Introduction

Thomas Heywood was born in Lincolnshire, almost certainly in 1573. His father appears to have been a diligent but impoverished country parson, whose death in 1593 probably cut short his son’s studies at Cambridge; Heywood matriculated as a pensioner at Emmanuel College in 1591, but he does not seem to have taken his degree. He died in 1641, and the parish records of his local church, St James’s, Clerkenwell, record the burial of ‘Tho. Heywood, Poet’ on 16 August.1 In the half century between his departure from Cambridge and his death he had acquired the rank of gentleman,2 and had enjoyed a literary career that in its length, its profusion and its diversity, was unlikely to have been matched by many, if any, of his contemporaries.