At the Blackfriars theatre in 1626 the King’s Men gave several performances of Philip Massinger’s tragedy The Roman Actor, a play which Anne Barton has characterized as ‘more pessimistic about the power of art to correct and inform its audience than any other play written between 1580 and 1642’.1 It seems certain that as avid a playgoer as Thomas Heywood would have made the short trip from his home in Clerkenwell to see it. If he did, the experience must have been a disconcerting one. He would have heard Joseph Taylor as the eponymous hero, the Roman actor Paris, defending the theatre, eloquently and at length, with arguments about its moral efficacy which were closely modelled on those Heywood himself had advanced in An Apology for Actors (probably written in 1607 but not published until 1612).2 He would then have witnessed the play’s systematic annihilation of both the arguments and the man who courageously expounds them. In The Roman Actor theatre itself is out of control; comedy entrenches rather than reforms folly, noble love stories incite not veneration but lust, and ‘real’ violence masquerades as tragic fiction.3 It is the contention of this chapter that Heywood’s own most theatrically self-conscious play, The English Traveller, can be seen as a work that

1 Anne Barton, ‘The Distinctive Voice of Massinger’, TLS (May, 1977); reprinted in Douglas Howard (ed.), Philip Massinger: A Critical Reassessment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 221-2 (231).