TOURNEUR

From "THE REVENGER'S TRAGEDY "

Here's an eye

Able to tempt a great man-to serve God;

A pretty hanging lip, that has forgot now to dissemble.
Methinks this mouth should make a swearer tremble;

A drunkard clasp his teeth, and not undo 'em,

To suffer wet damnation to run through 'em.

Here's a check keeps her colour let the wind go whistle;
Spout rain, we fear thee not be hot or cold,
All's one with us: and is not he absurd,
Whose fortunes are upon their faces set,
That fear no other God but wind and wet?

Does the silkworm expend her yellow
labours

For thee? for thee does she undo herself?
Are lordships sold to maintain ladyships,
For the poor benefit of a bewitching
minute ?

Why does yon fellow falsify highways,
And put his life between the judge's lips,
To refine such a thing? keep his horse and

And make him a good coward: put a reveller

Out of his antick amble,

And cloy an epicure with empty dishes.

THE

339

REVENGERS

TRAGEDIE,

As it hath beene fundry times Acted, by the Kings Maiesties Servants.

AT LONDON
Printed by G. E1 D, and are to be fold at his
hoefe in Fleere-lane at the figne of the
Printers-Presse.
1607.

Title page of Cyril Tourneur's "The
Revenger's Tragedy," 1607

Here might a scornful and ambitious woman

Look through and through herself.-See, ladies, with false forms
You deceive men, but cannot deceive worms.

From "THE ATHEIST'S TRAGEDY "

Walking upon the fatal shore,

Among the slaughter'd bodies of their men,
Which the full-stomach'd sea had cast upon
The sands, it was my unhappy chance to light
Upon a face, whose favour when it lived
My astonish'd mind inform'd me I had seen.
He lay in his armour, as if that had been
His coffin; and the weeping sea (like one

Title-page of Heywood's "Hierarchy of the Blessed Angels," 1635

341

The one fact about THOMAS HEYWOOD which is universally known is that Charles Lamb called him "a sort of prose Shakespeare." This genial expression, divorced from its context, has been a stumbling-block to many readers who have turned to A Challenge for Beauty or to The Fair Maid of the Exchange, and have been disappointed to meet there with some beauty, indeed, but with slovenly qualities the reverse of Shakespearean. But Lamb's too-telling phrase should not be quoted alone; it is true that he was carried away by the enthusiasm of the discoverer so far as to say that Heywood's "scenes are to the full as natural and affecting as Shakespeare's; yet he immediately qualified this excess of praise by adding, "but we miss the Poet, that which in Shakespeare always appears out of and above the surface of the nature. Heywood's characters, his country gentlemen, and so on, are exactly what we see, but of the best kind of what we see, in life." These words excellently indicate the tendency of this dramatist, whose merit lies not in the intensity and splendour of his fancy, or in his power over terror and pain, but in his

Allegorical plate from the "Hierarchy of the Blessed
Angels," with portraits of Charles I. and his Family

Thomas Heywood

humane simplicity. Nowhere in the Jacobean age do we seem to come so close to the ordinary conversation of the day, unrevised and unadorned. What Heywood lacks is distinction; he is content to be an indefatigable hackney writer, incessantly and without ambition engaged in amusing and awakening his contemporaries. The people whom Heywood collects before us in such plays as A Woman Killed with Kindness and The English Traveller are natural and, even in their errors, amiable. He does not deal in heroes and monsters, like so many of his fellow playwrights. In them a violence is notable, an uplifting of the whole soul in arms to resist fate and to perish, if necessary, in the struggle. But Heywood's gentle talent does not strive or cry; he loves to depict submission, reconciliations, facile intrigues which are "very very delectable and full of mirth." Besides the domestic plays by which this poet is best known, he wrote a considerable number of classical entertainments, half serious dramas, half burlesques, ingenious and extraordinary, of which The Rape of Lucrece is the type, and a mass of pseudophilosophical verse, garrulous and prosy, the most curious specimen of which is The Hierarchy of the Blessed Angels, a sort of analysis of the universe, visible and invisible.

It is probable that Thomas Heywood was born about 1575 in Lincolnshire. He was educated at Cambridge, and became a fellow of Peterhouse. During his residence at the University he became deeply interested in the stage, and doubtless contributed to the " tragedies, comedies, histories, pastorals, and shows " which he tells us were acted in his time by "graduates of good place." In 1596 he came to London and wrote a play for the Lord Admiral's Company, to which in 1598 we find him regularly attached as an actor. Of the dramas which he composed at this time. The Four Prentices of London is probably the only one which survives. We have, however, a series of tame chronicle-plays which seem to date from 1600. Heywood's masterpiece, A Woman Killed with Kindness, was produced in 1602 (printed in 1607). In the very interesting preface to The English Traveller, which was not published until 1633, Heywood tells us that this tragicomedy is but "one reserved amongst two hundred and twenty, in which I have had either an entire hand or at the least a main finger." Even at that date, many of these plays had "been negligently lost," and Heywood adds that "it never was any great ambition in me to be in this kind voluminously read." Of his vast body of dramatic writing, therefore, we may be surprised that so many as twenty-four complete plays have come down to us. Of his more ambitious, but less successful, non-dramatic works, Troja Britannica was published in 1609, Gunaikeion, or, Nine Books Concerning Women in 1624, and The Hierarchy of the Blessed Angels in 1635. He disappears after 1641.