Thomas Heywood and the classical tradition

Thomas Heywood was unusual in the diversity and sheer quantity of his output, and fascinatingly individual in his classicism. This volume offers a ground-breaking investigation of his engagement with the classics across a writing career that spanned more than 40 years. It is the first in-depth study of his classicism, and it features a variety of perspectives. The introduction and twelve essays trace how the classics shaped Heywood’s writing in a wide variety of genres – translation, drama, epyllic and epic verse, compendia, epigrams, panegyrics and pamphlets – and informed both his many pageants and the warship he helped design for Charles I. Close readings demonstrate the depth and breadth of his classicism, establishing the rich influence of continental editions and translations of Latin and Greek texts, early modern mythographies, chronicles and the medieval tradition of Troy as revived by the Tudors. The essays probe Heywood’s habit of juxtaposing different and often disjunctive layers of a capaciously conceived ‘classical tradition’ in thought-provoking ways, attend to his use of the multiplicitous logic of myth to interrogate gender and heroism, and consider the way he turns to antiquity not only to celebrate but also to defamiliarise the theatrical or political present. Different contributions focus on A Woman Killed with Kindness, Oenone and Paris, Loves School, The Rape of Lucrece, Troia Britanica, the Ages plays, Gynaikeion, Pleasant Dialogues and Dramma’s, Apology for Actors and Sovereign of the Seas. Classical reception thus provides an illuminating, productively cross-generic angle for approaching Heywood’s prolific output and idiosyncratic aesthetic. Front matter 1 Dedication 6 Contents 8 List of figures 10 List of tables 11 Notes on contributors 12 Acknowledgements 15 A note on the text 17 Introduction: Thomas Heywood and ‘the antique world’ 18 Intertextuality and Thomas Heywood’s early Ovid: Oenone and Paris 49 Thomas Heywood’s Loves Schoole: emulation, adaptation, and anachronism 71 Rescripting classical stories of rape from page to stage: Lucrece and Callisto 86 ‘Interlaced with sundry histories’: the open structure of The Silver Age 116 A ‘glorious Greek’? Thomas Heywood and Hercules 140 The not-so-classical tradition: mythographic complexities in 1 Iron Age 156 Reading the classics, but how? Mythographic paradigms and ‘ill-joined marquetry' 179 Compendious poetry: Homer and Ausonius in Thomas Heywood’s Various History Concerninge Women 199 ‘The scene lies in Hel’: the world of Lucian in Thomas Heywood’s stage poetry 224 Acting like Greeks 246 A theatre for the Iron Age: theorising practice in Thomas Heywood’s Ages plays 261 The Sovereign of the Seas: Thomas Heywood’s 3D engagement with the classics 283 Appendix: Heywood’s works: a chronological table 309 Select bibliography 314 Index 339 This collection offers a groundbreaking study of Thomas Heywood's fascinatingly individual engagement with the classics across his writing career. It considers the wide diversity of genres to which he contributed, including dramas, translations, compendia, and iconographical designs, and attends to the shaping role of classics in his authorial self-fashioning and idiosyncratic aesthetic. -- .