser, is not inconceivable,
if, together with the general character of his dramatic writings,
which will be considered immediately, the spirit in which he com-
posed them and the little care which he took of them, after
their appearance on the stage, be taken into account.
Nothing is more certain than that he gave little or no thought
to the destiny of his plays as 'literature. ' He wrote them, inprimis,
no doubt, for a living, and, also, in obedience to that impulse
towards dramatic production which was never more prevalent than
in the period of his connection with the stage, but which is not
necessarily the same thing as poetic inspiration. Manifestly, he
loved the theatre, which was to him a world in itself', as it is to
many actors and to not a few playwrights whose sense of their
importance in the world outside is too great to allow them to
confess it. But this did not make him anxious to find new ways
and methods for compassing old ends. Like his fellow dramatists,
he was constantly on the look-out for interesting dramatic
subjects, and he took them where he found them, setting to work,
we may rest assured, without loss of time and accomplishing his
task "all of a piece. ' To have finished his play and brought it on
the stage, was enough for him : he was careless about printing,
and, on at least one occasion, had to submit as well as he could to
the appearance of a corrupt copy, taken down by some enterprising
expert in stenography and put in print (scarce one word trew)? . '
Such plays of his as he allowed to be published he sent forth 'with
great modesty and small noise,' and, above all ‘singly,' not 'ex-
posed to the publike view of the world in numerous sheets, and
a large volume'-like Ben Jonson's 'works, or Shakespeare's”.
He that denyes then theaters should be,
He may as well deny a world to me.
• The Author to his Booke' (An Apology for Actors).
? See prologue to If you know not me, etc.
See the address •To the Reader' prefixed to The Fair Maid Of The West (printed
1631).
2
6
6


## p. 86 (#104) #############################################

86
Thomas Heywood
6
But, whether or not his rapidity of production was such as to
expose him, as Fleay conjectures, to contemporary dramatic satire
in the character of Posthaste'-whether or not we are to believe
Kirkman's ingenious statement that he was in the habit of writing
his plays on the back of tavern-bills (which, no doubt, would
satisfactorily account for the loss of many of them)whether or not,
according to the same authority, he, for several years together,
imposed on himself the rule of writing a minimum of a sheet
a day—his rate of productivity cannot be said to be left unexplained.
His pen was facile, because his mind was both fresh and ready, and
because, to use a vigorous German colloquialism, he ‘sang as his
beak had grown. ' Heywood's naïveté is, perhaps, the most delight-
ful element in his genius, although the directness of expression to
which it leads him frequently sins against refinement.
After Heywood had been an actor and a playwright for twelve
years or more
possibly at an earlier date-he bethought himself
of turning his proved ability as a writer, and the studies which he
cannot have allowed to lie fallow since his Cambridge days, to what
the age would deem a more strictly literary account. Beginning
with a translation of Sallust (1608), he produced a long series of
compositions, of which as complete as possible a list will be furnished
elsewhere, but which in no instance, with the exception of the
Apology for Actors, and, perhaps, the historical narrative entitled
England's Elizabeth(to be noticed below in connection with the play
which he based upon it), have any special interest for a generation
not so much addicted to useless learning as was the author's own.
We therefore leave aside his two long poetical productions, Troicus
Britannicus, or Great Britain's Troy, which tells its tale ab ovo
down to the pedigree of king James I, and the didactic Hierarchy
of the Blessed Angels, equal at all events to the ornate promise of
its title-page. On a similar encyclopaedic pattern he composed
Nine Books of Women, reprinted after his death under the still
more ambitious title The General History of Women. Posterity
would probably consent to burn these compilations, if from their
ashes could be produced the Lives of all the Poets, with which
the author had made some progress and which began with the
first before Homer'—and may have ended with Shakespeares.
The Lives and Acts of Nine of the most Worthy Women (three
Jews, three Gentiles and three Christians) savours, it must be
1 In Marston's Histrio-Mastix.
? See bibliography.
3 In The Fayre Mayde of the Exchange, generally attributed to Heywood, Bowdler,
'& humerous gallant,' says: “I never read anything but Venus and Adonis. ' Why,'
replies the Cripple, 'that's the very quintessence of love. '
6


## p. 87 (#105) #############################################

87
The Apology for Actors
confessed, more entirely of the bookmaker. In addition, Heywood
was an indefatigable translator and paraphraser, and one of his
lengthiest publications, Pleasant Dialogues and Drammas (of
which the date of publication is 1637), consists, mainly, of versions
of Erasmus, Textor and Lucian in heroic verse, and of Ovid in
blank, together with a long (and disagreeable) dialogue reproduced
a
from the Maechden-Pflicht of Vader Cats (1618). To these pieces
are added a series of prologues and epilogues, with as many
epitaphs, elegies, epigrams, acrostics and anagrams thrown in as
a last search of the author's cupboards can have produced. This
piece of bookmaking has scant interest for the literary student
except in so far as it helps to illustrate the extraordinary influence
of the Colloquies of Erasmus, which continued for more than
a century after their original appearance, and which, as has bee
pointed out by the editor of the Pleasant Dialogues, is distinctly
noticeable in the English drama of the Elizabethan and Jacobean
ages.
It cannot be said that the Apology for Actors (published in
1612) holds a very important place in the controversy between
the stage and its adversaries, which is narrated in a later chapter
of this volume, where Heywood's contribution to the contention is
discussed with the rest? Biographically, it interests us as giving
proof not only of his learning, which is solid and firsthand, as well
as varied and ready for use, but also of a natural moderation and
courtesy which led him to abstain from all personalities. And,
while we find him anxious for the good report of the profession
to which he belonged, and which such men as himself and Alleyn-
not to mention greater names-adorned, he at the same time
shows a modesty harmonising with all that we know of him as
a writer. In the double capacity of actor and playwright-for it
is noticeable that he seems to have no wish to distinguish between
the two functions—he describes himself as 'the youngest and
weakest of the nest wherein he was hatcht,' and liable to the
charge of presumptuousness for venturing to 'soare this pitch
before others of the same brood, more fledge, and of better wing'
than himself? . To his own plays he makes no reference or allusion
1 See the introduction to W. Bang's edition, where Fleay's assumption that any
of the pieces contained in the book had previously formed part of the Five Plays in
One performed in 1597, is rightly rejected as hazardous.
See post, chap. XIV.
3 Heywood's admiration of his chief fellow dramatists, and the kindly way in which
these men spoke of one another, are illustrated by the well known lines in the Hierarchy
of the Blessed Angels, cited in Collier's introduction to his edition of the Apology for
Actors.


## p. 88 (#106) #############################################

88
Thomas Heywood
in the course of his tract, except in the passage where he insists
on the moral purpose of the drama :
The unchaste are by us shewed in their errors in the persons of Phryne,
Lais, Thais, Flora; and amongst us Rosamond and Mistresse Shore.
The most rigid of censors could not set up a more respectable'
standard of morality and regard for authority than that desired by
the author of the Apology; though there is obviously a polemic
meaning in his protest against the practice of putting bitternesse'
and 'liberall invective' into the mouths of children-say of the
chapel-supposing their juniority to be a priviledge for any
railing. '
It has been concluded—though it cannot be proved—that from
1634—5 onwards Heywood ceased to write for the stage. His
Pleasant Dialogues and Drammas, a miscellaneous collection
of essays such as many a modern author has indulged himself by
publishing towards the close of his career, was completed by 1637;
and the last of the seven pageants which he produced, from 1631
onwards, was for the year 1639. These compositions attest his
cordial appreciations of the glories of the city under the auspices
of haberdashers, ironmongers and drapers — the dignity of
Merchants,' he exclaims with conviction, 'who can tell '? He
seems to have still been living in 1641, when a Life of Ambrosius
Merlin, compiled by him, appears to have been printed; indeed,
he is spoken of, as if alive, so late as 1648, in The Satire against
Satirists?
-
6
It seems to agree best with Heywood's method of production
to name his numerous dramatic works in their chronological
sequence, so far as this can be ascertained or, with more or less
probability, surmised, without, however, adhering to it with ab-
solute rigidity. A classification of his plays could be attempted
without much difficulty, if it were worth while ; but he, at least,
would certainly not have thought it so.
Priority of mention may, accordingly, be given to The Foure
Prentises of London. With the Conquest of Jerusalem, though,
possibly, it was preceded on the stage by one or both parts of
Edward IV. In the earliest extant edition, which is dated 1615,
the preface states the play to have been in the fashion 'some
1 See Porta Pietatis.
? Introduction to Apology, p. vi. The passage is quoted in Pearson's reprint,
vol. 1, p. XXV:
So may you come to sleep in fur at last
.
And Heywood sing your acts in lofty verse.


## p. 89 (#107) #############################################

The Foure Prentises of London
89
FLE
2
D.
6
fifteene or sixteene yeares agoe'; but Fleay has shown that there
must have been an earlier edition in, or not long after, 1610, and
that Heywood's play, probably, was the Godfrey of Bulloigne
performed by the Admiral's men as early as July 1594? And,
though Heywood certainly did not take the story of his play
direct from Tasso, it must be considered a curious coincidence
that, in 1594, Richard Carew's translation of five cantos of
Gerusalemme appeared in print? Whatever its immediate source,
this play, which combines the crude compiling method of the
early chronicle history with the violently symmetrical improba-
bilities of the popular romance, is primitive to the last degree.
The four heroes of the piece, whom their sire, the 'olde Earl
of Bulloign' had, under stress of misfortune, apprenticed in
London city, after taking service for the holy wars pass through
divers strange adventures in divers lands till they meet at last
before the ‘high wals of Hierusalem. ' Their sister, whose spirit
equals theirs, follows her star to the same spot, disguised as a
page; and a French lady, in love with one of the brothers, ac-
companies him in similar gear. After the victory has been won
(to the cries of 'A Syon! A Jerusalem ! '), each of the brothers
obtains a crown-Godfrey preferring one of thorns—and the story
ends in an accumulation of happiness. Presenter and dumb-show
have helped on the epic movement of the action, hardly any
attempt being made by the author to soar into poetry, though he
abounds in classical allusions. But the simplicity of Godfrey's
enthusiasm on beholding the
sacred path our Saviour trod
When he came riding to Hierusalem
is impressive; and the whole play must have told irresistibly upon
'the Honest and High-spirited Prentises' to whom it was after-
wards dedicated, and to whom Godfrey's accurate description of his
own and his brother's military functions, which has a strong smack
of the Artillery Garden, must have specially appealed.
In the amusing farce, The Knight of the Burning Pestles, in
which Beaumont and Fletcher ridiculed those very civic tastes
which Heywood's play had sought to gratify, fun is incidentally
made of The Foure Prentises, as well as of the plays which will
be noted next, and of a drama entitled The Bold Beachams
Cf. Fleay, English Drama, vol. 1, p. 282. The difficulties in the way cannot,
however, be ignored; see Greg, W. W. , Henslowe's Diary, vol. II, pp. 166, 284. The
indication noted by Collier that this was the play in which, in 1602, Wentworth Smith
collaborated with Heywood is not convincing.
2 Warton, vol. iv, p. 350.
3 Cf. post, chap. v.
th
het


## p. 90 (#108) #############################################

90
Thomas Heywood
(Beauchamps), which, without good authority, has been attributed
to Heywood
In the two plays, each of them in two parts, which next come
under consideration, Heywood worked on the model of the old
chronicle history pure and simple. Though doubt has been thrown
on Heywood's authorship of the earlier of these plays, King
Edward IV, on the ground of its superiority to the rest of the
dramatist's earlier work, it may confidently be accepted as his,
in view of the general unevenness in the relative merits of his
plays, and of the fact that, in its sentimental as well as its
humorous scenes, the piece is in a vein thoroughly his own.
Edward IV, which, after the full titlehad been entered in the
Stationers' register in 1599, was printed in the following year,
makes no attempt at dramatic unity-for it can hardly be said to
derive this from the personality of the city's favourite king,
Edward of the 'gadding eye.
' As has been pointed out by Schelling*,
the two parts of the play contain ‘not less than five stories in-
differently connected together by personages that fill roles in two
or more '—viz. the story of the bastard Falconbridge's siege of
London, in which were possibly incorporated reminiscences of
The Siege of London, a play revived by the Admiral's men in
December 1594, and in which the gallant flat-caps are not for-
gotten, while we meet with an original humorous figure in the
person of the well-meaning but unintelligible Maister Josselin ;
the diverting episode of Hobs the tanner of Tamworth, a figure
borrowed from an old ballad, who accurately represents the in-
difference of the populace towards the question at issue in the
wars of the Roses; the futile expedition of king Edward to
France (in which Louis XI makes his first appearance on the
English stage); the murder of the little princes in the Tower, a
tragic tale told with homely pathos; and, lastly, the story of Jane
Shore, which alone stretches from the first into the second part
of the play. The long-lived popularity of this story, which, also,
was taken from an old ballad, and which found its way again
and again into English dramatic and epic literature, needs no
1 See Fleay, u. 8. , vol. 1, p. 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.