Heywood, Thomas
Heywood, Thomas (1573/4–1641),poet, playwright, and miscellanist. In the preface to The English Traveller (1633) Heywood claims to have had a hand in some 220 plays, but only 20 or so survive. His best plays fall, broadly speaking, into two categories: lively studies of domestic and marital politics, often in a middle-class setting, such as The Wise-Woman of Hogsdon (1638), The English Traveller, and his tragicomic masterpiece, A Woman Killed with Kindness (1607); and spectacular dramatizations of classical myth and legend, such as The Rape of Lucrece (1608)—a strange musical tragedy which may be echoed in Shakespeare's Cymbeline—and his Ovidian theatrical epic in five instalments, The Golden Age (1611), The Silver Age (1613), The Brazen Age (1613), and the two parts of The Iron Age (printed in 1652). The Iron Age, which deals with the Trojan War, owes much to...
[The entire page is 358 words long]
Join eNotes
Over 3,500 study guides, question and answer forums, literature criticism, reference content, and much more!
Oxford University Press Titles
