Thomas Heywood and the classical tradition 9781526140241

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Thomas Heywood and the classical tradition

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Thomas Heywood and the classical tradition Edited by

Tania Demetriou and Janice Valls-Russell

manchester university press

Copyright © Manchester University Press 2021

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While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 5261 4023 4 hardback First published 2021 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Cover image: Peter Lely (1618–80), ‘Peter Pett and the Sovereign of the Seas’, c. 1645–50 (oil on canvas, detail). National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, UK. Cover design: Abbey Akanbi, Manchester University Press

Typeset by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire

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For Yves Peyré

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Contents

List of figures ix List of tables x Notes on contributors xi Acknowledgementsxiv A note on the text xvi Introduction: Thomas Heywood and ‘the antique world’  Janice Valls-Russell and Tania Demetriou

1

  1 Intertextuality and Thomas Heywood’s early Ovid: Oenone and Paris  Katherine Heavey

32

  2 Thomas Heywood’s Loves Schoole: emulation, adaptation, and anachronism  M. L. Stapleton

54

  3 Rescripting classical stories of rape from page to stage: Lucrece and Callisto  Janice Valls-Russell

69

  4 ‘Interlaced with sundry histories’: the open structure of The Silver Age  Yves Peyré

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  5 A ‘glorious Greek’? Thomas Heywood and Hercules  Richard Rowland   6 The not-so-classical tradition: mythographic complexities in 1 Iron Age  Charlotte Coffin

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Contents

  7 Reading the classics, but how? Mythographic paradigms and ‘ill-joined marquetry’  Yves Peyré

162

  8 Compendious poetry: Homer and Ausonius in Thomas Heywood’s Various History Concerninge Women  Tania Demetriou

182

  9 ‘The scene lies in Hel’: the world of Lucian in Thomas Heywood’s stage poetry  Camilla Temple

207

10 Acting like Greeks  Tanya Pollard

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11 A theatre for the Iron Age: theorising practice in Thomas Heywood’s Ages plays  Chloe Kathleen Preedy

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12 The Sovereign of the Seas: Thomas Heywood’s 3D engagement with the classics  Janice Valls-Russell

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Appendix: Heywood’s works: a chronological table 292 Select bibliography 297 Index322

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Figures

1 Peter Lely (1618–80), ‘Peter Pett and the Sovereign of the Seas’, c. 1645–50 (oil on canvas). National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, UK. 2 Hector and Ajax fighting before the walls of Troy. Frontispiece, The Iron Age (London: Nicholas Okes, 1632), [sig. Ar]. 3 The horse enters Troy. Frontispiece, The Second Part of The Iron Age, from The Iron Age (London: Nicholas Okes, 1632), [sig. Ar]. 4 The beginning of the Odyssey in Jean de Sponde’s edition, printed in Basel in 1583, and featuring the prose and verse hypotheses in Greek and translated word-for-word into Latin. Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, 1 A.gr.a. 25, Vol. II, p. 1 (detail). 5 The beginning of the Odyssey in Raphael Volaterranus’ ­translation, printed by Gryphius in 1528 with Ausonius’ ‘Periocha’ of Odyssey I as the ‘Argumentum’. Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, A.gr.a 1106, Vol. II, p. 2r. 6 [John Payne], ‘Sovereign of the Seas’ or ‘The True Portraicture of His Maties Royall Ship the Soveraigne of the Seas …’, 1637 (engraving). National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, UK. 7 The prow, with Cupid riding the lion and King Edgar trampling the kings. [John Payne], ‘Sovereign of the Seas’, 1637 (engraving, detail). National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, UK.

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Tables

1 Heywood’s translations in Gynaikeion.188 2 Thomas Heywood’s works: a chronological table. 292

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Notes on contributors

Charlotte Coffin is senior lecturer at Université Paris-Est Créteil Val de Marne (France) and a member of the Institut des mondes anglophone, germanique et roman (IMAGER). The author of articles and book chapters on classical mythology, the mythographers, Shakespeare and Heywood, she has co-edited Interweaving Myths in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries with Janice Valls-Russell and Agnès Lafont (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017) and is preparing an edition of Thomas Heywood’s Golden Age. She has contributed to the Dictionary of Shakespeare’s Classical Mythology and is a member of the editorial board (www.shak myth.org). Tania Demetriou is lecturer in the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge. She works on the reception of classical texts in the early modern period, especially on literary responses to Homer in the English Renaissance. Her published work includes articles and essays on Spenser, Chapman, translation, the Elizabethan epyllion, textual scholarship and the Homeric Question, and on Gabriel Harvey’s marginalia on literary texts, including his response to classical tragedy. Katherine Heavey is lecturer in Early Modern English Literature at the University of Glasgow. Her interests include the translation, adaptation and reception of classical myth in early modern England. Her first monograph, The Early Modern Medea, was published by Palgrave in 2015. She has edited a special issue of Translation and Literature (2020), entitled ‘Classical Tragedy Translated in Early Modern England’, and has published articles in journals including Translation and Literature, Renaissance Studies and Comparative Drama. Yves Peyré is emeritus professor of English literature at Université PaulValéry, Montpellier (France). He is general editor of the online Dictionary of Shakespeare’s Classical Mythology and the online edition of Thomas

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Notes on contributors

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Heywood’s Troia Britanica (available at www.shakmyth.org). He is the author of La voix des mythes dans la tragédie élisabéthaine (Paris: CNRS Editions, 1996); William Shakespeare: ‘Venus and Adonis’ (Paris: DidierErudition, 1998); and numerous essays on classical reception, published in the UK, the USA and France. Tanya Pollard is professor of English at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her research focuses on early modern plays, bodies, emotions, and responses to ancient Greek texts. Her recent books include Reader in Tragedy, co-edited with Marcus Nevitt (Oxford/New York: Bloomsbury, 2019), and Greek Tragic Women on Shakespearean Stages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), which won the Roland H. Bainton Literature Book Prize. She is currently editing Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist and writing about early modern actors’ ­contributions to making plays. Chloe Kathleen Preedy is senior lecturer in Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature at the University of Exeter. She is the author of Marlowe’s Literary Scepticism: Politic Religion and Post-Reformation Polemic (Oxford: Bloomsbury, 2013), as well as various articles and book chapters on early modern literature and drama. She is currently preparing a monograph on how early modern dramatists conceived of and represented the aerial environment as part of the AHRC-funded project, ‘Atmospheric Theatre: Open-Air Performance and the Environment’. Richard Rowland is senior lecturer in Drama and English at the University of York. He has edited plays by Marlowe (Edward II for the Oxford Complete Works), George Chapman and Ben Jonson (Penguin, 1998), and Thomas Heywood (Edward IV for the Revels series, 2005). He is also the author of Thomas Heywood’s Theatre, 1599–1639: Locations, Translations, and Conflict (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), and Killing Hercules: Deianira and the Politics of Domestic Violence, from Sophocles to the War on Terror (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017). M. L. Stapleton is Chapman Distinguished Professor of English at Purdue University, Fort Wayne, U.S.A. Camilla Temple’s research takes as its starting point the idea that Renaissance engagements with the classical tradition often contain highly sophisticated responses to contemporary traditions of materiality. She has been a research associate on the ERC-funded project ‘Crossroads of knowledge in early modern England: The place of literature’, at the



Notes on contributors xiii

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University of Cambridge (research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013)/ERC grant agreement no 617849), and an MHRA research associate on the Thomas Browne project at the University of York. She has published on Spenser and the Greek Anthology. Janice Valls-Russell is a principal research associate of France’s National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), at the Institute for Research on the Renaissance, the Neo-classical Age and the Enlightenment (IRCL), Université Paul-Valéry, Montpellier. She is project coordinator and an editor of A Dictionary of Shakespeare’s Classical Mythology (www.shak myth.org). The author of articles and book chapters on early modern forms of engagement with classical mythology, she has co-edited Interweaving Myths in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries with Charlotte Coffin and Agnès Lafont (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017).

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Acknowledgements

The idea for this volume emerged in York in the summer of 2014, under the flags that greeted the Tour de France and in the wake of a colloquium on ‘Greek texts and the early modern stage’, organised by Tania Demetriou and Tanya Pollard. It gathered strength in a conference on Thomas Heywood held the following, memorably hot summer in Montpellier. It was largely inspired by the now complete online edition of Heywood’s epic, Troia Britanica, under the careful and imaginative guidance of Yves Peyré. Work on this edition has uncovered the range of Heywood’s enthusiastic and scholarly familiarity with the classics by tracing his reading habits and the way these shaped his writing. Above all, however, this volume has drawn on the ample enthusiasm, scholarship and commitment of its contributors to whom we are profoundly grateful. We are deeply indebted to our institutions (past and present) for enabling us to organise those conferences. The University of York’s Centre for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies offered practical and intellectual support without which that original gathering of classically minded early modernists would have been impossible. The support of Montpellier’s Institute for Research on the Renaissance, the Neo-Classical Age and the Enlightenment (IRCL), a joint research unit of the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and Université Paul-Valéry, Montpellier, has been unfailing, and we owe special thanks to its director, Nathalie VienneGuerrin. At Cambridge, we were able to organise crucial co-working sessions on the fringes of another colloquium held in 2019, under the umbrella of the Cambridge Society for Neo-Latin Studies. The Humanities and Social Sciences Institute of France’s CNRS made this possible by awarding Janice Valls-Russell a generous international mobility grant. Over the course of putting the book together, we have relied on the patience of many a helpful librarian at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris, the British Library, the Shakespeare Institute Library, the Warburg Institute, the National Maritime Museum Library at Greenwich, as well as at the libraries of our respective institutions, Cambridge University Library

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Acknowledgements xv

and Bibliothèque interuniversitaire de Montpellier. The support and advice of Matthew Frost and everyone at Manchester University Press have greatly contributed to making this a stimulating and enjoyable journey. We are particularly grateful to colleagues and friends who have read drafts, discussed ideas that ended up formative to this volume or cheered us along the way: they include Yves Peyré, Charlotte Coffin, Rachel Darmon, Anna-Maria Hartmann, Katherine Heavey, Emily Mayne, Victoria Moul, Daniel Yabut and Matthew Reynolds. We are very grateful to Carla Suthren for helping us prepare the index. We would like to thank other friends for their support – Brigitte Belin, Nicoleta Cinpoeş, Vanessa Kuhner-Blaha, Elliot Leader, Florence March, Subha Mukherji, Boika Sokolova, Andrew Taylor – and our respective families for their patience, encouragement, and for making us laugh. Without Charles Martindale and Yves Peyré, who brought us together in a mythological encounter many years ago, the journey would have been unthinkable. To them we owe a deep debt of gratitude, intellectual and personal.

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A note on the text

Unless otherwise stated, all Greek and Latin references and their translations, when placed in quotation marks, are to the Loeb collection (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press and London: Heinemann), also available online at www.loebclassics.com. Translations in parentheses are by the authors themselves. Any other translations used are referenced in the endnotes. When quoting from early modern texts, ‘i’, ‘j’, ‘u’, ‘v’ and long ‘s’ have been silently modernised. Elided letters have been silently restored when the meaning is unchanged. Italics of names (gods, etc.) in early modern quotations have been removed and capitals retained only for proper names. Editors’ decisions have been respected when quoting from modern editions. The spelling of authors’ names follows the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Unless otherwise stated, we follow the spellings of names of characters given in modern editions where they exist. In play citations the abbreviation ‘sd’ stands for ‘stage direction’.

Introduction: Thomas Heywood and ‘the antique world’ Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Janice Valls-Russell and Tania Demetriou

Heywood’s women: a classical angle ‘Look for no glorious state; our muse is bent / Upon a barren subject’.1 Expect no grandiose spectacle, no ‘divine’ poetry, Thomas Heywood tells his audience in his prologue to A Woman Killed with Kindness, first performed in 1603, with the first quarto published in 1607. Still less, perhaps, a dazzling display of classical references. Certainly, a cursory reading of the play would seem to suggest this, for explicit mythological or other classical allusions are few and far between. This may seem unsurprising, if one opts for a restrictive view of the play as a ‘domestic tragedy’. Yet recent reassessments of a ‘genre’ that was unknown to Heywood, since it was invented in the nineteenth century, invite us to take a closer, more questioning look at its classicism as well.2 This prologue is probably, as Muriel C. Bradbrook has suggested, an instance of the rhetorical self-deprecation Heywood employs elsewhere in his paratexts.3 Diana E. Henderson is equally unconvinced by Heywood’s claims about the ‘barrenness’ of his subject, foregrounding instead his ability as ‘a skilled artist to craft a shapely narrative or symbolic allegory out of the facts of life’.4 Throughout his long career, as this volume shows, Heywood turned out generically porous writings for the stage and for print, many of which resist attempts at taxonomy. This ‘domestic tragedy’ is no different in this respect, we believe. And as with the majority of his oeuvre, one of the things its porousness productively draws in is the depth of its author’s classicism. At the heart of what John Webster termed his ‘right happy and copious industry’ – equal, in Webster’s view, to that of William Shakespeare or Thomas Dekker – lies an intimate and versatile familiarity with the classics.5 Algernon Charles Swinburne paid tribute to this in a sonnet to Heywood that ends with the lines from Shakespeare’s As You Like It that supply the title of our introduction: ‘how well in thee appears / The constant service of the antique world!’6 As David M. Bergeron notes in his study of Heywood’s civic pageants, ‘his assimilation of the materials of antiquity is admirable, and the whole subject of

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Thomas Heywood and the classical tradition

Figure 1  Peter Lely (1618–80), ‘Peter Pett and the Sovereign of the Seas’, c. 1645–50 (oil on canvas).

his classicism begs for a very full study’.7 Yet Heywood’s classicism has hitherto received scant attention. It is the aim of this volume to remedy this neglect and open up this area for more investigation. In the introduction to her edition of Woman Killed, Margaret Jane Kidnie draws attention to the way its central theme may relate the play to another of Heywood’s tragedies, The Rape of Lucrece, which was first published in 1608 and may have been performed a year earlier.8 Both explore a host– hostess–seducer triangle in the intimacy of a domestic setting: a Yorkshire gentleman’s home in Woman Killed, a Roman patrician’s in Lucrece. Shared structural, rhetorical and staging devices add up to something resembling a template. Like Collatine, Frankford boasts about his wife Anne’s qualities: ‘I have a fair, a chaste, and loving wife: / Perfection all, all truth, all ornament’ (iv.11–12). Unlike Collatine, he expresses his self-satisfaction in private, but both husbands publicise before a packed playhouse what belongs to the world of intimacy, exhibiting and thereby exposing their wives’ virtues like

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Thomas Heywood and ‘the antique world’ 3

wealthy possessions. What Collatine brings upon himself, dramatic irony inflicts on Frankford as, a couple of scenes later, the seducer, Wendoll, reveals his lust for Anne. He muses: ‘I’ll drive away this passion with a song.  / A song? Ha, ha, a song!’ (vi.4–5); the reference to singing, in the context of a game of seduction with fatal consequences for the victim, looks forward to the songs that frame Tarquin’s assault on Lucrece, in an instance of what Bradbrook described as an absence of ‘compelled decorum’ which serves to critique male insensitivity to sexual aggression.9 At the end of the same scene, Wendoll invokes Jupiter in his brief attempt to resist temptation, casting himself as a potential villain: Thou god of thunder, Stay in thy thoughts of vengeance and of wrath Thy great almighty and all-judging hand From speedy execution on a villain – A villain, and a traitor to his friend. (Woman Killed, vi.21–5)

If this glances back at Tarquin’s longer, tepidly self-deprecatory speech in Shakespeare’s Rape of Lucrece, it also anticipates Heywood’s own briefer version of the speech, just before the rapist enters Lucrece’s chamber and carries her offstage: sextus: Lucrece, th’art mine: In spight of Jove and all the powers divine. He beares her out. (Lucrece, lines 2061–2)10

Strikingly, both plays map a domestic ‘cartography’ of seduction. The staging of the home is materialised through references to keys, doors and halls,11 with a stress laid on the nuptial chamber at the epicentre of the household, what Frankford feverishly calls ‘my polluted bedchamber’. The bed is a central prop, an inset stage to which a traumatised Lucrece draws the attention of her husband and his friends: luc: Stain’d, polluted, and defil’d. Strange steps are found in my adulterate bed. (Lucrece, lines 2431–2)

Tragedy is the result of adultery in Woman Killed, rape in Lucrece. Yet Wendoll the seducer is not unlike Sextus the rapist in convincing, if not forcing, Anne to allow him into the marital chamber. Moreover, his cynicism at the end of the play, when he hopes to return in grace at court even as he himself says of Anne, ‘she’s gone to death’ (xvi.126), may recall Sextus’ callous leave-taking of Lucrece:

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Nay, weepe not, sweet, what’s done is past recall, …   … what hath past Is hid from the worlds eye, and onely private Twixt us, faire Lucrece. (Lucrece, lines 2090, 2093–4)

But there is an even more disturbing parallel, as Kidnie notes. The staging of Frankford’s return to his house, ‘simultaneously householder and intruder’, conveys a sense of threat, and his progress towards the bedchamber in the dead of night powerfully resembles that of Sextus Tarquin: ‘Heywood structures Sextus Tarquin’s approach towards the sleeping Lucrece in Rape in a near identical manner to Frankford’s journey through the silent home’, a moment that is preceded in both plays by a scene between servants who ‘discuss the odd goings-on’ before being ordered off to bed.12 Heywood’s mapping of the rapist onto both the seducer and the wronged husband suggests a view of gender in which women are above all at risk, a risk that is analogous whether the aggressor is an unconscionable rapist, a reckless seducer or a kind-killing husband. This troubling analogy chimes with the queasy subplot of Woman Killed, in which Charles tries to persuade his sister Susan to yield, effectively, to being raped by Acton. The domestic environment turns out to be as liable to put women in danger of violence as those who intrude on it. As emerges from several contributions to this volume, women are often at the centre of Heywood’s traffic with the classics, in his plays, narrative poems (Oenone and Paris, Troia Britanica), translations, prose works such as Gynaikeion or the short poetic compositions within it. Heywood was not averse to erotic, especially Ovidian, playfulness, as in Troia or in the Ages dramatic cycle, but this was not incompatible with empathy towards women, and M. L. Stapleton shows in chapter 2 how, as a translator, Heywood ‘reconstructed [Ovid’s] Ars amatoria so that it was less unfavourable to women’. ‘In his depiction of women’, Bradbrook notes, ‘Heywood was not only sympathetic but subtle’.13 Though he does not wholly escape misogynist representations (he cites Helen as an instance of ‘turbulent and combustious women’),14 when he reports such discourses from classical authors, it is often, as he says in the opening chapter of A Curtaine Lecture (1637), all the better to unpick the arguments of ‘these satyrists against women’.15 His portrayal of Helen herself in 2 Iron Age shows her willing to embrace death and pass herself off as Polyxena to avoid the young girl being killed by Pyrrhus.16 From Heywood’s epyllion Oenone and Paris (1594) to his last works, his view of women for the most part reflects what he writes in his preface to The Exemplary Lives … of Nine The Most Worthy Women (1640): ‘that it is a kinde of duty in all that have had mothers, as far as



Thomas Heywood and ‘the antique world’ 5

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they can to dignifie the sex, which in my γυναικείον or history of women, I have strived to doe with my utmost minerva’.17 In his Marriage Triumphe, which he published in 1613 to celebrate the wedding of Princess Elizabeth and Prince Frederick, Elector Palatine, he radically rewrites agency in the myth of Pygmalion, in order to celebrate the mutual, life-giving power of marriage: … his faire hand he extends To ceaze her ivory palm, which as he warmes, She breathes into him many thousand charmes Of loves, affections, zeale, cordiall desires, Chast wishes, pleasures, mixt with deep suspires, Passions, distractions, ecstasies, amazes, All these he feels, when on her eies he gazes.18

Heywood was interested in famous women whose stories could be culled either directly from classical, biblical or historical sources, or from compendia of such sources. He gives prominence to those versions that enable him to recover, or invent, a voice for these women, even when the course of literary history may have silenced or relegated them to the margins. One such figure is Oenone, discussed by Katherine Heavey in chapter 1. Indeed, it is from the outset, with Heywood’s epyllion and his translation of Ovid, that this revisionary attitude to women may be traced. As Stapleton writes in chapter 2, by translating and ‘incorporating Loves Schoole into his subsequent polemical and dramatic work, Heywood strove to present an Ovid relieved of his misogynist reputation, reconfigured into the kind of man Heywood desired him to be’. This attitude goes together with a probing of masculine identity and male interactions, as Heavey has studied elsewhere:19 whether through the heroic and mythical feats of figures such as Achilles and Hector, in descriptions of battles in Troia and their staging in The Iron Age, or the mythologised celebration of young men such as Prince Henry of Wales and Frederick, the Elector Palatine.20 Heywood’s fascination with mythological stories often went hand in hand with a distanced, tongue-in-cheek tone in the writing, that could nevertheless simultaneously invite empathy. Gently ironic rather than outright satirical, Heywood took pleasure in staging intertextual injokes with his readers, as Heavey shows in her study of Oenone and Paris, in chapter 1; for example, he critiques Paris’ valour by importing Venus’s martial metaphor from Shakespeare’s poem, and exposes his subject’s duplicity when Paris recycles his letter to Helen when trying to appease Oenone. Heywood’s male heroes frequently emerge as anti-heroes, vulner­ able, unreliable or violent. As Kathleen E. McLuskie notes, ‘the Age plays … seem to move from the confidence of The Golden Age to the sense of decline

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from heroism evident in the final play [The Iron Age]’.21 In chapters 5 and 7 respectively, Richard Rowland and Yves Peyré trace the genesis of Hercules’ anti-heroic features in The Brazen Age while in chapter 6 Charlotte Coffin shows how Heywood draws attention to the contradictory features of Paris or Achilles in The Iron Age by playing on the disjunctions between the author’s sources and leaving them deliberately apparent: these ‘clashes’, she argues, ‘are deliberate – both a self-conscious highlighting of multiple versions, and an invitation to adopt a critical viewpoint on heroism’. Through an interplay of multiple voices and the variety of perspectives they offer, Heywood questions received views around gender, whether they concern heroism or chastity. He emphasises contradictions between versions rather than downplaying them, enriches his characters’ psychology and range of emotional expression by inviting into his text echoes of other voices his audiences may have read or heard, and thereby invites a wide range of responses. In the case of Woman Killed, a similar effect is realised by inviting classical echoes into the Yorkshire setting of his ‘barren subject’. The voice of Chaucer’s Criseyde may be heard behind that of Anne casting herself as a counter-exemplum of faithfulness:22 ‘O women, women, you that have yet kept  / Your holy matrimonial vow unstained,  / Make me your instance’ (xiii.136–8); one might hear, too, Shakespeare’s Troilus at the agonised moment of discovering that Cressida could be unfaithful: ‘Instance, O instance!’ (xvii[V.ii].148).23 The moment confirms the fears Anne had voiced, as she yielded to Wendoll: ‘This maze I am in / I fear will prove the labyrinth of sin’ (vi.161–2). The duplication of the classical topos of the labyrinth links her to Seneca’s Phaedra, another tragic, potentially adulterous, wife who, in John Studley’s translation, connects her desire for Hippolytus with the ‘crooked compast labyrinth’ and the ‘maze and dungeon blind’.24 The implications burst upon Anne when she realises that her children are to be removed from her. And when Frankford banishes her to his country manor, through his resolve ‘with usage / Of more humility [to] torment thy soul,  / And kill thee, even with kindness’ (xiii.149–51), another Senecan classical paradigm seems to resurface in this ‘torment’ he is inflicting upon her, that is the domestic equivalent to the ‘caeco carcere et saxo’ or ‘unlit, rocky dungeon’ (line 988)25 to which Clytemnestra banishes Electra at the end of Seneca’s Agamemnon. Both Electra – whose last words in the play are ‘concede mortem’, ‘grant me death’ (line 994) – and Anne call upon death as the ultimate form of release. The Senecan darkness of doom-laden genealogies thus overhangs the discovery scene in an otherwise banal Yorkshire household where spectators may simultaneously enjoy ludicrous moments, as when Wendoll emerges in his nightshirt and runs off the stage – to escape being run through with Frankford’s sword:



Thomas Heywood and ‘the antique world’ 7 Enter wendoll, running over the stage in a nightgown, he [frankford] after him with his sword drawn; the Maid in her smock stays his hand and clasps hold on him. He pauses awhile.

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frankford: I thank thee, maid; thou, like the angel’s hand, Hast stay’d me from a bloody sacrifice. (Woman Killed, xiii.sd, 62–3)

As Alan C. Dessen points out, the issue here is not an attempt at ‘realism’, domestic or otherwise: instead, Heywood conflates the conventions of comedy and moral allegory to ‘produce a striking theatrical effect that calls attention to a decision at the centre of the play’, namely ‘to leave Wendoll to his guilty conscience and to kill his wife with kindness’.26 This is enriched by ­classical undertones. Wishing unrevealed what he has been at pains to uncover, Frankford perceives his home as a microcosm of the universe. In what T. S. Eliot, no admirer of Heywood, grudgingly acknowledges as a ‘fine speech’,27 Frankford would have the sun ‘draw his coach backward’ (xiii.52) and the ‘seasons call’d again’ (54) – yet another Senecan topos, which conveys the disorder of the world in tragedies like Thyestes, Agamemnon and Phaedra, where adultery, incest and murder are rife. Frankford’s analogy, disproportionate as it might seem in a ‘domestic’ setting, reveals genuine distress (‘O  Nan, O Nan’ (xiii.111)), while at the same time bringing into the play the universe of classical tragedy, in which agency is always more complicated than characters are willing to acknowledge. That tragic framework makes more salient the fact that he had a part (unwittingly or not) in his wife’s unfaithfulness, and that his decision to banish her is his own, and not a vagary of Fortune. Indeed, his attempt to sidestep his responsibility establishes a kinship with his rival Wendoll, who abandons any pretence to morality in his pursuit of Anne: ‘Some Fury pricks me on; / The swift Fates drag me at their chariot wheel’ (vi.101–2). Classical references thus become a moral screen behind which both men seek to hide. But when Wendoll invokes Orpheus as he observes Anne’s banishment from afar, his classical culture reveals a greater awareness of his situation than he would consciously acknowledge: wendoll. So poets write that Orpheus made the trees And stones to dance to his melodious harp, Meaning the rustic and the barbarous hinds That had no understanding part in them, So she from these rude carters tears extracts, Making their flinty hearts with grief to rise, And draw down rivers from their rocky eyes. (Woman Killed, xvi.53–9)

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Wendoll’s opening lines closely follow Ovid’s Metamorphoses (XI.1–2), and his ensuing parallel between the carters’ empathetic response to Anne, and Orpheus’ ‘rustic’ audience, turns to the practice of glossing Ovid. What Wendoll does not comment on, is his choice to liken Anne, a distraught, adulterous wife separated from her husband and family, to Orpheus mourning Eurydice, an exemplum of mutual, faithful love. By giving him those lines, Heywood creates a poignantly discordant perspective. If the parallel to Orpheus produces in the spectator and the reader a sense of an ampler empathy with Anne, Wendoll’s callously distant words are contrastingly revealing. He expresses no personal sorrow, remaining a removed, uninvolved onlooker. The insight offered by the classical reference thus reflects in troubling ways on the character who introduces it. Strikingly, then, the classical knowledge displayed by the two men in the seduction triangle is equally inappropriate: both seek to deflect attention away from their role in this domestic tragedy, revealing, even as they map their own situation onto that of mythical others, a lack of empathy and a singular disinclination for introspection. Woman Killed offers a rich case study of how to read Heywood’s nonclassical plays through a classical lens, and how a non-classical play may in turn shape the ambience and characters of a classical play. Heywood was well aware that classical stories could provide patterns and tropes for non-classical plays or narratives; and he could fashion his classical drama by drawing on dramaturgical practices worked out in his other plays. He gives Lucrece’s story, taken from Livy and Ovid, an immediacy that creates a kinship with Anne Frankford, through the hauntingly achieved household setting and its props. Indeed, Lucrece may also be viewed as killed with kindness – her own, as Holaday notes: [B]y clever, persistent emphasis on Lucrece’s kindness to Sextus, Heywood again accentuates the brutality of the Tarquins. The betrayal of the wife of his friend and kinsman would have made Sextus a villain; but the betrayal of a Lucrece who is so solicitous for his comfort and so unsuspecting banishes him completely from our sympathy.28

Here is a picture of ‘perfect’, conventional womanhood that is unnervingly vulnerable to violence. Holaday does not suggest a kinship with Anne Frankford, but the way Sextus dramaturgically absorbs the fatal danger to Anne from both seducer and ‘kind’ husband might do. In the resonance between these two plays we find not so much a common ‘template’, as a process of parallel thought in which nothing less than an ethics of gender becomes subtly sculpted. The role of parallel in Heywood’s classicism is one to which we shall return.



Thomas Heywood and ‘the antique world’ 9

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Prolific yet ‘conspicuously neglected’ This volume thinks across the range of Heywood’s works from the perspective of his engagement with the classics, building on recent critical work on diverse aspects of his prolific output, and inspired by the exciting developments in the study of early modern classical reception and translation over the past couple of decades. The classics, as we have seen, relate in an intimate and defining way to Heywood’s responses to genre, at the same time as providing us with insights into the laboratory of his imaginative process. They enable us to probe his approach to his varied audiences and his self-presentation as a poet, playwright and designer. By focusing on Heywood’s multifaceted reception of the classics, we therefore hope to contribute to making a definitive break with dismissive portrayals of Heywood like T. S. Eliot’s, for whom he was ‘a typical literary jack-of-all trades of the epoch’, not to mention ‘gifted with very little sense of humour’.29 Heywood was, precisely, atypical in the diversity and sheer quantity of his output, and he was fascinatingly atypical in his classicism. As for humour, it is a staple of his engagements with classical myth. Eliot’s attitude to Heywood was not uncommon in its time: L. C. Knights, for instance, described his imagery as veering between the ‘inept’ and the ‘commonplace’.30 But others, like Swinburne and Arthur Melville Clark, were more sympathetic, as Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt had been.31 Bradbrook returned, in a fragmentary yet constructive fashion, to Heywood in her several studies of Elizabethan drama.32 More recent, revisionary critical studies of Heywood have tended to focus on his non-classical works, and even this has very often been piecemeal.33 A handful of individual plays has tended to get the lion’s share of critical attention. There has, nevertheless, been a notable enlivening of interest in Heywood since the 1990s, especially from the point of view of gender, as witnessed by essays, sections on Heywood within broader studies and editions of his works.34 Richard Rowland’s landmark volume, Thomas Heywood’s Theatre, 1599–1639: Locations, Translations and Conflicts (2010) has significantly enriched our understanding of Heywood’s drama. Rowland has also attended to the role of the classics in Heywood’s work, suggestively arguing, for example, that his appropriation of Plautus in The Captives is a response not simply to the ancient dramatist, who famously discusses the topic of tragicomedy, but also, simultaneously, to the new mode of tragicomedy instantiated in Pericles by Heywood’s close contemporaries, Shakespeare and George Wilkins.35 Rowland’s study of Heywood’s theatre has come at a time of renewed interest in companies and playhouses, including research into Heywood’s favourite playhouse, the Red Bull.36 His monograph includes a discussion of

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Heywood’s pageants, an area that has also received attention from others. In particular, Bergeron’s research into the seven pageants Heywood designed for the Lord Mayor’s Shows between 1631 and 1639 has brought to light the variety he achieved even within an established format. Importantly, from our point of view, Bergeron attributes this largely to Heywood’s ‘intense interest in and use of mythology and ancient traditions’.37 Last but not least, Heywood’s activity as a translator of Ovid has been studied by Stapleton, who has broken new ground by establishing Heywood’s authorship of Art of Love and Remedy of Love, unattributed to him in his lifetime.38 But his other translations of Latin and neo-Latin texts deserve further study, as do his more indirect forms of engagement with Greek. Heywood does not seem to have translated Greek texts directly, accessing them rather through Latin translations and bilingual Latin-Greek editions, as Camilla Temple’s contribution (chapter 9) shows in her discussion of Lucian, and Tania Demetriou and Janice Valls-Russell show in chapters 8 and 12, in relation to various prose authors like Athenaeus, Herodotus and Plutarch. Heywood also seems to have had access to Homer through vernacular translations and adaptations.39 This volume’s consideration of Heywood benefits from research carried out in the reception of Greek, a ‘newly excavated realm’ during the Renaissance which, as Tanya Pollard notes in chapter 10, was ‘[s]imultaneously familiar and strange … [offering] both a corrective response to Roman models, and a point of origin for them’. Out of the work, then, of that ‘[m]ost conspicuously neglected of Renaissance dramatists’, as Bradbrook termed him, his classical output has been particularly neglected.40 Except for the studies mentioned, Heywood’s classically inspired or inflected writings have received scant attention: there exists to date no single volume on the subject, whether collective or by a single author, and no scholarly edition of the Ages plays outside Arlene W. Weiner’s edition of The Iron Age.41 His Apology for Actors has attracted interest not for its ubiquitous classicism, which Pollard and Chloe Kathleen Preedy discuss in chapters 10 and 11 respectively, but for its defence of the theatre, its first-hand account of the early modern stage and its discussion of dramatic empathy, especially as they relate to Hamlet.42 His classical compendium, Gynaikeion, the subject of Demetriou’s chapter 8, has not received a dedicated study for nearly a century. And his involvement in devising the iconological programme of the royal ship Sovereign of the Seas, which Valls-Russell unpacks in chapter 12, has hitherto been merely touched upon, mainly by naval historians. Such blanks may be linked in part to the fact that the first edition of his complete works is only in its initial stages. Texts such as Troia, Pleasant Dialogues and Dramma’s or Gynaikeion have never been readily available in scholarly editions. Heywood’s visibility on the stage, meanwhile, is limited to a small number



Thomas Heywood and ‘the antique world’ 11

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of dramas, foremost of which are Woman Killed and The Fair Maid of the West: plays such as Lucrece or those in the Ages cycle have very rarely been performed since his own time.43 Speaking at a conference in Paris in 1983, Bradbrook made a case for further research into Heywood’s work, striking a self-deprecatory note that he might have appreciated: To my uninstructed mind, the fifty years of his dramatic career offer an unexplored field for the modern sophisticated resources of theatrical archaeology and sociology, knowledge of the technique of Renaissance printing which computer research supplies, and modern linguistic interests to unite for a joint exploration in depth.44

A significant breakthrough in Bradbrook’s terms is the collaborative work which Yves Peyré has led over a decade, to produce the first scholarly edition of Troia.45 The research that has gone into this edition and the workshops and conferences around it have contributed to making this collective volume possible. It has reshaped our knowledge of Heywood’s reading and working habits, uncovering, for example, how Heywood closely followed William Caxton’s Recuyell while simultaneously drawing directly on classical authors and finding much of his inspiration in mythographies and chronicles. When discussing Heywood, then, we need to take the classical tradition in its broadest sense: his perspective also includes a ‘not-soclassical tradition’ of ‘endless rewritings’, as Coffin notes in chapter 6. In line with the blueprint established by Peyré and his team, our discussion of Heywood’s classically inflected activity adopts this broader understanding of the classical, to explore the form of Heywood’s source-texts and the uses they enabled, questions of translation, interpretive traditions and their influence, and the writing processes this broadly conceived classicism inspired. What emerges is an intermingling of dramatic savvy, intellectual engagement and political opportunism, underwritten by a rare ability to combine the morally serious with the downright ludicrous. Heywood’s classical agendas were multiple. His translations sought both to entertain and to instruct. His plays, poems and pageants offered textual and visual entertainment. His epics and compendia organised and inscribed classical material in broader historical chronologies that also provided entry-points into the present through context, contrast and the safe distance of myth and history. And his pageants and panegyrics celebrated and memorialised the present: they included funeral elegies for Prince Henry and James I; the epithalamium for the marriage of Princess Elizabeth, James’ daughter, and Prince Frederick, Elector Palatine; and a pamphlet on the Sovereign of the Seas (1637). But as the contributions in this volume make clear, these different areas of work are not sealed off

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from each other, and it is this combination of multiplicity and porousness in Heywood that makes him so fascinating and entertaining. Three illustrations encapsulate this. The first is the cover illustration chosen for this volume, a detail from ‘Peter Pett and the Sovereign of the Seas’, by Peter Lely, painted c. 1645–50 (Figure 1). This painting features the royal ship, launched in 1637, for which Heywood designed a complex iconographic programme that he described in a pamphlet – this is discussed in chapter 12. The second illustration is the title-page woodcut for The Iron Age (Figure 2), which has Hector and Ajax hurling (respectively) a boulder and an uprooted tree at each other, with the walls and roofs of Troy, and the triangular tents of the Greek camp in the background: its design is simultaneously comedic and suggestive of larger-than-life heroes not unlike the giants that once peopled Britain, whom only the descendants of Trojans like Hector could defeat. Finally, the frontispiece of 2 Iron Age (Figure 3) features a medieval-Tudor Troy, dominated by the Trojan horse out of which the Greeks are emerging: the broken gateway through which the horse has entered frames the top half and right-hand sides of the page, and suggests a ruined antique arch that brings to mind pageant imagery, or etchings of Roman monuments ‘[w]ith sodaine falling broken all to dust’.46 Encompassing the sublime, the poignant and the ludicrous, these three illustrations offer visual representations of the richness of Heywood’s classical universe.

Heywood’s career: the classical perspective The interest of Heywood (c. 1573–1641) in the classics is perceptible throughout a career that has impressed critics for ‘the extraordinary amount, and the hardly less extraordinary diversity, of his literary labours’.47 This diversity has often been overshadowed by his prolific output as a playwright, Heywood having famously claimed to have had ‘either an entire hand, or at least a maine finger’ in the writing of more than 200 plays.48 His life is viewed (reasonably enough) through the lens of his career as an actor-playwright with the Earl of Worcester’s Men, who played at Philip Henslowe’s Rose Theatre and later absorbed Oxford’s Men to reform as Queen Anne’s Men, performing mainly at the Red Bull Theatre.49 Yet his story may also be viewed as a chronology of his engagement with the classics, the first surviving record of which would be his studies at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he matriculated in 1591. His period at Cambridge, which may have been cut short by his father’s death in 1593, was probably decisive for his future activities as classicist as well as dramatist: Heywood acknowledges in Apology for Actors (1612)

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Thomas Heywood and ‘the antique world’ 13

Figure 2  Hector and Ajax fighting before the walls of Troy. Frontispiece, The Iron Age (London: Nicholas Okes, 1632), [sig. Ar].

that ‘[i]n the time of my residence in Cambridge, I have seene tragedyes, comedyes, historyes, pastorals and shewes, publickly acted, in which the graduates of good place and standing have bene specially parted’.50

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Thomas Heywood and the classical tradition

Figure 3  The horse enters Troy. Frontispiece, The Second Part of The Iron Age, from The Iron Age (London: Nicholas Okes, 1632), [sig. Ar].

He seems to have moved from Cambridge to London in 1593, just as the vogue for mythological epyllia was taking readers and printing houses by storm. His first published incursion into myth was the 1594 Oenone and Paris. And it may be in 1598 that Heywood completed his translation

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Thomas Heywood and ‘the antique world’ 15

of Ovid’s Art of Love, even though no extant edition seems to predate the 1625 ones.51 We know very little about the subject-matter of his plays from this period. His interest in myth and the classics becomes even more manifest a decade or so later. As the new century set in, Heywood began to enjoy considerable success as a printed playwright; by 1616, according to Lukas Erne, he was in this respect the most successful dramatist after Shakespeare and this held true up to the closure of the theatres in 1642.52 Clark speculates that ‘the success of several of his plays on the stage and after publication may have encouraged Heywood to work more definitely literary than in his own estimation he had yet undertaken’.53 Turning to the classics appears to have been a way of doing that. Between 1607 and 1613, they were central to his production. Almost at the same time as he wrote Lucrece (1607, first published in 1608), he was translating Sallust’s Conspiracy of Catiline and Jugurthine War (1609), with an extensive ‘Epistle to the reader’, translated from Jean Bodin’s Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem (1566).54 A cluster of publications relates to the Troy tradition and the rich web of myths surrounding it: his epic, Troia, appeared in 1609 and was followed by the Ages cycle on stage, between 1611 and 1613.55 Also from this time, his Apology (1612) is not only packed with classical anecdotes, but discusses the architecture of the playhouse against the historical perspective of Greek drama, thereby establishing what Preedy calls ‘spatial markers of continuity’ (chapter 11). In addition, as Pollard discusses in chapter 10, Heywood ‘looks to Greece especially for the origins of acting, which he locates provocatively in the charged figure of Hercules’, who reperforms his father Jupiter’s ‘worthy and memorable acts’ (Apology, sig. B3r). A close relationship between Apology and the Ages plays thus comes through in the figure of Hercules, on which Rowland and Peyré elaborate in chapters 5 and 7 respectively. Though Apology differs from Troia in all kinds of ways, then, the two are linked as ambitious classical endeavours, and indeed both employ the epic convention of invoking the Muses for inspiration and legitimacy. A decade later comes a third and quite different classical cluster, covering the period from the mid-1620s to the end of Heywood’s life. Several editions of a translation of Ovid’s Art of Love appeared in 1625 without acknowledging the translator – Stapleton has identified this as being by Heywood (mentioned in the previous section of this chapter). This creative period is marked by Heywood’s several large compendia, all of which draw on classical, biblical and historical material: Gynaikeion (1624), a collection of ‘Various History Concerninge Women’ organised in nine books, named after each of the Muses; The Hierarchie of The Blessed Angells (1635), a gathering of religious, astrological and allegorical

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knowledge, narratives and legends, also organised in nine books named after so many angels; and Heywood’s answer to the medieval tradition of the nine (male) worthies, The Exemplary Lives and Memorable Acts of Nine the Most Worthy Women (1640). During this period, he also wrote Pleasant Dialogues, published in 1637 but probably already completed in 1635. Here, Englishings of dialogues and plays by neo-Latin Renaissance authors appeared alongside additional material from his own earlier plays and translations of Lucian. As Temple discusses in chapter 9, the focus on Lucian is shared between this collection and Hierarchie, but also looks back to the Ages plays, offering yet another instance of the way classical interests forge telling connections across Heywood’s diverse writing modes and his different creative periods. Several indications suggest that his earlier classically themed plays continued to be popular. Lucrece, first printed in 1608, saw its fifth reprint in 1638, with additional songs. Between 1617 and 1622, The Golden Age ‘either in its original form or in the conflated adaptation entitled The Escapes of Jupiter’ (which combines scenes from it and Silver Age) seems to have been part of the Cockpit repertory; in 1623, Escapes was apparently performed by Prince Charles’s Men at the Red Bull.56 The Iron Age was published in 1632 for the first time, potentially suggesting a revival, and certainly linked to a plan by Heywood to publish the entire Ages cycle in a single, ‘handsome volume’.57 He wrote one last play, Loves Maistresse: or, The Queen’s Masque, which dramatises the story of Cupid and Psyche from Apuleius’s Golden Ass; it was first performed in 1634 and published in 1636.58 By then, he had become known for a different area of work. Between 1631 and 1639, he devised pageants for seven of the annual Lord Mayor’s Shows, the 1639 one being the last staged in London before the execution of Charles I. As mentioned above, many of these were classically inspired, as was his design of the allegorical programme of Charles I’s warship, The Sovereign of the Seas (1637). Attempts to establish a detailed chronology of Heywood’s writings have been complicated by critical debate that essentially concerns his classical output: Lucrece, the Ages plays and Ovid’s Art of Love. Of these, the plays, as we have seen, belong to the same central period of his career. Arguments seeking to trace their writing to an earlier period of juvenilia may in part reflect discomfort with productions that unsettle generic categorisations by playing up the comedic potential of classical material that is more conventionally associated with earnest tragedy. This would be analogous to the unease David Womersley has noted in critical discussions of If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody, Heywood’s two-part play on Elizabeth. Part 1 is more gravely historiographical and protestant in outlook, in the continuity of John Foxe’s Arts and Monuments; part 2 is a London ‘medley of materials and tones’ reminiscent of city comedy that closes with the

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Thomas Heywood and ‘the antique world’ 17

victory over the Spanish Armada. Womersley argues that the differences in setting, emphasis and tone are to be understood as building up to a ‘troubled thoughtfulness’ about the monarchy, its relations with the city and the limited capacity of royal power to effect change.59 Like Kidnie, Womersley invites scholars to resist the compartmentalisation of Heywood’s writings into convenient categories. Such a methodology proves equally apt for the investigation of classical influences in Heywood. In his introduction to his edition of Lucrece, Holaday argues that the play belongs to the category of juvenilia, and was written much earlier than 1608, the year when the play was entered in the Stationers’ Registry and published, having possibly been performed in 1607. He advances what he considers to be a number of internal and external clues: an ‘extravagance in sentiment and speech’ (p. 8) that contrasts, in his view, with the mature dramatic technique developed in a play like Woman Killed; the likelihood of Heywood writing a near-immediate response to Shakespeare’s poem, first published in 1594; a reference to a Lucrece play in Michael Drayton’s Legend of Matilda, a poem also published in 1594; and a dramatisation of the Lucrece story performed in 1599 in Strasbourg, a city frequently visited by the English player Robert Browne. In 1607 Heywood, would have gone on to overhaul his earlier text, working from a manuscript owned by Browne, introducing an echo of Macbeth, which he may have seen performed a few months earlier.60 However, there is to date no evidence that Drayton’s reference to a Lucrece play is to an ur-version of Heywood’s. Revisiting old debates about the dating of the Ages plays, David Mann connects the props needed to stage The Silver Age and The Brazen Age with some of the flying equipment featured in the Admiral’s Men’s inventories of 1598, inviting connections with two lost plays that were revived that same year, 1 and 2 Hercules.61 Similarly, Douglas Arrell attempts to trace the genesis of four of the Ages to lost plays of the mid-1590s which Henslowe mentions in his Diary. In two articles, Arrell seeks to demonstrate that The Silver Age and The Brazen Age were an expansion of what he posits were Heywood’s earlier 1 and 2 Hercules, and that he was also the author of Troye, which grew into 1 and 2 Iron Age. Arrell’s theory leads him to an otherwise unsubstantiated and unconvincing early dating of George Chapman’s first translation of the Iliad, and the argument that Heywood saw a manuscript of it as early as the mid-1590s.62 Arrell’s argument in favour of an earlier Troye play by Heywood also inverts the chronology of influence between him and Shakespeare, with the latter borrowing features from Heywood rather than the other way round.63 One stumbling block, of course, is the absence of those earlier texts. Arrell offers close readings of the extant plays and unravels their webs of influence, while acknowledging the speculative nature of his approach, that

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involves ‘clumping together a name and a text that otherwise would be considered two separate entities’.64 In the absence of concrete evidence, the contributors to this volume have chosen not to go down those speculative paths in our assumed chronologies.65 In fact, as some of the chapters show, an examination of Heywood’s engagement with the classics brings to the fore a knack for drawing the dramatic potential out of stories and incidents that was notably enriched by his scholarly interest in surveying, compiling and juxtaposing sources and texts. This, we feel, undermines Arrell’s argument in favour of earlier dating which would invite a reading of Troia as elaborating on dramatic material, rather than inspiring the plays’ condensed, tonally mixed dramatisations of rhetorically and visually effective passages from it. The evidence does suggest that Heywood chose to print several of his Ages plays in 1611–13, soon after Troia. This seems to make them linked projects at this moment in his career, but in a different sense. We believe that his concern to leave traces in print became linked in great part to his self-awareness as a classicist. It seems almost mysteriously convenient that alongside these classical publications, at least one of which (The Golden Age) was, Heywood claimed, accidental, there appeared a pirated version of his translation of Ovid’s Ars amatoria under the title Loves Schoole. Certainly, this publication came in time for him to draw attention – in the preface to his Brazen Age (1613) – to his authorship of Art of Love and Remedy of Love, and to claim that these translations had been brazenly appropriated by ‘a pedant about this towne, who, when all trades fail’d, turn’d pedagogue’, one Henry Austin. Heywood had already used parts of his translation of Art of Love in Canto IX of Troia and in Apology.66 Around the same period, he complained against William Jaggard, who had lifted his translation of the Ovidian Epistles from Paris to Helen and Helen to Paris from Cantos IX and X of Troia, in order to include them in a 1612 collection of poems which he published under Shakespeare’s name.67 Whatever the details of those various incidents, all this enabled Heywood to establish retrospectively the consistent profile of a classicist, starting from translations of Ovid, ‘which out of my juniority and want of judgement, I committed to the veiw [sic] of some private friends, but with no purpose of publishing, or further communicating them’,68 and realised more maturely in his Troia, published in folio with printed marginalia and ‘scholies annexed’. Bradbrook has drawn attention to Heywood’s several other ‘enormous and very expensive folios’, all of them classically involved: his translation of Sallust, and the later Gynaikeion, Hierarchie and Exemplary Lives.69 Noting his endorsement of the folio format in his address to the readers of Troia, Francis X. Connor suggests that Heywood ‘connects the bibliographic integrity of his folio to the coherence of his literary work,

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Thomas Heywood and ‘the antique world’ 19

­ ositing both as representative of the quality of the work itself’.70 The p layout of these folios emphasises his scholarship, with preliminary matter (as with Troia, or Exemplary Lives) in which he is at pains to display his classical knowledge, listing the names of authors or mythological figures. The importance he attached to his classical writings and compendia is also suggested by the dedication of several of these works of vernacular humanism to members of the Somerset family, principally the third and fourth Earls of Worcester, Hierarchie being dedicated to Queen Henrietta Maria. At the same time, Heywood sought to persuade his readers of the attractiveness of some of his smaller-format scholarly publications. Pleasant Dialogues he described as ‘a small cabinet of many and choyse’.71 His Life of Merlin was ‘a small manual … made portable for thee’, but Heywood took care to stress that it contains ‘all the pith and marrow of the greater’, allowing readers to carry in their pocket ‘Hollinshed, Polychronicon, Fabian and Speed or any of the rest of more giantlike bulke or binding’ that ‘load and tyre a porter in carrying’.72 Here, we come to an important aspect of Heywood’s erudition, which sets his classicism apart from that of many of his contemporaries. The Horatian aim ‘to profit and to delight’ (Ars poetica, I.333) was important to Heywood, who made it his motto on the title-pages of several of his classicising works, including The Silver Age, the two parts of The Iron Age, Gynaikeion, Pleasant Dialogues, Loves Maistresse and (in a variant form) Troia Britanica. It was more than a platitude for Heywood, who was not chary of thinking earnestly in terms of readers and playgoers to whom he hoped his works might appeal. ‘All we have done we aime at your content, / Striving to illustrate things not knowne to all’, he writes in his epilogue to The Brazen Age. Whilst confident enough to allow the ‘learnd’ to censure as they best know, his particular appeal, voiced by ‘Homer blind’, is to ‘the rest … whom we unlettered call’. He invites them ‘rather to attend then judge: for more than sight / We seeke to please [t]he understanding eare / Which we have hitherto most gracious found, / Your general love, we rather hope then fear’.73 The ‘understanding eare’, a metonymy for the ‘unlettered’ audience’s sympathetic reception, becomes a more important target, or site of confident connection between him and them, than their ‘sight’, which might be pleased or displeased by his classical craftsmanship. His paratextual material in Pleasant Dialogues is aimed at an analogous category of reader: ‘I have prefixed before every particular piece its proper argument, with annotations and observations of all things as may appeare difficult or forreigne to the ignorant reader’.74 In the epistle to the reader that opens 2 Iron Age, he proposes, if he succeeds in gathering the whole cycle in a single volume, ‘to illustrate the whole worke; with an explanation of all the difficulties, and an historicall comment of every hard name, which may appeare obscure or intricate to such as are

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not frequent in poetry’.75 And while many of his classical publications were dedicated to the nobility, his Exemplary Lives are addressed ‘[t]o all noble and brave spirited gentlemen, with the excellent and vertuously disposed gentlewomen in generall’.76 Unlike Jonson, whose learned notes were aimed aggressively against the learned, ‘whose noses are ever like swine spoyling and rooting up the Muses gardens’, and who ended his epistle ‘To the readers’ in Sejanus by refusing to ‘plant my felicity, in your generall saying “Good”, or “Well”, &c.’, because ‘the better sort of’ readers would ‘hate’ him for such a stance;77 unlike Chapman, who reviled the ‘plebeian’ view ‘that a man is bound to write to every vulgar reader’s understanding’ as much as he scorned the criticism of pedants;78 unlike even, to an extent, Shakespeare, whose first published work appeared with the motto ‘Vilia miretur vulgus: mihi flauus Apollo / Pocula Castalia plena ministret aqua’ (let the common man admire trash or vile things; may golden Apollo serve me full cups of Castalian waters) (Venus and Adonis, title-page, taken from Ovid’s Amores, I.xv.35–6),79 Heywood was consistently and overtly happy to seek the most catholic of receptions, the embrace of the most broadchurch of constituencies. Prefacing Troia to its readers Heywood wrote, realistically, ‘[t]hough something may perhaps distaste, something again, I presume, will please the most curious palate’.80 Presenting his epic as inevitably only intermittently excellent, was a curiously homely basis for pleading his audience’s indulgence. This curious at-home-ness with literature as an enterprise of mixtures traces a through-line from the self-deprecatory, sensible pride of his paratexts, to his untroubled eagerness to recognise and please multiple audiences, to his bemusedly democratic approach to classical authorities.

A different classical practice: Heywood the mythographer? In a digression in Book IV of Hierarchie, Heywood appears to bid poetry a somewhat premature farewell. ‘It grieves us now, although too late, at last, / Our youth in idle studies to have past’, he says, alluding to the monitions of Ovid’s father against the ‘studium … inutile’ of the Muses, as reported in Tristia IV.x.21. He reverses the young Ovid’s decision – most famously expressed in Amores I.xv – to dedicate himself to the penurious immortality promised by poetry: ‘Barren Muses, seeke some other friend, / For I henceforth a thriving course intend’.81 Neither ‘fresh violets’, nor ‘sweet fragrant roses’ at Heywood’s grave will be any use to him: ‘If any loves me, and intends to give? / I wish to taste his bounty whilest I live’.82 And yet, for all this disillusionment, Heywood manages to construct within this complaint an affectionate monument to the community of Muse-devotees among

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whom he had made his career. Unlike the glorious cognomens by which the poets of antiquity were known, Heywood wittily says, ‘Marlo, renown’d for his rare art and wit,  / Could ne’re attaine beyond the name of Kit’, ‘Mellifluous Shake-speare, whose inchanting Quill / Commanded Mirth or Passion, was but Will’, and so on with a whole roll-call of ‘moderne Poets’, all of them dramatists, almost all dead by 1635.83 This is the, decidedly past, creative world to which the sexagenarian poet belongs. The gesture recalls Ovid’s tribute to the Roman poets he met or was influenced by in the same exilic elegy. Heywood’s digression is thus no simple renunciation, but a sort of poet’s autobiography, a satirical career retrospective inspired by Ovid’s wistful autobiography in Tristia IV.x. In one of his most confessional passages, then, Heywood speaks in a classical idiom. His thoughts about the poetic present are structured by comparison with anecdotes from the archive of ancient literary history and unfold on a template afforded by his beloved Ovid. The vivid presence of antiquity in Heywood’s invention is not, of course, distinctive in itself; but some of its key features are particular to him. Heywood was no ‘mellifluous Shake-speare’ in his way of thinking about the classics, as Valls-Russell concludes in chapter 12: ‘his approach was structural’. Where a poetic detail in the language of Golding’s Ovid or North’s Plutarch will grab Shakespeare, Heywood will be guided by structure and anecdote. We have seen the role played by template in the classical interactions of Woman Killed, not only with his later play, Lucrece, but also with the Ovidian myth of Orpheus and the inherited structures of classical tragedy. Heywood makes those evocations of parallel but different situations powerful tools for shaping subtle ethical points. Chapter 8’s account of Gynaikeion by Demetriou shows that this logic of juxtaposition is taken even further in Heywood’s strongly classical compendium, with its similar yet different stories of women. In an epigram about half-way into the work, Heywood describes his practice in terms of a ‘skillfull painter’ who deliberately ‘sets by’ a ‘surpassing faire’ creation ‘some foule deformed creature’ that enhances the former’s beauty by comparison. He goes on to imagine his readers liking some of his portraits, displeased by others, and above all to urge them to read on to the others he will offer, ‘(if I be able)’. His characteristic down-to-earth approach to his variously pleasing writing becomes conflated here with his decision to put female paradigms ‘to be eschewed … next to and so neere to the women illustrious’; the combination winds up placing on readers’ acts of comparison the weight of judgement, distinction, conclusion. Heywood’s ethics seems completely bound up with a ‘structural’ thinking that depends on parallels. This is connected, in our view, with the predilections of his classical reading. As the editorial work by Peyré’s team on Troia – crucial precursor to Heywood’s Ages plays – has been revealing, Heywood did not turn only

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to individual ancient texts for classical material, but drew heavily on mythographers like Natale Conti, who collected ancient sources on particular mythical figures, and supplemented them with the parallel reports of the ‘not-so-classical tradition’ of medieval and early Tudor retellings of classical myths, as popularised by the early modern press. These resources remained a staple right through to his design of the Sovereign of the Seas. In Gynaikeion, he added to his repertory the excited discovery of a range of classical miscellanies of ancient material grouped into topics, like those of Aelian, Athenaeus and Valerius Maximus. For much of his writing career, that is, he seems to have been drawn to texts and practices that thought about classical material comparatively and synchronically, ‘setting by’ different sources on the same theme, parallel accounts, competing versions, cognate stories. To an extent, this was simply to inhabit an early modern culture of commonplace books and commonplacing. But the contributions in this volume suggest that Heywood’s way of inhabiting it was distinctively formative of his dramatic and literary practice. Again and again, we find that he did not think of sources singly, but drew on them simultaneously, recombining and reworking stories and textual trails. Incorporating different versions and layers of myth into his own single rewritings, he drew attention, as Coffin shows in chapter 6, to the ‘tears in the fabric’, the cracks and gaps across the classical tradition. He was, writes Peyré in chapter 7, ‘keenly alert … to difference in emphasis and contrariety between diverging versions’, and leaned on this difference for the purposes of tonal and generic experimentation: he ‘liked to confront different discourses, to fuse them or make them jolt against each other’. And again, in chapter 4: ‘Far from being so many disjecta membra haphazardly jumbled together’, the various classical fragments on Heywood’s mythological stage ‘elicit … a multiperspective interplay’ with weighty ethical connotations. This, as Pollard shows in chapter 10, also transpires in the way, for instance, ‘Jupiter and Hercules … fare differently in Heywood’s dramatic practice than in his dramatic theory’. Through such classical figures, Heywood ‘suggests points of contact between opposing ethical categories, offering a wide spectrum of ambiguity’, as Rowland discusses in chapter 5. Heywood’s crosstemporal, eclectic approach to the layers of antiquity placed an emphasis on the viewer’s defamiliarising present, similar to the way that, according to Preedy in chapter 11, his ‘use of temporal coordinates’ in his classical plays ‘emphasise[d] the process of constructing history and narrative above theatre’s capacity to project [the] audience back into a coherent imaginative vision of the past’. The way in which he chose to access the classical world, certainly from Troia onwards, contextualises the eccentric compendia to which he devoted such a large part of his later career, but was also formative for the idiosyncratically mixed tone we associate with so many of his

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plays, for an ethical toolkit that relied on the deliberate juxtaposition of mixed messages, and for a distinctive, simultaneously reverent and iconoclastic, sense of his own mediation between antiquity and early modernity. It moulded many of the ways in which his classicism, at once workaday and individual, differed from that of his contemporaries. After imitating Ovid (and Shakespeare) in his epyllion Oenone and Paris (discussed in chapter 1), Heywood moved on to write a mythological epic. Troia initiated a phase of works in which Heywood’s structuredriven approach to classical reception might be described as increasingly mythographical. From his favourite classical poet, Ovid (see chapter 2), he seems to have learned ‘that all histories might have another alternative version of that history running alongside them’, and to have set out to make an aesthetics out of that multiplicity.84 ‘The most cunning and curious musick, is that which is made out of discords’, he writes in Gynaikeion.85 We are used to the idea that early modern authors discovered ancient literary texts through their interest in myth and that, using myth, they created literary artefacts in conversation with these texts. We are also used to the idea that literary texts absorbed and internalised the notion of allegory inherited from the explication of myth. In the first of these models of influence, literary text influences literary text via myth; in the second it is myth that influences text, as a regime of meaning. But perhaps Heywood helps us begin to think about the influence of myth qua literature, of mythical stories themselves as an aesthetic repertory, a repository of tones, effects and affects, subtly but provocatively variant across their different versions. Heywood’s vernacular classicism seems to register this literary work performed by the myths and legends of antiquity. Early modern ‘mythographies handle a multiplicity of fables, images, and interpretations, and they negotiate several approaches to the topic at the same time’, writes Anna-Maria Hartmann.86 Posing the question of whether, amidst such a cacophony of particulars, myth could have been seen as a way of thinking, she finds that individual English mythographers worked with ‘implicit’ concepts that gave coherence to the idea of myth. Heywood, we argue, with his systematic, probing, creative returns to the multiplicity of myth, found an aesthetic with something of such a coherence in it.

Notes  1 Thomas Heywood, ‘Prologue’, A Woman Killed With Kindness, lines 3–4. References are to Margaret Jane Kidnie (ed.), A Woman Killed With Kindness, Arden Early Modern Drama (London: Bloomsbury, 2017).

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 2 What follows is just a selection of landmark studies on domestic tragedies: Michel Grivelet, Thomas Heywood et le drame domestique élisabéthain (Paris: José Corti, 1957); Lena Cowen Orlin, Private Matters and Public Culture in PostReformation England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994); Catherine Richardson, Domestic Life and Domestic Tragedy in Early Modern England: The Material Life of the Household (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006); Emma Whipday, Shakespeare’s Domestic Tragedies: Violence in the Early Modern Home (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).  3 M. C. Bradbrook, The Growth and Structure of Elizabethan Comedy (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1963 [1955]), p. 67. Others have seen in this prologue a claim to innovation: Michael Wentworth, ‘Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness and the genetics of genre formation: a response to Lisa Hopkins’, Connotations 5:1 (1995–6), 55–68 (p. 55), available at www. connotations.de/article/michael-wentworth-thomas-heywoods-a-woman-killedwith-kindness-and-the-genetics-of-genre-formation-a-response-to-lisa-hopkins/, accessed 26 June 2020.   4 Diana E. Henderson, ‘A Woman Killed with Kindness and domesticity, false or true: a response to Lisa Hopkins’, Connotations 5:1 (1995–6), 49–54 (p. 50), available at www.connotations.de/article/diana-e-henderson-a-womankilled-with-kindness-and-domesticity-false-or-true-a-response-to-lisa-hopkins/, accessed 24 June 2020. See also Henderson, ‘Many mansions: reconstructing A Woman Killed with Kindness’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 26:2 (1986), 277–94 (p. 278).   5 ‘[T]he right happy industry of Master Shakespeare, Master Dekker, and Master Heywood’: John Webster, ‘To the reader’, in John Russell Brown (ed.), The White Devil, The Revels Plays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992 [1960]), p. 4.  6 These lines close Swinburne’s sonnet ‘Thomas Heywood’, in the collection ‘Sonnets on English Dramatic Poets (1590–1650)’, in Michael J. Allen (ed.), The Anthem Anthology of Victorian Sonnets (New York: Anthem Press, 2011), vol. I (1836–50), p. 225.   7 David M. Bergeron, English Civic Pageantry 1558–1642, rev. edn, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies Vol. 267 (Tempe: Arizona State University, 2003 [1971]), p. 218.   8 Kidnie (ed.), ‘Introduction’, Woman Killed, pp. 26–7. See below for a discussion of the dating of The Rape of Lucrece.   9 The notion of ‘compelled decorum’ and its absence from the popular stage come from M. C. Bradbrook, Shakespeare and Elizabethan Poetry: A Study of his Earlier Work in Relation to the Poetry of his Time (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1964 [1951]), p. 139. At the same time, songs may serve to comment on what cannot be told: see Bradbrook, Themes and Conventions of Elizabethan Tragedy (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1964 [1935]), p. 110. For a discussion of Lucrece, and the contributions the songs can make in performance, see Richard Rowland, Thomas Heywood’s Theatre, 1599–1639: Locations, Translations and Conflicts (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 4–14; Eva Griffith,

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A Jacobean Company and its Playhouse: The Queen’s Servants at the Red Bull (c. 1605–1619) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 161–71. Janice Valls-Russell briefly discusses the songs in chapter 3. 10 References are to Allan Holaday (ed.), Thomas Heywood’s ‘The Rape of Lucrece’, Illinois Studies in Language and Literature, XXXIV: 3 (Urbana: The University of Illinois Press, 1950). Holaday follows the fifth quarto (1638). 11 Frankford’s speech in Woman Killed, xiii.7–15. Subha Mukherji has discussed the paradox of Frankford using a copy of the keys to get into the house. Where locks are intended to keep out thieves and predators, here the predator is locked inside with a man’s most precious possession, his wife. See Subha Mukherji, Law and Representation in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 76. For a discussion of Shakespeare’s Lucrece and Cymbeline alongside Heywood’s Woman Killed, see Whipday, Shakespeare’s Domestic Tragedies, pp. 129–38. Whipday does not discuss Heywood’s Lucrece. 12 Kidnie (ed.), ‘Introduction’, p. 27 (for both quotations). 13 Bradbrook, Growth and Structure, p. 146. 14 ‘Elpheda’, The Exemplary Lives and Memorable Acts of Nine The Most Worthy Women in the World. Three Jewes. Three Gentiles. Three Christians (London: Tho[mas] Cotes for Richard Royston, 1640), p. 132. Helen is also viewed as ‘the cause of the Trojan warres’ (p. 132). Had Helen been more like James’s daughter Elizabeth, her commanding grace would have prevented her abduction and there would have been no war, Heywood contends in A Marriage Triumphe Solemnized in an Epithalamium, In Memorie of the Happie Nuptials Betwixt the High and Mightie Prince Count Palatine. And the Most Excellent Princesse the Lady Elizabeth (London: [N. Okes] for Edward Marchant, 1613), sig. B2v. 15 Heywood, A Curtaine Lecture (London: Robert Young for John Aston, 1637), sig. B11r (p. 21). 16 Heywood, The Second Part of The Iron Age (London: Nicholas Okes, 1632), sig. E3v. The two parts are bound together but the signatures begin again at A for the second part. 17 Heywood, The Exemplary Lives, sig. **4r. Minor misprints in the Greek word ‘γυναικείον’ have been silently corrected. 18 Heywood, A Marriage Triumphe, sig. B4r. 19 Katherine Heavey, ‘“Properer men”: myth, manhood and the Trojan War in Greene, Shakespeare and Heywood’, Journal of the Northern Renaissance, 7 (2015), 1–18, available at www.northernrenaissance.org/properer-men-mythmanhood-and-the-trojan-war-in-greene-shakespeare-and-heywood/, accessed 24 June 2020. 20 On Henry, see A Funerall Elegie Upon the Death of the Late Most Hopefull and Illustrious Prince, Henry, Prince of Wales (London: William Welbie, 1613), esp. sigs Br, C2r-v; on Frederick, A Marriage Triumphe, esp. sigs B3r-B4r. 21 Kathleen E. McLuskie, Dekker and Heywood: Professional Dramatists (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994), p. 22. 22 ‘Allas, of me, unto the worldes ende, / Shal neyther ben ywriten nor ysonge / No good word, for thise bokes wol me shende. / … / Thorughout the world my

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belle shal be ronge! / And wommen moost wol haten me of alle.’ (V.1058–63), Geoffrey Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry Benson, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 23 Gary Taylor, John Jowett, Terri Bourus and Gabriel Egan (gen. eds), The New Oxford Shakespeare, The Complete Works: Modern Critical Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017 [2016]). Unless otherwise indicated all references to Shakespeare are to this edition. The division in acts and scenes used in editions other than this one is provided in square brackets. 24 Seneca, Hippolytus [Phaedra], trans. John Studley, in Seneca His Tenne Tragedies (London: Thomas Martin, 1581), sig. 57v. Seneca never uses the word ‘labyrinth’ in his play. 25 References are to Seneca, Agamemnon, in Tragedies, ed. and trans. John G. Fitch, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018 [2002]), vol. II. 26 Alan C. Dessen, Elizabethan Drama and the Viewer’s Eye (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1977), pp. 76, 75. 27 T. S. Eliot, ‘Thomas Heywood’, Elizabethan Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1968 [1963]), pp. 94–106 (p. 106). 28 Holaday (ed.), ‘Introduction’, Thomas Heywood’s ‘The Rape of Lucrece’, p. 38. 29 Eliot, Elizabethan Essays, pp. 94, 101. 30 L. C. Knights, Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1962 [1937]), p. 208 n. 2. 31 Charles Algernon Swinburne discusses Heywood’s plays at length and praises the dramatist’s ‘amazing fecundity and … astonishing industry’, The Age of Shakespeare (New York: Harper, 1908), p. 249. Arthur Melville Clark, Thomas Heywood, Playwright and Miscellanist (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1931). Charles Lamb saw in Heywood a ‘sort of prose Shakespeare. His scenes are to the full as natural as affecting’, Specimens of English Dramatic Poets: Who Lived About the Time of Shakespeare, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013 [1808]), vol. I, p. 122. William Hazlitt describes the dialogues in a play like Woman Killed (he does not seem to have known the classical plays) as ‘beautiful prose put in heroic measure’ and notes the ‘unembarrassed facility of his style’: Lectures Chiefly on the Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth (London: Stodart and Steuart, 1820), pp. 73, 77. 32 Besides Growth and Structure, mentioned in note 3, see also Bradbrook, ‘Thomas Heywood, Shakespeare’s shadow: “a description is only a shadow, received by the ear” (An Apology for Actors)’, in Marie-Thérèse Jones-Davies (ed.), Du texte à la scène: langages du théâtre, Actes des congrès de la Société française Shakespeare (Paris: Jean Touzot, 1983), pp. 13–34, available at http:// journals.openedition.org/shakespeare/457, accessed 24 June 2020. 33 James Purkis studies the manuscript of The Captives in chapter 2 of Shakespeare and Manuscript Drama: Canon, Collaboration and Text (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). Interest in Heywood has also turned on his possible contribution to Sir Thomas More, one of the earliest in the long series of collaborative plays in which he had a hand: see Sir Thomas More, ed. John Jowett, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Bloomsbury, 2011).

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34 Further to earlier references to scholarship on Woman Killed: recent editions include The First and Second Parts of King Edward IV, ed. Richard Rowland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005) and The Four Prentices of London By Thomas Heywood, in Three Romances of Eastern Conquest, ed.  Ladan Niayesh (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018). See the notes to chapter 3 (Janice Valls-Russell) for critical studies on Lucrece. 35 Richard Rowland, ‘The Captives: Thomas Heywood’s “whole monopoly off mischeiff”’, Modern Language Review, 90:3 (1995), 585–602. 36 See the special section, ‘Issues in review: popular theatre and the Red Bull’, Early Theatre, 9:2 (2006), 99–156; also, Griffith, A Jacobean Company. 37 Bergeron, English Civic Pageantry, p. 234. He discusses Heywood’s civic shows in chapter 9. See also Bergeron (ed.), Thomas Heywood’s Pageants: A Critical Edition (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019 [1986]). In Pageantry and Power: A Cultural History of the Early Modern Lord Mayor’s Show 1585–1639 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), Tracey Hill considers the material and collaborative aspects of the shows in which Heywood was involved. Charlotte Coffin looks at the printed texts of the pageants and Heywood’s authorial self-fashioning in his printed accounts of the pageants; she notes how in Porta pietatis he refers readers to his pamphlet, ‘published the last summer of his Majesties great shippe, called the Sovereigne of the Seas’: ‘From pageant to text: the silent discourse of Heywood’s omissions’, Cahiers Charles V, 43 (2007), 71–96, available at www. persee.fr/doc/cchav_0184-1025_2007_num_43_1_1502, accessed 24 June 2020. 38 M. L. Stapleton (ed.), Thomas Heywood’s ‘Art of Love’: The First Complete English Translation of Ovid’s ‘Ars Amatoria’ (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000); and ‘A Remedy for Heywood?’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 43:1 (2001), 74–115 (Remedy occupies pp. 93–115). 39 Editing Troia Britanica has shown that Heywood used George Chapman’s Seaven Bookes of the Iliades of Homere (London: John Windet, 1598) and Achilles Shield. Translated As the Other Seven Bookes of Homer, Out of his Eighteenth Booke of Iliades (London: John Windet, 1598). See the notes to Cantos X and XIII in Yves Peyré (gen. ed.), Troia Britanica (2009–19), available at www.shakmyth.org, accessed 24 June 2020. On other modes of accessing Homer see chapter 8 (Demetriou). 40 Bradbrook, ‘Thomas Heywood, Shakespeare’s shadow’, p. 13. Exceptions include discussions of the Ages and Lucrece, by Swinburne in The Age of Shakespeare, and a chapter on his classical plays in Friedrich Mowbray Velte, The Bourgeois Elements in the Dramas of Thomas Heywood (New York: Haskell House, 1966). More recent work, relevant to this volume, includes Jonathan Bate’s discussions of The Winter’s Tale and The Golden Age, The Tempest and The Brazen Age in Shakespeare and Ovid (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), pp. 225–7, 253–4; Charlotte Coffin, ‘Burlesque or neoplatonic? Popular or elite? The shifting value of classical mythology in Love’s Mistress’, in Janice Valls-Russell, Agnès Lafont and Charlotte Coffin (eds), Interweaving Myths in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), pp. 216–38; Coffin, ‘Heywood’s Ages and Chapman’s Homer: nothing

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in common?’, in Tanya Pollard and Tania Demetriou (eds), Homer and Greek Tragedy in Early Modern England’s Theatres (= Classical Receptions Journal, 9:1 (2017)), 55–78. 41 Arlene W. Weiner (ed.), Thomas Heywood’s ‘The Iron Age’, Renaissance Drama: A Collection of Critical Editions (New York, Garland, 1979; published version of PhD dissertation, Brandeis University, 1971). 42 ‘Heywood’s Apology is the only document in the age of Shakespeare written by a knowledgeable figure sympathetic to the popular drama’, Dessen, Elizabethan Drama and the Viewer’s Eye, p. 10; ‘the only contemporary complete text we have – by an early modern actor about early modern actors’, Griffith, A Jacobean Company, p. 191. On Apology and Hamlet, see for instance Ceri Sullivan, ‘Armin, Shakespeare and Heywood on dramatic empathy’, Notes and Queries, 62:4 (2015), 560–2. 43 The Rape of Lucrece was directed by Sonia Ritter in 2005. For an account of the production, see Rowland, Thomas Heywood’s Theatre, p. 6–14. This production, in relation to stagings of Shakespeare’s poem, is briefly discussed in Janice Valls-Russell, ‘Ravishing the bride from the classical page to the early modern stage: Thomas Heywood’s The Rape of Lucrece’, Scènes de lit/Bedchamber Scenes, co-ed. Sujata Iyengar, Sarah Mayo and Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin, Arrêt sur scène/Scene Focus, 8 (2019), pp. 101–16 (p. 105), available at www.ircl.cnrs. fr/productions%20electroniques/arret_scene/8_2019/ASF8_2019_09_vallsrus sell.pdf, accessed 24 June 2020. 44 Bradbrook, ‘Thomas Heywood, Shakespeare’s shadow’, p. 32. 45 Peyré (gen. ed.), Troia Britanica. 46 Jan van der Noot, A Theatre Wherein be Represented As Wel the Miseries & Calamities that Follow the Voluptuous Worldlings, As Also the Greate Joyes and Plesures Which the Faithfull do Enjoy (London: Henry Bynneman, 1569). A Theatre was also published in Dutch and French in 1568. On the attribution of the sonnets within it to Spenser, see Andrew Hadfield, ‘Edmund Spenser’s translations of Du Bellay in Jan van der Noot’s A Theatre for Voluptuous Worldlings’, in Fred Schurink (ed.), Tudor Translation (London: Palgrave, 2011), pp. 143–60. 47 The quotation is from A. W. Ward (ed.), ‘Preface’, A Woman Killed with Kindness (London: Dent, 1897), p. vi. 48 Thomas Heywood, ‘To the reader’, The English Traveller (London: Robert Raworth, 1633), p. [5]. For an overview of Heywood’s life, see David Kathman, ‘Thomas Heywood (c. 1573–1641)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2014, doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/13190. See the appendix to this volume for a chronology of Heywood’s known extant works. 49 Griffith, A Jacobean Company, pp. 71–8. The company were also known as the Queen’s Servants or the Queen’s Majesty’s Servants. 50 Heywood, An Apology for Actors Containing Three Briefe Treatises (London: Nicholas Okes, 1612), sig. C3v. 51 Heywood complained that it had been pirated; editions appeared in London in 1625, without, however, acknowledging him as translator. For a full discussion

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of this, see Stapleton (ed.), ‘Introduction’, Thomas Heywood’s ‘Art of Love’, and chapter 2 in this volume. 52 See Lukas Erne, Shakespeare and the Book Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 37–49, ‘Appendix A, The publication of playbooks by Shakespeare and his contemporaries to 1660’, pp. 233–52, ‘Appendix  B, Printed playbooks of professional plays, including reprints, 1583–1622’, pp. 252–6. Four of Heywood’s plays were printed with woodcuts on their title pages, attesting to their popularity: 2 The Fair Maid of the West, featuring a female character, in 1631; If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody, featuring Queen Elizabeth in all the print runs, from 1605 to 1632; 1 and 2 Iron Age, in 1632 (Figures 2 and 3). 53 Clark, Thomas Heywood, p. 44. 54 The Two Most Worthy and Notable Histories Which Remaine Unmained to Posterity (viz:) the Conspiracie of Catiline, Undertaken Against the Government of the Senate of Rome, and the Warre which Jugurth for Many Years Maintained Against the Same State. Both Written by C. C. Salustius (London: [William Jaggard] for John Jaggard, 1608 [i.e.1609]). Jean Bodin’s Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem (Paris, 1566) is available online: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ ark:/12148/bpt6k111605f.image, accessed 26 June 2020. 55 By 1611, the first play in the Ages sequence, The Golden Age, had been ‘sundry times acted’ by Queen Anne’s Men at the Red Bull, and was first published that same year in unclear circumstances: see Martin Wiggins and Catherine Richardson, British Drama 1533–1642: A Catalogue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011–18), vol. VI: 1609–16 (2015), entry 1637 (The Golden Age), pp. 134–41. The Brazen Age was first performed perhaps in 1611, and first printed in 1613: ibid., entry 1653 (The Brazen Age), pp. 191–6. The Silver Age was probably first performed in 1611, another performance took place in 1612, and the play was first published in 1613: ibid., entry 1645 (The Silver Age), pp. 158–46. Things get more complicated with The Iron Age: Wiggins and Richardson consider that the safest guess for the writing of both parts is early 1613: ibid., entry 1704 (1 Iron Age), pp. 297–302, and entry 1709 (2 Iron Age), pp. 316–21. Part 1 had been performed by 1623 and both parts were published jointly in 1632. A possible extract from Part 2 may have been paraphrased by Edward Pudsey in his commonplace book as early as 1612 or 1613: David Kathman, ‘Edward Pudsey (bap. 1573, d. 1612/13)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2018, doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/ 71298. 56 This is deduced from the wording of Sir Henry Herbert’s licence of Escapes in 1623 for performance at the Red Bull. See Wiggins and Richardson, British Drama 1533–1642, vol. VI: 1609–16 (2015), entry 1637 (The Golden Age), pp. 134–41, p. 140. 57 Heywood, ‘To the reader’, The Second Part of The Iron Age, sig. [A2r]. (The signatures begin again at A for the second part). 58 For a discussion of Love’s Mistress, see Rowland, Thomas Heywood’s Theatre, pp. 233–97, and Coffin, ‘Burlesque or neoplatonic?’ It was also during that

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period that revised editions of other earlier works were printed: If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody and 2 The Fair Maid of the West. 59 David Womersley, Divinity and State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), esp. pp. 167–92 (p. 177 for the quotation). Part 1 (The Troubles of Queen Elizabeth) was first published in 1605, with a prologue and epilogue added in Pleasant Dialogues and Dramma’s (1635). Part 2 was first published in 1606. The early stage history is unknown, with a possible revival in the 1630s. See Wiggins and Richardson, British Drama 1533–1642, vol. V: 1603–1608; entry 1433, pp. 114–20. 60 For further details of Holaday’s argument, which includes biographical information about Browne, his acting career on the continent and return to England in 1607, and adduces his possible contribution to the songs of the play as further evidence of a connection with Heywood, see Holaday, ‘Introduction’, Thomas Heywood’s ‘The Rape of Lucrece’, pp. 5–19. 61 Allan Holaday, ‘Heywood’s Troia Britannica and the Ages’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 14 (1946): 430–9; David Mann, ‘Heywood’s Silver Age: a flight too far?’, Medieval & Renaissance Drama in England, 26 (2013), 184–203. 62 Note that work on Troia Britanica and the plays has established that Heywood read Chapman’s translation of the first seven books of Homer’s Iliad, but Arrell suggests that Troye already contained material from Chapman’s translation of Book VII, which Heywood could have seen in manuscript. There is, however, no contextual evidence that would support such an early dating of the translation. 63 Douglas Arrell, ‘Heywood, Henslowe and Hercules: tracking 1 and 2 Hercules in Heywood’s Silver and Brazen Ages’, Early Modern Literary Studies, 17:1 (2014), 1–22, available at https://extra.shu.ac.uk/emls/journal/index.php/emls/ article/view/100, accessed 24 June 2020; Arrell, ‘Heywood, Shakespeare, and the mystery of Troye’, Early Modern Literary Studies, 19:1 (2016), 1–22, available at https://extra.shu.ac.uk/emls/journal/index.php/emls/article/view/267, accessed 24 June 2020. 64 Arrell, ‘Heywood, Henslowe and Hercules’, 1–2. 65 Rowland refutes the earlier dating: see chapter 5. In ‘Heywood’s epic theater’, Comparative Drama, 48:4 (2014), 371–91, Mark Bayer refers to the controversy over the dating of the plays, stating that his ‘interest is not in these plays’ provenance, but in their performance at the Red Bull in the seventeenth century’ (p. 388 n. 2). 66 Heywood ends Canto IX with some eighty lines from Art of Love, on the story of Ariadne after Theseus’ desertion, and closing with another excerpt on drinking games and the art of seduction; on Apology, see Stapleton, ‘Introduction’, Thomas Heywood’s ‘Art of Love’, p. 3. 67 Heywood, Apology for Actors, sig. G4r. See also Francis X. Connor, Literary Folios and Ideas of the Book in Early Modern England (London: Palgrave, 2014), pp. 93–6. 68 Heywood, The Brazen Age (London: Nicholas Okes for Samuel Rand, 1613), sig. A2r.

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Thomas Heywood and ‘the antique world’ 31

69 Bradbrook, ‘Thomas Heywood’, p. 32. 70 Connor, Literary Folios, p. 95. 71 ‘To the right honourable Sir Henry Lord Cary’, Pleasant Dialogues and Dramma’s (London: R. O. for R. H., 1637), sig. A2r. 72 ‘To the Reader’, The Life of Merlin, Sirnamed Ambrosius his Prophesies and Predictions Interpreted, and their Truth Made Good by our English Annalls… (London: J. Okes, 1641), sig. [¶4v]. For a discussion of Heywood’s authorial strategies in Dialogues and Dramma’s, which combines performance and publication, see Nora Johnson, The Actor as Playwright in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), especially pp. 130–4; for the pageants, see Coffin, ‘From pageant to text’. 73 Heywood, The Brazen Age, sig. L3v. 74 ‘To the generous reader’, Pleasant Dialogues and Dramma’s, sig. [A3r]. 75 Heywood, The Second Part of The Iron Age, sig. [A2r-v]. 76 The Exemplary Lives, sig.**r. 77 Ben Jonson, ‘To the reader’, Sejanus (London: G. Elld for Thomas Thorpe, 1605), sig. ¶2v. 78 George Chapman, Homer’s ‘Iliad’, ed. Robert S. Miola (Cambridge: The Modern Humanities Research Association, 2017), lines 82–3, p. 274. 79 Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis (London: Richard Field, 1593). 80 See ‘To the two-fold Readers’, in Peyré (gen. ed.), Troia Britanica. 81 Thomas Heywood, The Hierarchie of the Blessed Angells. Their Names, Orders and Offices. The Fall of Lucifer with his Angells (London: Adam Islip, 1635), p. 207. 82 Hierarchie, p. 208. 83 Hierarchie, p. 206. 84 Colin Burrow, Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 98. 85 Heywood, Γυναικείον [Gynaikeion], or, Nine Bookes of Various History Concerninge Women (London: Adam Islip, 1624), sig. A4v. 86 Anna-Maria Hartmann, English Mythography in its European Context ­1500–1650 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), p. 14.

1 Intertextuality and Thomas Heywood’s early Ovid: Oenone and Paris Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Katherine Heavey

On 17 May 1594, an anonymous poem entitled Oenone and Paris was entered in the Stationers’ Register. The poem, bearing a preface signed by T. H., has long been attributed to Thomas Heywood. Joseph Quincy Adams cites various evidence in support of the ‘fair probability’ that T. H. is Heywood, including the obvious classical learning of the two authors, their common admiration for Ovid and Lucian as well as Shakespeare, their interest in the Troy story in particular and the various echoes of Oenone and Paris in Heywood’s later works.1 An epyllion set after the Trojan prince Paris’ first meeting with Helen, Oenone and Paris recounts his invented return to Ida, and the hopeless attempts of the nymph Oenone, Paris’ first love, to reattract his interest, before he leaves to be reunited with Helen. Damned in the eyes of many critics for what Adams has termed its ‘unblushing plagiarism’ of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis (1593),2 but owing just as much to classical poetry, T. H.’s epyllion inventively reshapes its Ovidian and Shakespearean source material, incorporating further details from Lucian, Colluthus and earlier Elizabethan Troy-stories along the way. In this chapter, I will show that Oenone and Paris merits new attention, not only because it appears to be one of Heywood’s earliest experimentations with an Ovidian source text, but also because it moves beyond this source in a variety of intriguing ways, demonstrating the complex and inventive intertextuality, and the interest in readers and reception, which would come to characterise Heywood’s more ambitious later classicism. In his choice of protagonists, T. H. attempts to write himself into a wellestablished mythic tradition, while also venturing in new directions with his treatment of his characters. Early modern authors and readers would have been most familiar with Paris as a key player in the famous story of the Trojan War. Oenone, meanwhile, was best known as one of the despairing letter-writers of Ovid’s Heroides, and Oenone and Paris is unarguably reflective of what Daniel Moss has usefully termed the ‘Ovidian vogue’ of the 1590s, in its reimagining of one of Ovid’s writing women.3 However, the poem is also remarkable as an adaptive project, one that demonstrates

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Intertextuality and Oenone and Paris 33

what Moss terms the ‘medieval and early modern impulse to inscribe multiple new identities on the legendary figures of the classical world’.4 T. H. is keenly aware that by choosing Oenone and Paris as his subjects, he is not just responding to Ovid, but is also activating his readers’ memories of the story of the Trojan War and offering a revision of that iconic tale. As this would suggest, the poem calls on its readers to be particularly engaged with the myths, as they situate this invented episode in relation to the characters and details they already know from Ovid, Virgil, Homer and early modern sources. Set before the outbreak of the war, and taking full advantage of what Tania Demetriou has termed ‘the prequel’s literary resource of being automatically read in relation to the known’,5 Oenone and Paris provides a new angle on a well-known story, not least by allowing a familiar but traditionally marginalised figure a new kind of power. T. H. permits Oenone to speak (rather than write) back to the man who has abandoned her, and the poem has been noted by critics for its sensitive treatment of its heroine,6 and for retelling a familiar story ‘from an unexpected, domestic and feminine, perspective’.7 Oenone’s voice is at the heart of the poem, with William Weaver pointing out that she is granted many more lines of dialogue than Paris, and that her speech is more rhetorically elaborate.8 Refusing to submit unquestioningly to Paris’ rejection, she is endowed with the complexified voice that Wendy Wall sees as characteristic of the female personae of Renaissance complaint poetry.9 At certain moments, as she appeals to Paris, Oenone even enjoys some of the ‘elevation and prestige’ that Leah Whittington has argued can (paradoxically) be enjoyed by a supplicating figure.10 As Michael L. Stapleton and Janice Valls-Russell trace in chapters 2 and 3 respectively, later mythical works of Heywood’s are equally remarkable for their emphasis on the voices and the ill-fated private relationships of classical women, and, like Oenone and Paris, these works might extend the stories of these women beyond their traditional classical boundaries. For example, in 1 Iron Age (printed 1632), Heywood brings the classical, Ovidian Helen to life onstage. He recycles his own work in the process, for much of her dialogue with Paris is borrowed from Heywood’s earlier translations of Heroides XVI and XVII, which he had interpolated into his 1609 poem Troia Britanica. However, he also departs from Ovid, and from his own earlier work with the poet, and refashions Helen for an early modern audience eager for new addenda to a well-known and scandalous story. For instance, in one unclassical scene, Helen is forced to make an onstage choice between her husband and her lover, in front of an audience composed of Greeks, Trojans and Jacobean theatregoers. T. H.’s focus on the private life of Paris and Oenone, and particularly on Oenone as a character, is a suggestive foreshadowing of Heywood’s later, almost voyeuristic interest in

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Thomas Heywood and the classical tradition

Helen’s psychology, and (more largely) his interest in what happened (or could have happened) before, around and after the familiar classical stories his educated audiences would already have known.11 Mark Bayer has argued that Heywood’s mythic works demonstrate a sophisticated appreciation of the diverse audiences for whom he was writing, and the expectations and interests of these recipients: for example, the audience for a play like The Iron Age might differ appreciably from the readership of his poem Troia Britanica, and Heywood cuts his mythic cloth accordingly.12 T. H. has also thought carefully about his readership, and their reception of his work, and in the preface to Oenone and Paris he addresses the ‘Gentlemen’ he imagines as constituting this readership. He claims, somewhat defensively, that he presents his creation, ‘the Maiden head of my Pen’, to the judicious critical view of these readers (sig. A2r), so that their assessments may improve his future writing.13 If T. H. is sincere in his quest for constructive critique then writing Oenone and Paris might be a good way to achieve this, because the growing popularity of such short mythic poems meant that, by 1594, mythologically inclined readers could compare his efforts to those of other poets, including Shakespeare and Thomas Lodge (Scilla’s Metamorphosis, 1589). The adaptation of Ovidian material (the Heroides) into a pseudo-Ovidian genre (the Elizabethan epyllion) also held other, more practical attractions for an author conscious of what his readership was already consuming for, as Moss puts it, ‘[q]uite simply, Ovidian poetry sold’.14 Moreover, an ambitious but inexperienced author might be especially drawn to the emerging and evolving form of the epyllion, having seen the success of his predecessors: Götz Schmitz points out that after the publication of Venus and Adonis in 1593 ‘the writing of an epyllion had become something of an obligatory apprentice work for aspiring poets’.15 As Schmitz’s phrasing suggests, there is perhaps a comfortingly formulaic quality to the epyllion, both for the writer and the reader. Sandra Clark notes that typically, such a poem combines disparate elements from several genres, is classicising (packed with self-consciously classical references and allusions) and erotic in manner, and devotes itself to an Ovidian-style story of love.16

Oenone and Paris clearly incorporates such elements, and in so doing reflects the essentially ‘disparate’ nature of this form of poetry.17 T. H.’s poem gestures to the Elizabethan interest in direct translations of Ovid (and particularly to George Turberville’s successful Heroides of 1567), and  to another popular contemporary form of poetry, that of male-authored female complaint, as well as to the period’s broader interest in representations of supplication and appeal.18 In Oenone and Paris, then, T. H. is able to marry familiarity with fluidity, to blend multiple fashionable Elizabethan

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Intertextuality and Oenone and Paris 35

forms and tropes with specific classical and early modern intertexts, and to refigure these on his own terms. In its subject-matter, its style and its address to the reader, the poem demonstrates an aspiring author thinking carefully about both his readership and his own approach to mythic writing, and reworking known material of various kinds to meet both the expectations of his imagined audience and his own intellectual and commercial agendas. T. H.’s poem is, inescapably, a reworking of one popular early modern intertext in particular for, as critics have noticed with disapproval, Oenone and Paris bears an obvious resemblance to Venus and Adonis, and its relationship to the earlier poem is signalled in the clear parallels between characters and in similarities of language.19 The poem opens with Paris, like Adonis, hunting at daybreak; the reader learns that he has already returned from Greece with Helen, for he has left the bed of his ‘new-stolne bryde’ (line 8) to wander in the woods of Ida. (From here on, numbers in brackets after a quotation – e.g. (8) – are the corresponding line numbers.) He is soon accosted by Oenone, who has learned of Paris’ betrayal (perhaps, as she describes in Heroides V, by seeing Paris and Helen together aboard his ship), and the narrator describes her grief, ‘Her face al swoolne with still distilling teares’ (38). She approaches Paris ‘As once the goddesse Citherea came, / To finde Adonis following of his game’ (53–4). Here T. H. not only likens Paris to Adonis, but also introduces the strange combination of powerlessness and agency that characterises Venus and Oenone, both of whom are compelled by fierce desire and pride, both of whom mount an attack (Venus’ amatory, Oenone’s admonitory) as soon as they meet their beloveds, and both of whom end their poems disconsolate, after their dire warnings of impending disaster have been ignored. Descriptions of physical appearance allow T. H. both to imitate Shakespeare and (perhaps secondarily) to flesh out his characters. Adonis and Paris are both described as red and white in hue, but while in Adonis’ case this demonstrates his desirability, since he is, as Venus tells him, ‘more white and red than doves or roses are’ (10),20 in Paris the colour combination betokens his guilt: Oenone tells him ‘Thy crimson rose the lilly doeth out-chase,  / Thy favour doeth thy fatall faultes discover!’ (63–4), and before Paris’ first speech the narrator observes ‘His crimson colour tells his late abuses’ (160).21 Katherine Duncan-Jones finds the poem’s imitation of Shakespeare’s red and white ‘rather unsubtle’,22 and she furnishes examples that do suggest the poet has inserted the colours somewhat at random, in opportunistic imitation of Shakespeare. For example, Paris notices Oenone and ‘when hee knewe she was his quondam wife / The white and redde were in his face at strife’ (155–6). Here, the poet suggests the implausible detail that perhaps Paris did not recognise Oenone at once, and in fact intends to reprimand her for daring, as a mere nymph, to approach him.23 The rapid

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Thomas Heywood and the classical tradition

realisation of her identity is hard to take seriously,24 and is likely to make Paris appear somewhat ridiculous, while also conveniently allowing the poet to import the Shakespearean imagery of red and white.25 Appearances remain a focal point, as the reader of the epyllion would expect, and they can be as revealing as Paris’ blushes, though not always in the same way. Clark notes the typical description of the male youth in the Elizabethan epyllion: ‘he is inexperienced and very young … he is irresistibly beautiful with long hair and a smooth pale body’.26 T. H. (and Oenone) are certainly aware of this tradition: Oenone praises Paris’ ‘faire hand’ that is, she says, ‘more soft and smooth then mine’ (135),27 and later his ‘milke-white skinne’ (459). As smooth as Paris’ hand may be, though, he does not fit the model of sexual inexperience that that writers of the epyllion prized, that was indicated by an androgynous appearance, and epitomised by Shakespeare’s ‘tender boy’ (32) or Christopher Marlowe’s Leander, ‘beautiful and young’ (51).28 Describing Paris in such conventional and eroticised terms, Oenone is perhaps trying to rewrite him into the innocent shepherd she once knew, closer to Adonis or Leander than to the seducing prince of Troy, who is so changed that he can no longer even recognise her. T. H. employs imagery that is typical of the epyllion, and of Venus and Adonis in particular, in order to heighten the knowing reader’s pity for Oenone, who cannot successfully use epyllic language to refashion Paris into the boy she remembers. Elsewhere, too, the characters’ relations to their Shakespearean antecedents are fascinatingly (and deliberately) unstable. When Paris cruelly tells her that he would never have married her if he had known that he was Trojan royalty, the damage his words do to Oenone is compared to the physical pain of a hunted creature: Like to a gosling in a puttockes clawes, Or silly dove, on whome the hauke hath seazed, Or to a young lambe in a Lyons pawes, Whose wrathfull furor can not be appeazed, Even so lyes poore Oenone on the playne, That living, dyed, yet dead, reviv’th againe. (319–24)

These lines echo Adonis’ helpless submission to Venus’ physical strength: Even as an empty eagle, sharp by fast, Tires with her beak on feathers, flesh, and bone, Shaking her wings, devouring all in haste, Till either gorge be stuffed, or prey be gone: Even so she kissed his brow, his cheek, his chin, And where she ends, she doth anew begin. (55–60)

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Intertextuality and Oenone and Paris 37

Oenone is literally floored by her lover’s cruelty, helpless to resist Paris’ figurative attack, as Adonis must endure Venus’ actual assault. There is a circularity to T. H.’s final couplet that recalls Shakespeare’s lines 59–60, and Adams notes that the same lines also echo Shakespeare’s lines 473–4, ‘For on the grass she lies as she were slain / Till his breath breatheth life in her again’.29 However, while there is still a superficial resemblance here between the collapsing figures of Oenone and Venus, a comparison of the context undercuts the likeness. The circularity in Shakespeare’s lines 59–60 relates to Venus’ endless embracing of Adonis; Oenone is instead trapped in a hopeless cycle of fainting and reviving, which underscores her unhappy status as a tragic suppliant.30 Moreover, when Venus is described swooning at lines 473–4, Adonis falls to his knees and frantically tries to revive her, while Paris watches impassively until Oenone recovers, and does not speak to her for almost 300 lines. If T. H. activates his readers’ recent memories of Venus and Adonis via such echoes, he does so in the hope that they will perceive difference as well as similarity in his creation. Later, too, Oenone is only permitted to be superficially akin to Venus, and the reader is encouraged to draw on memories of their previous reading, both of Shakespeare’s poem and of other Trojan stories. Fearing Paris may suffer at the hands of the Greeks, Oenone urges him to channel his energies into the figurative battle of sexual conquest instead, telling him I am thy foe, doe what thou canst to force me! Tilt, fayre, but fayrely, least thy stroakes rebound. Sit fast and close, or else I will unhorse thee, Yet fall the first, to save thee from the ground. (439–42)

This is all highly and deliberately reminiscent of Venus and Adonis’ militaristic language, as well as recalling the epyllion’s fascination with ‘the reversal of accepted gender-roles’, which becomes ‘[a] basic source of eroticism in the poems’.31 Again, though, there is a crucial sense of difference: Venus, with her greater size and strength, is able to engage Adonis in a tussle, while in the later poem this is all hypothetical, and Oenone merely hopes that Paris will take charge, and will play both her ‘foe’ and lover. Here and later, when she tries to tempt Paris into a fountain with the ludicrous offer ‘Be Phaoes Boateman, I will be thy barke’ (457), perhaps referring the reader to Heroides XV (Sappho’s letter to Phaon), Oenone is a figure of fun, because of her absurd exaggeration of seductive and/or supplicating postures.32 However, while he smiles at her excesses (thereby endorsing a similar response in the reader), Paris is also the butt of an authorial joke. The attentive reader might notice that even in their imaginary and eroticised joust it is Oenone who is imagined as unhorsing Paris,

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Thomas Heywood and the classical tradition

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and the episode demonstrates T. H. playing with the previous classical incarnations of his protagonists, in a way that Shakespeare does not. This is because the knowing reader would appreciate that the classical Paris was often scorned as a reluctant fighter and even a dishonourable coward, and so T. H.’s importing of the martial metaphor from Venus and Adonis is deliberately jarring. In Arthur Golding’s translation of the Metamorphoses, for example, Neptune urges Apollo to kill Achilles, which he does by using Paris: And in a cloud he down among the host of Troy did slide Where Paris dribbling out his shafts among the Greeks he spied. And, telling him what God he was, said ‘Wherefore dost thou waste Thine arrows on the simple sort? If any care thou hast Of those that are thy friends, go turn against Achilles’ head, And like a man revenge on him thy brothers that are dead.’ In saying this, he brought him where Achilles with his brand Was beating down the Trojan folk, and levelled so his hand As that Achilles tumbled down stark dead upon the land. (XII.661–9)33

Paris is a figure of ridicule here, at what should be his moment of greatest triumph. Unable even to identify important Greek foes in the battle, he stands ‘dribbling out his shafts’, a particularly vivid translation of the Latin ‘rara … spargentem … tela’ (XII.662), ‘taking infrequent shots’.34 Apollo urges Paris to act ‘like a man’ in seeking revenge on Achilles, but even when he has killed the Greek (with the god guiding his hand), he is dismissed by the narrator as a ‘coward carpet-knight’ (673). In Heroides XVII (here translated by George Turberville), long before the outbreak of war Helen already knows enough of Paris to dismiss his strength in arms flirtatiously: For Venus fitter thou than Mars dost seeme to bee; Love Paris, and let men of force go fight in fielde for thee. Let Hector, whome thou so dost vaunt, in armour broyle: Another kinde of warrefare is Farre better for thy toyle. (sig. Oiiir)35

Of course, Ovid is also capitalising on an already established reputation; in Book III of the Iliad Paris challenges the Greeks to a duel but, when Menelaus eagerly accepts, the Trojan beats a rapid retreat. Hector is disgusted by his brother’s reticence, condemning his apparent bravery as all for show: ‘Unhappie Paris, bearing shew as doughtie as the best, / Yet

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Intertextuality and Oenone and Paris 39

in effect but feminate, with luxure to detest’ (sig. Giiir).36 Original early modern works, as well as translations of classical poems, inherited this perception of Paris; to take an example from Heywood’s work, in 1 Iron Age Hector scorns him during the Trojan council as ‘effeminate boy  … fitter for young Oenons company  / Then for a bench of souldiers’ (sig. B2r).37 Even when Paris has killed Achilles (by ambushing him in Apollo’s temple) Ajax declares the Trojan ‘a milke-sop’ (sig. Kr), and in Part 2, Pyrrhus echoes Hector by terming him a ‘coward and effeminate Troian boy’ (sig. B4r).38 Thus, when T. H. adopts a key set-piece of Venus and Adonis (the amorous wrestling match) he is recalling Shakespeare’s poem, but he is also inviting the sufficiently well-read auditor to remember the Trojan’s famous reluctance to take the field, and smile at the incongruity of Oenone’s optimistically militaristic invitation. The Ovidian Helen notes archly that Paris is manifestly unsuited for battle (as the Trojan War will prove) and Oenone’s metaphoric call to arms is altogether too forceful. Her employment of the Shakespearean metaphor suggests that however well she once knew Paris, by the time of his return to Ida she utterly misunderstands him, and she is rendered pitiable by her attempts to mimic the flirtatiousness of Venus or Helen. Such moments, in which T. H. imports echoes of the Shakespearean poem but recasts them subtly to differentiate his characters from Shakespeare’s, in the light of their individual classical reputations, argue for the poem as a sophisticated experiment in intertextuality. Might early readers of Oenone and Paris have read the poem alongside Venus and Adonis? If so, they might have been struck not only by the similarities of language and plot that have so exasperated generations of critics, but also by the subtler differences, the ways in which T. H. recalls his Shakespearean model, while setting his creation somehow at an angle to it. Ika Willis has pointed out that ‘[a]ll texts necessarily situate themselves within a literary system both by referring to an earlier model, s­ uggesting a relationship of sameness or repetition, and comparing themselves to that model, suggesting difference’.39 If the reader of Oenone and Paris might notice obvious similarities with and subtler differences from Venus and Adonis, the same is true of the poem’s ancient sources, as I shall now show. T. H. does not want his readers to simply discern and admire echoes of Greek and Latin poems. Rather, he wants them to recognise and interrogate his models, just as they might think of his characters as more than mere echoes of Shakespeare’s. His complex and rewarding intertextual work with classical poems recalls the process of conscious refashioning and reshaping that Moss has argued lay at the heart of the period’s Ovidianism, and that Demetriou also sees in deliberately truncated and altered versions of the Trojan myth, both ancient and early modern.40

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Thomas Heywood and the classical tradition

If the most important early modern intertext for Oenone and Paris is Venus and Adonis, its most significant classical forebear is not the Metamorphoses (by which many of the Elizabethan epyllia were inspired) but Ovid’s Heroides, which, as Wall notes, was one model for complaint poetry.41 T. H. juggles classical and early modern precedent in his incorporation of Ovidian material: sometimes, particularly when Oenone speaks, he translates Ovid faithfully (Weaver argues that while he closely imitates Heroides V, Oenone’s letter, in her speeches, by contrast, he searches his memory for Heroides XVI, Paris’ letter to Helen).42 However, even when he is at his closest to Ovid’s Latin, he departs in some essential way from the spirit of the original, in his tireless quest to do something new with his known characters. Most obviously, rather than have her write, he has Oenone ventriloquise the words of her own Ovidian epistle as she speaks to Paris, and use different parts of her letter as speeches, to respond to his defences and explanations. T. H.’s approach to the classical letters is perhaps deliberately unclear. In Ovid, Oenone writes her letter after Paris has returned with Helen (she recalls seeing the couple on board his approaching ship) but there is no suggestion that she has met him. Here, Paris encounters Oenone after he has returned with Helen: when she echoes the mixed recriminations, laments and boasts of her own classical missive, is she repeating a letter that she has already sent him, or is the speech assumed to be a substitute for the letter? And how does she know the content of Paris’ letter to Helen, which she echoes in her recollection of Cassandra’s warnings to Paris?43 T. H.’s deconstructing and reframing of Ovidian epistles demonstrates one way in which the classical poet’s heroines were ‘collected, glossed and represented in a series of new and everchanging textual permutations’ during the period.44 The poet disassembles and refigures Heroides V for an Elizabethan audience, turning the written word into heartfelt speeches and, in the figure of Paris, embodying the faithless auditor that the Oenone of the Heroides had only imagined receiving and reading her words.45 T. H.’s Oenone echoes Heroides V as she curses Helen, ‘that forreine hecfar of the Greekes’ (67), as she urges Paris to consider the violent consequences of his new desire, as she recalls their swearing vows to one another and as she proudly insists that she is as worthy as Helen of the love of a Trojan prince. T. H. was probably using Turberville’s popular translation alongside a version of the Latin; when his Oenone describes the ‘shaggy Satyres’ and fauns searching for her (559–64), her specifying that the fauns are wounded is not in Ovid, but seems inspired by Turberville (in his translation the satyrs suffer ‘great and grieffull paine’: sig. Dvir). However, in this passage T. H. also includes a detail that is in Ovid but not in Turberville (that she ‘hidde me close and never come among them’).46 When Oenone

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Intertextuality and Oenone and Paris 41

describes herself and Paris carving their pledge on a tree, she follows Ovid (but not Turberville) in identifying this tree as a poplar (though this detail is also to be found in George Peele’s 1584 pastoral The Araygnement of Paris). The narrator might also expand on Ovid, building on classical material to satisfy the demands of his mixed genre. When Oenone recalls their oaths of fidelity, she adds references to the ‘mylchie goate’ of Ida and ‘silver swanne’ of the Po (341–2) that are nowhere in Ovid or Turberville (or Venus and Adonis) but that contribute to the sense of a tranquil, pastoral ideal that Paris destroys with his faithlessness.47 When the Ovidian Oenone describes sighting Paris’ ship, she recalls ‘illuc has lacrimas in mea saxa tuli’ (V.74), which T. H. renders as ‘yonder to the rocks I love I bore my tears’ (Turberville’s Oenone speaks more prosaically of taking her tears home to ‘my Cotte’, sig. Dvr). In Oenone and Paris, as the poem approaches its conclusion, Oenone asks natural features to mimic her grief: ‘Howle & lament, you cliffes, rocks, clowdy mou[n]tains,  / Clear-chrystal streams, wels, brooks, & lovely fou[n]tains!’ (767–8). Schmitz has shown how descriptions of the natural world are one way in which epyllion and complaint are distinguished: ‘the idyllic scenery in which the love-talk of the epyllion is often set … can be contrasted with the historic or waste-land settings of the Complaint’.48 Here, T. H. takes a tiny detail from Heroides V, and expands it to show how the idyll of epyllion – boasting goats, swans, ‘The primrose, cow-slippe, and the daffadillie,  / The pinke, the daysie, violet, and lillie’ (17–18) – gives way to an inhospitable landscape of complaint as Oenone perceives Paris slipping from her, the scenery at the poem’s conclusion composed of ‘ragged cliffes’ (763) and ‘desarts’ (785), amongst which the Elizabethan Oenone is left to wander. The poem’s ending has been termed ‘lame and impotent’,49 and it is true that T. H.’s choice of myth means that he has little choice but to let his poem peter out, for Oenone has no chance of convincing Paris to return. However, Schmitz sees the changing treatment of the natural world, and Oenone’s increasing isolation, as signalling T. H.’s calculated move from epyllion to complaint, his awareness of the related but subtly different requirements of the genres: ‘[i]t is as if the author would make us feel the dividing line between the gregariousness of the epyllion and the loneliness of the Complaint’.50 T. H. understands the potential for interplay between his two chosen genres, and between his Latin and English versions of Ovid’s letters, and he reworks an Ovidian moment in order to conclude with a bleakness and a lack of resolution that is both authentically complaining, and recognisably Heroidean. If T. H. relied heavily on some version of Heroides V for Oenone’s arguments and for her final, unresolved sense of despair, this may be in part because he had scant other literary sources for her voice. Denied an entry of her own in Natale Conti’s compendium Mythologia (1567),51 she is

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described in Thomas Cooper’s Thesaurus (1578) under the entry ‘Oenone’ as ‘the concubine of Paris, before that he ravished Helene’.52 Other early modern accounts stress her victimhood: for instance, she is mentioned as an example of an overly credulous lover in the ‘Admonition by the Auctor, to all yong Gentilwomen’ (1567), a poem that may be by Isabella Whitney.53 In Fennes Frutes (1590) Thomas Fenne includes her in his account of the Trojans in order to condemn Paris, who ‘violated most shamefully his vow made to Oenone’ (sig. Aa3r). George Peele’s Tale of Troy (1589, rev. 1604) mentions her fleetingly to regret that she was deceived by the Trojan’s beauty.54 His pastoral The Araygnement of Paris (1584) also explores Oenone’s potential as a character, rather than simply as a suffering foil to Paris, and the play may have furnished T. H. with the idea of using this pair, and moreover expanding Oenone’s voice by a further blending of classical and vernacular sources; tracing links between The Araygnement, Heroides V and Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender (1579), Lindsay Ann Reid describes Peele’s Oenone as ‘an author of implicit intertextual renown’.55 Peele’s couple swear their love and witness it with an inscription on the poplar tree (as they do in Heroides V), before Paris presides over the judgement of the goddesses. They do not meet again; Oenone’s next and final appearance sees her lamenting his faithlessness, and deciding ‘I will goe sit and pyne under the Poplar tree, / And write my answere to his vow, that everie eie may see’.56 She is given the opportunity to discuss Paris’ betrayal, but with Mercury rather than with Paris himself. In the following scene, Peele’s Venus asks Paris if he has ever been in love, and he replies ‘Lady, a little once’ (678), a damning erasure of Oenone that might paradoxically prompt the reader to wonder what would happen, if they were ever to meet again. T. H. takes up this loose end, and the model provided to him by Peele’s ‘conspicuously writerly’ heroine,57 who is so clearly linked with her Heroidean predecessor. However, he reworks his models to give Oenone a more direct and final engagement with Paris. In so doing, he fashions a far more developed and complex voice for his heroine, while respecting and retaining the sense of hopelessness he would have found in earlier versions, both classical and early modern. If, when he writes Oenone, T. H. adapts her Ovidian letter to Paris, with inspiration from previous Elizabethan texts and poetic forms along the way, he does something rather stranger with his Paris. When he has Paris respond to Oenone, T. H. uses material from Heroides XVI, which is of course not a letter to Oenone at all, but Paris’ flirtatious missive to Helen, written when all thoughts of the nymph have been driven from his mind. As well as directing Paris’ words to a different addressee, T. H. also alters events as he would have found them described in the Ovidian letter. For example, when Paris describes the judgement of the goddesses to Oenone, his account

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Intertextuality and Oenone and Paris 43

of this pivotal event is markedly different from the description he gives in Heroides XVI. Such differences may appear because, as Weaver theorises, T. H. simply did not have any version of this epistle before him, and so was attempting a paraphrase.58 However, if we assume that T.  H. was likely to be using complete editions of the poems (for example, the 1502 Aldine edition of the Latin, and Turberville’s English translation), then the strayings from Heroides XVI are more probably intentional. They are ‘a test of the poet’s skill in enargeia’,59 as Weaver goes on to suggest, but are also, and specifically, informed by the fact that it is Oenone hearing these words. As well as recognising his use of rhetorical techniques such as enargeia (the embroidering paraphrase recommended by Erasmus and Quintilian),60 T. H’s imagined readers would immediately notice that Paris is recycling an address to Helen. Here, as when he had Oenone suggest so enthusiastically that Paris might fight with her, T. H. is enjoying a joke with such readers, who would relish the incongruity of Paris attempting to appease Oenone with words he usually writes (perhaps, in this poem, has already written) to that ‘forreine hecfar’ (67) Helen of Troy.61 The repurposing of the letter is a literary in-joke at the expense of the hapless Oenone, but it also diminishes the Trojan prince, the redirection of his words capitalising on his wellknown reputation for duplicity and faithlessness, as T. H. had previously nodded to his propensity for cowardice. Likewise, the careful altering of the content of his Ovidian original also permits T. H. to poke fun at his characters, and to embellish one of the most famous parts of Heroides XVI, the judgement of the goddesses, for the eager Elizabethan reader. Paris’ judgement of Venus, Pallas Athene and Juno, and his choice of Venus as the fairest goddess, was one of the most well-known aspects of his myth, and T. H.’s classically educated readers would have known both the judgement, and the disapproving way in which Paris’ awarding of the prize to Venus is usually glossed.62 Heywood’s translation of Lucian’s version of the judgement, included in his miscellany collection Pleasant Dialogues and Dramma’s (1637) which Camilla Temple discusses in chapter 9, explains it as representing the folly of youth, which will choose the ‘fraile gifts’ offered by Venus over the more sensible and long-lasting rewards offered by Pallas Athene and Juno.63 Conti’s Mythologia is more forthright, suggesting ‘[b]y setting Paris’s disgraceful conduct before us, the ancients gave us the opportunity to condemn our own stupidity’.64 Weaver argues that the Ovidian version of the judgement, as recounted by Paris, is ‘the focal point of a set piece in self-praise’,65 but in recalling his famous task Paris also aims to convince Helen of his sincere interest in her. Accordingly, in the Ovidian epistle he tells her that he was almost immediately swayed towards Venus, regretting that two goddesses must lose out, but quickly realising that ‘one among the reast / surmounted other so’ (sig. Lvir) before he has even heard what

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they have to offer, and later telling Helen that Venus had ‘A face resembling thine’ (sig. Lviiir) when he judged her the victor.66 Conscious of his audience, T. H.’s Paris describes things very differently. He comforts Oenone by terming her ‘fayrer then the dames of Troy’ (163), and depicts himself as far more conflicted than the Ovidian Paris, who emphasises that he quickly chose Venus (and thus, by proxy, Helen). T. H.’s Paris tells Oenone Fayre was the first, the second was as fayre, The third no whit inferiour to the twaine: All would be victors, (and they worthie are), But one alone the victorie must gaine. That such should winne, I joyed much, beleeve me, That such shuld lose, this was the thing did grieve me. (241–6)

Here Paris, who has already expressed a similar regret that he is forced to disappoint Oenone, is keen that she should understand the difficulty of his choice, and be mollified as a result. Writing to Helen in Canto IX of Troia, Heywood’s 1609 version of Paris betrays a similar tendency to dither, telling Helen that when he beheld the goddesses Methinks all three are worthy to o’ercome; To injure two such beauties, what tongue dare, Or prefer one where they be all so fair? Now this seems fairest, now again that other; Now would I speak, and now my thoughts I smother …67

However, aware that he is addressing Oenone rather than Helen, T. H.’s Paris must go further in his explanation. Having prefaced his account with a compliment to Oenone (163), he gestures imploringly towards her (‘beleeve me’), and describes being forced to study the goddesses with great care, ‘Looking a-squint (as I doe nowe at you)’ (249), as he makes his nearimpossible decision. Other elements of the judgement, though, are geared less towards sparing Oenone’s feelings, and suggest that while Paris may be thinking of the nymph, the poet is thinking of his real-life readers. T. H. adds in the detail of the ‘golden ball’ (229) for which the goddesses are competing (which Paris does not mention in Heroides XVI, though Heywood includes it in Troia, at IX.242). Here, Weaver asks, was the poet ‘consciously modifying the story as told by Ovid, or (more likely) was he unconsciously importing the most famous visual element into his imaginative reconstruction of the story?’68 Unlike Weaver, I suggest that in incorporating one of the story’s most famous set-pieces, and one which an Elizabethan reader would expect despite its absence from the Heroides,69 T. H. was deliberately and

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Intertextuality and Oenone and Paris 45

c­onsciously departing from the Ovidian poem, as he had already done elsewhere in this work. He might have had Peele’s play in mind when he mentioned the prize, but as part of this conscious, reader-oriented refashioning, he also splices his use of Paris’ letter with other classical sources, this time Greek rather than Latin. In Lucian’s ‘Judgement of the Gods’, one of his Dialogues of the Gods, T. H. would have found the golden ball, along with a much greater emphasis on Paris’ indecision. He would also have found a crowd-pleasing bawdiness that is nowhere in Ovid’s or Peele’s accounts. Lucian’s Paris tells Mercury that he is finding it impossible to judge a winner, and proposes a solution, here translated by Heywood in Pleasant Dialogues: par:   Yet one thing, Hermes, I with leave would know,    Is it enough to judge by th’ outward shew,    Perusing them thus habited and clad?    Or wert not fit a nearer course were had?    To have them all stript naked, that myne eye    May view them with more curiositie? merc:  A question that from sound discretion growes,    And being judge, they are at thy dispose. par:   At my dispose? Then I will have all three    Stript to their skinnes. (sig. L2r)

Another possible ancient source for Venus’ nakedness is Colluthus’ irreverent and titillating short Greek poem The Rape of Helen, in which the goddess strips off in a successful effort to impress Paris.70 Demetriou has shown that in the Elizabethan period, though it was known to be postHomeric, this text ‘was often printed in Homeric editions, and mentioned in paratexts as a prequel to the Iliad’. She points out that such editions of Homer ‘circulated in England and put Colluthus on the literary map for anyone exploring Homer’s epics’, and that moreover, the poem was translated into Latin by Michael Neander, and subsequently paraphrased by the admired English poet Thomas Watson.71 As I have argued, T. H. works with the Homeric Paris’ reputation for cowardice, and if he read Homer in the kind of edition to which Demetriou refers, the poet could well have encountered Colluthus, and been drawn to the Greek poem for details that allow him to titillate his readers, and further undercut his hero.72 Nobody is naked in Heroides XVI, and this kind of additional reporting is unlikely to impress Oenone, but in the epyllion a misty-eyed Paris nevertheless recalls his new-found bravery: ‘I feared no more – for who is afraid of fairnesse / Or wanton ladies appearing in their barenesse?’ (227–8). Such embroidering can only be included for the benefit of T. H.’s readers, whether it is

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intended to make sport of the p ­ erennially pleasure-seeking Paris, to hint at the poet’s command of Greek as well as Latin forms, or simply to increase the voyeuristic eroticism that was intrinsic to the epyllion. The extended description of the judgement allows for a further comic subtlety, as the reader knows that Oenone has heard this story before: she tells him as much in Heroides V, and also in lines 103–4 of T. H.’s poem. However, the complexity of the poem is such that Paris’ enthusiastic emphasis on the nakedness of the goddesses here also creates a moment of tragicomic poignancy later, at line 446, when Oenone offers to ‘strippe’ herself, to win back the attentions of her erstwhile lover. Paris’ attempt to excuse himself via (another) description of the judgement, salaciously drawn from a combination of Ovid, Colluthus and Lucian, is a treat for the knowing and expectant reader, both a damning indictment of his own monumental self-involvement and a meandering but memorable interlude that is typical of the epyllion’s digressive nature.73 There is one final significant intertext for Oenone and Paris, and one that allows T. H. to focus pity on Oenone, in counterbalance to his lampooning of Paris. This is Paris’ epistle to Oenone, one of the so called ‘Sabinus’ epistles, poems first printed in the fifteenth century that were thought to be of ancient origin, and that saw some of the addressees of the original letters replying to their lovers. Paris’ Latin letter was included in the 1502 Aldine printing of the Heroides, which M. L. Stapleton notes was ‘the standard for English readers’ in the sixteenth century, and it was translated by Turberville alongside the other epistles in his edition of 1567.74 Paris’ reply is much briefer than either his epistle to Helen or Oenone’s letter to him, for there is little he can say to comfort her. As Raphael Lyne points out, the Paris of this letter immediately acknowledges that Oenone has fair grounds to complain, and so the letter ‘undoes its rhetorical platform from the beginning by confessing to the justness of the charges it has to answer’.75 T. H. imports this early admission of wrongdoing into his poem, though it will not sway Paris’ mind: he tells Oenone ‘Thy just complaint might urge a just remorse, / Had not the winged Lad bewitcht my sences’ (181–2).76 In Paris’ epistle, T. H. would have found this marked emphasis on Cupid’s culpability: Paris tells Oenone ‘For mée whome thou dost blame, / Cupido to his raigne / Hath forst to yeelde’ (sig. Uvir).77 In the epistle, Jupiter and Hercules are held up as examples of how even gods and demi-gods are victims of love, as they are in Oenone and Paris (649–90).78 Here, T. H. apparently imports an error from Turberville’s translation of his pseudo-classical source, which describes Hercules ‘Ysat at distaffe’ and ‘in Ioles garment clad’ (sig. Uviiv); Oenone and Paris also confuses Iole with Omphale, describing Hercules in ‘a womans frocke, / Spinning as much as Iole would aske’ (681–2), but the Latin letter does not name her.79 Like the reply he makes to the nymph in

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Intertextuality and Oenone and Paris 47

Oenone and Paris, Paris’ letter stresses his own pain at hurting her: in the epistle he tells her ‘I feele my guilt so gret … My conscience me condempnes’ (sig. Uvir) and in the epyllion ‘thy passions unto mee are painfull. / My eares do glow to heere thy sad Discourses’ (601–2). However, importantly, T. H. does not use everything from the epistle. Paris’ letter, like Heroides V, hints at far greater, quasi-magical abilities than anything Oenone possesses in the epyllion, and even, at its close, suggests that she has the power of life and death over him: she must elect either to ‘quench thy flames, or cleane put out / My brande that blazeth still’ (sig. Xir).80 T. H.’s Oenone has described the fauns searching for her so that she can cure them (562), but she has no such hold over Paris. The poet’s clear knowledge of some version of the Sabinus epistle, which gestures towards a more empowered Oenone, means that his decision to leave her wandering in despair at the poem’s close seems more calculated than accidental, deliberately reducing Oenone in comparison to her classical or pseudo-classical incarnations and making her a figure to be pitied rather than feared. In an essay on early modern intertextuality, Sarah Carter reminds us that key to intertextual practice is ‘the importance of writers being readers, reading, interpreting, imitating, and emulating’.81 T. H. was clearly an engaged and enthusiastic reader, and as a result Oenone and Paris is a knowing and allusive intertextual patchwork of classical and early modern sources, which in its choice of protagonists, and status as both prequel and sequel to more famous events, provides a new perspective on the Troy story, as well as furnishing the eager Elizabethan public with another epyllion to shelve alongside Shakespeare. Brown has noted that the epyllion ‘brings to the fore the things that tend to be marginalized by epic including … the bit players of grander epic narratives’,82 and T.  H. brings forward one such ‘bit player’ in Oenone, absorbing and deliberately reshaping a range of classical and early modern antecedents as he retells her story. If the poem is Heywood’s, as indeed it seems to be, he does not explicitly claim it as such in his extant writing. However, it is worth noting in conclusion that Heywood’s Trojan mythology is particularly self-reflexive and self-allusive (for example, as I have mentioned above, he recycles parts of Paris’ and Helen’s letters, which originally appeared in Troia, transforming them into dialogue in 1 Iron Age). This is significant because his seventeenthcentury version of Oenone’s story, which also appears in 1 Iron Age, bears some striking resemblances to Oenone and Paris, and so may be a further example of the same recycling tendency.83 This (very brief) episode constitutes another face-to-face meeting between the pair, taking place after Paris has resolved to abandon Oenone (albeit before his voyage).84 Paris initially fails to recognise the nymph, and Oenone piteously appeals for him to reconsider his decision, and attempts physically to hold him back;

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all these details appear in the earlier poem. Moss has pointed out that one way in which an early modern author might make use of Ovid was to revise and rewrite his own approaches to the poet throughout his career, to define and redefine himself as a writer over time.85 Heywood certainly regarded his own treatments of the Trojan story as ripe for this kind of recycling and revising; his reuse of material from Troia in The Iron Age is proof of that. However, Oenone’s reappearance in the play suggests that he was also keenly aware of what his fellow authors were producing for a mythologically inclined public. Reid points out that the lament of Peele’s Oenone was excerpted from his play, and inserted into the printed miscellany Englands Helicon (1600), more than fifteen years after its appearance in The Araygnement.86 Perhaps, having registered her continuing interest for English readers at the turn of the century, Heywood granted Oenone a nostalgic reappearance in The Iron Age (and one that deliberately evoked his own 1594 incarnation of her). Having done so, he then chose to refocus his attention (and the attention of his audience) on the more major players of this grandest of epic narratives, as befits a maturing writer and classicist.

Notes  1 Joseph Quincy Adams (ed.), Oenone and Paris, by T.  H. Reprinted from the unique copy in the Folger Shakespeare Library (Washington DC: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1943), pp. xxviii–xlv, xxviii. Quotations from the poem are taken from this edition unless otherwise indicated. In his footnotes and introduction, Adams records the many instances in which the language or syntax of the poem seems to be repeated in Heywood’s later works, including The Brazen Age (pp. xxxvi–vii), and 1 Iron Age (pp. xxxvi, xxxvii–iii).   2 Adams (ed.), Oenone and Paris, p. xiii.   3 See Daniel D. Moss, The Ovidian Vogue: Literary Fashion and Imitative Practice in Late Elizabethan England (London: University of Toronto Press, 2014).  4 Moss, The Ovidian Vogue, p. 181.  5 Tania Demetriou, ‘The non-Ovidian Elizabethan epyllion: Thomas Watson, Christopher Marlowe, Richard Barnfield’, in Janice Valls-Russell, Agnès Lafont and Charlotte Coffin (eds), Interweaving Myths in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), pp. 41–64 (p. 54).   6 For example by Götz Schmitz, The Fall of Women in Early English Narrative Verse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 68.  7 Georgia Brown, Redefining Elizabethan Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 103.  8 William P. Weaver, Untutored Lines: The Making of the English Epyllion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), p. 112.

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Intertextuality and Oenone and Paris 49

  9 Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 251–2. 10 Leah Whittington, Renaissance Suppliants: Poetry, Antiquity, Reconciliation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 5. 11 Although constraints of space prevent any extensive comment on Troia in comparison to Oenone and Paris, it can be observed that the lengthy, expository and alternating speeches of Paris and Oenone recall the long letters exchanged by the Heroidean Paris and Helen, and so anticipate the translations that were interpolated into Troia. Adams (Oenone and Paris, pp. xxxiv–vi) highlights various similarities of language in T. H.’s poem and Troia. The letters in Troia are in heroic couplets rather than ottava rima like the rest of the epic, and Adams speculates that this means they are very early examples of Heywood’s work, which were incorporated into Troia; thereby hinting at the tantalising possibility that Heywood was translating the words of Paris and Helen at around the same time as he gave Oenone her chance to speak in the epyllion. However, Weaver, who deems Canto IX of Troia ‘more graceful’ than the paraphrase of Paris’ letter in T. H.’s poem, notes an alternative possibility, that the altered metre is intended to draw the reader’s attention to the letters (Untutored Lines, p. 117). 12 Mark Bayer, ‘Popular classical drama: the case of Heywood’s Ages’, in Sean Keilen and Nick Moschovakis (eds), The Routledge Research Companion to Shakespeare and Classical Literature (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), pp. 227–35 (pp. 228–9). 13 T. H., Oenone and Paris (London: R. Jones, 1594). 14 Moss, The Ovidian Vogue, p. 181. 15 Schmitz, The Fall of Women, pp. 66–7. 16 Sandra Clark (ed.), Amorous Rites: Elizabethan Erotic Verse (London: Everyman, 1994), p. xxvii. 17 In an account of comparable contemporary English poems, inspired by Greek rather than Latin sources, Tania Demetriou sounds a note of caution about the modern critical use of ‘epyllion’, suggesting that in the 1590s the form was not necessarily as clearly defined as the term might imply. Demetriou, ‘The non-Ovidian Elizabethan epyllion’, p. 48. See also Clark (ed.), Amorous Rites, p. xxviii. 18 On male-authored female complaint, see John Kerrigan (ed.), Motives of Woe: Shakespeare and ‘Female Complaint’: A Critical Anthology (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991). On supplication, see Whittington, Renaissance Suppliants. 19 For a list of Heywood’s many borrowings from Venus and Adonis across his works, see Adams (ed.), Oenone and Paris, pp. x–xiii, xxxix–xlii. 20 William Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis, in Gary Taylor, John Jowett, Terri Bourus and Gabriel Egan (gen. eds), The New Oxford Shakespeare, The Complete Works: Modern Critical Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017 [2016]). 21 Elsewhere in Shakespeare’s poem, Adonis’ complexion changes ‘’Twixt crimson shame and anger ashy-pale’ (line 76), which only increases Venus’ desire.

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22 Katherine Duncan-Jones, ‘Much ado with red and white: the earliest readers of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis (1593)’, The Review of English Studies, 44 (1993), 479–501 (p. 495). 23 Though Adams notes that ‘knewe’ here might also mean ‘acknowledge’ or ‘admit the claims of’. Adams (ed.), Oenone and Paris, p. 13. 24 See also Weaver, Untutored Lines, p. 115, for the suggestion that ‘quondam wife’ is meant to be tongue-in-cheek. 25 Adams notes the specific echo of lines 345–6 of Venus and Adonis: Adams (ed.), Oenone and Paris, p. 13. 26 Clark (ed.), Amorous Rites, p. xxxi. 27 Adams notes the echo of Venus and Adonis, line 116: Adams (ed.), Oenone and Paris, p. 12. 28 Christopher Marlowe, Hero and Leander, in Clark (ed.), Amorous Rites. 29 Adams (ed.), Oenone and Paris, p. 22. 30 Whittington notes the importance of the suppliant’s physical posture – ­‘crouching, kneeling, bending, prostrating’ – in inscribing difference between parties during the act of supplication. Whittington, Renaissance Suppliants, p. 16. 31 Clark (ed.), Amorous Rites, p. xxxi. 32 On the erotic potential of the suppliant figure, see Whittington, Renaissance Suppliants, pp. 38, 41–2. 33 References are to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, trans. Arthur Golding, ed. Madeleine Forey (London: Penguin, 2002). 34 Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Frank Justus Miller, rev. G. P. Goold, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, rev. 1999 [1916]). 35 George Turberville, The Heroycall Epistles of the Learned Poet Publius Ovidius Naso, trans. George Turberville (London: Henrie Denham, 1567). 36 I quote the English translation (via French) of Arthur Hall, Ten Bookes of Homers Iliades, Translated Out of French (London: [Henry Bynneman?] for Ralphe Newberie, 1581). 37 In the 1632 printing these lines appear to be directed at Troilus, who has most recently addressed Hector, but Paris is also present, and seems a more likely addressee, given Hector’s reference to Oenone and to his brother’s ‘Sheepehooke’ (sig. B2r). If Oenone and Paris is Heywood’s, then this clear distinction between ‘Oenons company’ and ‘a bench of souldiers’ in the later play demonstrates Heywood consciously or unconsciously recalling his earlier work, and retrospectively undermining Oenone’s militaristic invitation even further. 38 Thomas Heywood, The Iron Age (London: Nicholas Okes, 1632). 39 Ika Willis, Reception (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018), p. 41. 40 See Moss, The Ovidian Vogue, and Demetriou, ‘The non-Ovidian Elizabethan epyllion’. 41 Wall, The Imprint of Gender, pp. 251–2. 42 See Weaver, Untutored Lines, pp. 101–2. 43 In Heroides V.113–20, Oenone recalls Cassandra warning her of Helen’s approach, and the unhappy consequences it will have for her; in Heroides XVI.121–4, Paris remembers his sister prophesying that he would bring back the

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Intertextuality and Oenone and Paris 51

fire that would burn Troy, and in XVII.239–40, Helen also mentions the predicted burning of the city. T. H.’s Oenone recalls these more specific warnings when she tells him to leave Helen, ‘Else wilt thou proove that burning fire-brand / Whereof the fayre Cassandra prophecied’ (91–2). 44 Lindsay Ann Reid, Ovidian Bibliofictions and the Tudor Book: Metamorphosing Classical Heroines in Late Medieval and Renaissance England (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), p. 40. 45 Ovid’s Oenone has the reader of her letter firmly in mind: she opens with a command, and a mocking acknowledgement that Paris may be fearing a letter from Menelaus: ‘perlegis? an coniunx prohibet nova? perlege – non est / ista Mycenaea littera facta manu!’ (Heroides V.1–2) ‘Will you read my letter through? Or does your new wife forbid? Read – this is no letter writ by a Mycenaean hand!’ Ovid, Heroides. Amores, trans. Grant Showerman, rev. G. P. Goold (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977 [1914]). Quotations from the Loeb Heroides have been cross-checked with the Aldine edition of 1502, Ovid, Publii Ovidii Nasonis heroidum epistolae (Venice, 1502), accessed via Early European Books Online. 46 Compare Turberville, sig. Dvir and Ovid, Heroides, V.135. 47 Joseph M. Ortiz reads Oenone and Paris as a ‘debate over the comparative merits of different classical genres, particularly pastoral and epic’: ‘Epic Oenone, pastoral Paris: undoing the Virgilian rota in Thomas Heywood’s Oenone and Paris’, in Lynn Enterline (ed.), Elizabethan Narrative Poems (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), pp. 71–94 (p. 72). 48 Schmitz, The Fall of Women, p. 66. 49 Duncan-Jones, ‘Much ado with red and white’, p. 496. 50 Schmitz, The Fall of Women, p. 68. 51 Conti does incorporate a snippet of Heroides V into an entry on fauns. See John Mulryan and Steven Brown (trans. and ed.), Natale Conti’s ‘Mythologiae’, 2 vols (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2006), vol. I, p. 385. Henceforth Mythologia. 52 Thomas Cooper, Thesaurus linguae romanae et britannicae (London: [Henry Denham], 1578), sig. Mmmmmmmvv. 53 [?Isabella Whitney], The Copy of a Letter, Lately Written in Meeter, by a Yonge Gentilwoman, to her Unconstant Lover (London: Richard Jones, 1567), sig. A7r. 54 Thomas Fenne, Fennes Frutes (London: [T. Orwin] for Richard Oliffe, 1590), George Peele, A Farewell, Entituled to the Famous and Fortunate Generalls of our English Forces. Whereunto is Annexed A Tale of Troy (London: J[ohn] C[harlewood], 1589), sigs Br-v. 55 Lindsay Ann Reid, ‘Oenone and Colin Clout’, Translation and Literature, 25 (2016), 298–314 (p. 306). 56 George Peele, The Araygnement of Paris, ed. R. Mark Benbow, in Charles Tyler Prouty (ed.), The Life and Works of George Peele, 3 vols (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970), vol. III, lines 666–7. For a full account of this poem, see Benbow’s introduction, pp. 7–60.

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57 Reid, ‘Oenone’, p. 314. 58 See Weaver, Untutored Lines, pp. 101–2. He posits that in general, with regard to Paris’ speeches, Heywood (whom he takes as the poem’s author) ‘ambles along pretty closely in the neighbourhood of the Ovidian text’ (p. 100), but enumerates various small omissions and alterations in the description of the judgement, in particular, which suggest that Heywood might have been recalling Ovid ‘without book’ (p. 102). As Weaver acknowledges, and as I argue here, it is also possible to regard his departures from Heroides XVI as a deliberate strategy. 59 Weaver, Untutored Lines, p. 104. 60 In his rich and illuminating account of the poem, Weaver suggests that T. H.’s dedication to such humanist techniques renders Paris ‘as much Elizabethan schoolboy as Trojan Prince’ (Untutored Lines, p. 110). 61 See Weaver, Untutored Lines, p. 100. He argues that the ‘gentlemen’ of Heywood’s readership, particularly, would have derived ‘no small pleasure’ from recognising the resetting of the Ovidian poem, and identifying the moments where it has been ‘diplomatically cleaned up in a couple of embarrassing particulars’. 62 On the judgement motif, see Margaret J. Ehrhart, The Judgment of the Trojan Prince Paris in Medieval Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987) and John D. Reeves, ‘The judgment of Paris as a device of Tudor flattery’, Notes and Queries, 199 (1954), 7–11. 63 Thomas Heywood, Pleasant Dialogues and Dramma’s, Selected out of Lucian, Erasmus, Textor, Ovid, &c. (London: R. O[ulton] for R. H[earne], 1637), sig. K6v. 64 Conti, Mythologia, vol. II, p. 561. 65 Weaver, Untutored Lines, p. 99. 66 The translations from the Heroides are Turberville’s. In the 1567 edition quoted, Paris’ epistle is numbered XV, and Helen’s XVI, with Sappho’s to Phaon as XVII. 67 Thomas Heywood, Troia Britanica (London: William Jaggard, 1609). References are to Yves Peyré (gen. ed.), Troia Britanica (2009–19), canto IX, lines 128–32, available at www.shakmyth.org, accessed 24 June 2020. 68 Weaver, Untutored Lines, p. 103. 69 The examples collected by Reeves, ‘The judgment of Paris’, pp. 7–11, very frequently mention the prize. 70 I am grateful to Tania Demetriou for drawing this intertext to my attention. 71 Demetriou, ‘The non-Ovidian Elizabethan epyllion’, pp. 50, 44–6. 72 For Heywood’s knowledge of the Iliad, in George Chapman’s translation but also in Greek, see Charlotte Coffin, ‘Heywood’s Ages and Chapman’s Homer: nothing in common?’, Classical Receptions Journal, 9:1 (2017), 55–78. On Heywood and Greek, see also the Introduction (Janice Valls-Russell and Tania Demetriou), chapter 8 (Tania Demetriou) and chapter 9 (Camilla Temple). 73 On digression in the epyllion, see Clark (ed.), Amorous Rites, p. xxix. 74 M. L. Stapleton, ‘Edmund Spenser, George Turberville, and Isabella Whitney read Ovid’s Heroides’, Studies in Philology, 105 (2008), 487–519 (p. 494). On

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Intertextuality and Oenone and Paris 53

the printing and provenance of the Sabine epistles, see Raphael Lyne, ‘Writing back to Ovid in the 1560s and 1570s’, Translation and Literature, 13 (2004), 143–64 (pp. 145–9). For the Latin letter, see Publii Ovidii Nasonis heroidum epistolae, fols kkiiv-kkivr. 75 Lyne, ‘Writing back to Ovid’, p. 148. 76 Lynn Enterline argues that Paris ‘portrays himself not as a lover, but as a lawyer pleading a case in court’: Enterline, ‘Elizabethan minor epic’, in Patrick Cheney and Philip Hardie (eds), The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, volume 2: 1558–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 253–71 (p. 256). 77 Quotations from this epistle are Turberville’s translations. 78 Another possible source for this particular defence is Mark Alexander Boyd’s Latin version of Paris’ reply to Oenone, published in 1590 as part of the collection Epistulae quindecim. See Paul White, Renaissance Postscripts: Responding to Ovid’s ‘Heroides’ in Sixteenth-Century France (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2009), pp. 236–41. However, if T. H. was using the 1502 Aldine edition of the Latin, and Turberville’s English translation, he would have had easy access to both the Sabinus epistle and its translation, making one or both of these versions more probably his source for Paris’ address to Oenone. 79 Adams (ed.), Oenone and Paris, p. 40, notes the same error in Heywood’s Silver Age, though Richard Rowland shows that in the Brazen Age, Heywood correctly identifies the cross-dressing with Omphale. Rowland, Killing Hercules: Deianira and the Politics of Domestic Violence, from Sophocles to the War on Terror (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), pp. 135–6. 80 Here and elsewhere, Paris’ epistle refers obliquely to a separate Greek but postHomeric tradition, in which he is mortally wounded during the Trojan War, and unsuccessfully appeals to Oenone to save him with her medical knowledge. See Quintus Smyrnaeus, The Fall of Troy, trans. Arthur S. Way (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1913), X.253–489. 81 Sarah Carter, ‘Early modern intertextuality: post structuralism, narrative systems, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, Literature Compass, 13:2 (2016), 47–57 (p. 55). 82 Brown, Redefining Elizabethan Literature, p. 103. 83 Speaking of the episode in 1 Iron Age, Adams sees its similarity to Oenone and Paris as a further hint at Heywood’s authorship of both works: ‘so closely in plot and general spirit does it resemble that poem, that one is inclined to suspect some significant relationship between the two’. Adams (ed.), Oenone and Paris, pp. xxxviii–ix. 84 See 1 Iron Age, sigs B4r-v. 85 See Moss, The Ovidian Vogue, chapter 4 and pp. 181–2. 86 Reid, ‘Oenone’, pp. 300–1.

2 Thomas Heywood’s Loves Schoole: emulation, adaptation, and anachronism Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

M. L. Stapleton

Current adaptation theory devoted to poststructuralist Shakespeare, film, and popular culture could be applied to Thomas Heywood’s translation of Ovid’s Ars amatoria, sometimes known as Loves Schoole (c. 1599–1620). Thomas Cartelli’s definition of the key term might obtain here: an author ‘adjusting or accommodating the original work to the tastes and expectations’ of his or her readers.1 However, in this case, the interrelated concepts of imitatio and aemulatio as they were understood in the sixteenth century, which anticipated these newer ways of reading, would be more fluid, flexible, and accurate modes for study. Authorities such as Thomas M. Greene, George Pigman III, Leonard Barkan, Gian Biagio Conte, and Stephen Hinds, along with more recent scholars such as Dale L. Sullivan, Lynn Enterline, and Trevor Cook, who have necessarily built on the foundations of their predecessors, have proven the indispensability of these terms for understanding early modern encounters with the ancient world.2 In order to historicise and thus contextualise these interactions, imitatio and aemulatio remain essential tools for analysis. These were not simply labels but signifiers of a multiplex educational and rhetorical system that authors imbibed from their Erasmian humanist schooling and that dominated their professional writing lives. They helped integrate the promulgation of literacy, the teaching of languages, the art of memory, and the production of salient discourse. Accordingly, as Heywood originally translated the Ars in his deftly undermining way, he reconfigured it into his language and time by inhabiting the ancient poet and poem as Ben Jonson, Petrarch, and Quintilian had previously urged their acolytes to do. By incorporating Loves Schoole into his subsequent polemical and dramatic work, Heywood strove to present an Ovid relieved of his misogynist reputation, reconfigured into the kind of man Heywood desired him to be. A current theoretical trend suggests that imitatio and aemulatio actually differed little from each other in medieval and early modern practice. Vernon Guy Dickson, René Girard, and James J. Murphy have written convincingly on their alleged interchangeability.3 Yet the degree of reverence

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Loves Schoole 55

or competitiveness a writer demonstrated toward his predecessor provided a means of distinction. Greene’s fourfold scheme of Renaissance imitatio suggests as much. The reproductive or sacramental type is self-explanatory. Less so is the eclectic or exploitative, the past a jumbled store to be drawn on at will. The heuristic form demonstrates its derivation from its original and seeks to compel a reader’s recognition of the distance traversed. Dialectical imitatio manifests itself as outwardly competitive and in some ways serves as a doppelganger of the heuristical. Greene underscores the viability of his historicised paradigm with the observation that ‘intertextuality has to be analysed as an interplay between stabilising etiologies and a destabilising perception of disjuncture.’4 The concept finds ample support in the methods of writers such as Heywood, whose works, including Loves Schoole, display the four modes jostling against one another. Loves Schoole was the first complete rendition of Ovid’s poem into English, and the standard version until the end of the seventeenth century, when it was displaced by the John Dryden and William Congreve production, Ovid’s Art of Love, in Three Books (1709).5 Heywood’s popular version was reprinted six times during the reign of Charles II: 1662 (twice), 1672, 1677, 1682, 1684.6 He frequently quoted his translation in his other publications. One reason is poignant: reclamation. The book pirate Henry Austin stole it from Heywood and printed it under Ovid’s name, with no intermediating English translator on the title page, as Loves Schoole: PVBLII OVIDII NASONIS DE ARTE AMANDI Or The Art of Love. Whether the author or those who had wronged him provided the foretitle remains mysterious.7 Heywood himself used the phrase in a play most now attribute to him, How a Man May Chuse a Good Wife from a Bad (1602). He denounced Austin’s perfidy in his preface to The Brazen Age (1613).8 Heywood cites his purloined poem in his prose and verse as well as in his drama: Troia Britanica (1609), Gynaikeion (1624), A Curtaine Lecture (1637), Pleasant Dialogues and Dramma’s (1637), and Exemplary Lives of Nine the Most Worthy Women in the World (1640).9 Several plays along with How a Man May Chuse reconfigure motifs from the Ars and quote or paraphrase the translation, such as the two parts of Edward IV (1599) and A Woman Killed with Kindness (1603). That the semi-comic, parodic treatise appears in these woman-centred theatrical entertainments appears curious, given its jibes at women’s expense. However, his initial translation ameliorated or eliminated some of Ovid’s antifeminism, a practice Heywood repeated in his rendition of the companion piece Remedia amoris, The First and Second Part of the Remedy of Love (1620), misattributed to Sir Thomas Overbury.10 He portrays his stage seducers, scions of the praeceptor who narrates the linked poems, as studies in romantic ineptitude. Heywood’s two transformational authorial activities, his subtle

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rehabilitation of the speaker in his translation and his critique of the unredeemable roué type in his plays, inform one another in his work. And the aforementioned dramatic, discursive, and historical writings in which Loves Schoole reappears reflect these modifications by outright changes and theatrical tableaux critical of the praeceptor. Heywood in this emulative fashion reconstructed the Ars amatoria so that it was less unfavourable to women. In crafting relatively minor differences between Loves Schoole and the Ars, Heywood shows the influence of the Erasmian schoolroom and its promulgation of the imitation theory of Quintilian. The ancient rhetorician clearly considered imitatio to be emulative, in equipoise between Greene’s heuristical and dialectical categories. The acolyte should not just compete with his master, but triumph over him: ‘Neque ego paraphrasin esse interpretationem tantum volo, sed circa eosdem sensus certamen atque aemulationem’ (The Orator’s Education, X.v.5), ‘I do not want paraphrase to be a mere passive reproduction, but to rival and vie with the original in expressing the same thoughts.’11 Heywood vies with his source-text by transforming Ovid’s conception of Venus’ role in Loves Schoole, in keeping with the presiding presence of the feminine in his plays. The praeceptor tells his prospective students, ‘Me Venus artificem tenero praefecit Amori’ (Ars Amatoria, henceforth AA, I.7), ‘me hath Venus set over tender Love as master in the art.’12 Loves Schoole (LS) instead removes Cupid as intermediary and creates a direct correspondence between the divine will and the speaker: ‘me hath Venus her Arts master made, / To teach her Science, and set up her trade’ (LS, Prol. 9–10).13 The goddess invests the praeceptor with the authority of a teacher who asserts the truth that women innately possess superior skills in the art or craft of love. Heywood repeats the motif several lines later. ‘My muse sings Venus spoiles and Loves sweete theft’ (LS, Prol.  46) excises Ovid’s urbanity and interpolates Love’s mother as an agent. The Ars does not involve the goddess and seems detached at this point in asserting the speaker’s morality and knowledge: ‘Nos venerem tutam concessaque furta canemus’ (AA, I.33), ‘of safe love-making do I sing, and permitted secrecy.’ In ways such as this, the translation and works such as Woman Killed would come to be in dialogue with one another. In practice, Heywood tended to eschew straightforward conceptions of imitatio as moderns would define it, such as ‘a carefully-plotted sequence of interpretive and re-creational activities using pre-existing texts to teach students how to create their own original texts.’14 Moreover, in spite of his experience of Erasmian pedagogy, his practice skewed the humanist paradigm as enunciated by Thomas Wilson in The Arte of Rhetorique. To Wilson, eloquentia results from imitating ‘the most wise and learned menne, and seke to fashion, aswell their speeche and gesturing, as their wit or enditying’ in order to ‘appear somewhat like the[m].’15 Heywood’s

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Loves Schoole 57

Jacobean Ovid, reflective of the subversively heuristical-dialectical mode of creation, transcends such naïve notions of self-improvement. Instead, he remakes the ancient poet into a man whose sensibilities resembled his own. Though Heywood’s version of the Ars praeceptor resembles the type of the rake in Woman Killed and How a Man May Chuse, in the translation he subtly ameliorated the speaker’s tone and habits of thought far beyond the previous examples I offered. This process begins early in his rendition of Book I, in which the magister Amoris imagines himself as an authority on love, perhaps unjustifiably, given Ovid’s propensity to establish ironic distance from his various personae. First, a man should find a suitable woman to pursue: ‘Elige cui dicas “tu mihi sola places”’ (AA, I.42), ‘choose to whom you will say, “You alone please me”.’ Heywood seems to have found this advice too clinical, his amorous pedagogue’s warmer tone a redemptive salvaging of his master: ‘The love of one above the rest preferre, / To whom thy soule sayes, you alone content me’ (LS, I.10–11). For at this juncture Ovid says nothing of love, devotion, or the soul’s yearning for a mate who can provide true contentment and solace with her attentions. Heywood did not apply to himself Wilson’s Erasmian tenet that students should model themselves on an ancient writer to reshape their character through imitation of a classical forebear. He instead did the opposite, reforming the Ovid he was reanimating. He thus employed a different method sanctioned by antiquity that Erasmus actually enunciated, puckishly invoking Ovid’s favourite god: ‘quoad fieri poterit eandem, veluti Proteum in omnem speciem vetere,’ ‘turn one idea into more shapes than Proteus himself is supposed to have turned into.’16 As Richard Rowland observed, Heywood’s plays interrogate notions concerning ‘gender, servitude, class, and political and moral responsibility.’17 So, appropriately Protean in fulfilling Rowland’s paradigm in the act of translating the Ars, Heywood would use his Ovid in diverse ways to inform the moral and social dimensions of his work. How did Heywood accomplish this? For example, he understood that the purpose of Book II was to teach the lover how to keep a conquest’s interest after seducing her so that future sex would be easier to procure. Loves Schoole modifies this clinical instruction into advice designed to create greater intimacy. Ovid’s ‘Non satis est venisse tibi me vate puellam’ (AA, II.11), ‘it is not enough that through my strains you have won your mistress’, merely serves as a transition to explain that one must expend effort, not so much the heart’s blood. Heywood’s ‘’Tis not enough to thee by my new Art / To finde a Lady that commands thy heart’ (LS, II.11–12) suggests that devotion and submission will be requisite, ‘lady’ corresponding to ‘domina’, an apparent correction of Ovid’s less respectful ‘puella’, ‘girl’, which Heywood generally renders ‘wench’. But ‘commands thy

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heart’ inflects Ovid with the reverence of fin’ Amors and sonnet traditions as the troubadours, Dante, and Petrarch established them, and with which Heywood was infinitely familiar. The Ars would shrink in revulsion from the recommendation of such subservience, since emotional involvements with women, the praeceptor warns, always ruin the sex for the amans and relegate him to a position of inferiority, the lady on top in all ways undesirable save one. Though Ovid does not recommend complete superficiality in ‘aliquid corpore pluris habe’ (AA, II.144), ‘possess something worth more than outward shape,’ Heywood’s translation of these four words verges on the neoplatonic: ‘Seeke inward beautie, such as lasts for aye’ (LS, II.196). The Ars counsels against aphrodisiacs and spells designed to arouse sexual interest, making the more sensible point, ‘ut ameris, amabilis esto’ (AA, II.107), ‘that you may be loved, be loveable.’ Who could dispute the validity of this neat aphorism? Even here, Heywood revises. ‘To gaine pure love, pure love returne againe’ (LS, II.143) doubles the epithet not as line filler, but as anadiplosis, appropriately bridging the caesura, making nothing into something. That love should be clear, vivid, strong, unadulterated, and true struck Heywood as a concept worth repeating. Heywood might have known Ben Jonson’s version of the Erasmian commonplace as articulated in Discoveries (1641), that the novice should ‘make choice of one excellent man above the rest, and so to follow him till he grow very he, or so like him as the copy may be mistaken for the principal.’ Jonson was shrewd enough to modify the prescription with the following comment, that a writer consulting the writers of antiquity should ‘not … rest in their sole authority, or take all upon trust from them,’ since they are ‘guides, not commanders.’18 This qualification might have influenced him when he was translating the lines in the Ars that seem to allow for non-­consensual sex. Given Heywood’s reverence for women, these passages must have troubled him. He emphatically does not valorise the oppressors of Jane Shore, in King Edward IV, and Lucrece, in The Rape of Lucrece (1607, published in 1608, revised in 1630 and again in 1638). How, then, did he reconcile these distasteful elements with the Ovid that he was championing or, when he felt it necessary, trying to curtail? Here perhaps Margaret Jane Kidnie’s concept of adaptation as more ‘problem’ than practice obtains. A work said to be set in a ‘sealed off’ version of the past, she wrote, can only be displaced, translated, or transformed by the adapter, an observation anticipated by Greene’s theory of dialectical imitation.19 Since little of the carnality in the Metamorphoses is mutually initiated, and the ravishing of women helps form the pseudohistorical core of the Romanitas that Ovid documents, some have labelled the unconventional mythographic epic a culturally sanctioned ‘rape handbook’.20 The abduction of the Sabines by Romulus’ soldiers and Sextus Tarquin’s crime against

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Loves Schoole 59

Lucrece served as historical etiology for the inception of Rome itself and the Republic, respectively. For this reason, some have concluded that in the stories Ovid inherited and wove together, he was validating, for instance, the often horrific violations that the pitiless gods indifferently perpetrated against mortals in that text and in the Ars. Heywood might have countered, as Ovid had before him in the Tristia, that merely because a writer’s characters or speakers behave outrageously or say ridiculous things does not mean that she or he endorses their words or actions.21 In addition, he might have observed that Ovid’s foundational myth of authorship, Apollo and Daphne, describes an attempted ravishment, plainly stated, whose thwarting rather than its perpetration creates the dynamic interrelationship of amor, inspiration, and reward that makes poetry itself. He depicts the sun god’s supernatural pursuit of the hapless nymph as a completely involuntary act that results from ‘Cupids fierce and cruel wrath’ (Metamorphoses, I.546), in the English rendering of Arthur Golding (1567).22 Apollo shouts to the back of Daphne’s fleeing form that he regrets the trauma he causes her, as the gods usually do not, and truly fears that she might be injured: Love is the cause that I Do follow thee: alas, alas, how would it grieve my heart To see thee fall among the briars, and that the blood should start Out of thy tender legs, I – wretch – the causer of thy smart. (Golding, Metamorphoses, I.612–15)

The sun god’s consummation of his burdensome desire – as a lawful husband, he makes clear – would ironically gratify the wish of Peneus, Daphne’s father, who stated ‘many a time and oft’ that she should provide him with grandsons: ‘Of nephews thou my debtor art, their grandsire’s heart to cheer’ (I.581). Amidst it all, the father of medicine explains why enjoyment eludes him: ‘the arts that others help their lord doth helpless prove!’ (I.637). Presumably, if Daphne had been supernaturally violated, the laurel and its accoutrements would not have manifested themselves. Poetry would not exist. The love that verse makes should arise solely from persuasion, Ovid seems to say, not brutality. And the lack of consummation holds more value than its attainment, a delicacy that Ovid and Golding show in the ars of their weaving. As Apollo ‘softly laid his hand upon the tender plant, / Within the bark new overgrown he felt her heart yet pant’ (I.679–80). From this thicket of desire, force, and poetry, Heywood credited Ovid as empathetic with women so attacked. His reading of the Ars amatoria and Amores taught him that authors often maintained a distance between themselves and their representations of the human. Perhaps then his drama would demonstrate to sophisticated playgoers that the versions of the

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­ raeceptor he satirised therein ultimately sprang from spores in the aforep mentioned texts. There Ovid’s seducer-narrators undermine their authority with their bad advice and misogyny. In Heywood’s theatrical productions featuring seduction, the correspondences to the speaker in Loves Schoole, albeit reformed, ridicule the perpetrator and serve as warnings for fair women. For his plays decry outrages against his heroines to the point of gender allegory, and his polemical prose criticises Ovid for his occasional misogyny, but Heywood does not accuse him of sanctioning this crime against women. His corrections are implicit.23 For example, the magister in the Ars decries the passion for women as a toxic attack that must be countered: ‘the more deepe my flaming heart is found, / The more I will revenge me of my wound’ (LS, Prol. 31–2). Such unexamined vindictiveness resurfaces in Aruns’ defence of Sextus’ abuse of Lucrece: ‘was she not a woman, / [Aye], and perhaps was willing to be forc’d[?]’ (The Rape of Lucrece, 2569–70).24 Surely her kinsmen to whom this was addressed did not agree. The motif recurs in the overconfident and boorish Mr. Roughman’s ‘I will put her to the squeake’ concerning the indefatigable and unsinkable Bess Bridges in 1 Fair Maid of the West (II.i.10). In Gynaikeion, Heywood’s nine-book history of womankind, he includes a bluntly titled section, ‘Of women ravish’d, &c.’, a catalogue of classical exempla on this topic, with loci. Heywood later includes the heroine of one of his plays among the victims of rape, using the now obsolete verb, ‘stuprate’, from Latin stuprum, shame, degradation, or illicit intercourse, and the verb stuprare: ‘Lucrece, the chast Roman Matron, was stuperated [sic] by Sextus Tarquinius.’25 In The Rape of Lucrece, Heywood presents this ‘stupration’ as criminal and despicable, the dismaying jocularity in the expression of the language of force making it all the more so. Its Ovidian associations are clear. Lines from the Clown’s song illustrate Sextus’ disturbing frame of mind as he readies himself to attack: ‘She that denies me, I would have’; and ‘That crafty girle shall please me best  / That No, for Yea, can say, / And every wanton willing kisse / Can season with a Nay’ (The Rape of Lucrece, 1022–5). These sentiments evoke the praeceptor’s similarly discordant, woman-distrusting lines: ‘Quod rogat illa, timet; quod non rogat, optat, ut instes; / Insequere, et voti postmodo compos eris’ (AA, I.485–6), ‘what she asks, she fears; what she does not ask, she  desires – that you will continue; press on, then, and soon you will have gained your wish.’ Just as Ovid suggests the vileness of such ideas in the unreliability of his magister, Heywood’s tragedy markedly demonstrates the implications of unempathetic, impersonal thinking when it coils, hisses, and strikes from the mind of a sociopath, Lucrece’s rapist. Sextus imagines her fearful resistance as an aphrodisiac: ‘those moist teares contending with my fire, / Quench not my heat, but make it clime much higher’ (The Rape of

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Lucrece, 2052–3). In this peculiar way, Heywood appears to have repurposed the unreconstructed voice of the praeceptor in his play when he could not revise or correct this speaker in his translation. He thus provided a supreme validation of Barkan’s thesis about imitators of the ancient writer in question: ‘the more profoundly they see into the spirit of Ovid, the more their own originality is enabled.’26 Ovid and Heywood ritually distinguish themselves from their speakers, whose words they do not sanction. Petrarch’s imitative ideal could be describing the ancient writer’s practice and anticipating that of the Jacobean translator-poet-playwright: ‘We must thus see to it that if there is something similar, there is also a great deal that is dissimilar, and that the similar be elusive and inextricable except in silent meditation, for the resemblance is to be felt rather than expressed.’27 For example of the implicit, the desultor amoris, the narrator of the Amores, no sooner boasts about a sexual encounter in one poem than his creator immediately undercuts him in the next. The lover brags about another conquest in an elegy sometimes subtitled Corinna concubitus (Amores, II.xii), gloating that the next two (II.xiii; II.xiv) simply crush, recounting the married lady’s reaction, aborting the foetal fruit of their endeavours. Heywood extends no kindness to his dramatic characters who behave in a similar fashion, kingly or otherwise. When Edward IV bestows concubinage on an unwilling Jane Shore, she does not express the gratitude that he expected: ‘If you enforce me, I have nought to say; / But wish I had not lived to see this day’ (1 Edward IV, ix.108–9). His parting comment befits an employer to an employee rather than one lover to another: ‘Nothing ill-meant, there can be no amiss’ (ix.114). She calls after him, ‘Well, I will in; and ere the time begin, / Learn how to be repentant for my sin’ (ix.115–16). When Mr. Goodlack calls Bess Bridges a whore, her response echoes through the playwright’s canon into Loves Schoole: ‘Sir, I will fetch you wine to wash your mouth, / It is so foule, I feare’t may fester else’ (1 Fair Maid of the West, III.iii.68–9). This well-turned distich epitomises the distance between Heywood and Ovid and their versions of the master of love. Sextus’ acting out of the praeceptor’s ridiculous advice suggests how much Heywood despised sexual assault. In his approach to Lucrece’s boudoir, he encourages himself in an act that he believes he cannot help: ‘make this fatall houre  / As true to rape, as thou hast made it kind  / To murder, and harsh mischief.’ After he has sated himself, he doubles over with guilt for the act and his victim’s suicide: ‘’twas for my rape, / Her constant hand ript up her innocent brest, ’twas Sextus did all this’ (The Rape of Lucrece, 2902–4). He enunciates a pathology for which he assumes responsibility, a paradoxical act of free will. His mournful self-loathing illustrates Heywood’s theory that even a man crazed by lust can control his impulses,

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just as his feminine prey can always refuse him and fight him off as much as her physical strength will allow. When Heywood felt he could not modify some of the most disagreeable counsel in the Ars, he appears to have satirised it by summarising it in the speeches of characters such as Sextus. His bizarre self-encouragement, ‘Oh who but Sextus could commit such waste?’; ‘forward still, / To make thy lust live, all thy vertues kill’ belies the metaphorical language of compulsion and betrays his complicity. ‘I am bound / Upon a blacke adventure’ ­(1925–6) and ‘I am lust-burnt all, bent on what’s bad’ (1962). He identifies his impending crime as a ‘practice’, and therefore knows what he does, implicit in his verbs: ‘Where faire meanes cannot, force shall make my way’ (1994). Indeed, that ravisher’s agony is a consequence of acting out the praeceptor’s fleering advice: ‘Pugnabit primo fortassis, et “improbe” dicet: / Pugnando vinci se tamen illa volet’ (AA, I.665–6), ‘perhaps she will struggle at first, and cry “You villain!” yet she will wish to be beaten in the struggle.’ Or, as Heywood’s translation goes:    perhaps at first shee’ll brawle, Strive and resist her all the wayes she can, And say withall away you naughty man. Yet will she fight like one would lose the field, And striving gladly be constrain’d to yeeld. (LS, I.871–5)

Lucrece’s suicide argues against such light-hearted assurances of feminine complicity in ravishment. Accordingly, the figure of Sextus illustrates what can happen when the wrong man betters the bad instruction that he has received. It is as if Heywood wished to dramatise the consequences of a concept that Ovid simply implied in his authorial distance from his master of love. Armed with these Ovidian associations, Heywood could better emulate his source, Livy. In that history, he found Sextus’ perverse ‘jollitie’ in his crime and amplified it in his tragedy as an inexplicably guilty relish at his fell deed.28 Lucrece begins her part of the encounter with a sensible aphorism: ‘Weigh but for what tis that you urge me still, / To gaine a womans love against her will?’ (2044–5). Sextus’ blackmail echoes that found in the ancient writer’s account but his diction epitomises his repellent, perverse nature: Ile broach thee on my steele, that done, straight murder One of thy basest groomes, and lay you both Graspt arme in arme, on thy adulterate bed, Then call in witnesse of that mechall sinne. (The Rape of Lucrece, lines 2012–15)

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Heywood’s nonce word ‘mechall’ (sexually evil), one of his invention, ironically applies to the speaker, not his target.29 And here, the playwright made his most significant modification from the received account. In Livy, Lucrece submitted desperately to avoid the threat of shame to her corpse and to her gens. However, in the play, she grants no consent, and this is strongly reinforced by the stage direction ‘He beares her out’, presumably upside-down over his shoulder, ‘true to Rape’ indeed. Such Ovidian emulation informs most of Heywood’s plays. Mr. Fuller and Mr. Anselme in How a Man May Chuse perform a semi-allegorical duet that dramatises how bad advice about approaching women utterly humiliates the seducer in his vain pursuit of the woman he seeks. The pupil’s naïve adherence to his master’s advice suggests an ironic, grimly humorous misapplication of his saintly namesake’s main tenet concerning faith and reason: ‘Neque enim quaero intelligere ut credam, sed credo ut intelligam’ (and I do not seek to understand that I may believe but believe that I might understand).30 Blind belief in this case precipitates disaster, since the object of Anselm’s genuinely romantic affection, the virtuous Mris. Arthur, Heywood clearly esteems for holding to marital chastity and the institution itself in spite of her worthless husband’s hateful behaviour. That no understanding of self or women results almost goes without saying. This English praeceptor’s name naturally rhymes with ‘guller’, as the play states: ‘He was a great guller, his name I take to be Fuller’ (How A Man May Chuse, sig. K4v). He cheats and beguiles, and Heywood evokes the term to describe the profession of one who thickened cloth to make it less porous or, conversely, to beat, trample down, or destroy (OED fuller n.1; full v.3). Both senses apply to Mr. Fuller’s needlessly cruel behavior to the unfortunate and unsaintly Mr. Anselme, fulfilling the cliché ‘pulling the wool over one’s eyes.’ In counselling Anselme on how he might best approach the woman whom he adores but whom he has long since surmised will have nothing to do with him, Fuller advises against ‘antick queint formalitie’ (sig. B3v). This would be the gentlemanly method of clarifying one’s romantic intentions without seeming impertinent, importunate, or indiscreet, the operation all the more delicate with a married lady. Such bashfulness, blushing, being ‘too apish female’, arriving in her presence armed with ‘foolish Sonets’, ‘pend speeches, or too far fetcht sighes’ (How A Man May Chuse, sig. B4v) will not do. It would never occur to the teacher that this humble and tentative mien might lessen the awkwardness somewhat should a woman be unwilling yet empathetic, an anodyne of sorts against open embarrassment for either party. Fuller freely deploys the Remedia along with the Ars, should Anselme wish to segregate himself permanently from feminine companionship: ‘list to me, Ile turn thy hart from love, / And make thee loath

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all of the feminine sexe’ (How A Man May Chuse, sig. B3r). This offer to inculcate total-immersion misogyny overgoes Ovid, whose speaker does not recommend woman-hating, merely a programme for cauterising love’s lacerations, as Heywood states in his translation of the Remedia: ‘Il’e ease you now which taught to love before, / The same hand which did wound shall heale the sore’ (I.17–18).31 Heywood features Loves Schoole in the central scene of How a Man May Chuse, one that clarifies his emulation of Ovid’s treatise unmistakably in the person of Fuller. He masterfully stages that play’s praeceptor counselling Anselm the amans in unsubtle asides while the latter tentatively and reluctantly reveals his feelings to Mris. Arthur, that paragon of marital chastity. Heywood’s Ovid assures the prospective lover in pursuit of his fleeing Daphne, ‘Do but persist the suite thou hast begone,  / In time will chaste Penelope be wonne’ and ‘Flatter, speake faire, ’tis done with little cost’ (LS, I.608–9; 556). Accordingly, Fuller urges his timid Apollo to proceed mendaciously: ‘Be not afraid man, shee’s but a woman … Thinke but upon my former principles’ (How A Man May Chuse, sig. C2r). The teacher himself fulfills Ovid’s dicta about fortitude in his advice to his pupil and in his persistence in bestowing the lesson on him. Then in expressing his annoyance to the audience about what he perceives to be his student’s ineptitude, he enunciates the foretitle to the translation itself: ‘Never was such a trewant in loves schoole, / I am asham’d that ere I was his tutor’ (sig. C2v), a Heywoodian signature of sorts. The translation of Ovid’s imperative ‘Fallite fallentes’ (AA, I.645), ‘Deceive the sly deceiver, they find snares / To catch poore harmlesse lovers unawares’ (LS, I.846–7), nicely encapsulates the villain’s cynicism. Anselme’s lack of success explains the futility of the more extreme aspects of the praeceptor’s program. Heywood intimates that this lack of amatory prowess results from the possibility of decency in the one who fails and accepts his failure graciously. Anselme truly loves Mris. Arthur in the least rational and calculating way possible. No rogue male, his instincts approach gallantry: ‘I cannot chuse but when a wench saies nay, / To take her at her word and leave my sute’ (sig. B3v). In response, Mr.  Fuller echoes the praeceptor, emphasised in rhyme, assonance, and feminising diction: ‘Continue that opinion, and be sure  / To die a virgin chaste, a mayden pure’ (How A Man May Chuse, sig. C2r). Eventually, Anselme explodes at Fuller in a fashion reminiscent of Roderigo to Iago in Act V of Othello: ‘Now where is your instruction? wheres the wench? / Where are my hopes? where your directions?’ (How A Man May Chuse, sig. C3r) and later refers to him as ‘my bitter genius’ (sig. Hv). Heywood’s capaciousness as a writer of plays and poems and as a translator is readily apparent. He understood how the Ars amatoria tends to change its shape and purpose with every reader’s encounter. It seems sexist,



Loves Schoole 65

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misogynist, comic, parodic, then earnest and caring and unusually empathetic. And it should, given Ovid’s authorial amorphousness. Heywood’s reformative emulations of his predecessor’s poem are analogous to his transformational interrogation of rogue maleness in his theatre. The overall result comprises a critique of the cultural oppression of women, criticism whose unspoken normative prescription implies how the wives, sisters, and daughters in his plays ought to have been treated. If you truly revere women and wish to be kind to them, do not kill them.

Notes   1 Thomas Cartelli, Repositioning Shakespeare: National Formations, Postcolonial Appropriations (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 15. See also Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2012); Jean Marsden, The Appropriation of Shakespeare: Post-Renaissance Reconstructions of the Works and the Myth (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991); Thomas Leitch (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).   2 Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982); George Pigman III, ‘Versions of imitation in the Renaissance’, Renaissance Quarterly, 33 (1980), 1–32; Leonard Barkan, The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986); Gian Biagio Conte, The Rhetoric of Imitation: Genre and Poetic Memory in Virgil and Other Latin Poets, ed. and trans. rev. by Charles Segal (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986); Stephen Hinds, Allusion and Intertext: Dynamics of Appropriation in Roman Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Dale L. Sullivan, ‘Attitudes toward imitation: Classical culture and the modern temper’, Rhetoric Review, 8 (1989), 5–21; Lynn Enterline, Shakespeare’s Schoolroom: Rhetoric, Discipline, Emotion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012); Trevor Cook, ‘The scourge of plagiary: Perversions of imitation in the English Renaissance’, University of Toronto Quarterly, 81 (2014), 39–63. See also Nancy S. Streuver, ‘Rhetorical imitatio, with its concept of virtuosity as both a command of past techniques which possess continuous sanctions and a sensitivity to the unique demands of the present situation, provides a model of continuity in change’, The Language of History in the Renaissance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), p. 193.   3 Vernon Guy Dickson, ‘“A pattern, precedent, and lively warrant”: Emulation, rhetoric, and cruel propriety in Titus Andronicus’, Renaissance Quarterly, 62 (2009), 376–409; James J. Murphy (ed.), A Short History of Writing Instruction from Ancient Greece to Modern America, 3rd edn (New York: Routledge, 2012); René Girard, A Theatre of Envy: William Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).

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 4 Greene, The Light in Troy, p. 30. For the four types of imitation, see pp. 38–53.  5 Ovid’s Art of Love, in Three Books, Translated by Mr. Dryden, Mr. Congreve, &c., Together with the Remedy of Love, to Which Are Added, The Court of Love, A Tale from Chaucer, and the History of Love, Adornd with Cuts (London: Jacob Tonson, 1709). For the history of the authorship issue for Loves Schoole and The Remedy of Love, see M. L. Stapleton (ed.), Thomas Heywood’s ‘Art of Love’: The First Complete English Translation of Ovid’s ‘Ars Amatoria’ (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), esp. pp. 3–20; Stapleton, ‘A Remedy for Heywood?’ Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 43:1 (2001), 74–92, and Stapleton (ed.), ‘The first and second part of The Remedy of Love [attr. Sir Thomas Overbury]’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 43:1 (2001), 93–115.   6 See A. W. Pollard, G. R. Redgrave, et al., A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, and Ireland, 3 vols, 2nd edn (London: Oxford University Press, 1976–91), vol. II, pp. 648–53.  7 It possessed some currency, given examples such as Correggio’s painting Educazione di Cupido, known in English as The School of Love (c. 1525), now in London’s National Gallery, NG10, and that notorious compendium of dialogues between two women about sex, L’Escole des filles (Paris: Louis Piot, 1655), literally ‘the school of girls.’   8 ‘[A] Pedant about this towne, who, when all trades fail’d, turn’d pedagogue, & once insinuating with me, borrowed from me certaine translations of Ovid, as his three books De Arte amandi, & two De Remedio amoris, which since, his most brazen face hath most impudently challenged as his own’: Thomas Heywood, The Brazen Age (London: Nicholas Okes for Samuel Rand, 1613), sig. A2r. For the publishing history of Ovidian texts and translations in English, see Pollard and Redgrave, A Short-Title Catalogue, vol. II, p. 201.  9 Ovid, it should be noted, is the most frequently cited author in Γυναικείον [Gynaikeion], or, Nine Bookes of Various History Concerninge Women Inscribed by Ye Names of Ye Nine Muses (London: Adam Islip, 1624), with twenty-seven different verse translations of more than four lines in length, most of which quote from or rewrite passages from Loves Schoole. See Robert Grant Martin, ‘A critical study of Thomas Heywood’s Gunaikeion’, Studies in Philology, 20 (1923), 160–83 (p. 169). For Heywood’s extensive reworking of the translation in Troia Britanica (especially Cantos V, VIII, IX, XII), see the online edition, Yves Peyré (gen. ed.), Troia Britanica (2009–19), available at www.shakmyth.org, accessed 24 June 2020. 10 See Stapleton, ‘A Remedy for Heywood?’ For earlier work on possible revisions, see S. Musgrove, ‘Some manuscripts of Heywood’s Art of Love’, The Library, s5-1:2 (1946), 106–12. 11 For text and translation, see Quintilian, The Orator’s Education, ed. and trans. Donald A. Russell, 5 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002 [2001]), vol. IV, pp. 357–9. 12 All references to the Latin Ars amatoria (henceforth referred to as AA) follow the lineation (and translation, as here) of The Art of Love in Art of Love.

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Cosmetics. Remedies for Love. Ibis. Walnut Tree. Sea Fishing. Consolation, trans. J. H. Mozley, rev. G. P. Goold (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1929). 13 All references to Loves Schoole (henceforth LS) follow the lineation of Thomas Heywood’s ‘Art of Love’, ed. Stapleton. 14 See Murphy (ed.), A Short History, p. 44. 15 Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique For the Use of All Suche as Are Studious of Eloquence, Sette Forth in English, by Thomas Wilson ([London]: Richard Grafton, 1553), fol. 3. 16 Erasmus, De Copia, chapter 8, in Craig R. Thompson (ed.), Collected Works of Erasmus (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974–), Literary and Educational Writings 2: De Copia. De Ratione Studii, Vol. XXIV (1978), p. 302. 17 Richard Rowland, Thomas Heywood’s Theatre, 1599–1639: Locations, Translations and Conflict (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), p. 17. 18 Ben Jonson, Discoveries, ed. Lorna Hutson, in David Bevington, Martin Butler  and Ian Donaldson (eds), The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, 7 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), vol. VII, pp. 583, 504. 19 Margaret Jane Kidnie, Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation (New York: Routledge, 2008), pp. 7, 69. 20 See Genevieve Lively, ‘Teaching rape in Roman elegy, part I,’ in Barbara K. Gold (ed.), A Companion to Roman Love Elegy (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), pp. 541–8. 21 ‘[C]rede mihi, distant mores a carmine nostro– / vita verecunda est, Musa jocosa mea’ (253–4) (‘I assure you, my character differs from my verse (my life is moral, my muse is gay).’) Text and translation are from Tristia. Ex Ponto, trans. A. L. Wheeler, rev. G. P. Goold (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988 [1924]). 22 References are to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, trans. Arthur Golding, ed. Madeleine Forey (London: Penguin, 2002). 23 In A Curtaine Lecture (London: Robert Young for John Aston, 1637), Heywood claimed that Ovid viewed shortcomings that women supposedly demonstrate ‘not as accidents appertaining to some, but adherents belonging to all; as borne with them in their infancie, encreasing with them in their growth, and inseparable from them till their last dissolution’ (pp. 7–8). 24 References to Heywood’s plays are taken from The Dramatic Works of Thomas Heywood, ed. Richard Herne Shepherd, 6 vols (London: John Pearson, 1874) and refer to volume and page number in the body of the essay, except for the following: The First and Second Parts of King Edward IV, ed. Richard Rowland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005); The Fair Maid of the West Parts I and II, ed. Robert K. Turner, Jr, Regents Renaissance Drama Series (London: Edward Arnold, 1968); Thomas Heywood’s ‘The Rape of Lucrece’, ed. Allan Holaday, Illinois Studies in Language and Literature, XXXIV:3 (Urbana: The University of Illinois Press, 1950), pp. i–viii, 1–186; and

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A Pleasant ­conceited Comedie, Wherein is Shewed How a Man May Chuse a Good Wife From a Bad (London: Mathew Lane, 1602). 25 ‘[T]e quoque bellum triste secutum est, / mactata tua, miseranda, manu, / nata Lucreti, / stuprum saevi passa tyranni’ (Octavia, 300–3), ‘civil war ensued from your death too, daughter of Lucretius, when you died by your own hand, pitiful woman, after suffering the brutal tyrant’s lust,’ Seneca, Tragedies, ed. and trans. John G. Fitch, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018 [2002]), vol. II. References from Gynaikeion are respectively to sig. A4v; pp. 421–4, 423, 424. 26 Barkan, The Gods Made Flesh, p. 172. 27 Petrarch, Letters on Familiar Matters, trans. Aldo S. Bernardo, 3 vols (New York: Italica Press, 2005), vol. III, pp. 301–2. 28 ‘Sextus Tarquinius was bewitched and possessed with wicked wanton lust, for to offer violence and villanie unto Lucretia: her passing beauty and her approved chastitie set him on fire and provoked him therto.’ She submitted from blackmail, since her tormentor vowed to shame her and her family after killing her, and sickeningly, he exulted ‘in great pride and jollitie, that he had by assault won the fort of a woman’s honor.’ Livy, The Romane Historie Written by T. Livius of Padua, trans. Philemon Holland (London: Adam Islip, 1600), p. 41. 29 See chapter 3 (Janice Valls-Russell) for a discussion of ‘mechall sinne’ in The Rape of Lucrece. 30 For Anselm, see F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds), The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 73–5. 31 The reference is to Stapleton (ed.), ‘The first and second part of The Remedy of Love’.

3 Rescripting classical stories of rape from page to stage: Lucrece and Callisto Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Janice Valls-Russell

And being now securely installed in the Constantinopolitane Principalitie, besides a thousand butcheries, slaughters, and other insufferable cruelties, he [the emperor Andronicus] addicted himselfe to all luxurious intemperance, as vitiating virgins, corrupting matrons, contaminating himselfe with shamefull whoredomes and adulteries, sparing the religious nunneries, but forcing the cloysters.1

In Gynaikeion, Thomas Heywood engages with ‘an armie of goddesses and women’, no less than ‘three thousand’,2 ‘of all times’, ‘of all faiths’, ‘of all callings’, ‘of all estates, conditions and qualities whatsoever’:3 classical, biblical, legendary and historical figures, whom he lodges, to use his own term, in nine books corresponding to each of the Muses. In this vast compendium, as indeed elsewhere in his work, as Yves Peyré shows in chapters 4 and 7, Heywood organises his material organically around related themes and analogous situations, also playing on ‘discords’, as he acknowledges. He thereby anticipates, rather as Vincenzo Cartari does in his Images of The Gods and the Ancients, the criticism of those who ‘may cavill, that I have not introduced them in order, neither alphabetically, nor according to custome or president’.4 Figures lifted from mythology, religion and history rub shoulders in categories which are structured and organised along mythographic patterns. While quite a few of those ‘three thousand’ figures may have been new to his readers, others were more familiar: they served as exemplars in poems, plays, prose romances and the visual arts, but they could also be held up to ridicule precisely because familiar. Just as Bottom (as Pyramus) and Flute (as Thisbe) refer to Lemander (for Leander), and Shafalus and Procrus (for Cephalus and Procris) in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (vii[V.i].192, ­194–5),5 the Citizen and his wife, seated on stools on the edge of the stage in The Knight of the Burning Pestle, discuss a ‘story … painted upon [a] cloth’ and conclude that it depicts ‘Raph and Lucrece’, an obvious pun on the rape of Lucrece – ‘Raph’ being not ‘our Raph’, the Citizen and his

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wife’s apprentice enacting the Knight of the burning pestle, but a ‘Tartarian’ (II.ii.Interlude, 11–17).6 This might well be a reference to Heywood’s tragedy, since the two plays may have been first performed in 1607.7 Less frequently, audiences encountered such figures on the stage as characters in their own right. I shall be focusing here on two of them, Lucrece and Callisto, drawing on Heywood’s own method to bring them together through a shared story of rape and classical lineage in which Jupiter is a pivotal figure. Heywood stages the rape and metamorphosis of Callisto, a nymph and chaste follower of Diana, in The Golden Age and in Callisto, or The Escapes of Jupiter, a further adaptation of his own adaptation of Jupiter’s early years and amorous conquests, which conflates scenes from The Golden Age and The Silver Age. The Rape of Lucrece and The Golden Age were performed by Queen Anne’s Men within a few years of each other, in 1607–08 and 1609–11 respectively, and the two figures feature in Gynaikeion.8 During that same period, Heywood published Troia Britanica (1609), where he bridges Cantos II and III with the story of Callisto. This chapter looks at what happens when Heywood invites the two figures on stage to embody the ‘discourse’ he went on to craft in Gynaikeion. It follows upon chapter 2, in which M. L. Stapleton shows how Heywood’s ‘reformative emulations’ of Ovid contribute to building up an empathetic view of women. And it anticipates to some extent chapter 7, where Yves Peyré traces the way Heywood reworks in Gynaikeion rich mythographic material into ‘reformulations [that] are not devoid of ethical awareness’. Told (mainly) by Livy, in History of Rome (I.lvii–lix) and Ovid, in Fasti (II.685–856; VI.585–610), the story of Lucrece inspired moral and mythographic commentaries, as well as religious debates, and featured in accounts of women’s lives.9 Told (mainly) by Ovid in Book II of Metamorphoses, the story of Callisto was taken up by Raoul Lefèvre in Le Recueil des histoires de Troyes (c. 1464), which reached English readers through William Caxton’s translation into English, which may have been printed for the first time in Ghent (1473/74). While Lucrece’s and Callisto’s classical lineages are different, I shall approach them as myths. Like the fall of Troy and Virgil’s ensuing narrative of the foundation of Rome, the story of Lucrece and the establishment of the Roman republic are purportedly ‘recorded’ in accounts written several centuries after the events supposedly took place. They belong to an indeterminate past in which history fashions its origins, where myth, legend and facts blur in a dynamic genealogical process that medieval and early modern chroniclers well understood.10 As Stapleton writes in chapter 2, ‘[t]he abduction of the Sabines by Romulus’ soldiers and Sextus Tarquin’s crime against Lucrece served as historical etiology for the inception of Rome itself and the Republic, respectively’. To some extent, Heywood does the same with Callisto: the son she bears of Jupiter, Arcas,

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reverses the destructiveness of Lycaon’s attempted deicide and enables the restoration of the world, which Apollo scorched after the death of his son Phaeton.11 It takes the son of a god to undo the destruction attached to the son of another god. Besides the attraction for readers of the erotic potential of the Callisto-Jupiter story, its inscription in Troia, an epic that culminates with the reign of James I, serves a genealogical function alongside the foundation of England and the English monarchy by Brutus, a descendant of Aeneas. In The Golden Age, Heywood interweaves the story of Callisto and her son with that of Jupiter’s own birth and issues of succession, with Jupiter making his son Arcas king of Arcadia just after he has finally resolved the mystery of his own birth. (As Peyré discusses in chapter  4, Heywood goes on to explore issues relating to fecundity and lineage in The Silver Age.) Kathleen McLuskie notes how ‘the resulting combination of a fully exploited theatrical style and a full account of the main outlines of classical legend create a sort of anthropological version in which classical legend was presented as an originating myth’.12 The dual figure of Jupiter as restorer of lost lineages and, more spectrally, rapist, is also present in Cymbeline, another near-contemporary play. Just as Lucrece invokes Jupiter moments before being raped by Sextus Tarquin, Innogen invokes (unnamed) divine protection moments before Iachimo climbs out of the chest: later in the play, Jupiter ‘descends in thunder and lightning, sitting upon an eagle’ (V.v.186sd), to reveal the circumstances of his birth to Posthumus. The Jupiter connection may also be material, since the machinery, eagle and all, may have been borrowed from the Red Bull, where it was used for Jupiter’s ascent to Olympus at the end of The Golden Age.13 Both stories may equally qualify as myths in that they function as such, sharing a rich capacity for elaboration and (self-)transformation, amply demonstrated in the arts, literature, religious writings, allegories and mythographies, and for informing writing and thinking about the world. I follow in this Ian Donaldson’s decision to approach the story of Lucrece as a myth, examining its origins and changing fortunes, and looking at some of the ways in which a myth may be interpreted, criticized, elaborated, and ­transformed … I have called this story a myth; and have chosen this word to indicate not simply its dubious historicity but also its capacity to endure and to adapt to changing social contexts, accumulating power, significance, and narrative complexity with the passage of time.14

The issues addressed here centre on how Heywood lifts these two victims of rape out of the realm of myth and exemplarity to bring them onstage. I am interested in what happens in the process of enacting familiar tales of

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s­eduction, and the possible impact on the expectations of spectators, to whom the ultimate outcome is known. In The Golden Age as in Lucrece, Heywood does this in seemingly contrasted ways that in fact simultaneously mirror and critique each other: in a tragic vein (Lucrece), building up voyeuristic tension while framing the deed with bawdy songs that seem to further restrict the victim’s scope for agency; and in a comedic mode (Callisto), that similarly seems to deny agency by inviting voyeurism, yet ridicules the rapist even as it plays on the victim’s naïvety. I hope to show that through the distancing effects of a remote mythical-historical perspective in Lucrece, and of erotic Ovidianism in The Golden Age, Heywood lifts Lucrece and Callisto out of a two-dimensional representation and gives them a voice by playing on multiple perspectives without resolving the ­contradictions that result from an accretion of different influences.

Leading up to the rape While none of Heywood’s sources for Lucrece and Callisto belong to classical drama, their theatrical potential was perhaps sensed from their earliest retellings, even while the staging presented challenges that might explain a shying away from their dramatisation. Donaldson notes that the story of Lucrece in ‘Livy’s narrative in particular is so strikingly dramatic as to have aroused speculation about an actual theatrical source, and to have eased many a later adaptation of the story for the stage’.15 The story of Lucrece is also found in Ovid, like that of Callisto, and the Renaissance fascination with Ovidian matter owed much to its dramatic potential, with the graphic immediacy and malleability of Metamorphoses and Heroides providing templates.

Lucrece Johannes Veltkirchius used the story of Lucrece in his commentary on Erasmus’s De Copia to illustrate a grammar-school exercise that consisted in comparing two sources: ‘Confer historiam Lucretiae descripta ab Ovidio in fine 2. Fast. Cum narratione Liviana in fine I. Lib.’16 (compare the story of Lucrece described by Ovid at the end of Fast. 2 with the Livian narrative at the end of Lib. I). Juán Luis Vives, who recommended it for the young Princess Mary, ‘thought it an exceptionally good story to impress upon youth, and schoolmasters generally agreed’.17 Heywood’s mastery of the rhetoric of the source texts, which he read in Latin,18 his awareness of their dramatic potential and his familiarity with the tricks of the theatrical trade enabled him to recontextualise a classical story his audiences were

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familiar with, albeit probably not so much on the stage.19 The dramatic impact of the rape is all the more powerful in that Heywood previously establishes how tyranny has reduced the patricians of Rome to ‘otium’ (Roman History, I.lvii.5), idleness:20 Brutus chooses to feign madness (lines 185–225), Valerius is ‘from a toward hopefull gentleman / Transeshapt to a meere ballater, none knowing / Whence should proceed this transmutation’ (540–1);21 and Collatine invites his friends to ‘weare out our houres  / In harmeles sports: hauk, hunt, game, sing, drinke, dance’ (987–8). Although the men advance this as forms of resistance, the result is analogous to public and private disempowerment, and it takes Lucrece’s rape and suicide to shake them out of their ‘mis-spent time’ and ‘sloath’ (2498). Departing from Livy’s and Ovid’s narrative conventions whereby Lucrece is first viewed through Collatine and his male friends’ eyes, Heywood adds a scene (1079–140) where she appears onstage with her servant Mirable and the clown: the audience’s first encounter with Lucrece is thus unmediated. Heywood transposes Livy’s concise mapping of Lucrece’s home. The meal that follows with Collatine and his friends (who do not include Sextus) confirms that the scene takes place ‘in medio aedium’ (Roman History, I.lvii.9), in the centre of a hall that could also be that of an early modern household. Even before Sextus sets eyes on Lucrece, the scene in which she first appears establishes a link between the fate of Rome at the hands of Tarquin and her own fate at the hands of his son. Her self-description as ‘Roman Lucrece’ (1104) is weighed with cruel irony, coming as it does after Horatius has described Rome as ‘bondaged’, a ‘virgin conqueress’ in ‘shackles’ (955–6). Furthermore, Heywood transforms Livy’s account of Sextus’ betrayal of the Gabii (I.liii–liv) into a report by Horatius during the meal, thereby introducing the ‘traiterous’ (2451) Sextus to Lucrece even before she meets him. In Ovid, it is Sextus himself who connects his treachery against the Gabii and his intention to rape Lucrece: ‘exitus in dubio est: audebimus ultima!’ dixit, ‘viderit! Audentes forsque deusque iuvat. cepimus audendo Gabios quoque’ (Fasti, II.781–3) ‘The issue is in doubt. We’ll dare the utmost,’ said he. ‘Let her look to it! God and fortune help the daring. By daring we captured Gabii too.’22

And lest some members of the audience miss the allusion to Sextus’ treachery and its wider implications, the sense of foreboding is underscored by Scevola – ‘Curtesie strangely requited, this none but the son of Tarquin would have enterprisde’ (1200) – conflating two passages from Livy: resorting to deceit and treachery is unworthy of Romans (‘minime arte Romana,

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fraude ac dolo’, I.liii.4–5); and that is precisely what Sextus does, ‘et dictis factisque omnibus ad fallendum instructis’ (I.liv.2–3), ‘all his words and acts were calculated to deceive’. The scene in which the men (who now include Sextus) pay her a second, surprise visit takes place in the same hall, to which Lucrece later admits Sextus. Ovid, in contrast, sets the first encounter with Lucrece in the intimacy of the bedchamber: inde cito passu petitur Lucretia, cuius ante torum calathi lanaque mollis erat. lumen ad exiguum famulae data pensa trahebant (Fasti, II.741–3) Thence they galloped to Lucretia, before whose bed were baskets full of soft wool. By a dim light the handmaids were spinning their allotted stints of yarn.

It is late evening: ‘But one hour more and you shall all to rest’, Lucrece tells her maids (1532), possibly seated centre-stage, and her words about reading could almost be those of Innogen before she falls asleep: ‘Here, take your work again, a while proceed, / And then to bed, for whilst you sow Ile read’ (1573–4). The men enter and view the scene like onstage spectators: ­‘collatine. See, lords, thus Lucrece revels with her maids; … she, like a good huswife, is teaching of her servants sundrie chares, Lucrece?’ (1594–6). Having won his wager, Collatine leaves, in spite of Lucrece’s gently Ovidian concern about his wellbeing, as she tries to persuade him not to return to the camp. In vain. Another man, that night, will force his way to the marital bed, having unlocked the door with the husband’s gift, a ring.

Callisto The story of Callisto travelled down two main paths to the early modern period: the Ovidian one, of Metamorphoses and Art of Love, and the medieval, non-Homeric Troy tradition that Charlotte Coffin discusses in chapter 6. Medieval adaptations such as Ovide moralisé provided commentaries (casting Callisto, for instance, as a harlot) that became decreasingly Christian and increasingly moral as time went by, further colouring perception. These traditions co-existed and commingled in libraries and on writing desks. In Book I of Metamorphoses (166, 211–43), Lycaon’s bestiality and attempted deicide motivate Jupiter’s decision to change him into a wolf and, more widely, bring on the Flood and people the world anew. In Book II, Lycaon’s daughter Callisto has somehow survived, attesting to the fluidity of Ovid’s imaginary scape. Jupiter’s impersonation of a female figure overlayers a disguise as Diana, the goddess of chastity, with a satyr-like behaviour. His rape

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of Callisto takes place in a secret grove, ‘nemus, quod nulla ceciderat aetas’ (II.418), ‘a forest that all the years had left unfelled’, which A.  D.  Melville translates as ‘a glade deep in the virgin woods’ (emphasis mine):23 the place, like the girl, is about to be ravished. Callisto is subjected to the gods’ whims, from Jupiter’s desire to Diana’s anger and Juno’s jealousy: she is raped, rejected, transformed into a bear and almost killed by her own son, until Jupiter whisks them both into the constellation of Ursa Major and Minor.24 All of this takes place (in Ovid) in barely 100 lines (II.409–507).25 Heywood expands the tale to some 650 lines in Cantos II and III of Troia, and explores its dramatic potential in The Golden Age (some 500 lines, II.i and III.i). To do so he also turns, through Caxton’s Recuyell, to Lefèvre’s readjustments and expansion of the story, reinforcing the narrative drive  and raising expectations, as he does with Lucrece. Heywood reconnects dissociated Ovidian elements (the reference to Lycaon in Book I and the story of Callisto in Book II) in a ‘genealogical’ narrative sequence. Caxton tells how after his defeat Lycaon was forced to flee to the forest, where living as a wolf turned him into just that.26 In Troia, Heywood conflates this with the transformative essence of Metamorphoses to create a shifting picture of Lycaon, who ‘strangely feeles himself transform’d in shape’ (II.33), before abruptly breaking off the story (like Lefèvre and Caxton) with a narratorial comment: ‘Where we will leave him in the desert Grove, / Transformd in body, but not chang’d in mind, / And as my story leads, returne to Jove’ (II.34). Close readings suggest that Heywood also knew William Warner’s account of the Callisto story in Albions England or Historicall Map of the Same Island (1586), which follows the traditions of Recuyell and of historical chronicles such as the one penned by Geoffrey of Monmouth. Retracing in verse the history of England from ‘the Brutons their first arryval in Albion’, and combining mythological and ‘historicall intermixtures, invention and varietie’, Albions England sits at a crossroads between medieval-Tudor reworkings of the Troy story, Elizabethan engagements with Ovid and the long tradition of chronicles.27 For his staging of the Callisto story in The Golden Age, Heywood draws on Ovid, Caxton, Warner and his own previous multilayering of all this material in Troia – unless one chooses to read his creative process in reverse, as a peeling back of the different versions to identify a core structure. He creates dramatic tension by staging in quick succession ‘A banquet, … with the limbes of a man in the service’ (sig. Dr), the fight between Lycaon and Jupiter, and Jupiter’s encounter with Callisto. Dramatisation invites compression and the direct engagement of the audience, which meets Callisto, like Lucrece, unmediated. Theatregoers simultaneously hear her expressing fear and see her displaying a form of authority, even before Jupiter sees her. Heywood reverses the trajectory of Ovid’s and Caxton’s narratives, that he

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had followed and blended in Troia, where Jupiter encounters Callisto as he explores the castle in search of Lycaon. The elaborate conceit of her grief and beauty in Troia (II.37–8) gives way in the play to a suddenness that recalls the swiftness of Ovid’s tale and respects the dramatic economy of stage action: ‘jup[iter]. But stay, what strange dejected beauty’s this / That on the sodaine hath surpris’d my heart, / And made me sicke with passion?’. Jupiter’s sense of wonder is undermined by Callisto’s retort, ‘Hence, away, / When we command, who dares presume to stay?’ (sig. D2r). And when he offers her the ‘sanctuary’ of his arms, she scoffs: ‘Uncivill stranger, you are much to rude, / Into my private chamber to intrude: / Go call the King my father’ (sigs D2r-v). Heywood’s writing for the stage reconnects here with the immediacy he had found in Caxton and sheds the sophistication of Troia, where Christian connotations provide a metaphoric reading of Diana’s Ovidian, sylvan abode, ‘her cloister [being], the cool shades’ (II.59), even as he retransforms this into a mythographic vision of the temple of Artemis at Ephesus, one of the Seven Wonders of the World imported from Natale Conti’s Mythologia (III.xviii).28 Shifting the context reshuffles social codes and hierarchies: while Diana is both abbess and goddess, Jupiter is no longer the god he was in Ovid nor yet the god he becomes at the end of The Golden Age, but a young and beardless lord, bound by chivalry to honour Callisto’s request to enter Diana’s following.29 The dramatic implication is clear: Callisto seems to have won the first round. That this is merely a respite is promptly made clear with the entrance of Jupiter dressed ‘like a nymph, or virago’ (sig.  D4v) and complaining about the difficulty of ­impersonating a woman – one of the many temporary identities he assumes in The Golden Age and The Silver Age, as Tanya Pollard recalls in chapter 10. This is all the more ironic in that it also applies to Diana and her followers in the previous scene who were, of course, performed by actors pretending to be women. At a key moment in the action, Heywood thus creates a distancing effect by choosing to recall boy actors’ concerns about the realism of their female i­mpersonation as well as their anxieties about a possible impact on their masculinity, thereby reminding the audience that this is a play – a ­performance and a game involving taking the risk of exposure.

Violating spaces and bodies Lucrece Heywood also draws on his own workmanship in Lucrece to prepare the audience for the scene of the rape. He heightens the sense of foreboding by

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carefully crafting the nocturnal setting after Lucrece has allowed Tarquin, the bearer of a ring from her husband, into the house: dramatist-cum-stagedirector, he seeks to maximise his lighting effects for daylight performance, also anticipating, perhaps, performances at court or in private, indoor theatres. Lucrece associates lavish lighting with immodest behaviour, in an evocative chronographia expanded from Ovid’s ‘Nox erat et tota lumina nulla domo’ (Fasti, II.792), ‘’twas night, and not a taper shone in the whole house’, which Shakespeare reworked in his poem (‘Now stole upon the time the dead of night…’, 162–8) and in Macbeth (II.i.49–56), before having Iachimo enact the scene onstage in Cymbeline (II.ii.11–14):30 lucrece:  Tis late; so many starres shine in this roome, By reason of this great and princely guest, The world might call our modestie in question To revell thus, our husband at the campe, Haste and to rest; save in the princes chamber, Let not a light appeare, my hearts all sadnesse, Jove unto thy protection I commit My chastitie and honour to thy keepe, My waking soul I give, whilst my thoughts sleepe. Exit. (1875–83)

This ominous note is not in the source texts, nor in contemporary versions: once again Heywood is giving Lucrece a voice before the deed. And even as, more prosaically, a serving-man, very much the stagehand, later orders ‘Out with your torches’ (1912), Heywood adds a dramatic turn of the screw in having Lucrece commit her protection to Jove here and moments later, just before the rape. However, the god, myth and history are on Sextus’ side: sextus:     By Jove Ile force thee. lucrece:  By a God you sweare, to do a devils deed, sweet lord forbear By the same Jove I sweare that made this soule, Never to yeild unto an act so foul. Helpe, helpe. … lucrece:  Jove guard my innocence. sextus:    Lucrece, th’art mine: In spight of Jove and all the powers divine. He bears her out. (2002–5, 2060–2)31

The rape scene opens with Sextus advancing centre-stage towards the bed, ‘with his sword drawne and a taper light’ (1915, sd). His soliloquy shifts gear, from an imagery of night to a martial ‘Forward still’, and is immediately followed by another stage direction, ‘Lu, discovered in her

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bed’ (1950–1, sd), which Sextus expands: ‘To make thy lust live, all thy vertues kill.  / Heere, heere, behold! Beneath these curtains lies  / That bright enchantresse that hath dazed my eyes’ (1951–3).32 This enacts Shakespeare’s ‘The Roman lord marcheth to Lucrece’ bed’ (301) and what amounts to a stage direction in the poem, that echoes the metallic harshness of Tarquin’s steps: ‘Into the chamber wickedly he stalks, / And gazeth on her yet-unstainèd bed. / The curtains being close, about he walks’ (365–7). Sextus’ thoughts, spoken as he approaches the bed and contemplates Lucrece, suggest momentary hesitation and self-disgust, as in Shakespeare.33 The dialogic pattern of Shakespeare’s poem (which gives Lucrece the voice she lacks in Livy’s and Ovid’s third-person narratives) acquires theatrical immediacy in the terse onstage confrontation: lucrece: sextus: lucrece: sextus: lucrece: sextus: lucrece: sextus: lucrece: sextus:

Who’s that? Oh me! beshrew you. Sweet, tis I. What I? Make roome. My husband Collatine? Thy husband’s at the campe. Heare is no place for any man save him. Grant me that grace. What are you? Tarquin and thy friend, and must enjoy thee. (1965–74)

This stichomythic sequence emphasises the physical space and the actor’s movements (‘Make roome’), simultaneously recalling the symbolic power of the marriage bed: ‘My husband’, ‘Thy husband’, ‘Heare is no place for any man save him’. It ends on a reiteration of Sextus’ aside – ‘Thy vertue, grace, and fame, I must enjoy’ (1820) – that simultaneously echoes Shakespeare: ‘“Lucrece,” quoth he, “This night I must enjoy thee”’ (512). References to the bed mark Sextus’ threats: sextus: … sextus:

I’me all impatience, violence and rage. And save thy bed naught can this fire assuage: wilt love me? These pillowes first shall stop thy breath, If thou but shriekest, hark how Ile frame thy death. (1997–8, 2006–7)

The reference to pillows (‘cushions’ in the 1608 edition), also made by Lucrece (‘A stranger came and on that pillow lay’, 1620), recalls Shakespeare’s ‘Her lily hand her rosy cheek lies under / Coz’ning the pillow of a lawful kiss’ (386–7). It also conjures up the image of an Othello-like Sextus threatening to stifle Lucrece, hence, perhaps, the Moor-like figure

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she later recalls – ‘his sharp pointed semitar / The tyrant bent against my naked breast’ (2454–5).34 Rape intersects with otherness and places Sextus beyond the pale of Roman civic virtues. Sextus’ language contaminates Lucrece’s. His ‘thy adulterate bed’ (2104), which he reinforces with the Latinate phrase ‘mechal sinne’ (2015), from the Latin moechus, adulterer, mechalis, adulterous, lewd,35 becomes ‘my adulterate bed’ (2023), soiled, like her body, ‘with lust-burn’d sinne’ (2434). His use of the verb ‘defile’ (‘defile thy innocent sleepe’, 1959) is echoed by Lucrece: lucrece: … marre not that Cannot be made againe: this once defilde, Not all the ocean waves can purifie Or wash my staine away. (2025–8)

‘Stain’d, polluted, and defil’d’ (2432), the victim seems to internalise her assailant’s discourse. Combined with the reference to ‘innocent sleepe’, the ‘staine’ that the ‘ocean waves’ cannot wash away seems to echo Macbeth’s ‘Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood  / Clean from my hand?’ (II.ii.57–58), which recalls Seneca’s Hercules Furens (1323–9). Lucrece, of course, is guilty of no murder, and her words may recall more directly those of another young classical victim trapped in a destructive web of desire, Seneca’s Hippolytus, who exclaims as he flees Phaedra’s advances: quis eluet me Tanais aut quae barbaris Maeotis undis Pontico incumbens mari? non ipse toto magnus Oceano pater tantum expiarit sceleris. o silvae, o ferae! (Phaedra, 715–18)36

John Studley translates this as follows: What bathing lukewarm Tanais may I defilde obtaine, Whose clensing watry Channell pure may washe mee cleane againe? Or what Meotis muddy meare, with rough barbarian wave That boardes on Pontus roring sea? Not Neptune graundsire grave With all his Ocean foulding flood can purge and wash away This dunghill foule of sinne: O woode, o salvage beast I say. (Hippolytus, fol. 65[bis]r)37

Just as Lucrece placed her trust in Jupiter, Hippolytus ironically invokes Neptune, who will be his destructor. He shares her fear of being ‘defilde’ so deeply that no ocean may ‘purify’ or ‘purge’ and ‘wash away’ the ‘staine’ or ‘sinne’. A follower of Diana and a hunter, he turns to the woods in search of solace, in a kinship with the nymphs that links him with Callisto.

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Callisto

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Where the male body is a threatening ‘other’ in Lucrece, it seems to invite comedic expectations in the Callisto story through references to crossdressing and acting: A brave virago [Diana] supposed him surely: ‘Were all my train of this large size’, she says, ‘Within these forests we might dwell securely. ‘Mongst all that stand or kneel upon the grass, I spy not such another manly lass.’ (Troia, II.85)

In The Golden Age, Jupiter enters ‘like a Nimph or a Virago’ (sd, sig. D4v) and Diana simply comments: ‘A manly lasse, a stout virago’ (sig. Er). ‘Virago’ may refer, as when Jupiter talks of his disguise, to ‘a bona roba, a rounceval, a virago, a good manly lasse’ (sig. Er). It also carries positive connotations and even admiration when applied to a female goddess such as Minerva, ‘the arm’d virago, Pallas’, or a ruler, as in Heywood’s depiction of Queen Elizabeth as ‘a virgin, and a virago of a masculine spirit, and of blessed and sacred memory’.38 The use of ‘virago’ in The Golden Age is eminently humorous: Jupiter complains about the difficulty of impersonating a woman, in what is both a stage direction and a comment on boy actors, and confesses to being rather nervous at the idea of being discovered by Diana (readers and playgoers knew of the risks, of course, through the fate of Actaeon): jup[iter]: There I strid too wide. That step was too large for one that professeth the straight order: what a pittifull coyle shall I have to counterfeit this woman, to lispe (forsooth) to simper and set my face like a sweet gentlewomans made out of ginger-bread? … I hope Diana doth not use to search her maides before she entertaines them. (sigs D4v-Er)

Jupiter’s disguise was bound to ensure success with the audience – and the god appears all the more ridiculous in contrast to Callisto’s proud reserve moments earlier that would also ensure a measure of sympathy for her. Heywood’s Jupiter, however, is unchastened, and he has no difficulties in taking the oath Atlanta asks of him: ‘atlan[ta]. You never shall with hated man attone, / But ly with woman or else ly alone’ (sig. Ev). Of course, all this recalls Hercules’ cross-dressing for Omphale, which Heywood went on to stage in The Brazen Age.39 But the stratagem also invites into the story of Callisto that of young Achilles in the women’s quarters at the court of Lycomedes – where his mother Thetis had sent him, disguised as a girl, in



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the hope of sparing him the Trojan war – and his seduction of Deidamia, which Heywood recalls in Troia (XII.7–18).40 Following Lefèvre and Caxton, Heywood gives Jupiter androgynous features: I am but young, No downy hair upon my face appear … my blood being fresh, my face indifferent fair.

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(Troia, II.75)

This embodiment of a cross-gendered identity is a stage illusion – a male actor impersonating a male character impersonating a female actor – and the sense of play cannot occlude that this is a prelude to a rape, with treachery disguised under companionable camaraderie, as Jupiter employs himself in ‘chare-works’ (Troia, II.78) – recalling Warner’s ‘womans chares’ (Albions England, p. 51). The rape is anticipated by a violation of the feminine circle and its rules that is all the more sacrilegious since the social group is compared to a religious order and their abode to a cloister, with Jupiter travestying the expressions of affect in an all-female community: ‘Yet all was well, a Maiden to a Maiden might doe this’ (Albions England, p. 51); ‘jup[iter]. So a woman with a woman may’ (The Golden Age, sig. E2v). The building up of expectation plays on the contrast between Callisto’s perception of her companion as a tiresome female companion and Jupiter’s increasingly intrusive behaviour, which Warner dwells upon: He feeleth oft her ivorie breasts, nor maketh coy to kisse: Yet all was well, a maiden to a maiden might doe this. Than ticks he up her tucked frocke, nor did Calysto blush, Or thinke abuse: he tickles to, no blab she thinks the bush. Thus whilest she thinks her sister nunne to be a merrie lasse, The wanton did disclose himself, and told her who he was. (Albions England, p. 51)

In Troia Heywood’s lines bridge, in a directorial mode, the generic leap from epic to drama, while building on and expanding the conceit already present in Ovid, ‘et oscula jungit  / nec moderata satis nec sic a virgine danda’ (II.430–1), ‘he kissed her lips, not modestly, nor as a maiden kisses’: Sometime by feeling touches he would woo, Sometime her neck and breast, and sometime choose Her lip to dally with … He heaves her silk coats, that were thin and rare, And yet she blushed not, though he see her bare. (Troia, II.87, 96)

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And in a further generic leap, Heywood finds a way of staging the scene: jup[iter]: cal[listo]: jup[iter]: cal[listo]: jup[iter]: cal[listo]: jup[iter]: … cal[listo]: jup[iter]:

Sweet sit still, Lend me thy lippes, that I may taste my fill. You kisse too wantonly. Thy bosome lend And by thy soft paps let my hand descend. Nay fye what meane you? Pre’the let me toy, I would the Gods would shape thee to a boy, Or me into a man. A man, how then? My sweet lye still, for we are farre from men, Lye downe againe. Your foot I oft have prais’d, Ey and your legge: (nay let your skirt be rais’d). Oh God you tickle me. Lend me your hand, And freely taste me, note how I will stand, I am not ticklish. (The Golden Age, sigs E2v-E3r)

Although Jupiter is Callisto’s bedmate the scene switches back to a grove for the rape, as if rewinding the sequence of retellings back to Metamorphoses. Ovid’s narrative is as swift and brutal as the act of rape: ‘dum redit itque frequens, in virgine Nonacrina / haesit, et accepti caluere sub ossibus ignes’ (409–10), ‘and as he came and went upon his tasks he chanced to see a certain Arcadian nymph, and straightway the fire he caught grew hot to his very marrow’. Jupiter takes on Diana’s form; kisses Callisto; ‘narrare parantem  / inpedit amplexu nec se sine crimine prodit’ (II.432–3), ‘he broke in upon her story with an embrace, and by this outrage betrayed himself’. In just a few lines, it is all over, ‘superum petit aethera victor / Juppiter’ (437–8), ‘Jupiter won the day, and went back to the sky’. Dilatable as his narrative of Jupiter and Callisto may be elsewhere, Heywood’s account of the rape in Troia is Ovidian in its swift brutality: Jove takes th’ advantage, by his former vow And force perforce, he makes her his sweete prize: Th’ amazed virgin (scarce a virgin now) Fills all the neighbour groves with shrieks and cries, She catches at his locks, his lips, his brow And rends her garments, as she struggling lies: The violence came so sudden and so fast, She scarce knew what had chanced her, till ’twas past. (Troia, II.96; emphasis mine)



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In The Golden Age, Callisto threatens to ‘fill the dales and mountaines with my cries’ (sig. E3r). At the same time, she resists the idea that Jupiter is a man and tries to persuade her companion to ‘go wound the stagge’ – an image which leads to the rape, expressed in terms of a hunt and a conquest: Stay ere you goe, Here stands one ready that must strike a doe. And thou art shee, I am Pelagius King, That thus have singled thee, mine thou shalt be. … He caries her away in his armes. (The Golden Age, sig. E3r)

The morning after Lucrece On the morning after the rape, Lucrece appears ‘unready’ (2089, sd), as in Ovid, ‘passis sedet illa capillis’ (813), ‘she sat with hair dishevelled’. Heywood – or rather, Lucrece – designs a set that matches her garment, both reflecting her state of mind, ‘A table and a chaire covered with blacke’ (2344, sd), and inviting a question from her maid: ‘Why is your chamber hung with mourning blacke, / Your habit sable, and your eyes thus swolne / With ominous tears, alas what troubles you?’ (2372–4). The men express their unease on discovering the room: ‘Why is this funerall blacke, and ornaments / Of widdow-hood?’ (2402–3). Drawing on the conventions of early modern households, when ‘after death … bed, bedchamber and sometimes spouses’ beds were draped in black mourning cloth’,41 Heywood materialises on the stage the deep, physical sense of bereavement that Ovid lingers on, in contrast to Livy’s terser ‘Lucretiam sedentem maestam in cubiculo inveniunt’ (I.lviii.7), ‘they found Lucrece sitting sadly in the chamber’: … passis sedet illa capillis, ut solet ad nati mater itura rogum, grandaevumque patrem fido cum conjuge castris evocat, et posita venit uterque mora. Utque vident habitum, quae luctus causa, requirunt, Cui paret exsequias, quove sit icta malo? (Fasti, II.813–18) She sat with hair dishevelled, like a mother who must attend the funeral pyre of her son. Her aged sire and faithful spouse she summoned from the camp, and both came without delay. When they saw her plight, they asked why she mourned, whose obsequies she was preparing, or what ill had befallen her.

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Lucrece then moves from the role of stage designer to that of narrator: lucrece:

Stain’d, polluted, and defil’d. Strange steps are found in my adulterate bed, And though my thoughts be white as innocence, Yet is my body soiled with lust-burn’d sinne, And by a stranger I am strumpeted.

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(2432–6)

Her lines conflate memories of Shakespeare, ‘A stranger came, and on that pillow lay’ (1620) and, perhaps, William Painter, ‘Alas Collatine, the steppes of an other man, be now fixed in thy bedde’, ‘steps’ here being the equivalent of Livy’s ‘“Vestigia viri alieni, Collatine, in lecto sunt tuo”’ (I.lviii.7), which Philemon Holland translates as ‘“The print, Collatinus, of another man is to be seen in thy own bed”’.42 Lucrece’s innocence is as poignantly constrained within a single line as she is in the patrician world and the grasp of a ‘stranger’. At the same time, she refuses to remain silent, crying out her innocence and implicitly reproaching Collatine with having given Sextus the ring. Her narrative draws out the moment of revelation: whereas Shakespeare’s Lucrece tells her tale, then names Tarquin and finally calls on vengeance, following Livy’s compact narrative (Ovid omits the call for revenge), Heywood’s Lucrece reverses the order: ‘Ere I speake my woe, / Sweare youle revenge poore Lucrece on her foe’ (2419–20). Once again, she attempts, within the narrow sphere that is hers, to weigh on the future course of action. This is her ultimate attempt at a measure of agency after staging, within the same bedchamber in which the rape took place, her own narrative and death.

Callisto As with Lucrece’s ‘unready’ state and her sense of defilement, rape irremediably transforms a woman. Callisto’s metamorphosis occurs in two stages in Troia, from maid to woman – … this new-made woman, late a mayde, Lyes senselesse after this her transformation Amazde at this her sudden alteration: She is she knows not what, she cares not where, Confounded with strange passion, force and feare. (Troia, II.98)

– then from woman to bear, which Heywood, dispensing with Juno, explains as a metaphor of Callisto’s decision to flee the company of men: ‘With g­ enerall mankind for Joves sake offended’ (III.23). Living in ‘dark

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shades’ (III.17), ‘clad in bark and leaves’ (III.21), she recalls the wild woman to whom she is assimilated by Lefèvre/Caxton. On stage, the transformation is moral, Callisto reasserting her initial wish to abjure human company. jup[iter]: cal[listo]:

O will you, beauteous Lady, Forsake the forrests and yet live with us? No thou false man; for thy perjurious lusts I have abandoned humaine subtleties: There take thy sonne, and use him like a prince, Being sonne unto a princess. Teach him arts And honoured armes. For me: I have abjured All peopled citties, and betooke my selfe To solitary deserts, adieu: Thou proving false, no mortall can be true. Exit. (The Golden Age, sig. F3v)

Like Lucrece, she is endowed with superior moral qualities, even though, of course, Collatine is not Jupiter – he did not rape his own wife. Callisto seems to mature into an ‘independent, noble, and determined’ woman,43 boldly linking Arcas’ rights to her own, royal, blood. Through her words, Heywood introduces a measure of gravitas in a staging that debunks the myth – and Jupiter. While the tone is eminently Caxtonian, it may also anticipate his interest in the cross-generic, irreverent potentialities of Lucian, whose gods, as Camilla Temple writes in chapter 9, ‘live in a comic world, … subject to the kind of comedic rules that operate in a Greek comedy’.

What scope for agency on stage? In reversing the classical narratives and inviting his audiences to discover the two women unmediated, Heywood gives them a voice and a physical immediacy. Lucrece and Callisto share a sense of authority. Lucrece is clearly in control of her home and staff. Callisto vigorously challenges Jupiter’s misogyny: jup[iter]: cal[listo]:

Women, faire Queene, are nothing without men: You are but cyphers, empty roomes to fill, And till mens figures come, uncounted still. Shall I sweet Lady, adde unto your grace, And but for number-sake supply that place. You’r one too many, and of all the rest, That beare mens figure, we can spare you best. What are you sir? (The Golden Age, sig. D2v)

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Later, when she requests, ‘This onely freedome to your captive give / That I a Nunne and profest maid may live’ (sig. D3r), Heywood follows Caxton (‘Prayyow … that I might goe yelde myself into ye religion of dame Deane the noble virgine … the whiche … made a cloystre in the woode of Archade’ (Recuyell, I, fol. 11r), and his own Troia: ‘What’s your demand (sweet Saint)? It is quoth she, / That I a consecrated maide may be’ (II.51). The domesticity of Lucrece’s home is matched in the conventual retreat of Golden Age. Heywood stages Diana’s world ‘as a place of chosen retreat – a “nunnery” – a place of escape from the pressures of patriarchy’.44 In much the same way as the virtues of domesticity are contrasted with the vacuous sycophancy of Rome’s patricians, the virtues of a medieval nunnery are valued above the hollow vanity of the court, both by Diana – ‘Here is no city-craft. / Here’s no court-flattery’ (sig. D4r) – and by Callisto: Even in my soule hate mans society,  And all their lusts, suggestions, all court-pleasures,  And city-curiosities are vaine,  And with my finer temper ill agree,  That now have vow’d sacred virginity. (The Golden Age, sig. D4v)

Yet the sylvan retreat proves no safer than a Roman matron’s home: not only is Callisto raped in the woods, but she is rejected by Diana and the other nymphs: A dumbe shew. Enter Diana and all her Nimphs to bathe them: shee makes them survey the place. They unlace themselves, and unlose their buskins: only Calisto refuseth to make her ready. Diana sends Atlanta to her, who perforce unlacing her, finds her great belly, and shewes it to Diana, who turns her out of her society, and leaves her. Calisto likewise in great sorrow forsakes the place. (sig. E3v)

Rape on stage – and its consequences – thus acquire a powerful, simultaneous synecdochic and metonymic dimension, affecting the individual and her environment, conflating body and abode, both of which are violated. Female solidarity is ripped apart by Sextus’ assault and Jupiter’s appropriation of markers of identity – clothes and expressions of affect. Condemned by Callisto who signals the negative precedent he sets for all men (‘Thou proving false, no mortal can be true’), Jupiter’s predatory cross-dressing to gain admission to a ‘nunnery’ anticipates (in Heywood’s writing) the emperor Andronicus’ ‘luxurious intemperance’, that extends to ‘forcing the cloysters’, quoted at the beginning of this essay. Whereas in Statius’ Achilleid cross-dressing draws attention to the fluidity of gender and traces nascent erotic desire, Heywood’s Jupiter seems to be

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enacting Ovid’s advice to male lovers which introduces the story of Achilles and Deidamia in Ars amatoria (I.681–704), ‘an exemplum proving that women really do want to be raped since they are too shy to take the sexual initiatives for themselves’:45 ‘Vim licet appelles; grata est vis ista puellis; / Quod juvat, invitae saepe dedisse volunt’ (I.673–4), which Heywood translates as ‘They term it force, such force comes welcome still, / What pleaseth them, they grant against their will’ (Art of Love, I.884–5). Similarly, in Lucrece, the bawdy songs about women’s sexual availability seem to frame and gloss the rape. Cross-generic shifts are less strongly marked in The Golden Age, where the dilatory play on disguise both encourages and distances voyeuristic expectation, achieving a dramatic tone that combines the lack of solemnity of Venus and Adonis and the disturbingly irreverent moments of Lucrece.

Reading across the two myths: moving beyond the initial discomfort The Roman matron and the nymph are linked in the way Heywood moves the audience into an area of discomfort heightened by comedic and voyeuristic effects. Having introduced the victims-to-be on stage, unmediated by a male discourse or gaze, he places the spectators in the uncomfortable position of having to share the predator’s viewpoint. He then distances the audience from the rapist by restoring the victim’s agency through the voicing of her ordeal and her ensuing decision (whether to take her own life or to withdraw from human company), thereby inviting a degree of empathy. The shifts in tone and perspective produced by the bawdy songs in Lucrece contribute to this process of involvement and distancing, precisely because they are a source of unease. What Donaldson describes as Heywood’s staging on the brink of parody,46 opening up the comic potential of what is a tragedy, is inverted in the Callisto story, where a similar form of staging on the brink of parody opens up the tragic potentialities of what is intended as a comedy. Either way, this staging on the brink, which catches the reader or spectator off balance, invites an individual readjustment. As if looking back on Lucrece and The Golden Age when writing Gynaikeion, Heywood acknowledges his method: It may be likewise objected, why amongst sad and grave histories, I have here and there inserted fabulous jeasts and tales, savouring of lightnesse? I answer, I have therein imitated our historicall and comicall Poets, that write to the stage; who least the auditorie should be dulled with serious courses (which are merely weightie and materiall) in everie act present some zanie with his mimick action, to breed in the lesse capable, mirth and laughter: for they that

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write to all, must strive to please all. And as such fashion themselves to a ­multitude, consisting of spectators severally addicted; so I, to an universalitie of readers, diversly disposed.47

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The stories of Lucrece and Callisto do not appear in the same sections of Gynaikeion, but their fates are semantically connected, through the use of the verb ‘stuprated’ and its variant, possibly due to a misprint, ‘stuperated’:48 Tarquinus Superbus being expulsed the kingdome, because his sonne Sextus had stuprated the faire Lucretia, wife to Collatine, to reobtaine his principalitie hee insinuated unto his aide Porsenna king of the Tuscans. (‘Of illustrious women’, III, ‘Of divers ladies famous for their modestie’, p. 143) Lucrece, the chast Roman Matron, was stuperated by Sextus Tarquinius: of whom, Seneca in Octavia thus saith: Nata Lucreti stuprum saevi passa Tyranni.49 (‘Of women in generall’, IX, ‘Of women ravished, &c.’, p. 424) [Leucippus, in love with Daphne, one of Diana’s nymphs] bethought himselfe what course Jupiter tooke to stuprate Calisto, the daughter of Lycaon; and attiring himselfe in the habite of a female huntresse, was entertayned by Diana, and admitted into their number. (‘Of chast women, and of women wantons’, VI, ‘Of chast women’, p. 275)50

Analogies between the two women’s predicaments (and their rapists) had been indirectly established by Thomas Middleton in The Ghost of Lucrece, a poem which was ‘probably written around 1598’ and published in 1600. The analogies turn on references to Jupiter and his victims.51 In this female complaint, Lucrece compares herself to ‘Diana by a lily fount’ (339), surrounded by nymph-like maids – who could include Callisto – and describes chastity as born of ‘Diana’s rib’, which ‘glisters in thy spirit like Jove’s eye-beam’ (489–90). The poem brushes into the picture ambivalent touches: Lucrece’s evocation of her canopied bed, ‘Spangled with stars like to the firmament …  / Resembling Jove’s white lacteal element’ (283–6), establishes an analogy between the adulterous god and Tarquin, and points to the bed the cross-dressed Jupiter shares with the unsuspecting Callisto. While there is no clear textual evidence that Heywood was thinking of Middleton’s poem when he wrote Lucrece (unlike his identifiable echoes of Shakespeare’s poem), its ghost may be hovering backstage. Hardly surprisingly in a future dramatist, Middleton seems to anticipate the dramatic potentialities of the Lucrece story. The prologue reads like a Chorus – ‘Call



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up the ghost of gored Lucretia: / Thrice hath the trumpet of my pens round stage / Sounded a Surge! to her bloody age.’ (Prol. 34–6) – and addresses the spectators, Rape-slaughtered Lucreces, all martyr’d Graces, Be ye the audience; take your tragic places. Here shall be played the miseries that immures Pure diamond hearts in crystal covertures.

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(Prol. 40–3).

Lucrece uses the emblematic imagery of pageants to represent ‘Rape’ and invite sympathy: Now enters on the stage of Lucrece’ heart, Black appetites in flamed habiliments. When they have acted all, then they depart. Rape ent’ring next, armèd in murder’s tents, Racks Vesta’s tenants, and takes all her rents. … This is the tragic scene. Bleed hearts, weep eyes. (241–8)

She holds up her tragic story as a mirror to an audience of Lucreces: He writes himself the shamer, I the shame, The actor he, and I the tragedy. The stage am I, and he the history, The subject I, and he the ravisher. He, murd’ring me, made me my murderer. (397–401)

and she concludes with what amounts to a dumb show of the underworld, where characters are doomed to play their parts on the stage of endless night: Here stops the stream of tragic blood and fire, Now Melpomene hales my spirit in, The stage is down, and Philomela’s choir Is hushed from prick-song: Acheron’s bells begin To call our ghosts clad in the spirits of sin. Now Tereus meets with ravished Philomel, Lucrece with Tarquin in the hall of hell. (591–7)

As in Lucrece and The Golden Age, the audience is invited to reconnect with a narrative spoken and handed down by the victim who inscribes her tale in a wider pattern and literary tradition – and to take note that female exemplars imply male counter-exemplars.

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Conclusion In Cantos IX and X of Troia, the story of Helen and Paris – drawn mainly from Heroides, as well as the Art of Love – acts as a thematic and structural hinge to the whole epic; these and other, shorter, love stories provide variations and commentaries on the storming of Troy through a mutually porous imagery of enclosure, confinement, violation and conquest. On the stage, both in Lucrece and The Golden Age, Heywood dramatises this process of refraction by juxtaposing male, military scenes and female, domestic scenes. At the same time, he is engaging closely with his sources, organising them and viewing them from different perspectives. His familiarity with the myths as handed down by Livy, Ovid and Lefèvre (through Caxton), with Warner,  Shakespeare and, perhaps, Middleton providing contemporary intertexts, enables him to translate onto the stage their inherent dramatic elements, combining and reworking them to transform narrative into action. Staging the stories of Lucrece and Callisto, Heywood is working indissociably as a classicist and a dramatist, conversant with a wide range of texts. Through Lucrece and Callisto, Heywood experiments with the staging of rape, pushing back the limits of performance to address head-on ‘the potentially problematic representation of the crucial event itself’ that ­‘references  … circumvent’.52 His two approaches ultimately connect: aggressive masculinity, with swords (or scimitars) and threats framed by male bawdiness; and a subversion of all-female companionship that parodies homoerotic ambivalence to reassert a dominating type of masculinity. As established through the songs in Lucrece and the cross-dressing in The Golden Age the discordant association of violence and humour does not enhance masculinity. By foregrounding the roles of Lucrece and Callisto, and giving the rapes a physical immediacy within a carefully mapped space of female intimacy, Heywood critiques the wider male environment in which they take place, in much the same way that he destabilises the virile representation of Hercules through a sympathetic depiction of the women who come into his orbit, as Peyré and Richard Rowland show in chapters 4 and 5 respectively. What Rowland defines as ‘Heywood’s talent for euhemeristic comedy’53 is apparent in his depiction of Jupiter, here as in his translations of Lucian in Pleasant Dialogues and Dramma’s which Camilla Temple discusses in chapter 9. Simultaneously, the songs in Lucrece, which, Kewes insists, are ‘far from being gratuitously lewd’,54 seem to question the ethics of that very same talent when it is pushed to the extremes of misogynist mockery. Lucrece’s ‘sable’ costume and the black draperies are an invitation to mourn her

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lost chastity and her imminent death, plunging her into the night that Middleton’s Lucrece haunts. After titillating the audience with what they might, or might not, view of the rape, Heywood steps back and hands over the staging, directing and narrating to Lucrece, whose agency, Nathalie Rivère de Carles observes, places her, and Sextus, ‘on a threshold between diegesis and myth’.55 Albeit, to echo Lee A. Ritscher, Lucrece’s and Callisto’s ‘inability to prevent [their] rape is due to [their] status as female and as property within a patriarchal system’, staging their plights restores a measure of agency in a literary tradition that has tended to view them as ‘an object rather than a subject’.56 Giving them a voice that moves from the confidentiality of Shakespeare’s and Middleton’s female complaints to the public space of Heywood’s stage may offer what Jean E. Howard describes as ‘fresh ways to think about how to confront through performance the authority of inherited narratives’, more especially those that tell stories of rape.57 In refusing Jupiter’s belated offer of marriage and Sextus’ offer of secret adultery,58 Callisto and Lucrece are linked in a sisterhood that also includes Innogen. The mixed genre of tragicomedy or comedic tragedy seems to offer a tenuously enabling environment. Compelling though these female, onstage presences may be, though, the discomfort remains. One reason is that Heywood is no moralist. Like his contemporaries, he has his finger on the pulse of erotic desire that runs through Ovidian poetry,59 alert to the anti-heroic ridicule to which this is apt to expose men, and to the violence it entails for women. Another is his way of considering myth, what one might term his ‘thinking blocks’, or thinking in blocks: as discussed in the introduction to this volume, and as appears in discussions of Heywood’s debts to Caxton (see chapter 6) and mythographers (see chapters 4 and 7), Heywood does not try to paper over the seams as he shifts in tone and perspective. Instead, he transposes to the stage the concatenation of multiple versions he finds in the classics, in what Coffin terms the ‘not-so-classical tradition’ of Caxton, and in the commentaries and mythographies. Far from being haphazard, this process of accretion, which he also elaborates in his own mythographic compilations, underlies a multigeneric approach that views Lucrece and Callisto from different perspectives, situating them at a nexus of multiple readings. Rather than try and resolve contradictions, Heywood plays with the dynamics this allows him. Through the challenge of staging a rape, Heywood is also exploring the ethics and challenges of staging the mythographic process.

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Notes   1 Thomas Heywood, Γυναικείον [Gynaikeion], or, Nine Bookes of Various History Concerninge Women (London: Adam Islip, 1624), IX, p. 438.  2 Heywood, Gynaikeion, ‘To the right honourable, and most noble, Edward Somerset, Earle of Worcester…’, sig. A3r.  3 Heywood, Gynaikeion, ‘To the reader’, sig. A4r.   4 ‘Perhaps one might say of me that I have not served good order in placing one image right after another.’ Quoted in John Mulryan (ed.), Vincenzo Cartari’s ‘Images of the Gods and the Ancients’: The First Italian Mythography (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2012), p. xxii. Heywood, Gynaikeion, ‘To the reader’, sig. A4r.   5 Gary Taylor, John Jowett, Terri Bourus and Gabriel Egan (gen. eds), The New Oxford Shakespeare, The Complete Works: Modern Critical Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017 [2016]). Unless otherwise indicated all references to Shakespeare are to this edition. The division in acts and scenes used in editions other than this one is provided in square brackets.   6 Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, ed. Cyrus Hoy, in Fredson Bowers (gen. ed.), The Dramatic Works of the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), vol. I, pp.  1–110. Overlapping Tarquin and Tartarian invites an association with Proserpine’s rapist, Pluto, who, we learn in The Golden Age, ‘was sent to Tartary’ to build ‘a strange city’ which he called Hell (II.i) (London: Nicholas Okes for William Barringer, 1611), sig. C4r.   7 ‘The play was likely acted in 1607, at the Blackfriars playhouse, by the Children of the Revels’: Alexander Leggatt, ‘The audience as patron: The Knight of the Burning Pestle’, in Paul Whitfield White and Suzanne R. Westfall (eds), Shakespeare and Theatrical Patronage in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 295–315 (p. 296). The plausibility of an echo of Heywood’s play in this parodic, metatheatrical comedy might be further endorsed by references to the Red Bull (IV.29–30) and to another of Heywood’s plays, The Four Prentices of London (IV.47–8). In British Drama 1533–1642: A Catalogue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011–), Martin Wiggins and Catherine Richardson indicate 1601–07, ‘best guess 1602’, for The Four Prentices (published in 1615), entry 1351, vol. IV: 1598–1602 (2012), pp. 408–13 (p. 408); 1607–08, ‘best guess 1607’, for The Rape of Lucrece, entry 1558, vol. V: 1603–08 (2012), pp. 420–6 (p. 421); and 1607 for The Knight of the Burning Pestle, entry 1562, pp. 432–7 (p. 432). A play entitled The Tragedy of Lucretia, possibly Fredericus Balduinus’ Lucretia (published at Wittenberg, 1597), was performed in Oxford in 1605: Wiggins and Richardson, British Drama 1533–1642, vol. V (1603–08), entry 1458, pp. 186–7.  8 The Rape of Lucrece was performed in 1607–8 by Queen Anne’s Men at the Red Bull and in 1612 at Greenwich Palace, possibly in collaboration with the King’s Men, who performed The Silver Age the previous evening: ‘[t]he Sunday

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followinge att Grinwidg before the Queen and the Prince was playd the Silver Aiedg: and ye  next night following Lucrecia’, ‘by the Queens players and the Kings Men’, Peter Cunningham (ed.), ‘[Book XIII.] The Booke of the Revells Ending the last day of October Ano Dom: 1612’, Extracts from the Accounts of the Revels at Court, in the Reigns of Queen Elizabeth and King James I: From the Original Office Books of the Masters and Yeomen (London: Shakespeare Society, 1842), p. 211. Lucrece enjoyed a long run of editions, the main change being the addition of songs: Wiggins and Richardson, British Drama, vol.  V: 1603–08, entry 1558, pp. 425–6. By the time of publication (1611), The Golden Age had been ‘sundry times acted’ by Queen Anne’s Men at the Red Bull: Wiggins and Richardson, British Drama, vol. VI: 1609–1616, entry 1637, pp.  133–41 (p. 140). The Escapes of Jupiter, which survives in a manuscript version, was adapted from The Golden Age and The Silver Age in 1623.   9 On the history of the myth, see Ian Donaldson, The Rapes of Lucretia: A Myth and its Transformations (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1982). On the women in Book I of Livy’s Roman History, see Tom Stevenson, ‘Women of early Rome as exempla in Livy, Ab urbe condita, book 1’, The Classical World, 104:2 (2011), 175–89. 10 See for instance Dominique Goy-Blanquet, ‘“This realm is an empire”: tales of origins in medieval and early modern France and England’, in Janice VallsRussell, Agnès Lafont and Charlotte Coffin (eds), Interweaving Myths in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), pp. 65–85. 11 Heywood, The Hierarchie of the Blessed Angells (London: Adam Islip, 1635), p. 36. 12 Kathleen McLuskie, Dekker and Heywood: Professional Dramatists (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994), p. 20. 13 Wiggins and Richardson note ‘the chronological and literary relationship between Heywood’s first three Ages and Shakespeare’s three romances of ­1610–11’ and suggest that the three Ages, ‘which make heavy demands on theatrical and casting resources, [could] have originally been co-productions between’ the King’s and Queen Anne’s Men. This would account for scenes in Cymbeline and The Golden Age ‘in which Jupiter descends on a giant eagle’. British Drama, vol. VI: 1609–1616, entry 1637, pp. 134–41 (p. 134). See also Valerie Wayne (ed.), ‘Introduction’, Cymbeline, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), pp. 46–9. 14 Donaldson, The Rapes of Lucretia, p. v. 15 Donaldson, The Rapes of Lucretia, p. 6. 16 Quoted by T. W. Baldwin, Shakspere’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke, 2 vols (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1944), vol. II, p. 194. The translation is mine. 17 Baldwin, William Shakspere’s Small Latine, vol. I, pp. 186–8, and vol. II, pp. 729–30 (p. 730). 18 Editions of Livy published after the 1469 editio princeps (Rome) included the 1518 one from the Aldine Press (Venice) that was reprinted throughout the

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sixteenth century. I have consulted Titi Livii Patavani Romanae historiae principis, libri omnes quotquot ad nostram aetatem pervenerunt, post varias doctorum virorum emendationes (London: Edmund Bollifant, 1598), a reprint of a continental edition. I quote from History of Rome, Volume I, trans. B.  O. Foster (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1919) unless otherwise ­indicated. Editions of Fasti included Fastorum libri VI. Tristium V. De Ponto III. In Ibin. (Basel: Johannes Herwagen, 1550), with commentaries by Paulus Marsus. I have consulted P. Ovidii Nasonis. Fastorum lib. VI; Tristium Lib.v.; De Ponto lib. iiii; In Ibim; Ad Liviam. (London: Thomas Vautrollier, 1583), a reprint of a continental edition (possibly the one published in Antwerp in 1578 by Christophe Plantin), with marginal commentaries that include references to Livy. I quote from Fasti, trans. James George Frazer, rev. G. P. Goold (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931). Peter Culhane notes that ‘Heywood … eschewed the version by Holland published just a few years before he wrote’: ‘Livy in early Jacobean drama’, Translation and Literature, 14:1 (2005), 21–44 (p. 24). On Shakespeare and Fasti, see Colin Burrow (ed.), ‘The Rape of Lucrece’, Complete Sonnets and Poems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 48–50. 19 Apart from the play performed in Oxford, mentioned in note 7, there are no other recorded early modern dramatisations. Michael Drayton’s Legend of Matilda, published in 1594, refers to a Lucrece play; her story seems to have been staged in 1599 in Strasbourg, a city frequently visited by the English player Robert Browne. For a discussion of this, and a possible earlier dating of Lucrece that this contribution chooses not to follow, see Allan Holaday (ed.), Thomas Heywood’s ‘The Rape of Lucrece’, Illinois Studies in Language and Literature, XXXIV:3 (Urbana: The University of Illinois Press, 1950), pp. i–viii, 1–185 (pp. 5–19). 20 The political aspects of the play have received much critical attention. See for instance Paulina Kewes, ‘Roman history and early Stuart drama: Thomas Heywood’s The Rape of Lucrece’, English Literary Renaissance, 32:2 (Spring 2002), 239–67; and Warren Chernaik, The Myth of Rome in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 35–55. On a possible influence of Machiavelli on Heywood’s crafting of the political scenes, see Kewes and also Mercedes Maroto Camino, ‘“My honour I’ll bequeath unto the knife”: public heroism, private sacrifice, and early modern rapes of Lucrece’, in Jonathan Hart (ed.), Imagining Culture: Essays in Early Modern History and Literature (London: Routledge, 2015 [1996]), pp. 95–107. 21 Citations are of Holaday’s edition, which follows the 1638 quarto, providing line references without breaking up the play into acts and scenes. 22 Heywood picks up Ovid’s deconstruction of male valour through the repetition of the verb audere (dare), moving it earlier in the play to the deposition scene: HORATIUS. Shall this be brookt my soveraigne: / Dismount the traitor. / SEXTUS. Touch him he that dares.  / HORATIUS. Dares!  / TULLIA. Dares. (268–72). 23 Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. A. D. Melville (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

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1986), p. 37. Unless otherwise indicated, I quote Ovid and provide translations from Metamorphoses, trans. Frank Justus Miller, rev. G. P. Goold, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999 [1916]). 24 In Troia Britanica, Heywood comments: ‘And though a perfect bear, yet bears affright her. / So do the wolves. Though ’mongst their savage crew / Her father lives, how should a wolf delight her / Unless Lycaon in such shape she knew?’ (III.26): Callisto is doubly alienated, from mankind and from the animal world. 25 Arthur Golding respects this length in his translation: Ovid’s Metamorphoses, trans. Arthur Golding, ed. Madeleine Forey (London: Penguin, 2002), II.512–629. 26 Pausanias tells the story in Description of Greece, trans. W. H. S. Jones, 5 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1918–35), vol. IV, VIII.ii.6; Raoul Lefèvre, The Recuile of the Histories of Troie … Translated out of Frenche by Wyllyam Caxton (London: William Copland, 1553), I, fo. 10v. In the text we use the more familiar short title ‘Recuyell’ for this edition of Caxton, from which we quote, and which Yves Peyré deems a plausible source for Heywood: Peyré (gen. ed.), ‘Heywood’s library’, Troia Britanica (2009–19), available at www.shakmyth.org, accessed 24 June 2020. 27 Books I–IV of Albions England were published in 1586, I–VI in 1589, I–IX in 1592, I–XII in 1596/7. Warner added a thirteenth book and a prose ‘Epitome of the whole historie of England’ in the 1602 edition. He published three additional books in A Continuance of Albions England (London: Felix Kyngston for George Potter, 1606). Heywood’s debt to Warner’s ‘vivacious realism’ as well as to Caxton is suggested by Douglas Bush, Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition in English Poetry (New York: Norton, 1963 [1932]), p.  194. References are to Albions England (London: Edm. Bollisant for George Potter, 1602), pp. 49–53. 28 Natale Conti, Natalis Comitis Mythologiae, sive explicationum fabularum libri decem (Paris: Arnold Sittart, 1583). Henceforth Mythologia. 29 Robert G. Martin, ‘Notes on Thomas Heywood’s Ages’, Modern Language Notes, 33 (1918), 23–9. 30 Burrow (ed.), Complete Poems and Sonnets, p. 254, note to 162–8: ‘A set piece description of a time of day was known as a chronographia (“time painting”)’. Ovid’s ‘Nox erat et tota lumina nulla domo’ metatextually refers back to Dido’s suicide in Virgil: ‘Nox erat, et placidum carpebant fessa soporem  / corpora per terras …’ (Aeneid, IV.522ff.), ‘it was night, and over the earth weary creatures were tasting peaceful slumber’. See Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 70 n. 26. 31 Shakespeare’s Lucrece also appeals to Jupiter: ‘She conjures him by high almighty Jove, / By knighthood, gentry, and sweet friendship’s oath’ (568–9). Heywood shares this moment of irony with his spectators and readers, in intratextual references to Jupiter’s sexual activities, principally in Troia, the Ages plays, Jupiter’s Escapes and Pleasant Dialogues and Dramma’s. For a detailed analysis of the rape scene, see Janice Valls-Russell, ‘Ravishing the bride from the classical page to the early modern stage: Thomas Heywood’s The Rape of Lucrece’, Scènes de

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lit/Bedchamber Scenes, co-ed. Sujata Iyengar, Sarah Mayo and Nathalie VienneGuerrin, Arrêt sur Scène/Scene Focus, 8 (2019), 101–16, available at www.ircl. cnrs.fr/productions%20electroniques/arret_scene/8_2019/ASF8_2019_09_vall​s​ r​​uss​ell.pdf, accessed 24 June 2020. 32 Heywood uses curtain effects elsewhere (The Golden Age, The Iron Age, 2 The Fair Maid of the West). Sextus’ description of Lucrece as an enchantress is in keeping with his misogyny, expressed earlier in Spenserian terms: ‘SEXTUS. What’s Lucrece but a woman, and what are women / But tortures and disturbance unto men? / If they be fowle th’are odious, and if faire, / Th’are like rich vessels full of poysonous drugs,  / Or like black serpents arm’d with golden scales: / For my own part, they shall not trouble me’ (1447–52). 33 Culhane notes (‘Livy in early Jacobean drama’, p. 25) that ‘[t]he parallels are particularly evident in Tarquin’s mental turmoil before committing the crime’. Burrow points out that ‘[n]othing in Ovid or any other source corresponds to this section of the poem: its focus on the psychology of Tarquin’s action is completely Shakespearean’: Complete Sonnets and Poems, p. 251, note to lines 127–441. 34 Aaron threatens: ‘He dies upon my scimitar’s sharp point / That touches this, my first-born and heir’ (Titus Andronicus, vii.88–9) and in The Merchant of Venice, Morocco swears by ‘this scimitar / That slew the Sophy and a Persian prince’ (II.i.24–5). 35 ‘Mechal’ (or ‘michal’), ‘adulterous’. The only three uses quoted in OED are from Heywood: A Challenge for Beauty (‘a mechall prostitute’, sig. I3v), The English Traveller (sig. Fr), which seems to echo Lucrece – ‘pollute the Nuptiall bed with Michall sinne’ – and The Captives (II.ii.44). Heywood uses ‘mechall sinne’ in Gynaikeion, IV, p. 273. In The Golden Age, Juno refers to Alcmena’s offspring as ‘mechal brats’: see chapter 9 (Camilla Temple). 36 I am quoting from Seneca, Tragedies, ed. and trans. John G. Fitch, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: University of Harvard Press, 2018 [2002]). 37 John Studley, Hippolytus, in Seneca, Seneca his Tenne tragedies (London, Thomas Marsh, 1581). 38 ‘Heywood, A True Description of His Majesties Royall Ship, Built This Year 1637 (London: John Okes for John Aston, 1637), p. 27 and p. 23. 39 See chapter 5 (Richard Rowland). 40 Ovid briefly recalls the story of Achilles and Deidamia in The Art of Love (I.681–704); see Art of Love. Cosmetics. Remedies for Love. Ibis. Walnut Tree. Sea Fishing. Consolation, trans. J. H. Mozley, rev. G. P. Goold (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1929); and Metamorphoses (XIII, 162–80). As Carole E. Newlands notes in Statius, Poet Between Rome and Naples (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 2012), p. 67, the Achilleid ‘is engaged in Ovidian erotic, transgendered play’, almost as if Statius’ Achilles had read about himself in Ovid’s Art of Love, even while his mother remembers Hercules and Omphale, as well as Jupiter taking on the appearance of a virgin (‘Virgineossi Jupiter induitartus’, I, 263), referring, of course to the Callisto story. The Achilleid was included in a medieval schoolbook, the Liber Catonianus: see Paul M. Clogan,

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The Medieval Achilleid (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1968), and repeatedly printed from 1472 onwards. The moment when Achilles, dressed as a girl, becomes excited by the weapons Ulysses brings to the court, inspired one of the hangings in the Ulysses suite of tapestries at Hardwick Hall. 41 Sasha Roberts, ‘“Let me the curtains draw”: the dramatic and symbolic properties of the bed in Shakespearean tragedy’, in Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda (eds), Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 153–74 (p. 156). Roberts is referring to Nigel Llewellyn’s The Art of Death: Visual Culture in the English Death Ritual, c. 1500–1800 (London: Reaktion Books, 1991). 42 William Painter, The Palace of Pleasure Beautified… (London: [John Kingston and] Henry Denham for Richard Tottell and William Jones, 1566), sig. B2r. Philemon Holland, The Romane Historie written by T. Livius of Padua … Translated out of Latine into English (London: Adam Islip, 1600), p. 41. 43 Kathleen Wall, The Callisto Myth from Ovid to Atwood (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1988), p. 39. 44 Wall, The Callisto Myth, p. 5. 45 Suzanne C. Hagedorn, Abandoned Women: Rewriting the Classics in Dante, Boccaccio and Chaucer (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), p. 58. See pp. 47–74 for a discussion of the Achilleid and its presence in Dante. 46 Donaldson, The Rapes of Lucretia, p. 86–7. 47 Heywood, Gynaikeion, ‘To the Reader’, sig. A4v. 48 On the use of this verb, see also chapter 2 (M. L. Stapleton). 49 The full quotation is: ‘te quoque bellum triste secutum ests,  / mactata tua, miseranda, manu,  / nata Lucreti,  / stuprum saevi passa tyranni’ (‘civil war ensued from your death too, / daughter of Lucretius, / when you died by your own hand, pitiful woman, after suffering the brutal tyrant’s lust’ (Octavia, 300–303). 50 Callisto also appears in Gynaikeion, I, in ‘An abstract of all the Fables in the fifteen bookes of Ovids Metamorphoses, as they follow in the poem’: ‘Now Jove surveighs the universe, restor’d / To pristine beautie: saw, and seeing ador’d / The bright Calisto, whom he made a rape / And vitiated in Dianaes shape’, p. 49. 51 Thomas Middleton, The Ghost of Lucrece (London: Valentine Simmes, 1600). Alison A. Chapman, ‘Writing outside the theatre’, in Susan Gossett (ed.), Thomas Middleton in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 243–9 (p. 244). For a discussion of Middleton’s poem, see Sarah Carter, Ovidian Myth and Sexual Deviance in Early Modern English Literature (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 66–78. References are to G. B. Shand (ed.), The Ghost of Lucrece, in Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (gen. eds), The Collected Works of Thomas Middleton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 1985–98. 52 Carter, Ovidian Myth, p. 54. 53 Richard Rowland, Killing Hercules: Deianira and the Politics of Domestic Violence, from Sophocles to the War on Terror (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), p. 135.

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54 Kewes, ‘Roman history and early Stuart drama’, p. 258. 55 ‘[L]es place sur un seuil entre la diégèse et le mythe’: Nathalie Rivère de Carles, ‘“Seest thou not what a deformed theefe this fashion is?” Le costume-piège dans le théâtre renaissant’, Actes des congrès de la Société Française Shakespeare, 26 (2008), 122–39 (pp. 129, 128–9 for a discussion of Heywood’s play), available at http://journals.openedition.org/shakespeare/1470, accessed 24 June 2020. 56 Lee A. Ritscher, The Semiotics of Rape in Renaissance English Literature (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), p. 55; Carter, Ovidian Myth, p. 64. 57 Jean E. Howard, ‘Interrupting the Lucrece effect? The performance of rape on the early modern stage’, in Valerie Traub (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 657–72 (p. 658). 58 ‘SEXTUS. … what hath past / Is hid from the worlds eye, and onely private / Twixt us’ (2092–4). 59 ‘Ovid gave him the theme that is the driving force of all his comedies and several of his tragedies: erotic desire’: Jonathan Bate, How the Classics Made Shakespeare (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), p. 11. What Bate writes of Shakespeare also applies here to Heywood.

4 ‘Interlaced with sundry histories’: the open structure of The Silver Age Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Yves Peyré

Thomas Heywood’s national epic, Troia Britanica, which draws much of its substance from William Caxton, Ovid, Virgil and George Chapman’s Seaven Bookes of the Iliades of Homer, was printed on William Jaggard’s press in 1609.1 By then, the author had acquired a solid reputation as a dramatist, with a dozen plays staged in the London theatres, quite a few of them already printed and some of them several times reprinted. His interest in classical texts was already evident, in the epyllion of Oenone and Paris (1594), as Katherine Heavey demonstrates in chapter 1; in the tragedy of The Rape of Lucrece (first performed in 1607, first printed in 1608), which M. L. Stapleton and Janice Valls-Russell discuss in chapters 2 and 3 respectively; and in a translation of Sallust’s Conspiracy of Catiline and Jugurthine War (1609). This translation Heywood completed with the help, besides the Latin text, of Louis Meigret’s French version;2 but unlike his French predecessor, he inserted marginal notes in Latin, borrowed from one of the heavily annotated sixteenth-century editions of Sallust, possibly C. Salustii Crispi de conjuratione Catilinae et de bello jugurthino historiae (Venice: Laurentius Bertellus, 1590), in which scholia by Laurentius Valla, Johannes Chrysostomus Soldus, Franciscus Sylvius Ambianus (François Du Bois) and Jacobus Crucius Bononiensis, taken over from earlier editions, were complemented with new commentaries by Jodocus Badius. In a similar scholarly gesture, Heywood also chose to enrich his Troia with marginalia and endnotes for which he drew material from several chronicles and, to a large extent, from Natale Conti’s Mythologia.3 With the translation of Sallust and Troia, the year 1609 therefore marked a new development in Heywood’s production, favouring a learned type of literature. This did not involve a renunciation of theatrical ventures: between 1610 and 1613, the five plays of the four Ages were brought to the stage. The four Ages, declined in five plays, which drew heavily, among other sources, on material from Troia, have given rise to widely diverging critical appraisals. Joseph Quincy Adams thought they constituted ‘a series of splendid plays’.4 This ‘panorama of Greek myth’, Tucker Brooke and

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Matthias A. Shaaber noted, is dramatised ‘with vigour and variety’.5 Harry Levin contended that Heywood merely ‘jumbled a medley of Greek myths into a sequence of five plays’, and the critic particularly frowned at ‘the irrelevant gallimaufries of The Silver Age and The Brazen Age’6 – not so irrelevant to Adams, who described the series as ‘a philanthropic attempt to popularize Greek culture among the middle classes of London’.7 The pedagogic intent was taken up by Mowbray Velte, who maintained that Heywood ‘wrote specifically to gratify and educate the bourgeoisie’.8 To succeed in that purpose, it was sufficient, Velte implied, to adopt ‘the episodic disjointed nature of the early chronicle play’ and to present mythological scenes ‘much as they came to the writer’s fancy’, so as to produce ‘a wonderful medley’.9 What mattered was to offer a good show to ‘a sensation-loving crowd’ or ‘a glorious spectacle for the populace’.10 True enough, the Ages are remarkable both for their dramatisation of classical myth and for their lavish use of spectacle – though David Mann has recently shown that even the most impressive episodes did not require any special stage machinery.11 Heywood himself did not consider that these plays should be reduced to a show: ‘the fulnesse of the sceane’, he writes, is equalled by the ‘gravity of the subject’.12 The matter was serious enough to have led him to contemplate, in his preface to 2 Iron Age, an annotated collected edition that would enable him ‘to illustrate the whole worke, with an explanation of all the difficulties, and an historicall comment of every hard name, which may appeare obscure or intricate to such as are not frequent in poetry’.13 These projected notes might have elucidated the erudite mythological and historical knowledge that constitutes the intellectual substructure of the plays, in much the same way as the marginalia and endnotes appended to Troia, which announce the encyclopaedic bent that characterises Heywood’s later literary endeavours in Gynaikeion and The Hierarchie of the Blessed Angells. The address ‘To the reader’ prefixed to 1 Iron Age expounds Heywood’s programme clearly. The two plays making up The Iron Age are valuable in his eyes because they were very successfully acted and ‘have at sundry times thronged three severall theaters, with numerous and mighty auditories’. They are also of interest – and that is true of all five plays in the Ages series – first because they are drawn from the classical tradition, which ensures ‘the antiquity and noblenesse of the history’; next, because they include ‘the most things of especiall remarke, which have beene ingeniously commented, and labouriously recorded, by the Muses darlings, the poets: and Times learned remembrancers, the hist[o]riographers’.14 This tribute is addressed to the poets of Antiquity whose various versions of the same myths constituted, layer upon layer, the rich soil that nourishes Heywood’s writing; it may also be thought to include their successors – like Caxton – and certainly their annotators and

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commentators, whose ­ interpretations stimulated Heywood’s intellectual apprehension of the stories he dramatised.15 Heywood’s purpose, when he elaborated the Ages cycle, may not have been purely philanthropic, as Adams wrote, nor was it demagogic, as other critics may have been tempted to suggest. Recent work has shown that the audience of the Red Bull Theatre, where the Ages were played, was not as homogeneously uninstructed as may have been thought:16 as Charlotte Coffin has contended, Heywood’s mythological plays, which ‘make demands on the spectators, on a variety of levels’, also required intellectual agility from at least part of their public.17 Heywood’s dramaturgy does not line up disconnected scenes that amount to no more than a spectacular ‘gallimaufry’: rather, from his peculiar combination of Caxton and the classics, myth and mythography, he meant to draw a coherent poetic design. Of the five plays, The Silver Age seems perhaps the most heterogeneously assembled. It therefore provides a propitious experimental field in which to test the plausibility of some unifying design based on Heywood’s understanding of classical myth. The Silver Age successively dramatises part of Perseus’ and Bellerophon’s stories, Jupiter’s deception of Alcmena, the birth of Hercules and some of his early labours, Pluto’s rape of Proserpine, Semele’s misfortune and, finally, ‘the Arraignement of the Moone’. What might appear as an episodic succession of diversified material harbours a mesh of echoes, both verbal and spectacular, ironic associations and startling collisions that bear evidence of an imaginative pattern. The brazen tower from which Danae was freed in The Golden Age and where Acrisius is imprisoned in the first act of The Silver Age is multiplied in ‘the brasen towers / Where ghosts are tortur’d’ (sig. K2v) in Pluto’s Underworld in the last act.18 When Alcmena, preparing for Amphitrio’s return, asks her servants to ‘let the roome wherein we rest to night, / Flow with no lesse delight, then Juno’s bed / When in her armes she claspeth Jupiter’ (sig. C4r), she does not suspect that her comparison will become reality when, unknown to her, she clasps Jupiter in her arms. Nor is she aware that her wish somehow anticipates Semele’s presumptuous desire for Jupiter to hug her ‘in that state / In which faire Juno he imbrac’d so late’ (sig. I2v). Complaining about Jupiter’s ‘trans-shapes’, Juno, ‘[r]oab’d all in wrath, and clad in scarlet fury’ (sig. Fv), herself assumes ‘a beldams shape’ (sig. Fv) both to impede Alcmena’s deliverance and to trick Semele under the mask of the old nurse Beroe. This malevolent crone is outwitted by another beldam, Alcmena’s midwife Galantis, who resembles the disguised goddess almost as much as Ganymede resembles Socia or Jupiter Amphitrio.19 Galantis proves more astute than Semele, but the latter’s credulity and trust match the ingenuousness of Hercules, who believes

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his ­fiercest enemy, Juno, to be a ‘loving step-dame’ to him (sig. H4r). The stage is ablaze in the Underworld as in Semele’s palace.20 Jupiter appears ‘[h]is right hand arm’d with lightning, on his head  / Heavens massy crowne’ (sig. I2v); his brother Pluto flaunts his ‘club of fire’ and ‘burning crowne’ (sig.  K3r) and reigns over an Underworld which, inhabited by devils ­cracking fireworks as well as ‘Furies with their wiery strings’, is both Christian and classical. Such overarching networking, with its combination of echoing, interweaving, association and disconnection, may constitute the surface expression of deeper syncretism – a fabric that reveals its cohesion by not attempting to hide the seams. The episodes of Jupiter’s love of Alcmena and Hercules’ birth conflate and reorganise elements drawn from Plautus’ Amphitryon and from Raoul Lefèvre’s different version of the same story in his Recueil des Histoires de Troyes (1464) that Heywood read in Caxton’s translation, The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye (1473/74).21 In Heywood’s play, Jupiter merges ‘Three nights … in one to take [his] fill  / Of daliance’ with Alcmena (sig. C3r). This detail he did not find in Caxton, where Jupiter stays with Alcmena ‘a nyght and a day’,22 nor in Plautus (Amphitryo, 279), where Sosia simply remarks ‘Neque ego hac nocte longoriem me vidisse censeo’ (I don’t think I ever did see a longer night).23 Other well-known authors, like Ovid and Seneca, mentioned a twofold night.24 But onto his amalgam of Plautus and Caxton, Heywood grafted the knowledge he derived from his general culture, which was also a common culture, of more or less anonymous origin, represented by ‘they say’ in Spenser’s allusion to Jupiter’s affair, ‘Three nights in one, they say, that for her sake / He then did put, her pleasures lenger to partake’.25 Heywood probably found the treble night of Hercules’ conception in Lucian’s Dialogues of the Gods, excerpts of which he later translated,26 but he could also have found confirmation in the mythographic compendia he usually depended on. In his Genealogia deorum gentilium, quoting a scholion on Statius’ Thebaid,27 Boccaccio noted that for Hercules to be born ‘noctem unam non suffecisse’ but three in one were needed.28 In his Mythologia, Conti quoted a few lines translated into Latin from the Argonautica Orphica, according to which Jupiter and Alcmena begot Hercules ‘Cum latuit Phoebus longas tres ordine noctes  / Continuas’ (when Phoebus stayed hidden for three long, successive, uninterrupted nights).29 The widespread notion of a threefold night of love imposed itself on Heywood’s mind and superseded his direct sources, Caxton and Plautus, all the more readily as it served his artistic purpose: it allowed him to make Jupiter’s three nights with Alcmena correspond with Joshua’s battle against the Canaanites (Joshua 10:13), conveniently extended to three days for the occasion. At the very moment when Jupiter and Alcmena meet,



‘Interlaced with sundry histories’ 103 Now at this houre is fought By Josua duke unto the Hebrew nation, (Who are indeede the Antipodes to us) His famous battle ’gainst the Cananites, And at his orison the sunne stands still, That he may have there slaughter.

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(The Silver Age, sig. C3v)

That this passage was deleted in the manuscript of The Escapes of Jupiter,30 where the episode of Jupiter and Alcmena is transcribed from The Silver Age, does not necessarily mean that Heywood had become dissatisfied with it but, rather, that it had served a specific purpose in The Silver Age which was no longer relevant in the artistic design of The Escapes of Jupiter. The coincidence between Jupiter’s threefold night with Alcmena and Joshua’s victory over the Canaanites – which Heywood had already mentioned in Troia (in his endnotes to Canto VI) – proceeds from a logic exemplified in universal chronicles modelled on Eusebius’ Chronicon (like Lanquet and Cooper’s Chronicle, which Heywood had used in Troia), in which all the events of the history of the world are listed according to the same calendar, so that episodes from the Bible and from Greek mythology are made contemporary.31 The Theoduli ecloga, whose popularity lasted well into the sixteenth century,32 had underlined the correspondence between the stories of Joshua and of Alcmena: ‘Sufficeret thalamis ut jupiter amphitrionis / Noctis opem placide geminavit candida phebe’ (sig. Ciiii3r: so that Jupiter could complete the work in Amphitryon’s bed peacefully, bright Phoebe doubled the night) was to be read in conjunction with ‘phebus,  / Imperio iosue, stabat defixus in arce’ (sig. Ciiii3v: at Joshua’s command, Phoebus stopped his course). Rabelais too, in his epistle to Jean Bouchet, noted that the sun suspended its course for both Alcmena and Joshua.33 Such concurrence suggests shared patterns of thought rather than direct borrowing. In the context in which the conjunction of events appears in The Silver Age, Jupiter and Alcmena’s threefold night of love relegates the three-day battle of Joshua to the Antipodes. The field of fruitful femininity pushes the epic and political arena offstage. Procreation is the theme, not slaughter, which is consigned to the other end of the world. So much so that, although Heywood does not usually shy away from spectacular effects,34 Hercules’ fight with the Nemean lion is kept offstage and reported, in the limelight, by Iris (sigs Gr-v); the engagements of Hercules with the Erymanthian boar and ‘Dianaes hart’ (the Cerynitian hind) are not entirely dismissed but merely mentioned and presented as secondary, the former to Hypodamia’s wedding and the ensuing Centauromachia, the latter to the rescue of Proserpine. Bellerophon’s fight with Chimera (sig. B3r) occurs offstage: the real subject is Aurea’s treachery. Perseus’ fight with the sea monster is merely referred

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to: the hero here is first and foremost cast and staged as the ‘husband of the sweete Andromeda’, who, ‘ingraft’ into the royal line, ensures its posterity (sig. B3v, Cv). The play stages a tension between feminine fecundity and the male attributes of heroism and sovereignty. In Act I, the story of Danae’s son Perseus is interlaced with the plot against Bellerophon engineered by Pretus’ wife, Aurea, who wrongly accuses Bellerophon of having raped her.35 Heywood’s conflation of the stories of Danae, Perseus and Bellerophon foregrounds the combined themes of obstruction and obduration. The play starts in front of the brazen tower ‘that earst inclos’d [Acrisius’] childe’, Danae (sig. Bv): ‘now these brazen walles,  / Built to immure a faire and innocent maide’ shall become Acrisius’ ‘owne Jayle’ (sig. Bv). Acrisius’ crime, as dramatically foregrounded by Heywood, was not so much to have usurped the throne of Argus, over which his brother Pretus ruled, but to have tried to sterilise his daughter by confining her in a metal prison to prevent her from giving birth to the next generation. Immuring becomes psychological in the ensuing story of Aurea’s lust and treachery, which earn her Bellerophon’s taunt: ‘Oh woman, when thou art given up to sin / And shamelesse lusts, what brazen impudence,  / Hardens thy brow?’ (sig. B2r). She has become like one of Ovid’s Propoetides: Utque pudor cessit sanguisque induruit oris, In rigidum parvo silicem discrimine versae (Metamorphoses, X.241–2) For when that shame was gone, And that they waxèd brazen fast, she [Venus] turnèd them to stone, In which between their former shape was difference small or none. (Arthur Golding, Metamorphoses, X.258–60)36

Aurea thus enters into the poetic pattern of petrifaction that brings together, in the first act, Bellerophon and Perseus: the latter has just freed Andromeda ‘from that rocke where [she] was fixt’ (sig. B3v) after killing the Gorgon and cutting off This head that had the power to change to stone, All that durst gaze upon’t; and being plac’t here Retaines that power to whom it is uncas’d. (sig. B3v)

Throughout the first scenes of the play, and imaginatively dominating them, stands Acrisius’ tower, in which the old king retires, as in ‘an Arch of stone’ (sig. C2r) until his death, when ‘hee’s turn’d to stone, / That’s to his marble grave’ (sig. C2v). While Aurea, immured in impudicity, tries to imprison Bellerophon in her wiles, Perseus’ birth surmounts the strong

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‘Interlaced with sundry histories’ 105

walls in which Danae had been enclosed and Andromeda is freed from her rock. As Acrisius is finally led to acknowledge, the transmission of life and the perpetuation of a lineage prove superior to his selfish attempt at blocking love and succession: ‘You are to me a stronger sort of joy’, he admits to his grandson and his wife, ‘Then Darreines brasse, which no siege can destroy’ (sig. Cv). In the story of Jupiter’s love for Alcmena, the central symbol of Danae’s brazen tower gives place to the imaginary in-between of the threshold that may, or may not, be crossed – that offers a welcome into love’s delight or throws one out into the agony of dismissal. The Plautine door is turned into ‘gates’ and even ‘the porters lodge’ (sig. Dv), which allow Jupiter’s entrance while Amphitrio is kept out. Barred doors cause rage and a desire to get … some battering engine here To race my pallace walles, or some iron ramme To plant against these gates. (sig. E3v)

Finally, Amphitrio’s angry frustration transforms itself into a despair that brings him close to Acrisius’ self-entombment when he feels his brain to be ‘coffin’d in a bed of lead’ and wishes to be buried alive, with the sky falling upon him ‘like a marble monumentall stone’ (sig. Fr). His disorientation is the price to pay to ensure the benefit of a double birth. Beyond comic comings and goings and mistaken identities, the central stage image is that of a visibly pregnant woman every time Alcmena appears. On his arrival, Amphitrio longs to embrace – as he tells her – ‘Thy nine-moneth absent body, whose ripe birth  / Swels with such beauty in thy constant wombe’ (sig. D4v). She is, as Jupiter concurs, ‘full growne, and groaning, ready now / To invoke Lucina’ (sig. E4v). Here Heywood turns away from Plautus, where Alcmena gives birth ‘sine dolore’ (Amphitryo, 1100), to take his cue from Ovid’s and Caxton’s versions of the birth of Hercules in order to stage Juno’s attempt at killing the ‘bastard-brats’ and make Alcmena’s ‘wombe their tombes’ (sig. Fv). In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Juno sends Lucina, the goddess of childbirth, to prevent Alcmena’s delivery. Heywood, like Caxton, has Juno herself attempt the misdeed. Though Alcmena’s pangs, in Ovid, are prolonged seven nights and seven days (Metamorphoses, IX.292), Heywood follows Caxton and makes the torture last three days, possibly as a counterpart, in The Silver Age, to the three nights of pleasure of Hercules’ conception. But while Caxton’s Juno stays sitting with crossed legs, an attitude that the goddess’s spell constrains Alcmena to reproduce, Heywood’s Juno, like Ovid’s Lucina, not content with crossing her knees, also clenches her fingers. Ovid’s description, ‘dextroque a poplite laevum / pressa genu et digitis inter se pectine

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iunctis’ (IX.298–9), ‘with her right knee crossed over her left, and with her fingers interlocked’, completed with ‘bracchiaque in genibus digitis conexa tenentem’ (IX.311), ‘holding her clinched hands upon her knees’, is like an indirect stage direction for Heywood’s Juno, who ‘crosse-leg’d sits … / And with clutch’t hands’ (sig. F2r). The overdetermination of clenched hands pressed over crossed knees produces a powerful dramatic symbol of obstruction and closure that makes parturition impossible, what Juno calls a ‘knot’ that ‘shall never be dissolv’d’ (sig. F2r). Galanthis’ cunning, when she lets everyone believe that Alcmena has nonetheless given birth, did unbind the ‘knot’ in the Metamorphoses, when Lucina ‘exsiluit, iunctasque manus pavefacta remisit’ (IX.314), ‘up leaped … unclinched her hands and spread them wide in consternation’, which freed Alcmena, whose bonds were loosed, ‘vinclis … remissis’ (IX.315), the verbal echo between ‘remisit’ and ‘remissis’ suggesting the simultaneity and interrelatedness of the two events. Heywood translates Ovid into stage action, when ‘Juno riseth’ (sig. F2v) and raises her hands, as Galantis later explains: ‘no sooner you had cast your armes abroad, but my Lady was delivered’ (sig. F3r). One of Alcmena’s midwives understood that Juno ‘in her clutches  / Strangles my Ladies birth’ (sig. F2v). The next scene, in The Silver Age, shows in contrast how Hercules, in his cradle, ‘strangles’ (sig. F3v) the two snakes sent by Juno, which however, have time to kill his twin brother Ipectetes (sig. F3r) as they do in Caxton – though not in Plautus.37 Heywood follows Caxton’s sequence of Hercules’ exploits, which are extolled in the play, but also used as so many coordinating elements leading from Alcmena’s predicament to the stories of Hypodamia and Proserpine. Hercules’ success at the Olympiads enables him to meet Theseus and Perithous and befriend them, so that his victory over the Nemean lion earns him an invitation to the wedding of Perithous and Hypodamia, at which he intends to present, as a gift, the dead Erymanthian boar: ‘Perithous, I will bring thee to thy Bridals / This huge wilde swine, to feast the Centaurs with’ (sig. G2v). As in Caxton’s Recuyell, the wedding of Perithous and Hypodamia and the Centaurs’ attempted rape of the bride are connected with Pluto’s rape of Proserpine, two violent episodes onto which Heywood grafts the story of Semele, which is not part of Caxton’s plot. Like Alcmena’s sufferings, Hypodamia’s plight and Semele’s tragedy are brought about by Juno’s vindictiveness (against both Ixion’s progeny and Hercules as well as against Jupiter’s mistresses). In Alcmena’s story, Heywood conflates Juno and Lucina to create a monstrous situation in which the goddess of childbirth becomes a birth-denying agent. Juno does not appear in the accounts of the wedding of Pirithous and Hippodamia as narrated by Ovid or of Ypodame and Pirothus as reported by Caxton. By emphasising her malevolent role, Heywood ironically inverts pronuba Juno, the protector of marriage, into



‘Interlaced with sundry histories’ 107

its destroyer. At the arrival of the Centaurs, who are not medieval ‘geantes’, like Caxton’s, but classically ‘doubly shap’t’ (sig. H2r), the tone is set by Antimachus’38 rather inappropriate answer to Theseus’ welcoming speech: Now by Ixion, that our grand-sire was, That dar’d to kisse the mighty thundere[r]s wife, And did not feare to cuckold Jupiter, Thou dost the Centaur’s honour.

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(sig. H2v)

Because in The Silver Age, as in Caxton’s Recuyell, Hercules serves to connect the stories of Hypodamia and Proserpine, the hero is given a prominent part in the fight against the Centaurs even though Nestor’s narration in Ovid’s Metamorphoses omits to mention his participation (Metamorphoses, XII.536–76). In contrast, Heywood develops from Ovid the elements that enable him to emphasise the disruption of a well-ordered wedding celebration. His scene starts with a courteous exchange of toasts between the Centaurs and the Lapiths, in the course of which Cillarus drinks to Hypodamia’s health and Perithous, in return, pledges ‘faire Philonome, / Thy sweet She-Centaur’ (sig. H2v).39 A full understanding of the significance of the scene requires the spectator to remember Ovid’s description of the beauty and mutual love of the centaurs Cyllarus and Hylonome, a haven of harmony in the midst of chaos, made delicately fragile by the knowledge of impending death (Metamorphoses, XII.393–428). The exchange of courtesy between the two couples in The Silver Age emphasises concord and symbolises the ritualisation of marriage that is metaphorically endangered, even before the fight starts, by the threat to ‘[p]rophane that garment Hymen hath put on’ (sig. H3r). The ‘confused fray’ both contrasts with and partly originates in the drinking toasts ritual, with Centaurs ‘lust-burn’d and wine-heated’ (sig. H3v), an echo of Ovid’s ‘ebrietas geminata libidine’ (Metamorphoses, XII.221), ‘drunken passion redoubled by lust’. Here again, Heywood is not content with dramatising a conflation of Caxton and Ovid. Unlike them, he substitutes Antimachus for Eurytus, the leader of the Centaurs. There does not seem to be any reason for that change, unless Heywood read the name ‘Antimachus’, in this occurrence, as referring to the archetype of the opponent fighter, as modelled on the Greek word antimachos, ‘adversary’, related to antimachomai, ‘to fight’, and antimachesis, ‘a conflict’. Some of the other Centaurs’40 names, like Silanthus and Latreus, are to be found neither in Ovid nor in Caxton, but in Conti’s Mythologia and in Conrad Lycosthenes’s 1592 edition of Ravisius Textor’s Officina, where Conti’s list is reproduced.41 Heywood later returned to the subject in Gynaikeion; there, he explained that ‘Hyppodamia the wife of Perithous, was the occasion of that great Centauromachia, or battaile

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betwixt the Centaures and the Lapithes, for which Propertius calls her Ischomache of the greeke word Isco, which signifieth Habeo, and Mache, Pugna’,42 an etymology he borrowed from Filippo Beroaldo’s annotations on Propertius’ elegy (II.ii) in Claude Morel’s edition, in which he could find the poems of Catullus, Tibullus and Propertius conveniently collected and commented.43 But in The Silver Age he merely names Hypodamia ‘great Bistus daughter’ (sig. H2v), again after Conti.44 Heywood’s interest in mythography transpires in the attention he pays to the existence of several versions of the same myth. Once the Centaurs are routed, Hercules stops a while to ponder about their origins: were these Thessalian monsters bred at first By Saturne and Philiris, as some say, When in equinall shape she was deflour’d? Or when Ixion, snatcht to heaven by Jove, And feasted in the hye Olimpicke hall, He sought to strumpet Juno? (sig. H3v)

The interrogation echoes one of Conti’s remarks in the chapter devoted to Centaurs.45 Its insertion in Hercules’ victory speech may not be gratuitous. Dwelling on the Centaurs’ extraction draws attention to the kind of monstrous births Hypodamia’s rape might have resulted in had it been successful. This threat of undesirable progeny was already implicit in Heywood’s transmutation of an Ovidian image. The Centaur Thereus, in the Metamorphoses (XII.353–4), used to carry back home, alive and ­rebellious, the bears he had caught in the Hemonian mountains (‘Haemoniis qui prensos montibus ursos / ferre domum vivos indignantesque solebat’). In his steps, Heywood’s Antimachus, gloating and defiant, boasts: Ha, ha, have I from the fierce Lyon torne her whelp? Brought from the forrests she-Beares in my armes? And dandled them like infants? plaid with them, And shall I not then dare to kisse the bride? (The Silver Age, sig. H3r)

Elaborating on Ovid’s expression of brutish strength, Heywood jostles conflicting images of maternity and violence, rape and re-creation. Except for Antimachus’ remark, ‘wine and love / Adde fire to fire’ (sig. H2v), no explicit moralisation of the Centauromachia is provided, perhaps because part of its significance is also implicitly suggested by its threefold context. Several references to Ixion’s attempted rape of Juno recall a case of fecundity gone wrong. The wedding of Perithous and Hypodamia is preceded and followed by the story of Proserpine’s abduction – another rape – with

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‘Interlaced with sundry histories’ 109

Ceres’ distress visiting upon the earth the bane of sterility. And between two further episodes concerning Proserpine, the story of Semele is inserted, not technically a rape, although Juno does term it so (sig. Iv), but a form of destructive love that leads to paradoxical pregnancy and birth. After the stories of Acrisius trying to prevent his daughter from giving birth and of Juno’s attempt at making Alcmena’s womb a tomb, Heywood gives a new twist to his study of the problematics of procreation and fertility. While the wedding of Perithous and Hypodamia, starting in the hall of an orderly palace, is disrupted by the Centauromachia that ends in the wild ‘Thessalian fields’ (sig. H3r), the liaison of Jupiter and Semele is first imagined in the lush pastoral setting of ‘mountaine Erecine’ (sig. Iv), dedicated to Venus Erycina. Jupiter, dressed ‘like a wood-man in greene’ (sig. Ir), looks like ‘the yong Hyppolitus’ (sig. Iv), whose chastity, however, he lacks, while Semele, ‘like a huntresse’ (sig. Ir), seems to be one of Diana’s attendants, yet is devoid of their innocence – unlike, say, Callisto. These intimations of a green world are soon superseded by the lofty spires of an ambitious palace, in which Semele indulges her dreams of luxury and majesty. Her character, as developed by Heywood, finds its seeds in Ovid’s remark that Semele perished, ‘ambitious, by her own prayers’ (‘precibus periit ambitiosa suis’, Tristia, IV.iii.68), a reflection that fed most medieval and early modern commentaries and finally provided the subject of one of Barthélemy Aneau’s emblems. But Jupiter has a different, more pointed interpretation:46 ‘He by the Gods dyes, that ’bove man contends’ (sig. Kr). Heywood’s choric commentator, Homer, concurs with this moral, in an appropriately solemn rhyming couplet: ‘Let none the secrets of the Gods inquire, / Lest they (like her) be strooke with heavenly fire’ (sig. Kr). Neither Caxtonian nor classical, he sounds most like a medieval exegete. His moralisation may bring to mind Faustus’ ironically twisted address to Helen, in the context of unapproachable knowledge: ‘Brighter art thou then flaming Jupiter, / When he appeard to haplesse Semele’.47 The commentary George Sandys appended to his translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, ‘those who search too curiously and boldly into divine Maiesty, shall be oppressed with the glory and brightnesse of the same’,48 confirms that the interpretation Heywood lends Homer is not unique. In his De Deo Libri Quindecim (1560), the jurist and theologian Marcantonio Natta, commenting on Exodus 33:18–20, argued that Non potuisset Moses, aut etiamnum quilibet alius mortalis posset ferre tantum illum fulgorem divinae majestatis: minus profecto quam olim Semele Jovem fulgurantem & tonantem tulisse fingatur: quod mihi finxisse videtur antiquitas, ut intelligeretur Deum in sua majestate ab homine sine ejus interitu cerni non posse.49

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(No more than Moses could any other human being endure the intensity of brightness radiating from divine majesty; even less, no doubt, than how it is fabled that Semele once could bear Jupiter’s thunder and lightning; a story which, I think, the ancients forged to intimate that man, without dying, cannot see God in majesty.)

Although undeniable, the textual convergence does not necessarily imply a common exegetic source but it suggests, at the very least, shared associations of ideas belonging to a common mythographic culture. But the moralising, cautionary tone is not allowed to be predominant. It is only one of a multiplicity of voices in Heywood’s polyphony. With their false pretences, the pastoral world and the proud palace that harbour the love of Jupiter and Semele disappear in fire and smoke: ‘the heavens shall mourne  / In pitchy clouds, the earth in barrennesse’ (sig. Kr). But out of these ashes, new forms of fecundity arise. Although it is not yet come to term, Jupiter rescues the baby from Semele’s womb to nurse him in his thigh until he is fully formed. Or so says Ovid.50 In The Silver Age, Jupiter soberly declares: ‘this remainder, / … / I will conserve till his full time of birth’ (sig. Kr). Part of the audience is free to imagine that he transfers Semele’s pregnancy onto himself and invents the role of a motherly father: ‘he gives birth as a pregnant woman does’ (‘more gravidae mulieris enixus est’), Charles Estienne wrote.51 Another part of the audience might choose to infer a rationalised version of the myth, erasing Jupiter’s womb-like thigh, in line with Heywood’s euhemeristic presentation of the story of Danae inherited from Caxton; Conti explained that ‘fabulati sunt antiqui Bacchum fuisse Jovis femori assutum, quia educatus sit in specu Neri montis …, qui mons Neros Jovi erat consecratus’ (the ancients told the story that Bacchus was stitched up in Jupiter’s thigh, because he was brought up in a cave in mount Neros …, which mount was consecrated to Jupiter).52 About the god to be born Jupiter predicts that ‘his Bachenals / Shall be renown’d at feasts, when their light braines / Swim in the fumes of wine’ (sig. Kr), a reminder of what happened at the wedding of Perithous and Hypodamia, when Antimachus allowed his brain to be ‘through heated with the fumes of wine’ (sig. H3v). While Bacchus’ dark side is remembered in The Silver Age, his contribution to fecundity in the context of a wedding is tactfully obliterated after Semele’s death. In the different literary context of the epithalamium, Heywood, however, later emphasises it. In the section ‘Of nuptiall ornaments, pompe, feasts, epithalamions, &c.’, in Book VII of Gynaikeion, he translates the middle part of Ausonius’ Cento Nuptialis. His English text, as he claims, ‘rather added to [Ausonius’] invention, than any way derogated from his stile, or detracted from his conceite’.53 In the Epithalamium, the Latin text addresses the bride: ‘Sis felix, primos Lucinae experta labores /



‘Interlaced with sundry histories’ 111

et  mater. cape Maeonii carchesia Bacchi’ (‘mayest thou be blessed when thou first hast felt Lucina’s pangs and art a mother. Take goblets of Maeonian wine’).54 In Heywood’s translation, those two independent sentences are interpreted as logically interconnected:

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Oh may Lucina when her childing growes Be present, and release her painefull throwes: Proove fruitfull as the Vine, let Bacchus fill Her cup to th’ brim. (Gynaikeion, VII, p. 335)

Lucina and Bacchus thus become twin deities, both ensuring fertility. Not content with being twice-born, Bacchus is the inventor of the ‘fruitful vine’, a commonplace phrase in the context of matrimony, blending a sentence from the Hortulus attributed to Virgil, ‘Fecunda vitis conjuges ulmos gravat’ (the fruitful vine leans on her husband the elm),55 and the biblical promise in Psalm 128:3, ‘Thy wife shall be like a fruitful vine’. In the sermon he preached for the wedding of King James’s daughter Elizabeth and the Count Palatine, the Bishop of London expatiated on this image: ‘[s]urely a vine is a noble plant’, he said, ‘and an excellent embleme of a wife. First, there is nothing more flexible and tractable: you may bow it which way you will. So is the wisedome of a woman matrimonii legibus obtemperare, to conforme hir selfe to the rules of hir husband.’56 Performed at court a year or so earlier,57 The Silver Age did not associate Bacchus’ and the Psalmist’s vine as an image of fruitful matrimony. On the contrary, Semele’s death, which strikes the earth with barrenness (sig. Kr), is appropriately framed by the staging of Proserpine’s rape with Ceres’ grief ­involving universal fruitlessness. Ceres, ‘Queene of all fertility’ (sig. G3r) and ‘the chaste Proserpina’ (sig. G3r) enter the stage with swains and country wenches whose prosperity they come to ensure. This is not a betrothal feast, but Ceres’ promise of ‘plenty and increase’ (sig. G3r) echoes with the goddess’s gift of ‘Earth’s increase, and foison plenty’ in Shakespeare’s Tempest (IV.i.110).58 So does the song of swaines and country wenches (sig. G3r) reverberate with the dance of reapers and nymphs in Ariel’s masque.59 Dramatic and thematic relationships have been noticed between Heywood’s first three Ages and Shakespeare’s contemporary Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale and the Tempest. Such correspondences can be accounted for, Adams argued, on the basis of indirect clues, if Shakespeare’s company, the King’s Men, and Heywood’s, the Queen’s Men, collaborated in the presentation of these plays,60 a conjecture whose plausibility rests on its explanatory strength.61 It may not be necessary to detect an in-joke in Ceres’ natural wish to ban ‘Tempests hence’ (sig. G3v). But then, Proserpine, as she does in Caxton’s

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Recuyell, wanders off to make garlands, and discovers that the meadows yield no flower: Here neither is the white nor sanguine Rose, The Straw-berry flower, the Paunce nor Violet

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(The Silver Age, sig. G3v)

This new Proserpine not only offers a humorous temporary breaking of theatrical illusion by referring to the bare, flowerless, stage; recalling and negating classical inflorescence, she also offers the knowing spectator a conscious involvement with and ironic departure from Ovid, Claudian,62 and perhaps Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale (IV.iv.116–29), who recover their due, however, when one later finds, after Proserpine’s abduction, ‘her scattered flowers / And garland half made up’ (sig. G4v). Heywood’s conception of Proserpine, whom Ceres introduces as ‘this beauteous childe the Moone’ (sig. G3r), superimposes upon the dominant mythographic interpretation of the goddess as representing the seasonal cycle of vegetation,63 an alternative allegorisation of her as the moon. This interpretation, reported by Varro64 and by Servius,65 was spread in early modern times by Vives’s commentary on Augustine’s City of God and by Conti’s Mythologia.66 In Gynaikeion, it is Conti’s handbook that Heywood partly adapts, partly translates, in an original attempt at synthetically fusing the two interpretations of Proserpine, as he possibly meant to do in The Silver Age: Manie fables of Proserpina have bin introduc’d for our better instruction, by the ancient Poets; which is onely to expresse to us the nature of the seedes, and plants; for Proserpina, by whom is signified the Moone, shining to us one halfe of the moneth, and lying the other halfe in the armes of her husband Pluto, that is, being halfe the yeare in Heaven and the other in Hell, sixe moneths beneath the earth, and as manie above: so is it with the vertue of plants, whose sappe for sixe moneths space, is by reason of the subterren cold, forc’t and diffused upward into the boughes and branches: againe, by the extreamitie of the Winters upper cold, it is compulsively driven backe downeward into the roote, beneath the earth. (Gynaikeion, I, p. 18)

This mythographic blend makes Proserpine a figure of universal fertility. In the conflict between Ceres and Pluto, Jupiter imposes his ‘moderation’ (sig. K4v) in a balanced judgement: the yeare we part in twelve, Cal’d moneths of the Moone: twelve times a yeare She in full splendor shall supply her orbe, And shine in heaven: twelve times fill Pluto’s armes Below in hell. (The Silver Age, sig. Lr)



‘Interlaced with sundry histories’ 113

This arbitrage reconciles Pluto’s marital desires with universal harmony, ensured by the presence in heaven of Proserpine-the moon:  Be she confin’d Below the earth, where be the ebbes and tides? Where is her power infus’d in hearbes and plants? In trees for buildings? simples phisicall? Or minerall mines?

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(sig. Lr)

The young girl who went in the fields to gather garlands is transformed into a mythographic allegory, a metamorphosis to which she cannot but meekly agree: ‘Jove is all justice, and hath well decreed’ (sig. Lr). Proserpine’s costume, when she appeared ‘attired like the Moone’ (sig. G3r), may have reminded some of the spectators of the allegorical Moon in the court entertainments Ben Jonson had devised for Queen Anne, The Masque of Blackness (1605), where ‘her garments [were] white and silver’, and more recently The Masque of Beauty (1608), where she was seen in her chariot.67 But even though the costumes might have been similar, that hypothetical spectator would also have been struck by a major contrast. While the Moon, in Ben Jonson’s masques, appeared in state, in the splendour of her silvery majesty, Heywood’s Proserpine as the Moon is a young girl whose melancholic rest on the earth’s ‘despoyled breast’ (sig. G3v) creates a sense of frailty and vulnerability in repose, soon shattered by the brutality of Pluto’s thunderous entrance. He himself is thunderstruck when he catches sight of Proserpine: ‘I see and love, and at one instant both’ (sig. G4v) – ‘paene simul visa est dilectaque raptaque Diti’ (Ovid, Metamorphoses, V.395). Heywood’s Pluto is not a pirate like Caxton’s; neither is he a rebel like Claudian’s infernal god. His first speech denounces the ‘hurly-burly’ (sig. G3v) of the Giants’ revolt and expresses his desire to make sure that ‘the worlds foundations be still firme’ (sig. G4r). His preoccupation with universal stability is in keeping with the final agreement dividing Proserpine between hell and heaven so as not to endanger the harmony of the world. In a critical assessment of the two parts of The Iron Age, John Tatlock estimated that ‘this “bright easy-going desultory” play, as A. C. Swinburne called it, is the work of a young man full of uncritical enthusiasm for ancient myth and modern drama, too eager to put the one into the mould of the other to care how he did it’.68 One of the central questions in the Ages is indeed how the author gives dramatic shape to his material. Possibly inspired by the bipartite, apparently loose structure of The Iron Age, Tatlock’s judgement may nonetheless seem somewhat severe. Swinburne, for one, had praised ‘the admirable qualities displayed in Heywood’s

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dramatic treatment of these legends’.69 In The Silver Age, Heywood does not add elements haphazardly drawn from the plot of Caxton’s Recuyell and from a close reading of the classics – mainly Plautus and Ovid – while keeping an eye on contemporary plays staged by Queen Anne’s and the King’s Men. The play dramatises the story of Juno’s persevering, but frustrated, animosity against Jupiter’s protégés or, from a complementary point of view, a concatenation of Theseus’ and Hercules’ heroic exploits intertwined with Jupiter’s and Pluto’s amours. A deeper imaginative substructure correlates the two trends of the male sphere of power and the female field of fecundity. Danae and Alcmena do not merely serve Jupiter’s pleasure. Like Andromeda, ‘ingraft’ into Acrisius’ ‘royall line’ (sig. Cv), Danae ensures the perpetuation of a lineage; Alcmena proves Jupiter’s power to be unlimited and gives birth, like Danae, to a civilising hero. Jupiter’s omnipotence is such that he appropriates, to a certain extent, the female prerogative of giving birth when he rescues Bacchus from Semele’s ashes. His judgement of Proserpine’s case safeguards the universal fertility that rests on the circulation of the moon between the two hemispheres. Throughout the play, the preservation of fruitfulness in the interest of the ­perpetuation of a royal line or of universal harmony requires the breaking down of all forms of imprisonment – be it Acrisius’ brazen tower, Pluto’s ‘brasen Towers’ (sig. K2v), Amphitryon’s gate or Juno’s locked hands and crossed legs – that impede free circulation. Yet the play’s recourse to three levels of mythographic interpretation – ‘historical’ in several episodes, ‘ethical’ with the condemnation of Aurea’s lust and Semele’s ambition, ‘physical’ with the transformation of Proserpine into the moon – does not necessarily run a smooth course. The play’s harmony integrates jarring notes akin to the deliberate dissonances Charlotte Coffin studies in The Iron Age.70 The wedding of Perithous and Hypodamia, if it is to be considered as a symbol of the social organisation of human fertility, is superseded, in the spectator’s experience, by the chaos of the battle with the Centaurs, a mere recollection of which Shakespeare’s Theseus had found inappropriate in the course of a wedding (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, vii[V.i].44–6).71 Bacchus’ second birth and his invention of the fruitful vine are obliterated by the spectacular shock of the deflagration in which Semele dies. ‘The arraignement of the moone’, with its general reconciliation, seems to occur at a sufficiently great distance from the abduction of Proserpine for the shock it produced to have subsided. But the succession of scenes in between has increased rather than alleviated the spectator’s sense of shock: the rape of Proserpine is immediately followed by the Centaurs’ assault on Hypodamia, which in turn precedes Semele’s annihilation. Pluto’s courteous consideration for his new wife in

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his infernal kingdom is undermined by the threatening fireworks of his devils, which recall Semele’s fiery death. While the play upholds heroism, virtue and wisdom, it also constantly insists on suffering. More than Bellerophon’s valour, Acrisius sees his own rigour to Danae as the cause of his defeat and feels compassion for her distress, when she was thrown with her young infant ‘to the mercy / Of the rough billowes, in a mastlesse boat’ (sig. Bv). Alcmena’s excruciating torment is reported by Galantis (sig. F2v) while Homer expresses the solidarity of other women: ‘All those wives  / That heare her painfull throwes, are in dispaire’ (sig. F2r). An important section is devoted to Ceres’ disconsolate bereavement when her daughter disappears. Ovid recounted Proserpine’s terror and sorrow (‘territa maesto’, Metamorphoses, V.396) and Claudian reported her anguished lamentation (De Raptu, II.248–72). With the physical immediacy of theatrical presentation, the spectators of The Silver Age are made to sympathise with the girl’s shock and horror as they witness her dismay and helpless struggle. Heywood multiplies her panic-stricken cries for help and emphasises the contrast between her fragile beauty and the ‘ugly shape’ (sig. G4r) of a ‘foul fiend’ (sig. G4r), ‘hell-hound’ and ‘divell’ (sig. G4v). Set against the emotional trauma of the abduction, Jupiter’s linguistic juggling when he assures Ceres that ‘The rape that you call force, we title Love’ (sig. K4v) and Proserpine’s meek acceptance in the end both fail to carry full conviction as the terrified girl does not entirely fade into the allegory. Heywood’s classics did not come to him in stabilised, homogeneously formatted texts but in editions that sometimes still included the patristic and medieval commentaries. They also reached him as excerpts and exempla in commonplace books and subjected to moralisation and allegorisation in his favourite mythographical treatises. Classical stories were read in a rich variety of differing versions, not only because Ovid and Claudian present different versions of Proserpine’s story or because Plautus and Ovid diverge in their reports on Hercules’ birth, but because alongside Greek and Latin authors late medieval and early modern texts like Caxton’s influential translation of Lefèvre’s Recueil offered their competing rendition, while the contemporary literary endeavours of Shakespeare, Chapman or Jonson did not pass unnoticed. Such plurality was an opportunity for Heywood, whose mind nimbly grasped a diversity of fragments reassembled in original compositions with poetic intuition and dramatic flair. But his heterogeneous material also carried within itself seeds of dissension, which he allowed to develop into thought-provoking tensions between intellectual intent and theatrical emotion. The Silver Age is not structured by the concentration of a single plot but by a network of echoing analogues and divergences, which proceed from what Manfred Pfister referred to as an ‘open’ dramatic form.72 Far from being so many disjecta membra haphazardly jumbled together, the

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various classical myths brought to the stage elicit the imaginative design of a multiperspective interplay between male heroic epic and female fecundity. The open character of the play’s structure is enhanced by the common early modern practice of ‘interweaving’ classical texts,73 what early modern authors sometimes called ‘interlacing’. In the Poetics, Aristotle distinguishes four types of tragedy, among which he designates the first as ‘complex’, using the word πεπεγμένη, which suggests an intricately woven texture.74 It is the same word that Plutarch turns to in his praise of fiction when he places above all other literary forms ‘a clever interweaving of fabulous narrative’ (πεπεγμένη διάθεσις μυθολογίαζ),75 or, in Jacques Amyot’s French, ‘la disposition d’un conte fait à plaisir, bien entrelasse et bien deduit’.76 Elaborating on Amyot, Philemon Holland commended ‘a fabulous narration well couched, artificially enterlaced, and aptly delivered’.77 ‘Interlacing’ had become a mode of composition to be admired, and associated with the classics. John Grange thought highly of ‘the Tragedies of Euripides and Sophocles’ because he found them ‘interlaced with pretie Poemes and pleasaunt talke’,78 while William Adlington’s translation of The Golden Ass was publicised as The Metamorphosie of Lucius Apuleius enterlaced with sondrie pleasaunt and delectable tales. When Heywood indited the Ages, as when he advertised the ninth book of Gynaikeion, ‘Entreating of women in generall’, as being ‘interlaced with sundry histories’,79 he may have had the feeling that he was adopting a mode of composition that he surely considered attractive and even, perhaps, classical.

Notes   1 See Yves Peyré, ‘Heywood’s library: the books Thomas Heywood used when he wrote Troia Britanica’, in Thomas Heywood, Troia Britanica, ed. Y. Peyré et al. (2009–19), available at www.shakmyth.org, accessed 24 June 2020. Unless otherwise indicated, all references are to this edition.  2 L’Histoire de C. Crispe Saluste touchant la conjuration de L. Serge Catelin … ensemble la guerre jugurthine … par Loys Meigret Lyonnois (Paris: Chrétien Wechel, 1547). See Charles Whibley’s introduction to his edition of Heywood’s translation, Sallust: The Conspiracy of Catiline; The War of Jugurtha. Translated into English by Thomas Heywood, Anno 1608 (London: Constable & Co, 1924), pp. xxxiii–xxxiv. The early printed edition carries two dates, 1608 and 1609 on its two separate title pages.   3 Natale Conti, Natalis Comitis mythologiae, sive explicationum fabularum libri decem (Paris: Arnold Sittart, 1583). All references are to this edition, henceforth Mythologia.  4 Joseph Quincy Adams, ‘Shakespeare, Heywood, and the classics’, Modern Language Notes, 34:6 (1919), 336–9 (p. 336).

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  5 Tucker Brooke and Mathias A. Shaaber, The Renaissance, 1500–1660, in Albert C. Baugh (ed.), A Literary History of England (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967 [1948]), vol. II, p. 544.  6 Harry Levin, The Myth of the Golden Age in the Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972 [1969]), p. 117.   7 Adams, ‘Shakespeare, Heywood, and the classics’, p. 336.   8 Friedrich Mowbray Velte, The Bourgeois Elements in the Dramas of Thomas Heywood (New York: Haskell House, 1966), p. 43.  9 Velte, Bourgeois Elements, p. 48. 10 Velte, Bourgeois Elements, p. 49 and p. 50 respectively. 11 David Mann, ‘Heywood’s Silver Age: a flight too far?’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, 26 (2013), 184–203. 12 Thomas Heywood, The Iron Age (London: Nicholas Okes, 1632), ‘The Epistle Dedicatory to Thomas Hammon’, sig. A3r. 13 The Second Part of The Iron Age, ‘To the reader’, sigs A2r-v. Parts 1 and 2 are bound together but the signatures begin again at ‘A’ for the second part. 14 Heywood, The Iron Age, sig. A4r. 15 On the ‘successors’, see chapter 6 (Charlotte Coffin); on the ‘annotators’, see chapter 7 (Yves Peyré). 16 Eva Griffith, A Jacobean Company and its Playhouse: The Queen’s Servants at the Red Bull Theatre (c. 1605–1619) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Marta Straznicky, ‘The Red Bull repertory in print, 1605–60’, Early Theatre, 9:2 (2006), 144–56. 17 Charlotte Coffin, ‘Heywood’s Ages and Chapman’s Homer: nothing in common?’ in Tanya Pollard and Tania Demetriou (eds), Homer and Greek Tragedy in Early Modern England’s Theatres (= Classical Receptions Journal, 9:1 (2017), 55–78 (pp. 74–5). 18 All references are to The Silver Age (London: Nicholas Okes, 1613). 19 On Ganymede replacing Mercury, see chapter 9 (Camilla Temple). 20 As Margaret Kean points out, ‘the most audacious spectacles balance Semele’s burning bed raised to the heavens with two infernal fiery descents’: ‘A harmless distemper: accessing the classical underworld in Heywood’s The Silver Age’, in Fiona Macintosh, Justine McConnell, Stephen Harrison and Claire Kenward (eds), Epic Performances from the Middle Ages into the Twenty-First Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 181–94 (p. 184). 21 In chapter 9, Camilla Temple suggests that Heywood was also influenced by Lucian. 22 William Caxton, The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, ed. H. Oskar Sommer, 2 vols (London: David Nutt, 1894), vol. I, p. 233. 23 Plautus, Amphitryon, ed. and trans. Wolfgang de Melo (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). 24 Ovid, Amores, I.xiii.45–6, and Tristia, II.402. References are to Heroides. Amores, trans. Grant Showerman, rev. G. P. Goold (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977 [1914]), and Tristia. Ex Ponto, trans. A. L. Wheeler, rev. G. P. Goold (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988 [1924]).

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Seneca, Agamemnon, lines 813–15, Hercules Oetaeus, lines 147. References are to Tragedies, ed. and trans. John G. Fitch, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018 [2002]). Also Hyginus, Fabulae, xxix in R. Scott Smith and Stephen M. Trzaskoma (eds and trans.), Apollodorus’ ‘Library’ and Hyginus’ ‘Fabulae’ (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 2007). 25 Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, III.xi.33, ed. A. C. Hamilton (London: Longman, 1977). 26 Heywood, Pleasant Dialogues and Dramma’s, Selected out of Lucian, Erasmus, Textor, Ovid, &c. (London: R. O[ulton] for R. H[earne], 1637), dialogue IX, ‘Mercury and Apollo’, pp. 111–13, translating from a bilingual Greek-Latin edition of Luciani Samosatensis Deorum Dialogi. For a discussion of Heywood’s use, and translation, of Lucian, see chapter 9 (Camilla Temple). 27 Scholion on Statius, Thebaid, IX.424, quoting a fragment from Lucan’s lost Catachthonion, ‘Thebais Alcmene, qua dum frueretur Olympi rector Luciferum ter jusserat Hesperon esse’: see Fragmenta poetarum romanorum, ed. Aemilius Baehrens (Leipzig: Teubner, 1886), p. 367. 28 Giovanni Boccaccio, Genealogia deorum gentilium, quoting from the 1532 edition prepared by Jacobus Micyllus, De montium, silvarum, fontium, lacuum, fluviorum, stagnorum et marium nominibus Joannis bocatii peri genealogias deorum, libri quindecim, cum annotationibus Jacobi micylli (Basel: Johannes Herwagen, 1532), XIII.i, p. 322. 29 Conti’s reference is to the Argonautica orphica, 115–18. The threefold night of Hercules’ conception was also mentioned in Apollodorus’ Library, trans. James G. Frazer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1921), II.iv.8, and by the Second Vatican Mythographer, 148, in Vatican Mythographers, Scriptores rerum mythicarum latini tres Romae nuper reperti, ed. G. H. Bode (Celle: Schulze, 1834). Statius refers to it as ‘ter noctem Herculeam’ in the Thebaid, XII.300–1. The reference is to Thebaid, ed. and trans. D. R. Shackleton Bailey, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). 30 See Henry D. Janzen’s edition of The Escapes of Jupiter in the Malone Society Reprints (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1978 [1976]), p. 58. 31 In the case in point, Perseus’ decapitation of the Gorgon happened in the year of the world 2497, the year before Christ 1466, while Josuah reigned in Israel: Thomas Lanquet and Thomas Cooper, An Epitome of Chronicles (London: William Seres, 1559), fol. 26v. 32 The Theoduli ecloga, written in the ninth or tenth century, was regularly printed until 1578. In England, Julian Notary printed it in 1505, Richard Pynson in 1503 and 1508, and Wynkyn de Worde in 1509 and 1515. Quotations are from Theodolus, Liber Theodoli (London: Wynkyn de Worde, 1515). 33 François Rabelais, Œuvres complètes, ed. Pierre Jourda, 2 vols (Paris: Garnier, 1962), vol. II, pp. 477–8. 34 On the deliberate, original use of spectacle, see Mark Bayer, ‘Popular classical drama: the case of Heywood’s Ages’, in Sean Keilen and Nick Moschovakis (eds), The Routledge Research Companion to Shakespeare and Classical Literature (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), pp. 227–35.

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35 She is Anteia for Homer, Iliad, VI.160. Apollodorus (Library, II.iii.1) calls her Stheneboea, a name Heywood adopts (with the spelling ‘Sthenoboea’) in Γυναικείον [Gynaikeion], or, Nine Bookes of Various History Concerninge Women (London: Adam Islip, 1624), V, p. 242, where his direct source is no longer Caxton, but Johannes Ravisius Textor, Theatrum poeticum et historicum, sive officina Io. Ravisii, ed. Conrad Lycosthenes (Basel: Leonard Ostenius, 1592), II.xlviiii col. 220 and II.lxxx col. 293. In this particular case, Heywood does not seem to have been influenced by Homer’s account of Bellerophon (Iliad, VI) in Chapman’s translation in either the 1609 or the 1612 edition. Although he restores his classical name to king Pretus (Caxton’s Pricus), the episode is inspired by Caxton’s Recuyell, from which he borrows the name of Aurea (Lefèvre’s Auria) – the result of a scribal mistake for the classical Antea or Anteia. 36 References for the Latin text are to Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Frank Justus Miller, rev. G. P. Goold, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999 [1916]); for the translation, here, to Arthur Golding (trans.), Ovid’s Metamorphoses, ed. Madeleine Forey (London: Penguin, 2002). 37 In classical literature, Hercules’ twin is called Iphicles. Heywood’s Ipectetes is probably a printer’s deformation of Ypecleus, the name given in Lefèvre and Caxton, which may have appeared as Ipecleus in Heywood’s manuscript. 38 Ovid’s ‘biformis’ (Metamorphoses, XI.121) or ‘bimembres’ (ibid., XII.240). 39 Philonome instead of Hylonome is likely to be the result of a transcription error. Nothing suggests that Heywood may have thought of the story of Cygnus, Philonome and Tennes, in Apollodorus, ‘Epitome’, The Library, III.23–5; or Pausanias, ‘Phocis’, in Description of Greece, trans. W. H. S. Jones, 5 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1918–35), vol. IV, X.xiv.1–2. Nor does anything suggest that he thought of the different story of Mars and Philonome as told in Plutarch, Moralia, trans. Frank Cole Babbitt et al., 16 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927–2004), vol. IV (1936), Paralella graeca et romana, 36, p. 309. 40 Guillaume Budé’s Greek-Latin dictionary translated antimachesis as ‘contentio, repugnantia’: Lexicon sive dictionarium graecolatinum G. Budaei, I. Tusani, R. Constantini (Geneva: Jean Crespin, 1562), p. 205. 41 Conti, Mythologia, VII.iv, ‘De Centauris’, p. 716; Textor, Theatrum poeticum et historicum, II.xxix, col. 170. 42 Gynaikeion, IV, p. 216. 43 ‘Nomen est compositum ex duobus verbis Graecis, ischo, & mache. Ischo Graecè significat habeo & mache dicitur pugna. Quia Hippodamia habuit in nuptiis iis pugnam, certamenque Centaurorum. Ideo Ischomache eleganter nuncupatur’: C. Val. Catulli, Albii Tibulli, Sex. Avr. Propertii, opera omnia quae exstant (Paris: Claudius Morellus, 1604), p. 630. Filippo Beroaldo’s commentary, first published in Venice (1495), was inserted in 1604, with others, in Morel’s Paris edition. 44 Conti, Mythologia, VII.iv, ‘De Centauris’, p. 714, ‘cum Pirithous … Hippodamiam Bystii filiam ducens nuptias celebraret’.

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45 Conti, Mythologia, VII.iv, ‘De Centauris’, p. 716: ‘alii igitur Ixionis filium Chironem fuisse tradiderunt, a quo originem duxerint Centauri. Alii Saturnum cum Phillyra Oceani filia congressum inquiunt …: mox cum ipsos Rhea deprehendisset, Saturnus ob pudorem se in equum vertit, unde Chiron natus dicitur …’. 46 Barthélemy Aneau, Picta poesis (Lyons: Macé Bonhomme, 1552), ‘Ambitio destruens’, p. 76. 47 Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, xii.96–7, in Roma Gill (ed.), The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987–98), vol. 2, p. 42. 48 George Sandys, Ovid’s Metamorphosis Englished, Mythologizd, and Represented in Figures (Oxford: John Lichfield, 1632), p. 101. 49 Marcantonio Natta, Marci Antonii Nattae Astensis De Deo libri XV (Venice: Paul Manutius, 1560), p. 20. The translation that follows is mine. 50 Metamorphoses, III.310–12. 51 Charles Estienne, Dictionarium historicum, geographicum, historicum (Geneva: Jacob Stoer, 1590), ‘Bacchus’, p. 91. 52 Conti, Mythologia, V.xiii, ‘De Baccho’, p. 500. Conti’s transcription obliterates the etymological foundation of this interpretation, which appears more clearly in Albricus’ Allegoriae poeticae, where the mount is not Neros but Meros, from meros, the thigh (Paris: de Marnef, 1520), sig. H3v. 53 Gynaikeion, VII, p. 336. Tania Demetriou discusses Heywood’s use of Ausonius in chapter 8. 54 Ausonius, ed. and trans. Hugh G. Evelyn-White, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1919–21), vol. I, pp. 384–5, lines 71–2. 55 Hortulus, XV. Part of the Appendix Vergiliana, the poem was currently reprinted in Virgil’s complete works. 56 John King (Bishop of London), Vitis Palatina: A Sermon Appointed to be Preached at Whitehall Upon the Tuesday After the Mariage of the Ladie Elizabeth her Grace (London: [Eliot’s Court Press] for John Bill, 1614), p. 17. Andrew Willet echoed John King in A Treatise of Salomons Marriage (London: Felix Kingston for Thomas Man and William Welby, 1612 [i.e. 1613]), sig. A2r: ‘[i]n the vine three speciall things excell, the tendernes thereof, the pleasantnes, fruitfulnes, as was excellently observed by that learned Bishop in his sermon’, signifying in a wife ‘the like flexible disposition, and mutuall delectation, and fruitfull propagation’. 57 The wedding took place on 14 February 1613. The Silver Age was presented at Court on the Sunday after Twelfth Night 1612. 58 All references to Shakespeare are to Gary Taylor, John Jowett, Terri Bourus and Gabriel Egan (gen. eds), The New Oxford Shakespeare, The Complete Works: Modern Critical Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017 [2016]). 59 The Silver Age, sig. G3v; The Tempest, IV.i.128–38. See Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), pp. 360–2. 60 Adams, ‘Shakespeare, Heywood, and the classics’, pp. 336–9.

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61 See Martin Wiggins and Catherine Richardson, British Drama 1533–1642: A Catalogue, Volume VI: 1609–1616 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 134. 62 Metamorphoses, V.491–4; Fasti, trans. James George Frazer, rev. G. P. Goold (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931), IV.437–42; Claudian, Claudian, trans. M. Platnauer, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1922), vol. II, De Raptu Proserpinae, II.118–50. 63 See for example Estienne, Dictionarium, pp. 267–8; Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1933), II.xxvi.66–7; Conti, Mythologia, III.xvi, ‘De Proserpina’; et al. 64 Varro, De Lingua latina, V.68, ‘Hinc Epicharmus Ennii Proserpinam quoque appellat, quod solet esse sub terris. Dicta Proserpina, quod haec ut serpens modo in dexteram modo in sinisteram partem late movetur’ (Ennius’ Epicharmus also calls her [the moon] Proserpine, because she regularly hides under the earth. She is called Proserpine because like a reptile she moves widely, now right now left). References are to Varro, On the Latin Language, trans. Roland G. Kent (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1938). Translation mine. 65 Servius, ‘Commentary on Virgil’s Georgics, I, v’, in Georg Thilo (ed.), Servii grammatici qui feruntur in Vergilii Bucolica et Georgica commentarii (Leipzig: Teubner, 1887), p. 130. 66 First published in his 1522 Basel edition of De Civitate Dei, Vives’s commentary was included in John Healey’s English translation, St. Augustine, Of the Citie of God With the Learned Comments of Jo. Lod. Vives (London: George Eld, 1610). The mythography of Proserpine is expounded on p. 164. For Conti, see Mythologia, III.xvi, ‘De Proserpina’, p. 251. 67 Ben Jonson, The Masque of Blackness, ed. David Lindley, line 172, vol. II, p. 519; The Masque of Beauty, ed. David Lindley, line 207, vol. III, p. 242; in David Bevington, Martin Butler and Ian Donaldson (gen. eds), The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, 7 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 68 John S. P. Tatlock, ‘The chief problem in Shakespeare’, The Sewanee Review, 24:2 (April 1916), 129–47 (p. 136). 69 Algernon Charles Swinburne, The Age of Shakespeare (New York: Harper, 1908), p. 212. 70 See chapter 6 (Charlotte Coffin). 71 The division in acts and scenes used in editions other than the Taylor, Jowett et al. edition is provided in square brackets. 72 Manfred Pfister, The Theory and Analysis of Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 239–45. 73 See Janice Valls-Russell, Agnès Lafont and Charlotte Coffin (eds), Interweaving Myths in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017). 74 Aristotle, Poetics, 1455b, trans. Stephen Halliwell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995).

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75 Plutarch, Moralia, XVI, ‘How the young man should study poetry’, vol. I, pp. 82–3. 76 Les Oeuvres morales & meslees de Plutarque translatees du grec en françois par Messire Jacques Amyot (Paris: M. de Vascosan, 1572), fol. 9v. 77 Philemon Holland, The Philosophie commonlie called the Morals written by the learned Philosopher Plutarch of Chaeronea (London: Arnold Hatfield, 1603), p. 20. 78 John Grange, The Golden Aphroditis (London: Bynneman, 1577), sig. N4v. 79 Gynaikeion, ‘Index, or Table’, sig. A4v.

5 A ‘glorious Greek’? Thomas Heywood and Hercules Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Richard Rowland

In 1609 William Jaggard printed – very badly indeed – Thomas Heywood’s Troia Britanica. This curious epic is essentially a versification of William Caxton’s Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye (first published in 1473/74, but reissued for the fifth time by Thomas Creede in 1607), interspersed with recent episodes of English history and establishing a ‘continuity’ between the legend of Troy and the history of England, from its beginnings to the reign of James I. Unsurprisingly, given that he devastated Troy twice, Hercules features in the work regularly, but the ways in which he is characterised there tell us a good deal about the ambivalence with which Heywood regarded him. So, for instance, in Canto VII we hear how the ‘glorious Greek’ (stanza 36) who had once heroically attempted to rescue Proserpina from her hellish dungeon, ‘with his club whole thousands slew’ in his second, climactic destruction of Troy (stanza 6).1 After his first assault on the city and its ungrateful ruler, we saw Hercules and his companions ‘[i]nsulting in the Trojan blood they spilled’ (VI.103), but in this final campaign they ‘pillage all the substance of the land, …, the Temples ruin quite, / And kill poor infants in their mothers’ sight’ (VII.89). The victors rape the wives and daughters – the ‘reverent Virgins’ – of their subjugated foes, and leave Troy ‘a confus’d heap of men and stones’ (VII.90). And yet, the analogy Heywood deploys to link these mythical acts of Herculean ­violence with England’s actual past is the capture of Cadiz, undertaken first by Sir Francis Drake, and more recently by the Earl of Essex, both ­characters Heywood ostensibly held in high regard; Drake had appeared heroically in the final moments of 2 If You Know Not Me, You Know No Bodie (c. 1604), and would be lauded in the closing canto of Troia itself, and Essex’s ‘great success’ in his expedition to Cadiz launched the action of 1 The Fair Maid of the West (1604?).2 A strangely blurred image of Hercules, then, emerges from Heywood’s epic poem, in which heroic  strength and occasional acts of generosity are juxtaposed with instances of indiscriminate brutality. Where did this bifurcated portrait come from?

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In An Apology for Actors, a work probably written the year before Troia but not published until 1612, Heywood claimed to ‘have seene, Hercules in his owne shape’ performing the twelve labours.3 We cannot be certain about what exactly Heywood had been watching – spectacular shows depicting the labours had been given in a number of European cities throughout the sixteenth century, some of them seen by English spectators and some featuring travelling English players – although it seems probable that he was referring to one or more plays that had been produced at the Rose playhouse on the South Bank of the Thames.4 On 7 May 1595 the impresario Philip Henslowe recorded takings for the first part of an anonymous (and lost) play entitled the firste pte of herculous, and two weeks later a performance of the 2 p of hercolas was marked in the account books as ‘ne’ (new); for the next seven months the two plays were performed regularly and on consecutive days, until in the winter the second part, which had proved consistently less lucrative, was dropped from the repertoire. In May 1598 the Admiral’s Men paid Martin Slater for ‘boockes … called ij ptes of hercolus’ (either completely new plays or repatched versions of the earlier works), and it may have been these playbooks that were recorded in an inventory of the same year.5 Whatever version of the Hercules narrative he had seen, a year after the publication of An Apology Heywood brought out his own interpretation of the story that had been performed by the Queen Anne’s Men playing at the Red Bull. The Brazen Age is an eccentric work, even by Heywood’s own standards. It is not really a single five-act play, but rather five one-act plays loosely grouped together, with the first and fifth sections, that chart the second marriage and ultimate demise of Hercules, bookending tales about Jason and Medea, and an essentially comic interlude featuring Venus and her less than successful love life. Its stage directions alone display some of the most bizarre descriptions/instructions of any early modern playtext, with the first act’s requirement for the centaur Nessus to enter ‘with an arrow through him’ providing a mere prelude to many of the staging challenges to come; Heywood’s text suggests that we should see rather than just hear about Mars’ hapless squire Gallus being transformed into a cockerel, Hercules killing a sea-monster and ‘tearing downe trees’ for his funeral pyre, not to mention Jupiter striking the burning hero with a thunderbolt, and fixing him as a star ‘in the firmament’.6 And yet, for all its spectacular visual pyrotechnics, and despite the fact that Heywood had insisted in An Apology that watching the exploits of Hercules was an unequivocally uplifting experience that would make any spectator aspire to emulate such deeds, the picture of the hero that emerges from his own play is a troubling one.7 As was his usual practice, Heywood would have familiarised himself with a huge range of sources as he began to compose

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the play – he was a formidable Latinist and we should recall that he had already produced a competent translation of Sallust and a version of Ovid’s Ars amatoria that would be reprinted many times and not displaced until John Dryden, William Congreve and Nahum Tate collaborated on a new version in the 1690s8 – but for his most striking reinterpretations of the Hercules myth he seems to have abandoned fidelity to the texts of Roman antiquity altogether. The basic story of the demise of Hercules at the hands of his second wife, Deianira, was a familiar one. Hercules, nearing the end of his many labours, was on his way home when he was overcome by an unconquerable lust for Iole, a princess, and when the girl’s father proved reluctant to hand his daughter over, Hercules not only killed the recalcitrant king but destroyed the city over which he ruled, and everything and everybody in it. Hercules then sent the girl ahead of him to his marital home, where his publicists leaked the rumour that Iole was just another captive, a legitimate trophy from a just war. Deianira discovers the truth of what has happened, and sends her husband a robe, to which she has applied a potion that she believes will secure his affections for her alone. This potion, however, has come from a dubious source: it was given to her by the centaur Nessus, who had tried to molest her but had been shot by Hercules before he could do so. It transpires that the potion is actually poison, and when Deianira is told by her son Hyllus that Hercules is now close to death, she takes her own life. Hercules himself, having brutally murdered his herald Lichas (the unwitting bearer of the poisoned robe), instructs his son to arrange a funeral pyre, and the hero then surrenders his body to the flames, achieving immortality rather than merely death in the process. The tale had been alluded to, cryptically and elliptically, in Hesiod’s Catalogue of Women, and it had been told in full in the Trachiniae (The Women of Trachis) of Sophocles.9 The narrative had been reinvented in ancient Rome, twice by Ovid – in Epistle IX of the Heroides, and in Book IX of the Metamorphoses – and then again in the pseudo-Senecan Hercules Oetaeus.10 Heywood’s reimagining of the story contains some surprising omissions. Iole, for instance, an entirely mute if significant character in the Sophocles play, but a voluble complainant in the Hercules Oetaeus, receives just one fleeting mention in The Brazen Age (a scathing one from Omphale at sig. K3r), whereas Heywood would later – and with no warrant from the ancient sources – offer a sympathetic account of the princess a­ ttempting suicide to escape the sexual aggression of Hercules.11 But in Heywood’s retelling of the Hercules myth he is capable of embellishment and invention as well as compression. Heywood’s first major innovation is in his depiction of Achelous, the river god with whom Hercules competed for the hand of Deianira. In The Brazen

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Age, his shape-changing notwithstanding, Achelous appears as a rather noble figure, intimidating in battle but gracious in defeat and, as so often, Heywood thus anticipates very modern interpretations of the nuances of his Ovidian source; his Achelous is, as Davide Secci has observed of the character in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, hopelessly outclassed by a career soldier like Hercules, but nonetheless an essentially pious and hospitable figure, a ‘city boy who has never had to get into a real street fight’.12 Moreover, Deianira’s only comment on the forthcoming struggle – ‘my love must be bought with blowes, / Not oratory wins me but the sword’ (sig. B2r) – locates her response in the same kind of emotional territory that Sophocles had created in the Trachiniae, a play which depicted her as anxious at the thought that her beauty would be the cause of bloodshed and, although relieved at avoiding his marriage bed, distressed by the violent humiliation of Achelous too.13 Having won the battle, Hercules reassures Deianira and her family that ‘Not Jove’s guard / Can circle her with more security’ (sig. B3v), and if he seems unaware of the irony involved in invoking the protection of a serial rapist, the audience perhaps is not, especially when, only a minute of stage time later, they hear of the fifty daughters of Thespius, whom ‘in one night’ Hercules ‘did adulterate’ (sig. Cv).14 The sense of defilement by adultery – which is also the sense with which Heywood invests this verb in both the printed text of The Silver Age and the closely related authorial manuscript The Escapes of Jupiter – does connect Heywood’s reading of this myth both with that of Ovid in the Heroides, and with the first English translation of the sequence, George Turberville’s vigorous Heroycall Epistles of 1567.15 When, for instance, in Heroides IX Deianira writes of the daughters of Thespius, the shudder of Ovid’s ‘quarum de populo nulla relicta tibi est’ (IX.52), ‘from whose number none was spared by you’, is captured admirably by Turberville’s ‘Of whome there scapte not one untoucht’. It is worth noting that this allegation of Herculean sexual violence is almost entirely muted in the translation that Wye Saltonstall produced in 1637, and disappears altogether from subsequent English translations throughout the seventeenth century.16 And it is through his depictions of the women who come into the orbit of Hercules that Heywood destabilises the play’s representation of the protagonist’s inexorable progress from heroic deeds to deification. In the middle of the play, for instance, Hercules, accompanied by Jason and the Argonauts, kills the sea-monster that has been threatening Troy, but is then refused his promised payment by the city’s king, Laomedon. Hercules kills him, and then bestows Hesione, the daughter of Laomedon, on his colleague Telamon as ‘the warlike purchase’ of his ‘sword’. Hesione protests repeatedly and passionately against this enforced marriage and the

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shame of being made ‘a Dukes base Concubine’, but Hercules ignores her complaints, and, as he had with the more compliant Deianira, leads off the silenced (and orphaned) Hesione as one of the ‘honored spoiles’ of conquest (sigs Hv-H2r). Heywood departs from his sources here, for in none of them did Hesione go with her rescuer/capturer unwillingly; in both Apollodorus and Hyginus, for example, she chose to accompany Telamon, and indeed bore him a famous son, Teucer.17 The rewriting of mythology in The Brazen Age, then, often serves a serious purpose. Heywood’s most radical departure from his sources concerns the play’s staging of the episode in which Hercules becomes enslaved by, and swaps clothing with, Omphale. This tale was constantly reimagined throughout the second half of the sixteenth century. English readers of Plutarch’s Lives found Hercules compared with the sensually extravagant Antony, and their attention was drawn to the many ‘painted tables’ that depicted the emasculation of the hero at the hands of Omphale. Sir Philip Sidney likewise wrote of ‘Hercules painted … in a woman’s attire, spinning at Omphale’s commandment’ as a spectacle that ‘breedeth both delight and laughter’, but reminders of the story were in fact ubiquitous.18 The heraldic chronicler John Bossewell, for instance, building on an observation that originated in Lucian’s scurrilous works, wrote contemptuously of how Omphale had compelled Hercules ‘to pike wolle, and to spynne and carde, and woulde sometyme so abuse hym, that she woulde beate hym aboute the heade, with her sandale or slipper’. This piece of slapstick comedy – with the sanction of scholarly Renaissance editions of the Heroides, which explicated Deianira’s scornful references to Omphale by directing readers to the farcical closing moments of the Eunuchus of Terence19 – was realised in performance by 1594: in the anonymous play Locrine the eponymous hero’s infatuation with ‘Humbers concubine’ was represented by the dumbshow that opened the fourth act, in which spectators were shown ‘Omphale … having a club in her hand, and a lions skinne on her back, Hercules following with a distaffe. Then let Omphale turn about, and taking off her pantofle, strike Hercules on the head.’20 Less than a decade later, in the more rarefied environment of a Latin play at St John’s College, Oxford, Matthew Gwinne identified the desire to emulate Hercules at the distaff as a sign of the emperor Claudius’s inveterate stupidity.21 There were the odd exceptions to these scoffing voices, and surely the oddest was that of the great puritan divine William Perkins, who described Hercules’ submission to Omphale’s commands as an exemplary ­illustration of the selfless devotion – ‘undergoing any labour that may be for her good’  – demanded of faithful lovers by St Paul in 1 Corinthians 13.22 Perkins’s generous reading of the episode also found expression in the enormously influential Il Pastor Fido, the play – first published in

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Venice in 1590, and first performed in Ferrara five or six years later – in which Gianbattista Guarini illustrated the new and fully theorised genre of tragicomedy. In the opening scene of the play, the old servant Linco regards the pleasure Hercules has received at the hands (and in the lap) of Omphale as an entirely welcome and necessary respite from the excessive demands of the hero’s labours and, it seems, the relentless demands placed on him as the definitive exemplar of masculinity.23 Equally curiously, when in 1597 Thomas Deloney had Jack of Newbury conduct the king and queen on a tour of the ‘hundred Loomes’ in his workshop, the song with which the two men working at each celebrated their task and ‘the bands of amitie’ that unite them began with an entirely unpejorative reference to the time ‘When Hercules did use to spin’.24 In one sense these very different writers were following a strand of late medieval thought in which Hercules’ ­enslavement was understood as simply an indication of the not wholly unwelcome authority of Eros – a Florentine painted salver now in the Victoria and Albert Museum depicts Hercules dressed in women’s clothing and spinning as an illustration of the ‘Triumph of Love’25 – and they were also anticipating the way in which Rubens would very soon substitute ‘the implements and stuffs of a feminine technology of production for a male technology of violence’ in his 1606 Hercules Mocked by Omphale. As a seventeenth-century admirer of the painting observed, in it Hercules enjoys his immersion in the dirty pleasures of the sweet insults offered by his shameless, beautiful and adored Omphale who, sumptuous and radiant, affectionately tugs at his ear and delights in the fact that at the first flash of her beauty, the invincible hero who could dominate tyrants, conquer the Hydra and purge Hell, was rendered her prisoner.

In Rubens’ work Hercules, displaying a powerful torso draped only with a few shreds of feminine costume and brandishing a distaff with phallic suggestiveness, chafes mildly at his subjugation. The painting realises Sidney’s blend of ‘delight and laughter’ and, as Lisa Rosenthal has argued, brings into tension the pleasures of submission to erotic passion and the demands of a heroic identity.26 In The Brazen Age Omphale initially appears as an essentially comic creation, for which Heywood has drawn on the sardonic wit of the Heroides, as well as a native tradition of English theatrical comedy; we have already seen this kind of characterisation in the dumbshow of Locrine, but the roots of such representations go back much further, to plays such as the mid-Tudor Tom Tyler and His Wife, in which shrewish women intimidate their men with a combination of sexual allure, frowns and the threat of violence.27 Omphale is accompanied by ‘4 or 5 maids’, and clearly relishes the control

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she ­exercises over her cross-dressed lover, as she bids him to ‘Leave prating, ply your worke’ (sig. K1r). When the Greek lords arrive they are duly appalled by the sight of the ‘base effeminate groome’, the ‘Hermophrodite’ [sic] into which Hercules has been translated (sig. K1v), but they eventually, of course, cajole Hercules into shedding his distaff and female attire along with his infatuation, and he then turns viciously against the ‘strumpet’ who has enthralled and enslaved him. All this is conventional enough, and indeed  in accord with the contemptuous scorn shown by the poet Heywood would later style ‘the all praise-worthy and ever-to-be-remembred’ Edmund Spenser, in whose Faerie Queene the infatuation of Artegall with Radigund and her ‘distaffe vile’ recalls Hercules’ subjugation to Omphale.28 But then, without prompting from any of his sources, Heywood makes three entirely original adjustments to the received narrative. First, it transpires that Omphale had not been solely motivated by a desire for dominance or the fame that she would accrue through her subjugation of so great a figure. Rather she had been in love with Hercules, and as a result – and this constitutes Heywood’s second innovation – she has followed him to the site of the sacrificial ritual in order to win back his affection. There, she witnesses the donning of the poisoned robe and the beginning of his torment, and she makes a remarkable vow in response to the spectacle: The Lydian Omphale will be to him A truer mystresse, then his wife, whose hate Hath brought on him this sad and ominous fate. Nor hence, for any force or prayer remove, But die with him whom I so deerely love. (The Brazen Age, sig. L2r)

Accordingly, she presents herself to her former lover, but Hercules, in his mad rage, believes that she is in fact Deianira and so, in the last and most extraordinary of his departures from the sources, Heywood’s Hercules smashes Omphale’s head in with a rock and kills her. When we hear, in the closing moments of the play, of Deianira’s remorse and suicide, it is described as a ‘noble act’ (sig. L3r). Yet the killing of the ‘guiltlesse queene that came to mourne’ Hercules but was instead murdered by him is seen, by the audience on and off stage, in a very different light. The layers of irony with which Heywood handles Deianira’s story are many and complex. It is, for instance, an unusual twist on the tale to have her first celebrated as a ‘constant Lady’, ‘faire, chast’, and ‘absolute  / In all perfections’ (sigs K2r, K3r), and only moments later denounced – ‘Shee is her sexes scandall, and her shame / Even whilst Time lives, shall every tongue proclaime’ (sig. Lr) – by, of all people, the adulterous Jason, and

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for this public shaming to be overheard by the concealed (and similarly adulterous) Omphale. This kind of vilification of Deianira harks back to the ferociously misogynist and misogamist texts of late medieval England, such as the very first book to appear from William Caxton’s shop (in 1473), his own English rendition of Raoul Lefèvre’s Le Recueil des histoires de Troyes. For Caxton, a major source of Heywood’s for Troia, Hercules is a knightly hero, but also an intellectual one, who ‘lovyd bookes above all the rychesse of the world’.29 Despite the inclusion of a loose paraphrase of Heroides IX, figured as a second letter from Deianira to her husband upon the reading of which he is ‘smyten with remors of conscience’ (p. 493, lines 13–14), Caxton omits all reference to the impregnation of the fifty d ­ aughters of Thespius, and incorporates only the briefest of Deianira’s allusions to her husband’s living ‘after the gyfe and maner of a woman’, and his spinning ‘on the rocke’ (p. 491, lines 14–15). In Caxton’s hands Deianira’s guilt is exacerbated by the fact that not one but two of her waiting women entrusted with the application of Nessus’ potion to the ‘sherte’ she sends to her husband drop dead as a result of their labours (pp. 494–5), and Caxton’s account of the life of Hercules, and indeed the second book of the entire history, ends with the hero’s fierce denunciation of his wife’s ‘false Jalousye’, ‘machynacion’, and ‘trayson’ (p. 499, lines 1–3). Twice arraigning his wife as a ‘disnaturall woman’ (p. 497, lines 30–1, p. 498, line 4), Hercules insists that Deianira will be an eternal object  of loathing to all ‘propre wyves’, and that even their unborn children will ‘cracche’ (spit) in her face and curse her ‘with oute ende’ (p. 498, line 14). While The Brazen Age gives strident voice to such defamations of Deianira, the action of the play as a whole tells a very different story: Deianira’s love for Hercules is never in question, but it is equally clear that her marriage brings her more sorrow than pleasure. As in the Heroides, she laments her husband’s long and frequent absences, and on the rare occasions they are seen together, their encounters are fleeting and inconsequential. Heywood’s choric ‘Homer’ describes how upon his return from the cleansing of the Augean stables, Deianira greets Hercules ‘[w]ith glad imbraces, but he staies not long’ (sig. E3v, sd), and again, after the news arrives of Hercules’ adultery with Omphale, Deianira is shown in a dumbshow, ‘sad’, and impervious to the attempts of her husband’s followers to console her (sig. I4r). Heywood’s staging, then, goes beyond the speaker in Chaucer’s The Monk’s Tale, who is unable to decide on the nature and extent of Deianira’s guilt – ‘Be as be may, I wol hire noght accusen’ – and ventures rather towards the position adopted by John Gower in the fourth book of his Confessio Amantis, who asks his readers to ponder carefully the ‘wepende yhe and woful herte’ of Deianira, and ends his tale not with the

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death (much less the apotheosis) of Hercules, but with the haunting image of his betrayed wife, ‘sori for everemo’.30 This image of Deianira as an abused and solitary figure was also, of course, most powerfully realised in the Trachiniae of Sophocles,31 and Heywood may have had some first-hand knowledge of the Greek dramatist. In the preface to The Iron Age (published in 1632, but probably composed and performed in 1613) Heywood made an unmistakable reference to the parallel Greek and Latin text of Aristophanes prepared by Philipp Nicodemus Frischlin, and published in Frankfurt in 1597.32 Parallel-text editions of Sophocles, such as the one edited by Joachim Camerarius and Henri Estienne published in Geneva in 1603 that found its way into the library of Sir Edward Dering, were widely available, particularly in Cambridge, where Heywood studied in the early 1590s.33 It is quite possible that Heywood derived from such editions the knowledge he displays of both the Oedipus Tyrannus and the Oedipus at Colonus in his Gynaikeion, and he may have consulted the same sources when he quoted, in Latin, from both the Oedipus Tyrannus and the Ajax in his Hierarchie of the Blessed Angells.34 As discussed in other chapters in this volume, other collections, including mythographic compendia, commonplace books and dictionaries, also provided Heywood with some of his more abstruse references – as when he enlists the support of Sophocles in the denunciation of idolatry with which Hierarchie begins, and even cites a little-known fragment from his Andromeda. He could have found plenty of references to the Trachiniae in other places too: for instance, in 1593, the year in which Heywood probably abandoned his studies in Cambridge, the innovative university printer John Legate issued a Greek text of Lysias’ Eratosthenes, followed by an extensive Latin commentary in which Andrew Downes, the Regius Professor of Greek, not only recounted the story of Hercules’ impregnation of the daughters of Thespius, but quoted (in Greek, but with Latin contextualisation and translations) repeatedly from the Trachiniae.35 If Heywood did know the tragedy, he would have found there a particularly distressing example of the Sophoclean chorus, which is utterly unmoved by the plight of the play’s female protagonist, and although Heywood does not deploy a chorus as such in The Brazen Age, he does provide his Hercules with a group of followers who are similarly and entirely indifferent to Deianira’s suffering. Amongst this circle of unsympathetic witnesses, it is the fickle Jason who also generates the play’s most sinister allusion to the darkest aspects of the Herculean myth. Upon receiving the ‘welcome present’ of the ‘shirt’ sent by Deianira, Hercules promises to celebrate her ‘guift’ by erecting his famous pillars ‘beyond the Pyrene Hils’, a region he describes as ‘Alcides utmost bounds’. Ancient historians such as Silius Italicus told that Pyrene was a

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girl raped, impregnated and abandoned by Hercules, and that the mountain range amidst which she gave birth (to a snake) and died was named the Pyrenees (the ‘Pyrene Hils’) in commemoration of her fate.36 Jason’s response to this promise – ‘Never was Hercules so much himselfe’ (sig. K4r) – is an unwittingly accurate tribute to the damage the hero has done, particularly to the women unfortunate enough to attract his attentions. Women are not of course the only victims of Hercules, and Heywood once again presented his players with an interesting logistical problem when they had to act the murder of the luckless man who carried the poisoned shirt from Deianira to her husband: ‘Hercules swings Lychas about his head, and kils him’ (sig. L1v, sd). But if we return to Heywood’s Apology, we find this brutal episode in the hero’s career posing challenges that transcend the mere practicalities of staging. Here is how Heywood reported Nero indulging his appetite for violent theatrical performance, and in ­particular his fondness for playing the role of Hercules: Amongst many other parts acted by him in person, it is recorded of him, that with generall applause in his owne theater he played Hercules Furens, and amongst many other arguments of his compleatnesse, excellence, and extraordinary care in his action, it is thus reported of him: being in the depth of a passion, one of his servants (as his part then fell out) presenting Lychas, who before had from Deianeira brought him the poysoned shirt, dipt in the bloud of the centaure Nessus: he in the middest of his torture and fury, finding this Lychas hid in a remote corner (appoynted him to creep into of purpose) although he was, as our tragedians use, but seemingly to kill him by some false imagined wound, yet was Caesar so extremely carryed away with the violence of his practised fury, and by the perfect shape of the madnesse of Hercules, to which he had fashioned all his active spirits, that he slew him dead at his foot, & after swoong him terq; quaterq; (as the poet sayes) about his head. It was the manner of the emperours, in those dayes, in their publicke tragedies to choose out the fittest amongst such, as for capital offences were condemned to dye, and imploy them in such parts as were to be kil’d in the tragedy … (Apology, sig. E3v)

Heywood was clearly fascinated by the horrific demise of Hercules’ herald. He had reported it in Troia, where he inserts into a narrative that follows Caxton’s version in Recuyell a direct echo of Ovid’s description in Metamorphoses IX.217, ‘terque quaterque rotatum’: ‘about his head he wheels him in the skies’ (Troia, VII.102). In quick succession, therefore, between 1608 and 1613, Heywood reports the death of Lichas in Troia, stages it in The Brazen Age and embeds it in a portrait of a tyrant, in a ­troubling mise-en-abyme which, Tanya Pollard suggests in chapter 10, ‘highlights the mobilising force that Heywood ascribes to the theatre’, especially when the theatrical identification is with a hero ‘rooted in mythic

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greatness’. But he then goes on to mock his own fascination a couple of years later, in The Four Prentices of London, when the boisterous Godfrey threatens to deal with a putative enemy just as ‘Hercules threw Lichas from an Hill’ (vi.38).37 Heywood’s capacity for self-mockery is almost as boundless as his seeming capacity for the disingenuous, particularly in a work like An Apology. It is difficult to imagine how even he could have believed that this anecdote would enhance the credibility of his defence of the theatrical profession, and quoting Ovid, behind whom may resonate Aeneas’ anguished death wish, ‘o terque, quaterque beati’ (Aeneid, I, 94), is surely a hindrance rather than a help to his cause.38 In An Apology, then, Heywood presented one nightmarish vision – of the close relationship between the theatre, the myths of Herculean violence and the horrors of political tyranny – that, during the first full year of the reign of Charles I, would be brilliantly realised at the Blackfriars playhouse in Philip Massinger’s The Roman Actor. Meanwhile, in the pages of Troia and Gynaikeion, and on the stage of the Red Bull, Heywood explored what was, for him, an equally disturbing scenario: the vulnerability of any ‘weak woman’ or ‘innocent lady’ who had the misfortune to cross paths with ‘the great Alcides’.39

Notes This chapter builds upon my previous work on Hercules, published in Killing Hercules: Deianira and the Politics of Domestic Violence from Sophocles to the War on Terror (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017).   1 Thomas Heywood, Troia Britanica (London: William Jaggard, 1609). References are to Yves Peyré (gen. ed.), Troia Britanica (2009–19), available at www.shak myth.org, accessed 24 June 2020.   2 Thomas Heywood, The Second Part of, If You Know Not Me, You Know No Bodie (London: [Thomas Purfoot] for Nathaniel Butter, 1606), sigs Kr-v; Robert K. Turner, Jr (ed.), The Fair Maid of the West, Parts I and II (London: Edward Arnold, 1968), Part I, I.i.5. Heywood was still heralding the triumphs of Drake in A True Description of His Majesties Royall Ship (London: John Okes for John Aston, 1637), sigs D4r-v, which Janice Valls-Russell discusses in chapter 12. See the appendix to this volume for a chronology of Heywood’s writings.   3 Thomas Heywood, An Apology for Actors (London: Nicholas Okes, 1612), sig. B4r; all further references are to this edition.   4 In 1572 Sir Thomas Smyth described seeing in Paris ‘Antiques … carying of men one uppon an other wch som men call Labores Herculis’; John Stow wrote in his Annales of 1592 of English comedians under the patronage of the Earl of Leicester ‘dauncing, vauting & tumbling, with the forces of Hercules’ in the Netherlands in 1586; and these shows followed acrobatic representations

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of Herculean exploits given in Venice in 1528, Geneva and Nuremburg in the 1540s, and Strasbourg in the 1570s: see K. M. Lea, Italian Popular Comedy: A Study in the Commedia Dell’Arte, 1560–1620, with Special Reference to the English Stage, 2 vols (New York: Russell & Russell, 1962 [1934]), vol. II, pp. 348, 406.   5 R. A. Foakes (ed.), Henslowe’s Diary, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 29–34, 89, 324; Carol Chillington Rutter, Documents of the Rose Playhouse (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), pp. 91, 96.   6 Thomas Heywood, The Brazen Age (London: Nicholas Okes for Samuel Rand, 1613), sigs C1v, H4v, F1v, L2r and L3r; all further references are to this edition. It should be noted, however, that Alan C. Dessen has eloquently defended the first of these directions: see ‘The arrow in Nessus’, in Elizabethan Stage Conventions and Modern Interpreters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), esp. pp. 16–18. For an astute analysis of the staging demands of Heywood’s Ages sequence as a whole, see Eva Griffith, A Jacobean Company and its Playhouse: The Queen’s Servants at the Red Bull Theatre (c. 1605–1619) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), esp. pp.  103–5. But George Fulmer Reynolds clearly had a point when he observed that ‘the end of the play would drive a realistically minded person quite frantic’: The Staging of Elizabethan Plays at the Red Bull Theater 1605–1625 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1940), p. 150.   7 I am not convinced by Douglas Arrell’s suggestion that The Brazen Age is in fact just a reworking of part of the two Henslowe plays that Heywood wrote himself back in the 1590s: see ‘Heywood, Henslowe and Hercules: tracking 1 and 2 Hercules in Heywood’s Silver and Brazen Ages’, Early Modern Literary Studies, 17:1 (2014), 1–21. See also the Introduction to this volume for a discussion of the dating of the plays.   8 On Heywood’s version of Ars amatoria, see chapter 2 (M. L. Stapleton).   9 See Hesiod, The Shield. Catalogue of Women. Other Fragments, ed. and trans. Glenn W. Most (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), fr. 22, lines 17–23. 10 In this chapter I am primarily interested in actual stagings of the Hercules story, but it should be acknowledged that both the genuinely Senecan Hercules Furens and the pseudo-Senecan Hercules Oetaeus had a profound influence on the dramaturgy of early modern England. Well-known examples are discussed throughout Robert S. Miola, Shakespeare and Classical Tragedy: The Influence of Seneca (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), esp. pp. 122–43, and they are brilliantly analysed in Gordon Braden’s Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradition: Anger’s Privilege (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), esp. pp. 172–8. In what was essentially a redaction of the final act of the Oetaeus, Heywood offered a graphic description of the deaths of both Hercules and his herald Lichas in Troia, Canto VII. But texts such as William Gager’s Meleager, an academic Latin tragedy performed at Oxford in 1582, and William Alabaster’s Roxana, a Latin tragedy given at Cambridge in the 1590s, were also littered with echoes of or quotations from the Oetaeus. Gager’s debt is charted

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in Helen Slaney, The Senecan Aesthetic: A Performance History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 50–4. In Roxana, Deianira’s foreboding of great evil as Hyllus brings news of his dying father (line 745) is one of dozens of Alabaster’s borrowings from the Roman play: see (with the proviso that its location of quotations is not unfailingly accurate) Act II, line 318 in Dana F. Sutton’s hypertext edition of the Latin text, available at www.philological.bham.ac.uk/ alabaster/, accessed 24 June 2020. 11 Γυναικείον [Gynaikeion], or, Nine Bookes of Various History Concerninge Women (London: Adam Islip, 1624), sig. Hh5v; Heywood also wrote poignantly of Deianira’s suicide in the same book (sig. T3r). Elsewhere, Heywood introduced Iole into his account of Hercules’ behaviour where his ancient sources did not. Thus, where Ovid made no mention of the princess, in Heywood’s ‘translation’ Hercules ‘[s]hapt like a woman did both card and spin’ to win ‘Ioles grace’: see M. L. Stapleton (ed.), Thomas Heywood’s ‘Art of Love’: The First Complete English Translation of Ovid’s ‘Ars Amatoria’ (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), II.297–8 (p. 84). 12 Davide A. Secci, ‘Ovid Met. 9.1–97: through the eyes of Achelous’, Greece & Rome, 56:1 (2009), 34–54 (p. 38). 13 See Sophocles, The Women of Trachis, ed. and trans. Hugh Lloyd-Jones (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), lines 9–25, 517–30; all further references are to this edition. 14 Similarly, Lucrece invokes the protection of Jove moments before she is raped: see chapter 3 (Janice Valls-Russell). 15 See The Silver Age (London: Nicholas Okes, 1613), sig. Fv; Henry D. Janzen (ed.). The Escapes of Jupiter, Malone Society Reprints (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978 [1976]), line 2373. 16 This, and all subsequent quotations from the Heroides, are from the edition and translation by Grant Showerman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977 [1914]); George Turberville (trans.), The Heroycall Epistles of the Learned Poet Publius Ovidius Naso (London: Henry Denham, 1567), sig. G7r; Wye Saltonstall (trans.), Ovids Heroicall Epistles, Englished by W.S (London: R[ichard] B[adger] for M[ichael] Sparke, 1637), sig. E3v. For discussion of these translations, see Rowland, Killing Hercules, pp. 106–23. Heywood revisited the tale of the daughters of Thespius in A Challenge for Beautie (London: R. Raworth, 1636), sig. Er. 17 Apollodorus, The Library, II.v.ix, III.xii; Hyginus, Fabulae, lxxxix. I am quoting from R. Scott Smith and Stephen M. Trzaskoma (eds and trans.), Apollodorus’ ‘Library’ and Hyginus’ ‘Fabulae’ (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 2007), pp. 34, 38–9, 126–7. For a survey of the ancient sources on Hesione, see Timothy Gantz, Early Greek Myth: A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources, 2 vols (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), vol. I, pp. 400–2, 442–3. 18 Plutarch, The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romanes, trans. Sir Thomas North (London: Thomas Vautroullier and John Wight, 1579), sig. QQQQ2v; in his life of Theseus, a more sympathetic view of the Omphale episode is offered,

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not least because Plutarch suggests that during the year of Hercules’ servitude international crime levels rose dramatically (sig. A2v). See also The Defence of Poesy in Katherine Duncan-Jones (ed.), Sir Philip Sidney: The Major Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 245. 19 See for instance Publii Ovidii Nasonis poetae sulmonensis, heroides epistolae: cum interpretibus Hubertino (Venice: np, 1587), sig. G6v. The reference is to the captain Thraso’s justification of his proposed surrender to the courtesan Thais at Eunuchus, line 1027: see Frederick W. Clayton (trans.), The Comedies of Terence (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2006), p. 148. 20 John Bossewell, Workes of Armorie (London: Richard Totell, 1572), sig. C6v; R. B. McKerrow (ed.), The Tragedy of Locrine, Malone Society Reprints (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1908), lines 1353–8, 1371; Lucian, Dialogues of the Gods, XV (XIII), in The Works, trans. M. D. Macleod, 8 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1913–67), vol. VII, pp. 314–15. Heywood did not include Lucian’s dialogue between Asclepius and Hercules in the collection he published in Pleasant Dialogues and Dramma’s (London: R. O[ulton] for R. H[earne], 1637). 21 Matthew Gwinne, Nero tragædia nova (London: Edward Blount, 1603), sig. B2r. This less than respectful view of Hercules would be echoed in Heywood’s contribution to the collection of verses that celebrated Robert Dover’s initiation of a new crop of rural sports in the Cotswold hills – a venture that dwarfs, Heywood suggests, Hercules’ supposed founding of the Olympic games: see Matthew Walbancke, Annalia Dubrensia: Upon the Yeerely Celebration of M Robert Dovers Olimpick Games Upon Cotswold-Hills (London: Robert Raworth for Mathewe Walbancke, 1636), sigs Kr-v. 22 William Perkins, A Commentarie or Exposition, upon the Five First Chapters of the Epistle to the Galatians ([Cambridge]: John Legate, 1604), sig. Eeee1v. Abraham Fraunce was less respectful than Perkins, noting that ‘[h]e that mastred men, was whipped by a woman’, but he also reported that, this aberration notwithstanding, Hercules duly achieved deification: The Third Part of the Countesse of Pembrokes Yvychurch: Entituled, Amintas Dale (London: [Thomas Orwyn] for Thomas Woodcocke, 1592), sig. Nr. 23 See the translation of Battista Guarini, Il Pastor Fido: or The Faithfull Shepheard, trans. John(?) or Charles(?) Dymock (London: [Thomas Creede] for Simon Waterson, 1602), sig. B3r. See also the online edition of the University of Oxford Text Archive, available at https://ota.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/repository/ xmlui/handle/20.500.12024/A42281, accessed 2 July 2020. In a fine essay Patricia Simons notes the ways in which the strain of forging Hercules as the exemplar of masculinity unleashed a plethora of artefacts – sculptures, statuettes, drawings and paintings – in which his labours, and particularly his struggle with Antaeus, were depicted with erotic (and often homoerotic) intensity: ‘Hercules in Italian Renaissance art: masculine labour and homoerotic libido’, Art History, 31:5 (2008), 632–64. 24 Francis Oscar Mann (ed.), The Works of Thomas Deloney (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912), 31.

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25 See Susan L. Smith, The Power of Women: A Topos in Medieval Art and Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), p. 195 and fig. 44. 26 Lisa Rosenthal, Gender, Politics, and Allegory in the Art of Rubens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp.  133–44; the translation of the letter quoted here, written to the Duke of Mantua from his agent in 1661, is Rosenthal’s (p. 135). 27 See the edition by George Charles Moore Smith, Tom Tyler and His Wife, Malone Society Reprints (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1910), sig. C3v, for a song in which the shrew and her gossips celebrate her power over her husband; and for discussion, see Pamela Allen Brown’s excellent Better a Shrew than a Sheep: Women, Drama, and the Culture of Jest in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), esp. pp. 129–31. 28 Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton (London: Longman, 1977), V.v.24; Thomas Heywood, The Hierarchie of the Blessed Angells (London: Adam Islip, 1635), sig. X5r. 29 William Caxton, The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, ed. H. Oskar Sommer, 2 vols (London: David Nutt, 1894; reprinted as one volume, New York: AMS Press, 1973), pp.  417, lines 6–7; all further references are to page and line numbers in this edition. Heywood acknowledges a debt to Caxton’s ‘historical’ writings in The Life of Merlin (London: J. Okes, 1641), sig. Bb4r (p. 183). 30 The Monk’s Tale, in Larry Benson (ed.), The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), line 2129; Russell A. Peck (ed.), John Gower: Confessio Amantis, 3 vols (Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University Press, 2000–03), vol. II, Book IV, lines 2279, 2307. Heywood referred to Chaucer as ‘the reverent Poet’ in Troia, Canto XI (Heywood’s endnotes to Canto XI). 31 See, for instance, Poulheria Kyriakou, who suggests that Deianira is ‘the loneliest, most isolated person in extant Greek tragedy’: The Past in Aeschylus and Sophocles (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2011), pp. 381–3. 32 The Iron Age (London: Nicholas Okes, 1632), sig. A3r. 33 R. J. Fehrenbach and E. S. Leedham-Green (eds), Private Libraries in Renaissance England: A Collection and Catalogue of Tudor and Early Stuart Book-Lists, 5 vols (Binghamton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1992–2004), vol. I, 223. Tanya Pollard notes the existence of thirty-six editions of Sophocles in sixteenth-century Cambridge alone: ‘Greek playbooks and dramatic forms in early modern England’, in Allison K. Deutermann and András Kiséry (eds), Formal Matters: Reading the Materials of English Renaissance Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), pp. 99–123 (p. 100). 34 Gynaikeion, sig. Q3r; Hierarchie, sigs Yy5v and Xx4r. 35 Hierarchie, sigs A5v and P2v; Lysias, Lysias Eratosthenes, hoc est, brevis et luculenta defensio Lysiae pro caede Eratosthenis (Cambridge: John Legate, 1593), sigs M2r, O2v, O3r, P6v and Q2v (for the daughters of Thespius, see sig. M6r). Heywood probably picked up the allusion to the Andromeda from its mention in the Deipnosophists of Athenaeus, which he read in the Latin translation, first published by Natale Conti in Venice in 1556, and ­subsequently issued in England in 1609; see Richard Rowland, Thomas Heywood’s Theatre,

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­ 599–1639: Locations, Translations and Conflict (Burlington, VT and Farnham: 1 Ashgate, 2010), p. 218, n. 37. 36 Silius Italicus, Punica, III.415–41, trans. J. D. Duff (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1934). Heywood undoubtedly knew the Pyrene story well, and the Punica version of it in particular: he referred to it twice in Gynaikeion, and on the second occasion specifically cited Silius Italicus as his source; and in the same volume he turned to the work again when describing how ‘flourishing citties’ are ruined by ‘riot’ and ‘unlawfull pleasure’: Gynaikeion, sigs T3v, Oov and Pp5r. On Pyrene, see also chapter 7 (Yves Peyré). Heywood returned to the Punica as the source of a tale of yet another potentially ‘defiled daughter’, Virginia, in A Curtaine Lecture (London: Robert Young for John Aston, 1637), sig. D12r-v (p. [71], wrongly numbered 91). 37 Thomas Heywood, The Four Prentices of London by Thomas Heywood, in Ladan Niayesh (ed.), Three Romances of Eastern Conquest (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018). 38 Heywood’s story, however, does have the sanction of ancient sources. See, for instance, Dio Cassius, Roman History, Epitome of Book LXIII.9.5, who also claimed (LXII.20.3) that Seneca both coached Nero’s performances and orchestrated favourable audience responses to them. Dio Cassius, History, trans. Earnest Cary with Herbert B. Foster (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914). See also Suetonius, Lives of the Caesars. VI, Nero, XXI, trans. J. C. Rolfe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914) – also in Philemon Holland’s translation, The Historie of Twelve Caesars (London: [H. Lownes and G. Snowdon] for Matthew Lownes, 1606), sig. R4v. See also Shadi Bartsch, Actors in the Audience: Theatricality and Doublespeak from Nero to Hadrian (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), pp. 1–62. 39 Troia, VII, stanzas 99–8, 103.

6 The not-so-classical tradition: mythographic complexities in 1 Iron Age Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Charlotte Coffin

Thomas Heywood’s 1 Iron Age (performed c. 1613, published 1632)1 contains evidence of the playwright’s interest in Homer and particularly in George Chapman’s translation of the Iliad.2 However, this staging of the Trojan War also relies on non-Homeric sources, especially William Caxton’s The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye (1473/74). Although scholars have long recognised this debt,3 Heywood’s engagement with medieval mythography has not been analysed in detail. The electronic edition of Troia Britanica (in which Heywood also exploits Caxton’s text) has accomplished tremendous work in identifying several of the sources he combined and pinpointing specific borrowings.4 Such textual scholarship lays the groundwork for investigations into Heywood’s creative methods of rewriting and of incorporating classical material which are, to a great extent, the object of the present volume. As I explore Heywood’s debt to the late medieval Recuyell, my aim is first to complicate our understanding of ‘the classical tradition’. Does the expression suggest a straight line from antiquity to Renaissance, with Heywood reading Homer and Ovid – which he did, ‘fine classicist’ that he was5 – or does it imply a chain made of multiple intermediary links, any of which Heywood may have drawn on? I shall turn to both mythological scholarship and literary historiography as I discuss the not-so-classical tradition. Then I shall focus on Recuyell’s influence upon 1 Iron Age, to argue that Heywood picked up its medieval, retrospective, pessimistic viewpoint on Troy and translated it into the play’s obsession with predictions and posterity. Finally, I shall study how Heywood handled the contradictions arising both from within Caxton’s collection and from his combination of it with Homer’s Iliad and Ovid’s Heroides and Metamorphoses. While he reverted to classical sources to supplement Recuyell,6 his interweaving is not seamless but sometimes looks like a patchwork of disparate pieces.7 Like Richard Rowland, I think that Heywood was both learned and experienced enough to have deliberately introduced such jarring juxtapositions, and that

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they were part of his poetics.8 In 1 Iron Age, they may also invite us to take a critical look at classical culture and heroism.

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Reconsidering the tradition Although mythology seems classical material par excellence, its endless rewritings complicate the notion of a classical tradition. As Yves Peyré writes, intertextuality is present from the start: When Shakespeare plays host to Ovid, he is not inviting Ovid alone into his text, he is also welcoming in Ovid reading Virgil, himself reading Homer, with all the depth, freedom and delicious lightness this multi-layering engenders, as each text leaves a trace in the others, introducing an enriching leaven that expands the text.9

The volume from which this quotation is taken emphasises the fluidity of the mythological tradition, which involves adaptations from antiquity through the Middle Ages to the early modern period, and their simultaneous availability to playwrights who combined them in a process of interweaving or multilayering. This is what Peyré calls feuilletage, using a culinary metaphor from Roland Barthes. The point is not so much to consider intermediary steps in a linear process of transmission as to recognise ‘multi-directional interactions’.10 Embracing classical versions and medieval rewritings, translations and originals, erudite glosses and dictionary entries, plus reappropriations across various genres, the mythological ‘tradition’ is better visualised as a web than a line. The Trojan story epitomises this complexity. It is diversely recounted by Homer, Ovid and Virgil: the electronic edition of Troia demonstrates that Heywood used all three, accessing the Greek epic through Chapman’s Seaven Bookes.11 But that tradition also took an early step to the side with Dares Phrygius’s De Excidio Troiae historia and Dictys Cretensis’s Ephemeris belli Trojani. Tempting as it is to exclude from the classical tradition what C. D. Benson terms ‘odd works, brief and crude’,12 medieval and early modern culture viewed them as more classical than Homer: they allegedly offered eyewitness reports on the war and seemed more ancient and truthful than the Iliad. Although those documents are forgeries, they originate in antiquity. Both sixth-century ce Latin accounts claim to be translations from Greek texts; scholars found fragments of a Greek original for Ephemeris dating probably from the second century ce, and deem it likely that De Excidio has a similar source. Written long after Homer, these texts rely on the Iliad even as they strive to distinguish themselves from it.13 So Homer remains at the origin of a tradition which splits into

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two branches and two genres, poetry and history. Heywood alludes to this divergence when he writes in the second preface to 1 Iron Age that the Trojan story has been ‘ingeniously commented, and labouriously recorded, by the Muses darlings, the poets: And Times learned remembrancers, the hist[o]riographers’.14 The sentence points to two categories of sources without implying tension between them: at this stage having multiple versions reinforces the ‘antiquity and noblenesse of the history’ and is good advertising.15 The Trojan tradition is further complicated by subsequent adaptations of Dares and Dictys. Around 1160, Benoît de Sainte-Maure combined them into his French verse Roman de Troie, which was translated into Latin prose by Guido delle Colonne as Historia destructionis Troiae in 1287. Raoul Lefèvre turned Guido back into French, finishing Le Recueil des histoires de Troyes in 1464, which William Caxton translated into the English Recuyell published in 1473/74.16 The word ‘translation’ does not convey the alterations along the way: this is a story of metamorphoses across genres and styles, through expansion or reduction. Benoît much developed the story he found in Dares and Dictys, adding lavish descriptions and f­abulous details. He was ‘weaving in elements not only from ­classical sources like the Metamorphoses but also from all the romances and fairy tales he had ever read or heard’, and he created the story of Troilus and Briseida (later Cressida).17 Conversely, Guido was intent on historical accuracy and removed Benoît’s additions, ‘excising’ everything that seemed ‘historically suspect’.18 Heywood himself rewrites Recuyell first in Troia, a copious narrative poem full of developments and digressions, then in 1 Iron Age, where the dramatic form requires great economy. These transformations complicate the apparent linearity of successive adaptations, and other texts written in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries further enhance the sense of a network rather than a chain: Benson’s The History of Troy in Middle  English Literature explores three ‘histories’ (The Destruction of Troy, The Laud Troy Book and Lydgate’s Troy Book) and two poems (Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and Henryson’s Testament of Cressid). When Heywood rewrites the Trojan book of Recuyell into several cantos of Troia and then 1 Iron Age, he therefore joins a rich and complex tradition. Having strayed far from its Homeric origins, the Trojan narrative in Recuyell seems unclassical and quaint to modern readers, yet Caxton is self-conscious about his position within the tradition. Book III of Recuyell recurrently alludes to Dares, leaping over local sources to quote the most ancient one.19 Despite successive transformations, indications like ‘in this place declareth Dares’ are accurate.20 But Caxton gestures towards a more complex tradition in the appended epilogue to Book III, where he defends his text

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though it accorde not unto the translacion of other whiche have written it, for diverce men have made dyverce bookes, which in all pointes acorde not as Dictes, Dares, and Homerus, for Dictes and Homerus as Grekes sayn and writen favorably for the Grekes, and give to them more worship than to the Troyans, And Dares wryteth otherwise than they doo … (III, fol. 48r)

Clearly aware of multiple but also divergent classical versions, he tries both to explain the differences (invoking patriotism) and to downplay them, since ‘all accorde in conclusion the generall destruccyon’ of Troy (ibid.).21 Recuyell cites further authorities, especially when something is missing or debatable. Several are classical, as the sacrifice of Iphigenia illustrates: ‘Dares ne putteth determynatly, wherof the kynge Agamenon made his Sacrifice to Diane. But Ovide (in the twelfe booke of Methaphormose) sayeth that it was Effigenye hys doughter’ (III, fol. 14r). Both as a translator and an editor, therefore, Caxton locates Recuyell within a tradition that stretches from antiquity. He does not just point at this heritage, but highlights its contemporary dynamism. Thus he mentions Lydgate’s Troy Book before embarking on the Trojan section, fearing that ‘[i]t nedeth not to translate it in to Englishe, for asmuche as that worshypfull and religious man dan John lydgate monke of Burye dyd translate it but late’ (II, fol. 52v). The comment suggests anxiety and the necessity to differentiate himself from Lydgate, but it simultaneously draws Lydgate into the tradition, implying that both of them are part of an up-to-date community of English humanists. Caxton also intervenes in the middle of Book III to offer further reading on Troilus and Cressida: ‘let hym rede the booke of Troyllus that Chaucer made, wherein he shall fynde the story whole, whyche were to longe to write here’ (III, fol. 27v). The allusion is both an excuse and a deliberate reference to English productions. As William Kuskin writes, ‘Caxton is profoundly interested in humanist scholarship’ and his texts ‘actively place Virgil and Ovid in the context of the English poetry of Chaucer, Lydgate, and Skelton’.22 Accordingly, Caxton does not merely retell the story of Troy but situates it within a tradition that includes classical and contemporary authors, and appears as a dynamic process to which he earnestly contributes. His literary self-consciousness supports my point that we should not isolate the medieval versions of Troy from the classical tradition, but accept them as part of a continuous and flexible process. I am thus advocating an inclusive definition of the classical tradition, which embraces multidirectional branchings and looks at the multiple links that compose the chain, recognising their interconnectedness. Heywood did

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read authors from antiquity. However, he consulted a diversity of sources (which the printing press made simultaneously available to him) and texts like Recuyell presented themselves as active elements in a wide and complex tradition. Literary historians and historians of the book can help further define this inclusive not-so-classical tradition. In the past dozen years they have endeavoured to dispute conventional periodisation, pay attention to continuity rather than rupture between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and rehabilitate the understudied late fifteenth century to which Caxton belongs.23 Anne Coldiron’s ‘reprint culture’ and Kuskin’s ‘recursivity’ are particularly useful for my purpose. Starting from Helen Cooper’s 1977 remark that ‘Renaissance writers “reused everything and forgot nothing”’, Coldiron shows how this attitude was encouraged by the conditions in which printing technology emerged.24 When the printing press suddenly increased production capacity, it caused a ‘content vacuum’ which printers like Caxton filled with old or foreign texts.25 Printers tended to ‘reissu[e] works that had already proven ­successful or saleable’, fostering ‘the continuing presence of copious and vividly present pasts’.26 Hence a ‘cacophonous variety’ of French medieval, English medieval and English early modern versions of old stories that ‘[remains] available to the changing literary culture over the long term’; meanwhile, ‘[e]ven authors claiming to exhume an ancient past relied directly on a more recent past’s texts’.27 This approach sheds light on the complexity of the classical tradition by linking the co-presence of multiple versions to the material conditions in which texts were made available. It replaces diachronicity with synchronicity, or rather, highlights the constant reactivation of diachronic pasts within the synchronic present. Kuskin, on the other hand, uses recursion to redefine literary history.28 Imported from computer science, the concept designates the principle of reiterating one small operation again and again, gaining complexity every time.29 It appears in the division of plants, for instance, or in fractals. It can be used both backwards and forwards, that is, to deconstruct a complex entity or to construct it. Crucially, it is an operation: a dynamic process rather than a static description. It places the focus on small loops (indefinitely repeated) rather than huge leaps. As Kuskin notes, ‘the so-called moment of origins is less a comprehensive return to the classical past than a cycling through of local recursions on immediate precedents’.30 Caxton’s Recuyell is a case in point, being both the first book printed in English, and a highly recursive text, with Book III looping backward to Lefèvre, Guido, Benoît and Dares. The paradox of the classical tradition we are addressing in this volume is that it both implies a return to or persistence of classical

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origins, and a continuous process of recursion that engenders an infinity of intermediary rewritings, transformations, appropriations. This is no news to mythology specialists, but such recent developments in literary history, medieval studies and print culture bring new tools to our studies. Recursion constructs the classical tradition not as a smooth line but as a chain in which each link is a dynamic loop, actively performing its own local rehearsing. The not-so-classical tradition in my title, therefore, is not truly a negation but rather indicates an inclusive approach, which involves multidirectionality and interweaving, reprint culture and recursivity, and invites us to highlight Heywood’s engagement with Caxton’s Recuyell alongside his reading of Homer or Ovid. While book historians have begun to make a place for Caxton in literary history, literary scholars have yet to explore early modern playwrights’ engagements with Recuyell: the two parts that follow are a step in that direction.

Hindsight and foresight My contention is that Heywood inherited from Caxton a specifically medieval perspective on the Trojan conflict, and developed it into an ironic play on hindsight and foresight. In his chapter on Historia destructionis Troiae, Benson emphasises Guido’s ‘deep pessimism concerning man’s ability to shape or even comprehend his own destiny’: In a series of emotional laments, uttered in a distinct, almost personal voice far different from the formal one used to narrate historical events, Guido looks back across the centuries and agonizes over the trivial faults and unknowing mistakes that bring about the ruin of Troy. Guido’s anguish comes from the conflict between his characters’ ignorance and his own historical perspective. He knows, as they cannot, how things will turn out.31

The passage draws attention to the narrator’s different voices, the temporal gap between the medieval historian and the Trojan War, and the knowledge that comes from hindsight and results in ‘deep pessimism’. Guido’s historical approach rejects any kind of providential design. With no moral lesson to be drawn, it exhibits a nihilistic drive towards complete destruction, despairing of ‘human ignorance and impotence’.32 Two links down the mythographical chain, Caxton’s Recuyell, translating Lefèvre’s adaptation of Guido, contains similar narratorial interventions. Although he frequently refers to Dares, the narrator is not the alleged eyewitness and his is the ‘long perspective’ of the medieval historian who knows the consequences of each action.33 As hindsight triggers regret,



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he repeatedly switches from neutral narration to emotional commentary. When Priam is about to initiate the war, Recuyell’s narrator blurts out: Alas kynge Pryant, tell me what mysaventure is thys that hath gyven to the so grete hardynes of corage, for to caste oute thy selfe of thy welthe and reste (III, fol. 4r)

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When Helen hears of Paris, he exclaims O how grete domage came unto the Grekes and to the Troyans of thys that Helayne wente so lightly to see the Trojans. (III, fols 7v-8r)

When Achilles falls in love with Polyxena, he comments ‘this was the cause and the beginning of hys mischefe’ (fol. 32r). Dark reminders of how it all ended punctuate Book III, creating a double temporality simultaneously based on immersion and retrospection over many centuries.34 Furthermore, Recuyell articulates retrospection with prospection: the Trojans were warned about the oncoming disaster, and with hindsight prophecies such as Cassandra’s appear tragically accurate. Implicitly, the accumulation of inefficient warnings suggests they are right and creates a pessimistic framework for the story. When Priam decides to provoke the Greeks, Hector is reluctant, fearing that ‘We ne begin thinges that we ought to leve for to eschewe more grete myschefe’ (III, fol. 5r). No fewer than three seers contribute graphic evocations of future destruction: Hector’s brother Helenus, Pantheus (the ‘sonne of Deufrobe’ who ‘knew the science of thinges to come hereafter’, fol. 6v) and Cassandra, who wails, ‘thou [Troy] shalte in shorte tymes be beaten doune, and thyne highe Towers ben demolysshed and destroyed unto the grounde’ (fol. 7r). Their insistence exposes Priam’s blind obstinacy. The connection between the characters’ foresight and the narrator’s hindsight is made explicit later, when after recording Cassandra’s frantic warnings upon Paris and Helen’s wedding, the narrator comments: O what piti was it, that the Troians beleved not this warninge and amonicion: For yf they had beleved it: they had eschewed the right great evels that came after unto them That shalbe told in fables to them that wol here hem unto the ende of the world. (fol. 9v)

Not only does Caxton validate Cassandra’s predictions but he self-consciously refers to the mythographical tradition, switching from her desperate forecasts to poets’ and historians’ sorry retrospection, then projecting his own gaze further ‘unto the ende of the world’, when the tragic story will still be told.

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The dedication of 1 Iron Age conveys a similar pessimism to Guido’s and Caxton’s. As Heywood exclaims, ‘what pen of note, in one page or other hath not remembred Troy, and bewayl’d the sacke, and subversion of so illustrious a citty’ (sigs A3r-v): the historical enterprise is fraught with regret. In this play Heywood does not use a Chorus figure as he did with Homer in the previous Ages: there is no direct equivalent of the narrator’s interventions – though Thersites’ sarcasm introduces critical distance, and he and Synon later form a cynical double Chorus in 2 Iron Age. However, tragic irony can serve the same purpose. Heywood follows Caxton’s lead in emphasising predictions, and this paradoxically suggests a pessimistic retrospective gaze as characters announce how things will unfold, and spectators know they are right. Dramatic economy forces Heywood to eliminate some characters, so that Cassandra mostly fulfils that role; yet her repeated prophecies in the opening scene mirror the successive interventions in Recuyell. She first cries out: stay Troian peeres To plot your universall overthrow. What hath poore Troy deserv’d, that you should kindle Flames to destroy it? (sig. B3r)

As she wishes ‘To quench bright burning Troy’ (ibid.), the alliterative phrase both highlights her vision and echoes Titus Andronicus,35 recalling that the catastrophe was an early modern topos. Cassandra harps on the fire motif, saying Paris ‘Would sayle to bring fire which shall burne all Troy’, ‘Then let Troy burne, / Let the Greekes … warme themselues / At this bright bone-fire’ (with a pun on bonfire and its original meaning), ‘Then Troy, no Troy, but ashes; and a place / Where once a citty stood’, ‘a confused heape of twice burnt bricke’ (sigs B3r-B4r). To generate tragic irony, those insistent prophecies depend on the retrospective gaze of an audience who knows the ending and perceives her family’s blindness. Pessimism pervades this bitter play as the announced tragedy inexorably unfolds. The play on hindsight and foresight is even clearer when Ajax persuades Hector to spare the Greek camp. In Recuyell, the narrator concludes regretfully: On this daye had the Troyans had victory of all the grekes yf fortune (that is diverse) had wyl consented: for they myght have slaine hem alle … This was the cause wherfore the troyans lost to have the victory … (III, fol. 23v)

In 1 Iron Age, Ajax soliloquises: Greece was this day At her last cast, had they pursude advantage:

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But I devine, hereafter from this hower, We never more shall shrinke beneath their power. (sig. G4v)

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Heywood transforms Caxton’s retrospective laments into predictions which stimulate the audience’s hindsight.36 He also introduces a different note when, before dying, Hector recalls that time when he might have sent up your Greekish pride in flames, Which would have fixt a starre in that high orbe, To memorize to all succeeding times Our glories and your shames … (sig. H3v)

Instead of prophesying Greek victory, Hector evokes the Trojan success that might have been passed down the centuries. Perhaps Heywood is remembering Caxton’s mention that ‘On this daye had the Troyans had victory’ and that fortune is ‘diverse’, unstable. In any case he moves beyond the hindsight/foresight pattern I have outlined, to play with false and true predictions. This appears as early as the opening scene: priamus:

Princes and sonnes of Priam, to this end Wee cal’d you to this solemne parleance, There’s a devining spirit prompts mee still, That if we new begin hostility, The Grecians may be forc’t to make repayre … (sig. Br, my emphasis)

In Recuyell, Priam foregrounds the Greeks’ ‘injuries’ to justify his war (III, fol. 5r). Heywood interpolates a ‘devining spirit’ promising victory: considering what follows, this is clearly humorous. The words reverberate even more ironically when Priam disparages Cassandra’s prophetic skills: Away with her, some false devining spirit Envying the honour we shall gaine from Greece, Would trouble our designements. (sig. B2v, my emphasis)

There is apparently a double standard as to ‘devining spirit[s]’ who reliably inform kings but mislead young women. Heywood’s playfulness comes out again when Cassandra turns to Aeneas: ‘Why good Aeneas dost thou speech forbeare? / Thou hop’st in time another Troy to reare, / When this is sackt’ (sig. B3v). While the prophecy is correct, she is out of her traditional part, foreseeing an outcome so far ahead Aeneas can have no ‘hope’ of it. The accusation is not based on character psychology but on meta- and intertextuality as it gestures at Virgil’s epic and translatio imperii. Cassandra’s

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incongruous remark is an enjoyable private joke for the audience, and those examples suggest a playful instead of merely pessimistic use of predictions that can be tragically ignored, but also manipulated and wryly falsified. The characters in 1 Iron Age are obsessed with posterity. In the first scene Troilus and Paris counter Hector’s reluctance, claiming that if Greek offences remain unrevenged, their severall blemishes The aged hand of Time can never wipe From our succession. ’Twill be registred That all King Priams sonnes save one were willing And forward to revenge them on the Greekes, Onely that Hector durst not. (sig. B2r)

Their preoccupation with how things are ‘registred’ metatextually alludes to the classical tradition and its many rewritings. In this respect, their grasp on their mythographical future is ironically inaccurate: the tradition retains that the Trojans acted unwisely and Hector was their boldest warrior. When Helen lands in Troy, Margareton comments that ‘her fame / Will bee eterniz’d’ (sig. D4r), while Paris confidently exclaims who would feare for such a royall wife To set the universall world at strife: Bright Hellens name shall live, and nere have end When all the world about you shall contend. (sigs D4v-Er)

Both imagine future retellings of their story, and simultaneously betray their ignorance of its tragic significance. The discrepancy is underlined by Paris’ unconscious echoing of Cassandra: ‘universall World’ recalls her forecast of ‘universall overthrow’ and ‘Bright Hellen’ is responsible for ‘bright burning Troy’ (sig. B3r). Even more misguidedly, Paris prophesies: Let that day In which we espouse the beauteous Hellena, Be held a holy-day, a day of joy For ever, in the calenders of Troy. (sig. Er)

Few statements could ring more ironically to the audience’s ears. Thus Heywood revisits Caxton’s (and Lefèvre’s and Guido’s) emphasis on retrospection and creates a sharp contrast between the characters’ (often inaccurate) foresight and the audience’s hindsight. He exploits the medieval sorrow at mankind’s blindness, but also translates it across genres into dramatic irony. As the spectators enjoy a sense of superior knowledge and



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complicity with the playwright, the effect can be playful or poignant – as when Troilus confronts Achilles and mistakenly announces: ‘posterity  / From age to age this to succession tell,  / Hee falls by Troilus, by whom Hector fell’ (sig. I2r).

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Playing with contradictions I now wish to look at a number of apparent contradictions within 1 Iron Age. Some of these Heywood inherited from Caxton, others he generated by juxtaposing episodes from Recuyell with passages from classical sources. Recuyell draws on a tradition that built itself against Homer, with Dares and Dictys both claiming to correct his historical inaccuracies. Gérard Fry shows how they sought to discredit the Iliad through variation (some episodes are simply different from Homer) and opposition (others directly contradict Homer’s version).37 When Heywood inserts Homeric episodes or details within his basically Caxtonian play, the collage creates dissonance. Within Recuyell, dissonance also springs from the Dares/ Dictys filiation: Dares in particular left an elliptic text that suggests historical accuracy through facts and figures but leaves much unsaid.38 Analysing Guido, Benson finds that the eyewitness perspective results in a narrative that registers the heroes’ outward actions without ever delving into their inward motivations. Every action is seen separately from the others, and it does not matter that the characters behave inconsistently.39 Caxton is similarly aporetic on occasion, opening potential gaps for Heywood to exploit. On at least one occasion, however, Caxton suggests psychological coherence – and Heywood erases it. I read this as a clue that Heywood is concerned not with downplaying but rather highlighting inconsistencies. Recuyell describes a conflicted Achilles, who cannot decide whether to keep his promise to Polyxena’s family and abstain from combat, or betray them and fight: he went to bed, and there he had many thoughtes, and purposed once to go to the bataile for avenge the death of his men, and another tyme he thought on the beauty of Polixene and thought that yf he wente, he should lese her love for alway, and that the Kynge Priant and hys wyfe should holde him a deceyver … (III, fols 35v-36r)

Despite its dramatic potential, Heywood minimises this internal conflict. In 1 Iron Age, Achilles answers his companions’ desperate pleas with such concise stubbornness that it becomes comic:

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agamemnon: achilles:

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[menelaus]: achilles:

Can our great Champion touch a womanish Lute, And heare the grones of twenty thousand soules Gasping their last breath? I can. Alarume. Enter Menelaus. Rescue, some rescue, the red field is strowd With Hectors honours and young Troilus spoyles. Yet all this moves not me. (sigs G2v-G3r)

He remains strikingly silent when Patroclus asks ‘Revenge my death, before I meete my grave’, and laughs when Menelaus says the fleet is burning (sigs G3v, G4r). He fleetingly admits ‘My honor and my oath both combate in mee: / But love swayes most’ (sig. G3v), but does a U-turn when his tent catches fire: ‘My sword and armour: / Polixena, thy love we will lay by, / Till by this hand, that Trojan Hector dye’ (sig. G4r). Although this remark echoes Recuyell,40 the play grants less psychological depth to Achilles, and makes his behaviour more inconsistent as he switches from callous refusal to sudden rage. The reshuffling of episodes further contributes to this. In Recuyell, Patroclus dies earlier, in a battle Achilles misses ‘for his woundes that he had and dyd do heale hem in his tente’ (III, fol. 20r). The next chapter indicates that ‘Achilles was than sorowful for the death of Patroclus, that he coulde not in no wise be conforted’ (fol. 24r). In relocating Patroclus’ death Heywood moves closer to Homer; but by eliminating Achilles’ pain he contradicts both Homer and Caxton and erases the little psychological substance Recuyell gave him. This suggests that Heywood deliberately chose discordance over cohesion. I wish to expand from this particular example and consider the various strategies Heywood used regarding Hector, Helen, Paris and Achilles. Benson remarks on the inconsistent portrayal of Hector in Historia destructionis Troiae. He observes that after the initial argument ‘Hector’s anti-war position is never again discussed’, and that Hector’s ‘inexcusable anger and cruelty’ towards his wife and father after Andromache’s dream contradict his description throughout as a generous champion.41 He attributes this to the eyewitness style, which remains exterior to the characters, and to ‘Guido’s inability to see human relationships in any terms other than those of pitched battle’.42 Caxton reproduces Guido’s inconsistencies; Heywood, however, minimises them. Where Hector is concerned, Heywood attenuates incongruities rather than highlighting them. 1 Iron Age slightly rearranges the Trojan debate on whether to initiate a war. In Recuyell it takes place after Antenor reports how scandalously the Greeks treat Hesione. Heywood inserts Antenor’s return in the middle, and uses Hesione’s situation to justify Hector’s turnabout:

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hector:

By Jove wee’le fetch her thence, Or make all populous Greece a wilderness, Paris a hand, wee are friends, now Greece shall finde And thou shalt know what mighty Hector dares.

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(sig. B2v)

After arguing that ‘In mine opinion we have no just cause / To rayse new tumults, that may live in peace’, he now assents to Paris’ expedition ‘As an attempt the Heavens have cause to prosper’ (sigs Bv, B3r) – the repetition of ‘cause’ underlines the reversal. When he meets Helen he mentions his initial reluctance and dismisses it: ‘I desired not / To have bright Hellen brought, but being landed,  / Hector proclaimes himselfe her champion’ (sig. B4v). Thus the tension is simultaneously registered and solved. Heywood provides reasons for the character’s change of mind and removes any ambiguity about his attitude towards future developments. As for Andromache’s dream Heywood maintains the contrast between Hector’s harsh determination and his family’s desperate pleas, with Astyanax hanging on his father’s armour and Hector threatening to whip the boy (sig. Hv). However, while in Recuyell Priam has to physically stop his son (III, fol. 29v), in 1 Iron Age Hector yields to his brothers’ entreaties; and whereas in Recuyell he ‘went him to the batayle that his father knew not of’ after Margareton’s death (fol. 29v), in 1 Iron Age he gives warning that ‘if one Troian shall for succour cry, / I’le leave the walls and to his rescue flye’ (sigs H2r-v). Priam tries to hold Hector back and he goes anyway: he neither deceives his father nor behaves violently, but leaves with a heroic declaration, ‘Before the sunne decline, / That terrour of the earth I’le make devine’ (sig. H3r). In this instance Heywood does not efface the contradictions as clearly as in the previous example, but he mitigates the violence and emphasises the heroic task at hand rather than harshness to one’s family. In Hector’s case, therefore, Heywood downplays his source’s contradictions. A probable explanation lies in early modern admiration for the Trojans. The theory of translatio imperii claims not only that Aeneas founded Rome but that Trojan descendants established other European capitals, like Brutus with London. The title of Troia Britanica suggests the equation of Britain with Troy from the outset. So does the dedication in 1 Iron Age, mentioning that ‘out of her [Troy’s] ashes hath risen, two the rarest phœnixes in Europe, namely London and Rome’ (sig. A3v). Troia foregrounds Hector and expands on his bravery by comparison with Recuyell.43 While the play is necessarily more economical, it participates in the same ideological context as Heywood smooths over Hector’s character to enhance his heroism.

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Helen and Paris are more controversial, with people doubting whether Helen’s beauty was worth the carnage.44 While Heywood follows the medieval tradition in combining epic and romance,45 he also exploits gaps and contradictions within his source. Act I of 1 Iron Age stages Helen’s seduction in detail, which in Recuyell remains brief and (uncharacteristically) has no direct speech: Paris ‘spake to her wyth a softe voice ryght swetely and she to him, and exposed eche to other how they were surprysed of the love of that one and of the other, and howe they myght come to the ende after her [their] desire’ (III, fol. 8r). The passage highlights reciprocity and does not dwell on the seduction process. We never know whether the lovers plotted the kidnapping together, only that in the attack ‘Parys with his owen hande tooke Helayne’ (fol. 8v). Heywood uses Ovid to supplement Caxton. He had already interpolated his own translation of Heroides XVI and XVII to make up Cantos IX and X of Troia. In 1 Iron Age, he refashions the poetic borrowing into dialogue, mixing lines from the two letters to produce a coherent conversation. For instance, on sigs C3v-C4r Paris’ speech, ‘Your Husband Menelaus hither bring …’ is copied from Troia, IX, lines 363–6; Helen’s answer (‘Had you then sett sayle … You come too late, and covet goods possest’) echoes canto X, lines 178–86; Paris’ protest that he will marry her ‘Or in this Province where I vent my mones, / I’le begge a Tombe for my exiled bones’ is again from Canto IX, lines 480–83. There is no dissonance in this combination of Ovid and Caxton since Heywood fills in a gap and exploits an obvious dramatic opportunity: the seduction scene which Caxton neglects. The episode illustrates Heywood’s composition methods as he moves from Troia to 1 Iron Age. Similarly, he inserts a banquet scene in the play (sigs C4r-D2r) which builds upon Paris’ account of sitting at Helen’s table in Troia (IX, lines 381–420). He adds a comic trick as Paris pretends to pass out from too much drink in order to be left alone with Helen. The stratagem is typically theatrical and absent from Troia, but it probably proceeds from the appendix to Canto IX relaying Ovid’s advice in Art of Love that a lover feign tipsiness to excuse inappropriate compliments.46 Heywood thus supplements Caxton with Ovid, using both Heroides and Art of Love and refashioning them as he moves from poem to play. His mythographical collage involves combination of classical and medieval sources as well as generic adaptation. Recuyell’s account of Helen and Paris, however, is not only elliptic but contradictory. The quotation above indicates that their feelings are reciprocal, although Helen’s role in the abduction plot is unclear. But no sooner is she in the boat than ‘she made greate sorowe, and cessid not to wepe ne to bewayle with greate sighes her husbande, her brethren, her doughter, her countrey and her frendes’ (III, fol. 9r). This discrepancy between two visions of Helen (accomplice or victim) goes back to Dares, whose Helen is

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first willing then grieving.47 I believe Heywood picked up the tension from Caxton and instead of smoothing it out, used it for dramatic effect: Helen’s contradictions are translated into coyness. helen:

Well Paris I beshrew you with my heart, That ever you came to Sparta (by my joy Queene Hellen lyes, and longs to be at Troy:) Yet use me as you please, you know you have My dearest love, and therefore cannot crave What Ile deny; but if reproach and shame Pursue us, on you Paris light the blame: Ile wash my hands of all, nor will I yield But by compulsion to your least demaund: Yet if in lieu of my Kings intertaine, You bid me to a feast aboord your ship, And when you have me there, unknowne to me Hoyse sayle, weigh Anchor, and beare out to Sea: I cannot helpe it … (sig. D2r)

The oscillations convey no tragic conflict, but a comic tension. Helen simultaneously reproaches Paris and plans her own abduction. The incoherence conveyed by the mythographical tradition is preserved yet metamorphosed into Helen’s contrasting tones (as dutiful wife and eager lover) which create an enjoyably comic and erotic scene. Transformed into coyness, Helen’s paradoxes are integrated within recognisable dramatic patterns: the scene recalls Danae’s seduction in Heywood’s Golden Age, for instance, where the girl simultaneously rejects Jupiter and points to her bedroom door.48 Paris’ portrayal also involves contradictions. In Recuyell, Paris is something of a dandy when he meets Helen, with everybody staring at him ‘For he was one of the fayrest knight of the worlde and was so rychely and so queyntly clothed and habilled’ (III, fol. 7v); yet in the subsequent war he appears as a heroic warrior. This tension is reinforced by the early modern view of Paris as a useless courtier, a man ‘alway descrived of Homere as a more pleasaunt carpet knight, then stoute warriour, and more delyghting in instruments and daliaunce, than martiall prowesse and chivalrie’.49 Thus when Helen suggests Paris might be a traitor: menelaus: diomed:

Hee such an one? rather a giddy braine, A formall traveller … A capring, carpet Knight, a cushion lord, One that hath stald his courtly trickes at home, And now got leave to publish them abroad Hee’s a meere toy. (sigs C4r-v)50

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Heywood takes up Thomas Cooper’s ‘carpet knight’ and expands on the phrase to dismiss Paris’ abilities completely. However, he suggests ironic discrepancy as the characters are unaware of how much damage Paris will cause. The discrepancy is reinforced when, thinking Paris is sleeping his wine off, they repeat that he is a ‘shallow weake braine courtier’ (sig. Dr) – just before he rises to plot with Helen. While Paris’ apparent drunkenness confirms his reputation, the stratagem destabilises it or redefines it as roleplay: Heywood is playing with the early modern topos. While he exploits the comic/romantic characterisation of Paris, he also retains the heroic portrayal conveyed by Caxton: A great alarme and excursions, after which, enter Hector and Paris. hector: Oh brother Paris, thou hast this day lodg’d Thy love in Hectors soule, it did me good To see two Greekish knights fall in their blood Under thy manly arme. (sig. E3r)

The passage overturns previous descriptions as Hector, Troy’s champion, validates his brother’s bravery. In reply, Paris wishes that ‘this general quarell might be ended / In equall opposition, you and I / Against the two most valiant’ (sig. E3v). Playfulness is still perceptible, for Paris’ proposal of a double duel contradicts the tradition: Hector immediately suggests the well-known single combat, which metatextually pushes his younger brother back to the sidelines of the conflict. Thus Heywood not only reproduces Caxton’s contradictory portrayal of Paris as dandy and warrior, but reinforces the dissonance as he injects irony in both the ‘carpet knight’ motif and the heroic vision. I am therefore contending that, as Heywood rewrites Recuyell and combines sources, he is not merely matching pieces but deliberately leaving gaps in the mosaic or tears in the fabric. The contrasts culminate in Achilles, and arise from the juxtaposition of the Homeric perspective with the Dares/ Dictys tradition. As the latter claimed to be more truthful than Homer, one way to mark the difference was to alter famous episodes like Achilles’ slaying of Hector. Dictys offers a strikingly discordant account where Achilles and his companions ambush the Trojan and attack him by surprise.51 Following that lead, later texts turn Achilles into an underhand character who treacherously kills Hector and Troilus. Thus Recuyell recounts how, after several encounters where Hector always dominates, Achilles assails him only to get wounded in the thigh.52 When Achilles comes back from binding his wound, Hector is busy: in order to lead a prisoner away he ‘had caste hys sheelde behinde him at his backe, and had lefte his breste discoverte … and tooke none hede of Achilles that came pryvely unto hym and put thys spere



The not-so-classical tradition 155

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wyth in his body’ (III, fol. 30r). Perfidy is further emphasised as Achilles sets his Myrmidons on Troilus, who ‘was enclosed on all partes’. Only when Achilles ‘sawe Troyllus al naked’ (and wounded) did he ‘r[u]n vpon hym in a rage and sm[i]te of his heed’ – before proceeding to drag his body with his horse, whereupon the narrator exclaims ‘Certes yf anye noblesse had been in achilles, he wold not have dooen this villony’ (fol. 36v). Heywood inherits that tradition, and in Troia he gestures at the discrepancy between Homer’s poem and ‘historical’ accounts: Achilles durst not look on Hector when He guled his silver arms in greekish blood. Homer, that loved him more than other men, Gave him such heart that he ’gainst Hector stood; ’Twas not Achilles’ sword, but Homer’s pen That drew from Hector’s breast a crimson flood: Hector, his Myrmidons and him subdued— In such high blood faint hands were not imbrued.

(VIII, stanza 8)

The stanza attributes Achilles’ bravery to Homer’s transformative poetic powers, and contrasts it with his actual villainy. The passage recalls Recuyell’s account of Troilus’ rather than Hector’s death: Heywood transposed the ambush, making Achilles’ treachery all the more shocking as it is directed at the Trojan champion.53 The detailed narrative in Troia (VIII.100–117) matches the statement above, with Achilles delivering the final blow ‘With shameful odds against all knighthood’s law’ (stanza 117). The episode is similar in 1 Iron Age. Achilles exhorts his Myrmidons to ‘Fixe all at once, and girt him round with wounds’ (sig. H3v); despite his protests at such unchivalrous behaviour, ‘Hector fals slayne by the Mermidons, then Achilles wounds him with his Launce’ (sig. H4r). Achilles appears as an unscrupulous murderer rather than a hero, and Troilus highlights the contrast between him and Hector when he curses ‘that hand … That tooke such base advantage on a worthy, / Who all advantage scorn’d’ (sig. H4r).54 Ironically, he is the next victim of Achilles’ perfidy, as the same scenario is replayed: ‘Troilus is slaine by him and the Mirmidons’ (sig. I2r). However, a discrepancy arises between what the audience see, and what some characters say. While Thersites rebukes Achilles in his usual biting tone,55 others keep praising him as if this were Homer’s and not Caxton’s Achilles, the Greek hero and not the disloyal murderer. Right after Troilus’ death, Paris goes to the Greek camp to see their ‘great Champion’ (sig. I2v). Ajax recognises that the killing of Hector ‘Was but scarse fairely’ or even ‘with base advantage’, but Ulysses retorts that ‘the streame of glory now runnes all towards’ Achilles and ‘Thetis sonne lookes for a world of

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sound  /  To spread his attributes’ (sig. I3r). When Paris kills Achilles, he justifies his own duplicity by pointing ‘Did not this bleeding Greeke kil valiant Hector, / Incompast with his Guard of Mermidons?’, yet Greeks and Trojans equally condemn his act and Agamemnon mourns for ‘the pride of all our Grecian army’ (sig. Kr). Finally, when they take the body away, Paris’ pointed remark that they will not ‘drag it ’bout the walls of Troy’ contrasts even more strongly with Agamemnon’s conclusion: ‘Come princes, on your shoulder beare him then, / Bravest of souldiers, and the best of men’ (sig. Kr). I think Heywood deliberately stresses the tension between two contradictory interpretations of Achilles, ‘base’ or ‘bravest’. It is a matter of conflicting discourses, and also of contradiction between what is said and what is shown – the audience witnessed Hector’s and Troilus’ deaths. The dissonance further resonates in Act V when Ajax and Ulysses contend for Achilles’ arms. Here Heywood leaves both Caxton and Homer aside and imports an episode from Metamorphoses, XIII. The play appears again as a collage, ensuring that the spectators enjoy all the famous incidents. However, this new tile in the mosaic reflects a different Achilles: in Ovid he never used his Myrmidons to trap his enemies, so the scene unequivocally celebrates his valour and displays ‘great Achilles armour … / Due to the worthier’ (sig. K2r). The pieces do not quite fit together. Similarly, the Ovidian speeches do not correspond with the staged events: both Ajax and Ulysses boast of exploits that far exceed the scope of the play and that the audience have not witnessed. While there is no incompatibility, spectators who noticed the earlier discrepancies may develop a critical perspective: as different versions of the Trojan War are juxtaposed, nothing seems reliable any more and words become increasingly suspect. Furthermore, the contradictions surrounding Achilles are based on telling vs showing: they replay the tension between Homer’s poetic rendering and Dares’s and Dictys’s alleged eyewitness testimonies. Heywood plays the part of Dares and Dictys as he stages Achilles’ treachery and turns the spectators into eyewitnesses; then he voices Homeric and Ovidian views, and leaves the contradictions hanging in the air. While this could be considered mismatched collage, I believe the clashes are deliberate – both a self-conscious highlighting of multiple versions, and an invitation to adopt a critical viewpoint on heroism.56 There is an explicitly critical voice in 1 Iron Age, that of Thersites the ‘raylor’,57 whose insults and comments undermine the epic framework.58 They culminate in the bitter exchanges with Ajax before the latter’s suicide (sigs Lr-L2r) and in the anti-heroic epilogue – ‘Is it not better farre  / To keepe our selves in breath, and linger warre’ (sig. L3r). Not in Recuyell, the character is borrowed from Homer.59 While the medieval texts challenge Homer’s view of Achilles’ heroism, here a Homeric character is used



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to destabilise the medieval epic. Or perhaps the critique was already latent in Recuyell, where Achilles (then intent on pursuing his amorous interests) strangely echoes Thersites: ‘I have no more entencion to put me more in daunger, and love better to lese my renomee than my life, for in the ende there is no prowesse, but it be forgotten’ (III, fol. 34v). My purpose in studying 1 Iron Age was both to explore Heywood’s engagement with Caxton’s Recuyell and to reconsider the classical tradition in the light of the Trojan material. I have argued in favour of a not-soclassical tradition that embraces the dynamic heterogeneity of Heywood’s mythological material. In a book culture based on reprint and recursion, he had simultaneous access to classical, medieval and early modern sources, and each rewriting was not merely a repetition but an active contribution to the tradition. Heywood did not adopt an ‘either … or’ but a ‘both … and’ approach and wove multiple versions together into the Ages plays. From the medieval loops of the chain, he borrowed a form of pessimistic retrospection and translated this into the predictions of 1 Iron Age. In the process he added fake prophecies and exploited the effects of dramatic irony. Heywood was also sensitive to the disjunctions within Recuyell and the clashes between sources. Through the examples of Hector, Helen, Paris and Achilles I have emphasised the tears in the fabric, or the gaps in the mosaic of 1 Iron Age. A learned scholar and a skilful dramatist, Heywood mixed passages from various origins, based on dramatic potential; but he deliberately left, and sometimes emphasised, contradictions. These disjunctions suggest a cultural game for the enjoyment of those educated or attentive enough to spot them. In the specific context of Troy, they encourage a critical, instead of merely reverent, approach to the classical tradition, and complement Thersites’ open questioning of epic values. In the broader context of Heywood’s drama, I believe these mythological dissonances are part of his aesthetics. Deliberate, jarring juxtapositions characterise what Rowland terms his ‘incendiary’ theatre60 – a particularly apt epithet for a Trojan play.

Notes I warmly thank Janice Valls-Russell and Tania Demetriou for their thoughtful comments and suggestions on various versions of this chapter. I am also grateful for the feedback I received from the participants in the Heywood conference at Montpellier in July 2015, and for the generous help of Heidi Brayman and Stephen Tabor at the Huntington Library.

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  1 References in Philip Henslowe’s diary to plays on similar topics in the mid-1590s have fuelled debate about the dating of the Ages plays. See the Introduction to this volume for a discussion of this.  2 See Charlotte Coffin, ‘Heywood’s Ages and Chapman’s Homer: nothing in common?’, in Tanya Pollard and Tania Demetriou (eds), Homer and Greek Tragedy in Early Modern England’s Theatres (= Classical Receptions Journal, 9:1 (2017)), 55–78.   3 See John S. P. Tatlock, ‘The siege of Troy in Elizabethan literature, especially in Shakespeare and Heywood’, Proceedings of the Modern Language Association, 30:4 (1915), 673–770. All five Ages plays draw on Caxton, though to a different degree. On the connections between Caxton’s Recuyell and Heywood’s Troia and Golden Age through the story of Callisto, see chapter 3 (Janice VallsRussell).   4 Thomas Heywood, Troia Britanica (London: W. Jaggard, 1609). References are to Yves Peyré (gen. ed.), Troia Britanica (2009–19), available at www.shak myth.org, accessed 24 June 2020.  5 Richard Rowland, Thomas Heywood’s Theatre, 1599–1639: Locations, Translations, and Conflicts (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), p. 2.  6 Recuyell does not include the Homeric duel between Hector and Ajax or the Ovidian competition for Achilles’ weapons, for instance.   7 I am borrowing the textile metaphor from Janice Valls-Russell, Agnès Lafont and Charlotte Coffin (eds), Interweaving Myths in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017). See also chapter 7 on reading the classics alongside and through the mythographers (Yves Peyré).   8 See Rowland, Thomas Heywood’s Theatre, especially pp. 4–18. By contrast, Douglas Arrell interprets disjunctions as evidence of revision: see ‘Heywood, Shakespeare, and the mystery of Troye’, Early Modern Literary Studies, 19:1 (2016), 1–22, available at https://extra.shu.ac.uk/emls/journal/index.php/emls/ article/view/267, accessed 24 June 2020.   9 Yves Peyré, ‘Shakespeare’s mythological feuilletage: a methodological induction’, in Valls-Russell, Lafont and Coffin (eds), Interweaving Myths, pp. 25–40 (p. 25). 10 Valls-Russell, Lafont and Coffin (eds), Interweaving Myths, ‘Introduction’, pp. 1–24 (p. 3). 11 George Chapman, Seaven Bookes of the Iliades of Homere (London: John Windet, 1598). 12 C. D. Benson, The History of Troy in Middle English Literature: Guido delle Colonne’s ‘Historia Destructionis Troiae’ in Medieval England (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 1980), p. 4. 13 Gérard Fry (ed. and trans.), Récits inédits sur la guerre de Troie (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1998), explains the history of Dares’s and Dictys’s texts and their differences from Homer. 14 Thomas Heywood, The Iron Age (London: Nicholas Okes, 1632), sig. A4r. All quotations refer to this edition.

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15 Ibid. 16 This description applies to Book III of Recuyell, which deals with Troy; Books I and II recount a variety of mythological episodes and rely, through Lefèvre, on Boccaccio’s Genealogia deorum gentilium. 17 Guido delle Colonne, Historia destructionis Troiae, ed. and trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1974), p. xiii. 18 Benson, The History of Troy, p. 5. 19 Meek (ed. and trans.), Historia destructionis Troiae, p. xvii, remarks that this is a ‘well-attested medieval custom’. As Janice Valls-Russell pointed out to me, Heywood does something similar in Troia, where he refers to many ancient texts without once acknowledging his debt to Caxton and Lefèvre. 20 William Caxton’s translation of Lefèvre first appeared under the title The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye (?Ghent: ?David Aubert for William Caxton, 1473/74), hence the widely accepted short title Recuyell. I am quoting from Raoul Lefèvre, The Recuile of the Histories of Troie … Translated out of Frenche by Wyllyam Caxton (London: William Copland, 1553), III, fol. 10v. All quotations refer to this edition, which Yves Peyré deems a plausible source: Peyré (gen. ed.), ‘Heywood’s library: the books Thomas Heywood used when he wrote Troia Britanica’, Troia, available at www.shakmyth.org, accessed 24 June 2020. 21 For further analysis of Caxton’s paratext see William Kuskin, Symbolic Caxton: Literary Culture and Print Capitalism (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008), pp. 93–7. 22 Kuskin, Symbolic Caxton, p. 236; see the whole chapter on ‘vernacular humanism’, pp. 236–83. 23 See Gordon McMullan and David Matthews (eds), Reading the Medieval in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Curtis Perry and John Watkins (eds), Shakespeare and the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Ruth Morse, Helen Cooper and Peter Holland (eds), Medieval Shakespeare: Pasts and Presents (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Kuskin, Symbolic Caxton, and Recursive Origins: Writing at the Transition to Modernity (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013). 24 A. E. B. Coldiron, ‘The mediated “medieval” and Shakespeare’, in Morse, Cooper and Holland (eds), Medieval Shakespeare, pp. 55–77 (p. 55). 25 Ibid., p. 60. 26 Ibid., p. 55. 27 Ibid., pp. 62 and 56. 28 See Kuskin, Recursive Origins. 29 I thank Mélanie Guenais for her mathematical explanations on the subject. 30 Kuskin, Recursive Origins, p. 17. 31 Benson, The History of Troy, p. 23. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid., p. 24. 34 Immersion: the book describes battles practically blow by blow; the narrative in the preterite constantly switches to the present of direct speech.

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35 ‘What fool hath added water to the sea, / Or brought a faggot to bright-burning Troy?’, xv[III.i].68–9. Unless otherwise indicated, all references to Shakespeare are to Gary Taylor, John Jowett, Terri Bourus and Gabriel Egan (gen. eds), The New Oxford Shakespeare, The Complete Works: Modern Critical Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017 [2016]). The division into acts and scenes (also provided in this edition) is indicated in square brackets. 36 See chapter 11 (Chloe Preedy) for a very different argument on temporality. 37 Fry (ed. and trans.), Récits inédits, pp. 82–3. 38 Ibid., p. 238, see pp. 233–41. 39 Benson, The History of Troy, pp. 16–19. 40 ‘At these wordes Achilles quoke for yre, and set behinde him the love of polixene / And dyde do Arme hym hastely and mounted on his hors and ran out all araged as a lyon’ (III, fol. 36r). 41 Benson, The History of Troy, pp. 19 and 22. 42 Ibid., p. 22. 43 Compare for instance Troia, XI, stanzas 55–61, and Recuyell, III, fol. 19r. 44 Achilles voices that view in Recuyell, III, fols 33r and 34v. In Thomas Cooper’s Thesaurus linguae romanae et britannicae (London: [Henry Denham], 1578), the entry on Menelaus concludes: ‘So much to doe had he, ere he coulde bring home againe his fayre and famous strumpet’. 45 Meek (ed. and trans.), Historia destructionis Troiae, pp. xiii–xiv, underlines how Benoît expanded the love stories. 46 See Peyré, ‘Heywood’s excerpts from Ovid’s Art of Love’ in Troia Britanica, canto IX, available at www.shakmyth.org, accessed 22 June 2020. 47 See Fry (ed. and trans.), Récits inédits, p. 254, and his comment on the incongruity, p. 381 n. 47. 48 Thomas Heywood, The Golden Age (London: [Nicholas Okes] for William Barrenger, 1611), sig. I1r; see also sigs I2r-v. 49 ‘Paris’ in Cooper, Thesaurus. 50 The Early English Books Online copy of STC 13340, digitised from the Huntington copy, includes a second screenshot of opening D1v-D2r in place of opening C4v-D1r. The missing pages can be seen in the reissue (STC 133405) (also published in 1632 by Nicholas Okes). 51 See Fry (ed. and trans.), Récits inédits, pp. 167 and 341 n. 54. Dares’s account of the event is elliptic, yet it also differs from Homer’s (see pp. 269 and 387 n. 109). 52 This detail echoes Dares (see ibid., p. 269). 53 Shakespeare did the same a decade earlier in Troilus and Cressida (xxv[V.x]), also undoubtedly adapting Caxton. The transposition may have been suggested by Recuyell’s description of Troilus as ‘a newe Hector’ (III, fol. 35r). 54 Troilus is echoing Hector’s own protest: ‘Dishonourable Greeke, Hector nere dealt / On base advantage …’ (sig. H3v). 55 ‘Thou art a coward’ (sig. I2r). Thersites’ criticisms retrospectively clarify the stage direction: Achilles killed Troilus ‘when he was out of breath so thou slewest Hector / Girt with thy Mirmidons’ (ibid.).

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56 Taking a broader angle, Katherine Heavey demonstrates that the refashioning of mythological warriors in 1 Iron Age, Troilus and Cressida and Greene’s Euphues His Censure to Philautus expresses early modern anxiety about male identity. See ‘“Properer men”: myth, manhood and the Trojan War in Greene, Shakespeare and Heywood’, Journal of the Northern Renaissance, 7 (2015), available at www.northernrenaissance.org/properer-men-myth-manhood-andthe-trojan-war-in-greene-shakespeare-and-heywood/, accessed 24 June 2020. 57 The dramatis personae describes him thus (sig. Av) and the verb ‘rail’ is recurrently associated with him. 58 For further information on Thersites, see Claire Kenward, ‘“Of arms and the man”: Thersites in early modern English drama’, in Fiona Macintosh et al. (eds), Epic Performances from the Middle Ages into the Twenty-First Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 421–38. 59 Heywood is probably drawing upon both Chapman’s Homer and Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida. See my ‘Heywood’s Ages and Chapman’s Homer’, pp. 63–4. 60 Rowland, Thomas Heywood’s Theatre, p. 18.

7 Reading the classics, but how? Mythographic paradigms and ‘ill-joined marquetry’ Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Yves Peyré

‘Don’t classify me, read me. I’m a writer, not a genre’, Carlos Fuentes exclaimed, advising his readers not to ask for generic affiliation but rather for a dialogue, if not for the outright abolition of genre; not for one language, but for many languages at odds with one another; not, as Bakhtin would put it, for unity of style but for heteroglossia, not for monologic but for dialogic imagination.1

Had Thomas Heywood foreseen that John Addington Symonds would classify his plays into Histories, Domestic dramas, Romances and Classic dramas,2 and had he envisaged that further criticism might erect watertight partitions between his dramatic output, his poems and his prose, well might he have concurred with Fuentes. An experienced craftsman, Heywood was fully aware of generic requirements and expectations, but he also liked to confront different discourses, to fuse them or make them jolt against each other. Enjoying trans-generic freedom, he invited Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis into the city comedy setting of The Fair Maid of the Exchange (1601–02, printed 1607) or reshuffled material from his historical, seventeen-canto epic Troia Britanica (1609) in the dramatic series of the four Ages, where spectacular effects, tragedy, comedy and mythographic interpretation all coalesce in a form of multitextual heteroglossia. Intellectual cross-currents irrigate his whole works not merely because areas of his production overlap, but because the  material he poured into different generic moulds proceeded from the same intellectual outlook, which did not consider history, poetry, philosophy and science as mutually exclusive but as pieces of a single jigsaw puzzle. A specific example of such comprehensiveness and mobility is to be found in Heywood’s use of mythography, an early modern body of knowledge which itself indiscriminately draws on ethics, aesthetics, science and philosophy, thus offering a system of thought based on plurality and plasticity and a variety of discourses capable of adapting to different, ­sometimes conflicting contexts.

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Reading the classics, but how? 163

After Troia, Heywood did not forget the mythographic learning that he had paraded in his marginalia and endnotes to the cantos.3 He used it again in his London pageants, which draw on mythography almost as much as Jonson’s masques do, and for the iconographic programme he devised for Charles I’s ship, the Sovereign of the Seas, which Janice Valls-Russell studies in chapter 12. As well as on Ovid and Horace, his civic shows rely on Natale Conti’s Mythologia, whose chapter on Arion (VIII.xiv) provides material for Londini Artium & Scientiarum Scaturigo (1632); they also draw on Vincenzo Cartari, whose Imagini degli Dei de gli Antichi supplies the allegorical description of Mercury in Londini Emporia, or Londons Mercatura (1633).4 Heywood’s pageants reveal his skill at adapting mythography to artistic and civic purposes in a genre where it is naturally expected; more, perhaps, than it was in Troia. More unusually, maybe, as discussed in chapter 4, a close reading of The Silver Age suggests that early modern mythographic commentaries also contributed material, together with liberally tapped classical texts, to plays where their presence does not seem so obviously required. The Rape of Lucrece adapts Livy to the Jacobean stage, but more than the historian’s narrative, it is the vigorous eloquence of Ovid’s Fasti (VI.589–96) that breathes dramatic energy into Tullia’s initial recriminations so as to make her sound like a new Lady Macbeth.5 She reappears in Gynaikeion (1624) in a section partly drawn from a chapter devoted to women who originated a civil war in Conrad Lycosthenes’ 1592 edition of Ravisius Textor’s Officina.6 Lucrece herself also turns up, unsurprisingly, in the chapter ‘Of women ravished’.7 The play is built on an axis joining the two contrasted extremes of Tullia as fiendish instigator and Lucrece as noble victim. The section ‘Of women ravished’ opens up another vista in recalling that ‘Lucrece, the chast Roman Matron, was stuperated by Sextus Tarquinus: of whom, Seneca in Octavia thus saith: Nata Lucreti stuprum saevi passa Tyranni’.8 The Chorus in Octavia remembers, as also does Textor, that Lucrece’s rape and ensuing suicide started a civil war: ‘te quoque bellum triste secutum est, / mactata tua’ (300–1). The Chorus, moreover, follows up the argument with an immediate reference to Tullia’s crime (304–9), thus linking the two women in a double-faced figure of femininity, criminal and sacrificial, typifying both the origin and the result of tyranny. For Heywood as for Livy, Tullia’s impiety and Lucrece’s martyrdom are the incentives for and the cement of Brutus’ revolt. Horatius’ solemn vow, ‘To purchase freedome to thus bondag’d Rome’ (The Rape of Lucrece, 955), is in tune with Livy’s remark that the detestation of kings accelerated the advent of liberty (I.i.46.3) and it reverberates as well with Boccaccio’s neat conclusion, in De Claris Mulieribus, that from Lucrece’s suicide ensued Rome’s freedom (‘consecuta sit Rhomana libertas’).9 Heywood

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may well have written Lucrece with Livy on his working table, but his play is not the straightforward adaptation of a single text. Not only does it interweave The History of Rome and Ovid’s Fasti, as Valls-Russell traces in chapter 3, but it relies on memorised knowledge, possibly on notes taken from printed commonplace books like Textor’s, on speeches recollected from Octavia, blending perhaps with Boccaccio’s portrait of Lucrece. Heywood’s experience of the classics is both direct and mediated; his reading is not compartmentalised but cumulative. When inspired by the stories of Antiquity, his writing involves acts of remembering, which involve both dismembering and blending. His composition, combining segmentation and selection with imaginative connexions, reflects to some extent his reading experience, which can be partly reconstituted from his system of borrowings and quotations in such works as Gynaikeion and The Hierarchie of the Blessed Angells (1635). This, in turn, may throw retrospective light on the structure and meaning of some at least of his other works. The definition of Gynaikeion as a collection of ‘Various History Concerninge Women’ sounds like a programme, coupling ‘variety’ (here a mode of composition) and ‘history’, an intricate early modern notion, which for Thomas Heywood seems to have meant something akin to Thomas Cooper’s definition of history, that combines, and oscillates between, ‘the declaration of true things in order set forth’ and an invented story, a fiction, as in Plautus’ ‘Satis historiarum est: There be tales inough tolde’.10 Heywood gives each of the nine books in Gynaikeion the name of a Muse, thus implicitly claiming Herodotus as a model. Inside that overall structure, he associates a few biographies in the tradition of Boccaccio’s De Claris Mulieribus, which he occasionally quotes; he also quotes from the Decameron;11 long excerpts and translations from a great variety of classical poets;12 anecdotes from contemporary historians; and, occasionally, a popular tale. With those several threads – and others – he interweaves and textures his own mythography. Conti is very much present, as in Troia,13 the pageants and, unadvertised but nonetheless operative, the Ages. For his account of Proserpina in Gynaikeion, Heywood relies on Mythologia, III.xvi, as he had probably done in Act V of The Silver Age. For his development on the Muses, he  might have read the chapter Conti devotes to them in Mythologia (VII.xv) or Lilio Gregorio Giraldi’s De Musis Syntagma.14 Yet he preferred to turn to Linocier’s Mythologiae Musarum Libellus, first published in Paris (Sittart, 1582) and regularly reprinted in Conti’s Mythologia as from the 1583 edition, also printed by Sittart. Although the main part of his argument is adapted from Linocier’s Libellus, which he abbreviates and partly



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translates, Heywood also complements it with other borrowings. To sum up the functions of the Muses, for instance, he reproduces a Latin poem: Clio gesta canens transactis tempora reddit, Melpomene tragico proclamat maesta boatis.15 Comica lascivo gaudet sermone Thalia, Dulciloqui16 calamos Euterpe flatibus urget. Terpsichore affectus Cytharis movet, imperat, auget, Plectra gerens Erato saltat pede, carmine, vultu. Carmina Calliope libris heroica mandat. Urania poli motus scrutatur & Astra: Signat cuncta manu loquiturque Polimnia gestu, Mentis Apolliniae17 vis has movet undiq; Musas, In medio residens complectitur omnia Phebus.

and obligingly provides a translation: Clio past acts to after ages sings, Melpomine, with tragicke buskin, she In bellowing breath proclaimes disasterous things. Comick Thalia affects wanton be To speake and write. The eloquent mans quill Euterpe undertaketh to inspire With her learn’d breath. Terpsichore is still Busied about the musicke of the lyre, Th’affections to command, to moove, and sway. But Erato a rebeck beares, and knows To tread to it: of verse she can the way, And how to frame the gesture. Number flowes, In straynes heroick, from Calliop’s penne; Which she to bookes commits. The starres and spheares, Urania searches, and instructeth men In their true motion. Polihimnia steares Action and language, by her hand directed, Which by her helpe, an orator much graceth. By Phoebus thus the Muses live protected, He in the midest, the Nine about him placeth. (Gynaikeion, II, pp. 59–60)

This poem does not appear in Linocier’s Libellus. It could be found instead in any edition of Ausonius’ complete works, in which it was printed as Idyll XX, ‘Musarum inventa et munera’.18 As Tania Demetriou demonstrates in chapter 8, Heywood knew Ausonius well – he quoted and translated large excerpts of the Roman’s poems elsewhere in Gynaikeion. But he ascribes the piece to Virgil, not to Ausonius. This suggests he found the poem in one of the numerous editions of Giraldi’s De Musis Syntagma, in which

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it is attributed to ‘P. Vergilius Maro’;19 or, most probably, he discovered it in Lycosthenes’ 1592 edition of Textor’s Officina, which included both Linocier’s Mythologiae Musae Libellus and Giraldi’s De Musis Syntagma,20 so that he could easily base his development on the former while inserting some elements from the latter. Textor’s Officina, edited by Lycosthenes, is not strictly speaking a mythographical treatise, but more of a thought-structuring commonplace book.21 It is of great use to Heywood because it presents historical and mythological figures arranged in thematic c­ ategories. Thus the section ‘Of warlike women, and those of masculine vertue’ in Gynaikeion partially derives from Textor’s ‘Mulieres bellicosae et masculae virtutis’,22 where one meets, among many others, Virgil’s Camilla, Penthesilea as described by Propertius, and Janus’ daughter Helerna, probably invented by pseudo-Berosus. Illustrating Textor’s chapter on ‘Bella … a mulieribus orta’, Lucrece and Tullia offer further useful examples. The chapter on the Amazons provides insights into further aspects of Heywood’s working method. The first paragraph, devoted to the location and customs of the Amazons, is borrowed, almost word for word, from Ranulf Higden’s Polychronicon, a fourteenth-century universal chronicle that was translated into English by John Trevisa in 1387 and printed by William Caxton in 1480. More specific information is drawn from Justin’s Epitome of Pompeius Trogus (I.ii.4) and from Herodotus (IV.110–16). Onto that historical background, Heywood grafts literary elements drawn from Textor’s Officina. Although he obviously had a direct knowledge of Virgil, Ovid and Seneca, it was convenient to find the appropriate quotations from Seneca’s Agamemnon, Ovid’s Heroides, Virgil’s Aeneid and Valerius Flaccus’ Argonautica handily gathered by Textor.23 Still following Textor, he attributes to Virgil a line from a poem summing up Hercules’ labours: Of Menalippe, Virgill thus: Threicean sexto spoliavit Amazona Baltheo.24

This also appears as Epigram XIX, ‘Monosticha de aerumnis Herculis’, in editions of Ausonius’ works.25 Heywood did not need Textor, however, to quote Ovid’s Ars amatoria, large excerpts of which he had translated himself.26 In the course of the chapter, having already named Hyppolite and Penthesilea, Heywood refers to Hyginus to complete the list.27 According to Heywood, Higinus addes unto the number of those Amazons these following, Ociale, Dioxippe, Iphinome, Xanthe, Hypothoe, Orthrepte or Otrere, Antioche, Laomache, Glauce, Agave, Theseis, Climene, and Polidora. Calaber besides these reckons up twelve, but by diverse and doubtfull names.28

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If this formulation is compared with the text in Commelinus’s 1599 edition of Hyginus: clxiii. Amazones.

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Ocyale, Dioxippe, Iphinome, Xanthe, Hippothoe, Othrepte, Antioche, Laomache, Glauce, Agave, Theseis, Hippolyte, Clymene, Polydora, Penthesilea29

and with the 1535 editio princeps prepared by Jacobus Micyllus (Jakob Moltzer): clxiii. Amazones. Ocyale, Dioxippe, Iphinome, Xanthe, Hippothoee, *Orthrepte, Antioche, Laomache, Glauce, Agave, Theseis, Hippolyte, Clymene, Polydora, Penthesilea. [* marginal note: Otrere] Apud Calabrum quoque in primo duodecim numerantur, sed diversis nominibus30

it clearly appears that Heywood integrates Micyllus’s annotations: the spelling of ‘Orthrepte’ for Othrepte, as well as the variant in a marginal note, ‘Otrere’; and the references to the twelve Amazons mentioned by Quintus Smyrnaeus.31 That Heywood read Hyginus in one of Micyllus’s editions means that he had simultaneous access to an important collection of mythographic texts. In the 1535 editio princeps, Micyllus gathered, besides Hyginus’ Fabulae and Astronomica, Fulgentius, Palaephatus in Latin, and Aratus and Proclus, both in Greek and in Latin. This collection was gradually enlarged over successive editions. The anonymous Libellus de Imaginibus Deorum was added in the Basel 1549 edition, together with a Latin version of Cornutus by Jodocus Velareus. Apollodorus in Latin and Giraldi’s De Musis Syntagma were added in the Paris 1578 edition. Micyllus’s volume thus made available the texts of some of the most widely read mythographers. In his chapter on the Amazons in Gynaikeion, Heywood also reports Palaephatus’ demythologising interpretation – most probably borrowed from Micyllus’s compendium – that ‘[t]he Amasons were not women, but certaine barbarous men who used to weare long garments and loose, reaching below their ankles after the manner of the Thracian women, who shaved their chinnes, and wore the haires of their head long, but covered with miters’.32 Not devoid of critical distance, Heywood sceptically adds ‘this was but his opinion’. Acting as a genuinely fully fledged mythographer, he composes, after the model of Conti, a chapter that was missing in the Mythologia, gathering and commenting on everything he can collect about

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the Amazons from literature and history – everything, including the most abstruse nuggets of information. The reader no doubt finds it gratifying to learn that ‘Stephanus Bizantius writes, that they [the Amazons] are called by the Greekes Sauropatidae, because they are said to feede on lysards, which in their language they call saura’, a scrap of knowledge Heywood derives from his precious Textor.33 Yet as a mythographer, Heywood is not just on the lookout for picturesque details. He trained himself to gather a multiplicity of texts and collate the information they provide, keenly alert as he was to difference in emphasis and contrariety between diverging versions. Thus Penthesilea is ‘shee that in the ayd of Priam (or as some say, for the love of Hector) came to the siege of Troy with a thousand ladies, where after many deeds of chivalrie by her performed she was slaine by the hands of Achilles, or as the most will have it, by Neoptolimus’.34 In 2 Iron Age, when Pyrrhus (Neoptolemus) struts on stage brandishing Penthesilea’s head at the point of his sword, it is Caxton’s variant Heywood adopts from his translation of Raoul Lefèvre’s Recueil des histoires de Troyes, before switching from Caxton to Virgil to dramatise the fall of Troy.35 Before Penthesilea fights with Pyrrhus, however, she has time to try to comfort Cressida, who has just been repudiated by Diomede. The scene contrasts two types of women, the warlike, boldly energetic Amazon and the misled, pliant girl – both victims in the end. Their encounter onstage is also like a conversation Heywood holds, in this occurrence, with Caxton, Chaucer, Henryson and Shakespeare, listening to what they said and adding his own contribution. Penthesilea meeting Cressida is a theatrical symbol with which Heywood advertises his literary practice. He does not bow to any monolithic, aweinspiring tradition, classical or otherwise, but plays, like a juggler, with various versions of different texts, constantly reshuffling his pack of stories in a conscious, cultural game. At the same time, his reformulations are not devoid of ethical awareness. While Hyginus classifies the story of Hagnodice, the first midwife, among inventors and their inventions, Heywood draws attention instead to ‘such as have died in child-byrth’,36 so as to insist on the crucial importance of Hagnodice’s contribution to civilisation: Hyginus’ terse Latin, ‘[a]ntiqui obstetrices non habuerunt, unde mulieres verecundia ductae intereriant’ is made more explicit for the English reader: ‘[i]n the old time … there were no midwives at all, and for that cause many women in their modestie, rather suffered themselves to perish for want of helpe, than that any man should bee seene or knowne to come about them’.37 That is why Hagnodice decided to learn medicine, disguised as a boy, since ‘the Athenians were most curious that no servant or woman should learne the art of ­chyrurgerie’38 – Hyginus’ ‘[n]am Athenienses caverant, nequis servus, aut foemina artem medicinam disceret’ (fol. 52v). Heywood not only welcomes, and adapts,

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some of Hyginus’ mythography within his own text, he also takes over some of the sections, expanding Hyginus’ ‘Quae piissimae fuerunt, vel piissimi’ into his ‘Of pious daughters’,39 and basing his ‘Of mothers that have slaine their children, or wives their husbands, &c’ on Hyginus’ Fabulae ccxxxix, ‘Matres quae filios interfecerunt’, and ccxl, ‘Quae conjuges suos occiderunt’.40 The combination of Conti’s Mythologia and Boccaccio’s Genealogia – which Heywood occasionally used in Troia and refers to in Gynaikeion41 – with the authors of Micyllus’s collection provided him with rich and diversified mythographical material. His interest in love stories led him also to Plutarch’s Erotikai Diêgêseis, which was very easily accessible both in Greek and in Latin, and to Parthenius of Nicaea’s Erotika Pathemata, which gathers mythological stories of unhappy love. Heywood might have used the 1531 editio princeps of Erotika Pathemata with a Latin translation by Hellenist Janus Cornarius Zuiccaviensis (Johann Hagenbut of Zwickau),42 but he seems rather to have laid hands on a reprint that often passes unnoticed among other texts collected by Johann Herold. A Basel printer, Herold is better known as the editor of Petrarch’s Latin works and of a German mythography based on Giraldi’s De Deis Gentium.43 In Herold’s compendium, Exempla Virtutum et Vitiorum (Basel: Henricus Petrus, 1555), Heywood found not only Parthenius’ love stories but several other texts of which he made use, some of them infrequently, others quite extensively.44 What he found in Hyginus’ Fabulae, in Textor’s Officina, in Herold’s eclectic collection and in another of his favourite books, Athenaeus’ Deipnosophistae,45 was a series of texts that could easily be read discontinuously, in a fragmentary way: such volumes did not require sustained, uninterrupted perusal, but allowed themselves to be dipped into, now and then, as need or leisure invited. For similar reasons of pithy brevity and variety he praised the anecdotes of Aelian and Valerius Maximus, claiming to ‘have imitated Aelianus de Var. Hist. and Valer. Maxim. who epitomised great and memorable acts, reducing and contracting into a compendious method wide and loose histories, giving them notwithstanding their full weight, in few words’.46 At the same time, many of the books on his working table, if not most, grouped their subjects, mythological or otherwise, according to thematic categories. This enabled him to select items from a plurality of sources to rearrange them in new patterns. In other words, he seems to have been attracted by easily detachable pieces that could be reconfigured ­according to need. In the section devoted to ‘Women remarkeable for their love to their husbands’, in Book III of Gynaikeion, Heywood treats of devoted wives, some of them found in books of history. He also notes that ‘Michael Lord Montaigne in his Essayes speakes onely of three women for the like vertue

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memorable’,47 and goes on to report the stories Montaigne narrates in his essay ‘De trois bonnes femmes’ (II.xxxv), three virtuous wives drawn from the Epistles of Pliny the Younger (VI.xxiv; III.xvi) and from Tacitus’ Annals (XV.lx–lxiv). If Heywood read the essay to the end – which, of course, cannot be ascertained – he could hardly miss one of its conclusions, in which Montaigne suggests that, rather than invent new stories, it is more pleasurable and profitable to collect and assemble those that already exist in books: Et qui en voudroit bastir un corps entier et s’entretenant, il ne faudroit qu’il fournit du sien que la liaison, comme la soudure d’un autre metal; et pourroit entasser par ce moyen force veritables evenemens de toutes sortes, les disposant et diversifiant selon que la beauté de l’ouvrage le requerroit, à peu près comme Ovide a cousu et r’apiecé sa Metamorphose, de ce grand nombre de fables diverses.48

Perhaps it is not too fanciful to surmise that Heywood may have recognised his own practice in Gynaikeion, if he did read this programme – possibly in John Florio’s 1603 translation: And whosoever would undertake to frame a compleate and well joynted bodie of them, neede neither employe nor adde any thing of his owne unto it except the ligaments, as the soldring of another mettall, and by this meanes might compact sundry events of all kindes, disposing and diversifying them, according as the beauty and lustre of the worke should require: And very neere, as Ovid hath sowen and contrived his Metamorphosis, with that strange number of diverse fables.49

Montaigne’s ‘cousu et r’apiecé’ is adequately represented by Florio’s ‘sowen and contrived’: the latter word, used in the sense of ‘brought by ingenuity or skill into a place, position, or form’ (OED, †7) rendering ‘r’apiecé’, which suggests gathering diverse pieces here and there to bring them together. While the stitching metaphor as a method of composition is not explicitly theorised, it is at least hinted at in the section Heywood devotes to women’s weaving where, after interlacing information drawn both from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and from Textor’s Officina, he brings in a quotation from Ausonius’ epigram XXXV, ‘De Sabina textrice, carmina faciente’: Sive probas Tyrio textam sub tegmine vestra [sic for ‘vestem’] Seu placet inscripti commoditus [sic for ‘commoditas’] tituli, &c.

which is thus Englished: If thou affect’st a purple roabe, Woaven in the Tyrian staine, Or if a title well inscrib’d,



Reading the classics, but how? 171

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By which thy wit may gaine, Behold her workes unpartially, And censure on them well: Both, one Sabina doth professe, And doth in both excell.50

This concludes his section, as if Heywood were leading the reader to a culminating point from which to enhance the parallel of Ausonius’ ‘geminas artes’, the twin arts of writing and weaving. ‘The most cunning and curious Musick, is that which is made out of Discords’, Heywood declares in his address ‘To the [r]eader’ introducing Gynaikeion. The multifarious nature of the work, which allows itself to oscillate between several genres, makes it an easy receptacle in which several systems of thought, mythographic included, can happily rub shoulders. In subtler tunes, such discordant notes can be heard in The Silver Age. Neither are they absent from the other mythological plays, in the fabric of which a few mythographic shreds are visibly stitched, participating in the overall aesthetic design. At the beginning of The Golden Age, a Lord comes to announce that ‘The old Uranus, sonne of the Aire & Day  / Is dead’ (sig. Bv). This genealogy of Uranus has no equivalent in Heywood’s direct source, Caxton’s translation of Lefèvre. It was expounded in Boccaccio’s Genealogia,51 ultimately derived from Cicero’s De Natura Deorum (III  xvii), and was probably common knowledge.52 Mainly, the additional detail seems irrelevant, with no obvious dramatic or thematic purpose at this point. But it briefly hints at a tension in the conception of the character that draws him into the different spaces of political history and natural allegory: in the following play, Proserpine is torn, in a more fruitfully dramatic way, between human suffering and celestial transmutation. In The Brazen Age, some of Hercules’ labours are interpreted along traditional lines popularised by Boccaccio and Conti: ‘That he supported heaven, doth well express  / His astronomick skill, knowledge in stars’ (sig. C2v); he killed the Hydra, ‘This shewed his Logicke skill’ (sig. C2v). Jason won the Golden Fleece: ‘Some think this rich fleece was a golden book’ (sig. G4r). Such slight incursions into mythography may seem superficial, unobtrusive and without any deep influence on the dramatic structure. Yet they invite the more alert spectators to consider that the brawny heroics on stage are not just what they seem to be, that reality is multiple and that a single object can be viewed from various angles. In Hierarchie, Althaea is mentioned as one in a list ‘Of mothers that most cruelly and unnaturally have murthered their owne children’,53 an enumeration which Heywood borrows almost entirely from Hyginus’ ‘Matres quae

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filios interfecerunt’.54 Similarly, in Gynaikeion, she appears in a series ‘Of women contentious, and bloodie’.55 In a later chapter in the same book, she has even become a sorceress: ‘Meleager was tormented by his mother, the witch Althaea, who in the fatall brand burned him alive, as it is expressed at large by Ovid in his Metamorph’.56 But Ovid offers a much subtler presentation of Althaea’s tortured hesitation and endless doubts until she finally throws the fatal brand into the fire; and it is this Althaea that inspires the character Heywood calls on stage in the Brazen Age. Her language is very close to Ovid’s formulations, some phrases translated almost word for word. But Heywood inevitably adds a theatrical dimension. While, in Ovid, ‘tum conata quater flammis inponere ramum / coepta quater tenuit’ (VIII.462–3), ‘[t]hen four times she made to throw the billet in the flames and four times she held her hand’,57 in The Brazen Age, she does set the brand on fire and immediately, in another part of the stage, Meleager starts feeling unbearable pains; Althaea, full of remorse, takes the brand out of the fire, and Meleager’s convulsions subside; but anger prevailing again over maternal feeling, Althea throws the brand back into the fire. In Ovid, after Meleager’s death Althaea disappears and is heard of no more. Heywood makes her spectacularly kill herself with Meleager’s sword, a symbolic retribution that is meant to lend her a tragic stature. Medea’s eulogy of the Golden Fleece pays suitable tribute to the Drapers’ corporation in the civic pageant, Londini Status Pacatus (1639).58 The point of view changes radically when she obtains pride of place in the lists ‘Of mothers that have slaine their children, or wives their husbands’, and ‘Of mothers that most cruelly and unnaturally have murthered their owne children’.59 She is fittingly banished from religious rituals in a few lines Heywood translates from Ovid’s Fasti, II.623–30.60 Jason’s capture of the Golden Fleece, in Troia, is but a pale image of Essex’s Spanish expedition (VII, stanzas 50–1), but this deference to national pride does not preclude sympathy for young Medea’s quandary, torn as she is between her love for Jason and her reluctance to betray her father (VII, stanzas 60–7). In The Brazen Age, Medea is a powerful magician and cruel murderess, but also a young, infatuated girl, who shares the tortured anguish of her Ovidian model (Metamorphoses, VII.9–71), whose language she remembers. In Ovid, she thinks in the secret of her heart; in Caxton’s History of Jason, she could not find rest at night as ‘so many thoughtes & ymagynacions assaylled her on alle parties by suche facion that she torned her often in yelding many a syghe’;61 in The Brazen Age, the monologue in which she expresses her qualms of conscience and tormented mind is ironically delivered in alternation with Jason’s own separate monologue in which, simultaneously present on stage, he smoothly discloses his cynical project of seduction.

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The Althaea and the Medea of The Brazen Age, dramatically torn between incompatible loyalties, are the result of a theatrical elaboration of Ovid while Gynaikeion’s one-dimensional Althaea and Medea, inspired by Hyginus, are merely murderesses. It might be misleading, however, to systematise a contrast between the complex subtlety of literary writing and the possible simplifications of mythographic catalogues – or a constant incompatibility between the contradictions inherent to drama and the onesided encomia of civic pageants. Still in The Brazen Age, when Hercules has become a ‘base effeminate groome’ subjected to Omphale, a group of Greek heroes, among whom are Jason, Telamon, Castor, Pollux, Nestor, Atreus and others, come to try and shake him out of his shameful torpor. They hope to do so by reminding him of all his valorous feats, which they enumerate at length and finally emphasise that it was ‘He that Oecalia and Betricia wan’ (sig. K2r). The allusion to ‘Betricia’, for ‘Bebricia’ – the result of a printer’s mistake – is developed in Gynaikeion, where Heywood writes that Hercules ravished the nymph Pyrene of Bebritia, from her the Pyrenaean Mountaines tooke name, of whom Syllius: Nomen Bebricia duxere à virgine colles, Hospitis Alcidae crimen, &c. From the Bebrician maid these hills tooke name, Of her guest Hercules, the fault and blame.62

Drawn from one of the mythographic lists in Textor’s Officina, ‘De raptoribus diversarum puellarum’, together with its reference to Silius Italicus’ Punica, III.415–41,63 the anecdote recalls how Hercules, when a guest of king Bebryx, allowed himself to get inebriated and raped his host’s daughter Pyrene, a crime which led to her death, on which Heywood expatiates, in another section of Gynaikeion, ‘Of women that have come by strange deaths’: ‘Pyrene the daughter of Bebrix was comprest by Hercules in the mountaines that divide Italy from Spaine, she was after torne in pieces by wild beasts, they were cald of her Montes Pyreneae. i. The Pyrenean mountaines’.64 Although Heywood’s geographical knowledge may have tottered, in this instance, his literary parallel between Bebrycia and Oechalia was firm. In Rafaello Regio’s commentary on Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a passing allusion to Hercules’ return after a victory in Oechalia (‘Victor ab Oechalia’, IX.136) called for an explanation that was generously provided: Hercules, ut scribit Diod. in Oechalia[m] contra Euryti liberos ob Iole[m] uxore[m] sibi denegata[m] exercita[m] duxit, urbeq; capta Euryti filios Toxeu[m], Deione[m] & Clytia[m] occidit, ac Iole[m] captiua[m] secum duxit.65

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(Hercules, according to Diodorus,66 waged war in Oechalia against Eurytus’ sons because he had been refused Iole’s hand. He took the city, killed Eurytus’ sons Toxeus, Deiones and Clytias, and took Iole prisoner.)

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Hyginus told a ghastlier story: Hercules cum Iolen Euryti filiam in coniugium petiisset, ille cum repudiasset, Oechaliam expugnauit. Qui ut a virgine rogatur, parentes eius coram ea interficere velle coepit. Illa animo pertinacior, parentes suos ante se necari est perpessa, quos omnes cum interfecisset, Iolem captivam ad Deianiram praemisit.67 (When, asking for Iole’s hand, he was refused by her father Eurytus, Hercules conquered Oechalia. Then, to oblige the girl to entreat him, the desire came to him to kill her family before her eyes. But with most resolute firmness, she allowed her family to be killed in front of her. When Hercules had killed them all, he sent Iole, captive, to Dejanira.)

An even more dramatic version, however, was given in Textor’s Officina, in the section on suicides: Hercules ab Iole connubio reiectus, Oechalia[m] puellae patria[m] diripuit. Dolore facti Iole se praecipitem è muro dedit. Autor Plut.68 (As he was refused Iole’s hand, Hercules sacked Oechalia, the girl’s country. Grieved at the deed, Iole threw herself down from the wall. So Plutarch.)

Seneca’s Iole does not commit suicide, but the vehement modulations of her complaint resonate with powerful images of Oechalia laid waste.69 In a reader’s memory, such striking variations on the same story may well coalesce to kindle the imagination while liberating it from any single track so as to encourage, perhaps, the invention of further twists. When he couples Oechalia and Bebrycia, Heywood connects two stories associating a woman’s ruthless subjection and ruin with the conquest and devastation of a territory. He creates a new mythographic series that imports a critical subtext into the list of exploits attributed to Hercules, whose heroic stance is questioned in The Brazen Age, as Richard Rowland shows in chapter 5, and is undermined here by the crimes alluded to sub tela: retrospectively, an invisible thread running beneath the warp seems to connect the conquest of Oechalia and Bebrycia with Hercules’ destruction of Troy that occurs earlier in the play, during which Hesione is captured and given to Telamon as part of his booty. Of a tragedy entitled Hesione, attributed to the Latin author Naevius, only one line survives,70 insufficient to reveal how the eponymous heroine was presented. In the story of Hercules allotting Hesione to Telamon, whether alluded to by Sophocles,71 reported by Apollodorus, Diodorus and Hyginus,72 or narrated by Lefèvre and Caxton,

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Hesione is never allowed to speak for herself. Ovid despatches her tersely, if not brutally, in three words: ‘Hesioneque data potitur’ (‘he is given possession of Hesione’).73 It is therefore not unlikely that Heywood may be the first author in literary history to give Hesione a voice, in a speech that might have been partly inspired by Iole’s in Hercules Oetaeus. In The Brazen Age, the dignified protests of Hesione at being dishonourably ‘ravish’t hence perforce’ (sig. Hv) start a theme that echoes in the twin references to Oechalia and Bebrycia. In this case, a mythographic thought pattern, associating characters according to some salient feature in a topic series similar to those of Hyginus and of commonplace books, enables Heywood to enrich the presentation of Hercules and to question the place and voices of women in the heroic world, as he also did when he paralleled the excruciating doubts of Medea and Althaea, and as he had already done in the dramatic and mythographic architecture of The Silver Age. Colin Burrow noted that ‘a large part of the creativity of Shakespeare lies in his willingness to overlayer one shard of “the classics” with another …, to misremember, and to reinvent what he has read’.74 Heywood’s composition might be said to work along similar lines, if by ‘the classics’ one understands not only classical texts directly accessed, but also their commentaries, interpretations and reuse in commonplace books and mythographic handbooks. Like Shakespeare’s, Heywood’s writing was shaped not merely by what he read but by how he read – now deeply and extensively, now fragmentarily or at random, now through various interpretive screens – and by how he remembered and reassembled what he had read. Tania Demetriou and Tanya Pollard point out that ‘[e]vidence of reading habits consistently suggests … simultaneous engagement with multiple versions’.75 Heywood seems to have been simultaneously reading excerpts from a plurality of books, including several versions of the same myth, or the same version in different contexts. In a complementary way, and almost as a mirror effect, one might suppose that accessing a multiplicity of texts simultaneously, some of them fragmentary, at times contradictory, encouraged the composition of complex, multitextual, or multilayered literary texts gathering a variety of multicoloured pieces. In his De Oratore, Cicero ironically made fun of a composition that lacks smoothness and uniformity: ‘Quam lepide λέξεις compostae! ut tesserulae omnes / Arte pavimento atque emblemate vermiculato’ (III.xliii.171), ‘how charmingly he fait ses phrases – set in order, like the lines  / Of mosaic in a pavement, and his inlaid work he twines’.76 In contrast, it is precisely irregularity Montaigne claims for himself when he describes his essays as ‘une marqueterie mal jointe’ even while asserting that ‘[m]on livre est tousjours un’77 – or, in Florio’s words, ‘it is but uncoherent checky, or ill joined ­in-laid-worke’,

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but ‘[m]y booke is alwaies one’.78 More perhaps than Carlos Fuentes’s ‘dialogic imagination’, Heywood’s composition in the Ages and in his treatises might bring Montaigne’s self-derogatory appraisal to mind. Now loosely stitched, now finely woven, Heywood’s own chequer-work is another type of ‘ill-joined marquetry’. Dissimilar as their respective achievements might be in depth and scope of thought, and even though Montaigne, who is known to have possessed and annotated Giraldi’s mythography,79 nonetheless seems to have relied less than Heywood did on commonplace and reference books, or on original literary works, it is not impossible to imagine the English author reading in much the same way as the French essayist claims to have done: ‘je feuillette à cette heure un livre, à cette heure un autre, sans ordre et sans dessein, à pieces descousues’,80 ‘without order, without method, and by peece-meales I turne over and ransacke, now one booke and now another’.81 In both cases, albeit in differing ways and for dissimilar purposes, reading that could be wide and desultory, plural and fragmentary, as well as sensitive and profound, may have proved a fruitful form of investigation, reflection and creativity.

Notes   1 Carlos Fuentes, ‘How I started to write’, in Carlos Fuentes, Myself with Others, Selected Essays (London: André Deutsch, 1988), pp. 3–27 (p. 27).  2 John Addington Symonds, ‘Introduction’, in Thomas Heywood, ed. Arthur Wilson Verity, The Mermaid Series (London: Vizetelly, 1888), pp. vii–xxxii.   3 Thomas Heywood, Troia Britanica (London: W. Jaggard, 1609). See the online edition, Yves Peyré (gen. ed.), Troia Britanica (2009–19), available at www. shakmyth.org, accessed 24 June 2020.   4 References to Natale Conti are to Natalis Comitis Mythologiae, sive explicationum fabularum libri decem (Paris: Arnold Sittart, 1583), henceforth Mythologia. References to Vincenzo Cartari are to the Latin translation, Imagines Deorum, qui ab antiquis colebantur, trans. Antoine Du Verdier (Lyons: B. Honoratum, 1581).   5 See lines 73–81, 85–94, 96–103 and 115–17. References are to Allan Holaday (ed.), Thomas Heywood’s ‘The Rape of Lucrece’, Illinois Studies in Language and Literature, XXXIV:3 (Urbana: The University of Illinois Press, 1950), pp. i–viii, 1–186.  6 Thomas Heywood, Γυναικείον [Gynaikeion], or, Nine Bookes of Various History Concerninge Women (London: Adam Islip, 1624), V, p. 217; Tullia also appears, with a reference to Livy, in the section ‘Of women contentious, and bloodie’, VII, p. 354. Johannes Ravisius Textor, Theatrum poeticum et historicum, sive officina Io. Ravisii, ed. Conrad Lycosthenes (Basel: Leonard Ostenius, 1592), col. 170. This edition substantially augments earlier ones.

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 7 Heywood, Gynaikeion, IX, p. 424. The staging of her rape is discussed by Janice Valls-Russell in chapter 3.   8 ‘Lucretius’ daughter, victim of the cruel tyrant’s lust’, pseudo-Seneca, Octavia, 302–3. Line references are to Seneca, Octavia, in Tragedies, ed. and trans. John G. Fitch, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), vol. II.   9 The 1608 edition of The Rape of Lucrece reads ‘this bondag’d Rome’, sig. D2v; Livy, History of Rome, Volume I (Books 1–2), trans. B. O. Foster (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1919); Giovanni Boccaccio, ‘De Lucretia Collatini conjuge’, De claris mulieribus (Bern: Mathias Apiarus, 1539), XLVI, p. xxxiii. 10 Thomas Cooper, Thesaurus linguae romanae et britannicae (London: [Henry Denham], 1578), entry for ‘Historia’, quoting Plautus, Bacchides, line 158. 11 Respectively Gynaikeion, VIII, p. 376, and The Hierarchie of the Blessed Angells (London: Adam Islip, 1635), IV, p. 256. 12 Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Fasti and Ars amatoria are favourites, together with Virgil’s Aeneid, Horace, Seneca, Martial, Claudian, Tibullus, Propertius, Statius, Ausonius and Plutarch. 13 Heywood’s notes in Troia are heavily indebted to Conti’s Mythologia. See Yves Peyré (gen. ed.), ‘Heywood’s library’, Troia Britanica (2009–19), available at www.shakmyth.org, accessed 24 June 2020. 14 Lilio Gregorio Giraldi, De Musis Syntagma, nunc reconcinnatum & auctum, in Lilii Greg. Gyraldi Ferrariensis operum, quae extant, omnium (Basel: Thomas Guarin, 1580), vol. I, pp. 531–43. De Musis was first published in Strasbourg (Mathias Schurerius, 1511), reprinted in 1512 and 1539, and collected in Giraldi’s Opera Omnia as from 1580. 15 A printer’s mistake for ‘moesta boatu’. 16 A printer’s mistake for either ‘Dulciloquis’ or ‘Dulciloquos’, the two readings to be found in early modern editions, ‘Dulciloquos’ being the most frequent. 17 For ‘Apollineae’. 18 For example in Joseph Juste Scaliger’s edition of Ausonius, Opera in meliorem ordinem digesta. … Ausonianarum lectionum libri duo (Lyons: Gryphius, 1575), p. 188; or in Scaliger and Elie Vinet’s edition, D. Magni Ausonii Burdigalensis … opera (Geneva: Jacob Stoer, 1588), p. 188. 19 The poem appears in the first edition, Lilii Graegorii Ziraldi Ferrariensis syntagma de musis (Strasbourg: Matthias Schurerius, 1511), sig. Cr. It also provided Sambucus with one of his emblems in Emblemata (Antwerp: Christophe Plantin, 1564). 20 In his 1592 edition of Textor (see note 6), Lycosthenes added Linocier’s and Giraldi’s treatises on the Muses, cols 471–521 and 521–35 respectively. The poem on the Muses ascribed to Virgil by Linocier appears in this edition and in its reprints. The poem disappeared from the edition of Giraldi’s complete works and was not printed in the text of his De Musis that was added to Micyllus’s edition of Hyginus (see note 27), from the 1578 edition onwards. 21 See Ann Moss, Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996).

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22 Heywood, Gynaikeion, V, pp. 224[204]–30 (misnumbered page indicated in ­ 60–65. square brackets); Textor, Theatrum poeticum et historicum, II, xxvii, cols 1 23 Textor, Theatrum poeticum et historicum, cols 166–7. 24 Heywood, Gynaikeion, V, p. 221 (with the sixth [labour] he deprived the Thracian Amazon of her belt); borrowed from Textor, col. 167. 25 For example, in Scaliger and Vinet’s joint 1588 edition, D. Magni Ausonii Burdigalensis … Opera, p. 188. 26 Heywood, Gynaikeion, V, p. 224[204]. See chapter 2 (M. L. Stapleton) for a discussion of Heywood’s translation of Ars amatoria. 27 Two main editions of Hyginus were available: the editio princeps, C. Julii Hygini Augusti liberti fabularum liber, ed. Jacobus Micyllus (Basel: Johannes Herwagen, 1535), which was reprinted several times; and Mythologici latini, ed. Hieronymus Commelinus (Heidelberg: Hieronymus Commelinus (heirs of), 1599). Together with Hyginus’ Fabulae, Commelinus had gathered Fulgentius, Albricus and Firmicus Maternus. 28 Heywood, Gynaikeion, V, pp. 223–4[204]. 29 Commelinus, Mythologici latini, p. 97. 30 Hyginus, Fabulae, clxiii, fol. 36r in Micyllus’s 1578 edition (Paris: Jean Parent). Unless otherwise mentioned, citations are of this edition. 31 The Fall of Troy, or Posthomerica, I.42–7. An edition of Quintus Smyrnaeus’ Greek text was published by Aldo Manuzio in Venice in 1505. A translation into Latin by Jodocus Velareus (Joost Welare), Quinti Calabri De Relictorum ab Homero libri quatuordecim, was published at Antwerp by Joannes Steelsius in 1539 and reprinted two years later (Lyons: Sebastianus Gryphius, 1541). There is no indication that Heywood knew this text. 32 Heywood, Gynaikeion, V, p. 219. 33 Heywood, Gynaikeion, V, p. 223; Textor, Theatrum poeticum et historicum, col. 167. Textor himself owed it to Philippo Beroaldo’s commentary on Suetonius’ Twelve Caesars (1494), reprinted in Caii Suetonii Tranquilli duodecim Caesares (Lyons: Jean Frellon, 1548), p. 28. 34 Heywood, Gynaikeion, V, p. 222. 35 William Caxton’s translation of Lefèvre first appeared under the title The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye (?Ghent: ?David Aubert for William Caxton, 1473/74). Henceforth Recuyell. In chapter 6 Charlotte Coffin discusses Heywood’s engagement with Caxton in The Iron Age. 36 Hyginus, Fabulae, cclxxiv, ‘Quis quid invenerit’, fols 52r–53r; Heywood, Gynaikeion, IV, pp. 203–4. 37 Heywood, Gynaikeion, IV, p. 203. 38 Ibid., p. 204. 39 Hyginus, Fabulae, ccliv, fols 48v–49r; Heywood, Gynaikeion, VII, pp. 319–24. 40 Gynaikeion, IX, pp. 435–6. 41 Relating the story of Althaea’s brand, Heywood mentions both Ovid’s Tristia and Boccaccio’s Genealogia (Gynaikeion, VII, p. 354). 42 Parthenii Nicaensis, De Amatoriis Affectionibus Liber Iano Cornario Zuiccaviensi interprete (Basel: Froben, 1531).

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43 Francisci Petrarchae Florentini, philosophi, oratoris, et poetae clarissimi … Opera quae extant omnia (Basel: Sebastianus Henricpetri, 1554; reissued 1581); the mythographical Heydenweldt und irer Götter anfängcklicher Ursprung was published together with a translation of Diodorus Siculus and Dictys Cretensis into German (Basel: Henricus Petrus, 1554). 44 Heywood used Nicolaus Hanapus for his biblical characters and Frontinus for his stratagems; Valerius Maximus, Aelian and Battista Fregoso for their anecdotes; the Italian Marcus Antonius Coccius, surnamed Sabellicus, the French Guy de Fontenay de Bourges and the Croatian Marco Marulic for their compilations of exemplary characters. All these texts were conveniently gathered in Herold’s volume, in which Heywood also found excerpts attributed to the ancient Greek Heraclides Lembos, Excerpta Politiarum, for details on the customs of Spartan and Cretan women. 45 Natale Conti’s translation into Latin, Athenaei Dipnosophistarum sive Coenae Sapientum Libri XV, was printed in Lyons and Basel in 1556 and reprinted in Venice in 1572. Heywood seems to have used the Basel edition, as Janice VallsRussell shows in chapter 12. Another translation, by Jacques Dalechamps, was printed in Lyons in 1583. Heywood used Athenaeus in The English Traveller, Gynaikeion (see chapter 8) and Philocothonista: see Richard Rowland, Thomas Heywood’s Theatre, 1599–1639: Locations, Translations and Conflicts (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), p. 218. 46 Gynaikeion, ‘To the reader’, sig. A2v. 47 Gynaikeion, III, ‘Of women remarkeable for their love to their husbands’, p. 159. 48 Michel de Montaigne, Les Essais de Michel de Montaigne (Paris: Club Français du Livre, 1962), II.xxxv, ‘De trois bonnes femmes’, p. 815. 49 Montaigne’s Essays translated by John Florio, ed. L. C. Harmer, 3 vols (London: Dent, 1965 [1910]), vol. II, xxxv, ‘Of three good women’, p. 481. 50 D. Magni Ausonii … opera, p. 11; Gynaikeion, VII, ‘Of women excellent in the art of painting, weaving, &c’, pp. 352–3. 51 Caelus or Uranus ‘filius fuit Aetheris et Diei’ in the 1532 edition of Boccaccio’s Genealogia deorum gentilium prepared by Micyllus, De montium, silvarum, fontium, lacuum, fluviorum, stagnorum et marium nominibus Joannis bocatii peri genealogias deorum, libri quindecim, cum annotationibus Jacobi micylli (Basel: Johannes Herwagen, 1532), III.i, p. 57. 52 Abraham Fraunce, for example, had written that ‘[t]he two last children of Demogorgon, were Aether and Dies … who, of brother and sister, became man and wife, and begat Caelius, or Caelus, the heaven: which name was first attributed to Uranius, Father of Saturnus, king of Creete’: The Third Part of the Countesse of Pembrokes Yvychurch: Entituled, Amintas Dale (London: [Thomas Orwyn] for Thomas Woodcock, 1592), fol. 6r. 53 Heywood, Hierarchie, I, p. 38. 54 Hyginus, Fabulae, ccxxxix, fol. 46v. 55 Gynaikeion, VII, p. 354. 56 Ibid., VIII, p. 414.

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57 Metamorphoses, VIII.462–3, trans. Frank Justus Miller, rev. G. P. Goold (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999 [1916]). 58 See Katherine Heavey, The Early Modern Medea: Medea in English Literature, 1558–1688 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 157–8. 59 Heywood, Gynaikeion, IX, p. 435 and Hierarchie, I, p. 38, respectively. 60 Hierarchie, I, p. 35. 61 William Caxton, The History of Jason, ed. John Munro, Early English Text Society, Extra Series 111 (London and Oxford, 1913), p. 117. 62 Gynaikeion, ‘Of women in generall, with their punishments and rewards’, IX, p. 422. 63 Silii Italici De Bello Punico Secundo XVII libri (Venice: In aedibus Aldi, et Andreae Asulani soceri, 1523), fol. 35v. 64 Gynaikeion, IV, p. 210. 65 Metamorphoseon Pub. Ovidii Nasonis libri XV (Venice: Haeredes Petri Ravani et socios, 1548/9), p. 198. 66 Diodorus Siculus, Library of History, Volume II: Books 2.35–4.58, trans. C. H. Oldfather (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1935), IV.xxxvii.5. Rafaello Regio translates Diodorus’ paragraph. 67 Hyginus, Fabulae, xxxv, fol. 11r. 68 The reference is to pseudo-Plutarch, Parallel Stories, XIII. Textor makes the episode tragic by deleting its continuation, ‘but it came about, since her garment was billowed out by the wind, that she suffered no harm’, translated by Frank Cole Babbitt et al., Plutarch’s ‘Moralia’, 16 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927–2004), vol. IV (1962), p. 277. 69 Seneca, Hercules Oetaeus, lines 173–224 and 123–32. 70 E. H. Warmington, Remains of Old Latin, 4 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961), vol. II, F 19, pp. 118–19. Demetrius’ Hesione, a lost satyr play, and Alexis’ Hesione (the two surviving fragments of which suggest it was a comedy) are not likely to have voiced Hesione’s tragedy. 71 Sophocles, Ajax, lines 1299–1303, Ajax. Electra. Oedipus Tyrannus, ed. and trans. Hugh Lloyd-Jones (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994). 72 Diodorus Siculus, Library of History, IV.xlii.3–7; Apollodorus, The Library, trans. James G. Frazer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1921), II.vi.4; Hyginus, Fabulae, lxxxix, fols 20v–21r. 73 Ovid, Metamorphoses, XI.217. 74 Colin Burrow, ‘Shakespeare and humanistic culture’ in Charles Martindale and A. B. Taylor (eds), Shakespeare and the Classics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 9–27 (p. 24). 75 Tanya Pollard and Tania Demetriou (eds), Homer and Greek Tragedy in Early Modern England’s Theatres (= Classical Receptions Journal, 9:1 (2017), Introduction, pp. 1–35 (p. 23); and Emrys Jones, The Origins of Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), p. 102. 76 Cicero, De Oratore, ed. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1942), vol. II, pp. 136–7.

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77 Montaigne, Essais, III.ix, ‘De la vanité’, p.  1046. The quotation occurs in a ­paragraph added in the 1588 edition. 78 Montaigne’s Essays translated by John Florio, III.ix, ‘Of vanitie’, vol. III, pp. 205–6. 79 The copy of Giraldi’s De Deis Gentium in the Bibliothèque nationale de France (Res. Z PAYEN-490) is annotated in Montaigne’s own hand. See Alain Legros, ‘Michaelis Montani annotatione decem latine ac graece in Giraldi historiam de deis gentium […] Le Giraldus de Montaigne et autres livres annotés de sa main’, Journal de la Renaissance, 1 (2000), pp. 13–88. 80 Essais, III.iii, ‘De trois commerces’, p. 903. 81 Montaigne’s Essays, III.iii, ‘Of three commerces or societies’, p. 49.

8

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Compendious poetry: Homer and Ausonius in Thomas Heywood’s Various History Concerninge Women Tania Demetriou Heywood’s Various History A little-known fact about Homer’s early modern reception is that he is one of the recurring fascinations in Thomas Heywood’s surprising work, Γυναικείον [Gynaikeion], or Nine Bookes of Various History Concerninge Women, Inscribed by the Names of the Nine Muses, which appeared in 1624. The book nods to Greek antiquity in other ways, starting from its title Γυναικείον, set in Greek type. Its self-description as a ‘Various History’ references the Varia historia (Ποικίλη Ἱστορία) of Aelian, a b ­ilingual Roman  from the third century ce who wrote in Greek. A potpourri of historical, literary and other nuggets about past Greek culture, the Varia historia, or Historical Miscellany as it is also known, supplied its readers with, among other things, exempla in the form of myths, ­ moralising tales and anecdotes.  Gynaikeion is another such miscellany of facts and testimonies, but its focus is on paradigmatic women from myth and ­ history across all times and locations. Aelian’s work was likened by its first English t­ranslator to a sumptuous and ornamented interior, waiting to be d ­ iscovered inside an unprepossessing ‘building … not altogether outwardly voide of beuty’.1 Heywood’s compendium, by contrast, is very invested in its outward ­presentation: it is laid out in nine books named after the Muses, replicating those of another Greek historian, Herodotus. Herodotus’ books pursue, of course, a roughly continuous narrative, but this is not Heywood’s preferred  approach to history. As his address ‘To the reader’ explains, he would rather ‘epitomis[e] great and memorable acts, reducing and contracting into a compendious Method wide and loose  Histories’.2 In this, he cites Aelian as his model, but also a third ancient h ­ istorian, this time a Roman who wrote in Latin: the first-century ce collector of deeds and sayings Valerius Maximus.3 Heywood points to  a  jumble of ­historiographical precedents from antiquity, and happily goes on to mine all these authors for material, without feeling bound to imitate any  of them  with particular closeness. In so far as Gynaikeion

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Compendious poetry in Gynaikeion 183

signals a Greek affiliation, this seems accordingly unprogrammatic and unassuming, a homage to his explorations in a wide variety of ancient history. It is such philologically insouciant creativity that made Robert Grant Martin declare, towards the conclusion of his 1923 erudite study of the Gynaikeion: ‘“scholarship” is … not a word which can be applied with any great exactness to Heywood’s attainments’.4 The real litmus test of ‘scholarship’, as Martin understood it, was Greek, and his verdict concluded an account of Heywood’s Greek, which was the final exploration of his study. Heywood’s dubious competence in the language, damningly evidenced in his incompetent etymologies and his inability ‘to know a bad etymology or a misprint when he saw one’, was clinching proof of his below-par credentials as a classical scholar.5 Martin was writing almost a century ago. Since then, notions of classical scholarship, modern and early modern, have changed dramatically, as has the perspective within which Greek linguistic competence, that gold standard of the Victorian classical scholar, is viewed. Over the past decade in particular, scholars of early modern classical reception have moved away from assessing authors’ Greek, and begun to focus instead on the wealth of Greek texts circulating in translation during this period, and how writers responded to them from their various creative situations.6 Heywood’s scholarship in the Gynaikeion has drawn little critical attention across this span of time. Yet, as Yves Peyré’s chapter on Heywood’s mythographical reading shows (chapter 7), there is much to be gained from revisiting this work’s classical practices. In what follows, I explore how Heywood’s traffic with one Greek author, Homer, might figure most productively in our view of this unusual book of vernacular ­scholarship. Deferring to Martin on the soundness of Heywood as a Greek philologist, I excavate Gynaikeion’s engagement with the figure and works of ‘the most famous of Poets, Homer’, in the context of its aims and literary interests.7 This essay is partly about a paradox. Heywood appears not to have come within proximity of any copy of the Iliad or the Odyssey as he composed Gynaikeion, or not to have cared if he did. Yet his various history of women repeatedly comes back to Homer, in ways that build into a response that is at once scholarly, fresh and thought-provoking. Crucially, the essay is also about a Roman enabler in this story of reception: Ausonius, a professor of grammar and rhetoric and ingenious poet from fourth-­century ce Bordeaux, who appears with unexpected regularity in Heywood’s historical miscellany. To understand his frequent appearances, we should start from the kind of work Gynaikeion is and the role of poetry in it. Gynaikeion was Heywood’s second ambitious, classicising, non-­ dramatic composition, after the sprawling historical-mythological epic

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Troia Britanica of 1609.8 Like its predecessor, it used a composite discourse, involving a lively mixture of historical anecdotes, mythography, translations from the classics and authorial asides. Heywood’s asides pursue an intermittent, spirited argument, which often strikes up against the traditional maligning of women. ‘What man was ever knowne to be eminent, whom woman in some manner hath not equalled?’ he exclaims in the introduction to his third book, on ‘Illustrious Women’, or ‘Illustrious Queenes, Famous Wives, Mothers, Daughters etc’.9 This preamble offers a good illustration of Heywood’s way of moving between different modes of discourse. Focusing on ‘true conjugall love’ as the ‘greate[st] vertue … either sex [can] expresse themselves’ in, he juxtaposes two stories of ­conjugal sacrifice in response to an oracle: those of Tiberius Gracchus, who chose to endanger his own life rather than that of his wife Cornelia, and Alcestis, who took her own life to save her husband Admetus.10 Heywood challenges ‘Satyrists against the sex of women, that call them fraile, ­inconstant, weake, and timerous’ to confess ‘in which of these two did manly courage, noble resolution, or conjugall love most shine?’ He concludes: In these things then you see, [women] may justly claime an equall competence with men, but in many things a just prioritie, as in noursing and bringing up their children, in mannaging the affaires of the house, and care of all domestick businesse, in providing us Diet, Linnen for the backe and bed, in sewing, weaving, and in spinning.

He interrupts himself here, ‘least I be taxed of palpable flatterie’, but he reinforces the point about the value of conjugal love by Englishing an epigram that Ausonius addressed to his wife Sabina.11 It imagines the two of them growing old together happily, ‘liv[ing] as we have liv’d, still to each other new’, as Heywood puts it. Refreshingly un-misogynistic, Ausonius’ ‘Ad Uxorem’ (‘To his wife’) is ‘rare in extant Greco-Roman poetry … in centering on a poet’s affection for his own wife’, according to one modern editor.12 Heywood makes this aspect of the poem even more remarkable. ‘Still to each other new’ is his addition to ‘vivamus quod viximus’ (‘let us live as we have lived’), identifying lassitude as what threatens to erode the conjugality being projected into the long future. Similarly, by expanding ‘nec ferat ulla dies ut commutemur in aevo’ (‘let no day bring it about that we change with time’) to ‘Let the day never come to see the change, / that either Time, or Age, shall make us strange’, he replaces the abstract fear of ‘change’ with a concrete vision of estrangement. In the specificity of those imagined relations and states of mind, we recognise Heywood’s sensitivity to the emotional life of the domestic setting and hence to female perspectives. His translation may be offered, with minimal commentary,

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Compendious poetry in Gynaikeion 185

as a diversion that chimes pleasingly with the theme under discussion, yet it is full of choices that continue the ideological work of his examples and commentary. Gynaikeion is a work of juxtaposition: among the stories and voices it compiles, there is arguably no such thing as a true digression. The material brought into it often retains a certain integrity, the air of being an excerpted or extractable commonplace, or even an indulgent addendum, yet everything becomes part of an ongoing, free-flowing and open-ended conversation. This is a key feature of the genre of the themed miscellany, concocted by Heywood out of his ancient models. Focused on the enterprise of collecting ‘great and memorable’ snapshots under general rubrics, it holds off overly directive commentary just enough to prompt readers to notice resonances, links and even dissonances between the ‘various’ ­elements it presents. It invites them, that is, to activate different trails of reflection made possible by juxtaposition under the sign of Heywood’s project. Heywood pays very different kinds of attention to the voices he draws into this conversation. In the pages we have been looking at, there are the authors he cites, like ‘Cicero De divinatione’ (I.18) and ‘Pliny’, i.e. Pliny the Elder’s Historia naturalis (VII.36.122), on Gracchus, and the sources he neglects to cite, such as Valerius Maximus’ Dicta et facta memorabilia (IV.6), to which he owes not only this version of Alcestis’ story, but also the idea of comparing these two instances of conjugal love. And then there is the poet Ausonius, whom he seems to take every adventitious opportunity to translate in his compendium. The Gynaikeion’s unit of organisation is types of women, but the choice of material is driven simultaneously by this enquiry and by texts or authors who are very present to Heywood at the time of writing, sources always within reach of his writing desk or on his notional book-wheel. This status renders a staple supplier of stories like Valerius occasionally invisible, but the situation tends to be very different with Heywood’s favourite classical poets, whom he delights in presenting to his readers in his own English verse. Out of his beloved Ovid he renders, for example, Tristia III.7, ‘To Perilla’, when writing about this historical poetess, all of ‘Sappho to Phaon’ from the Heroides, when he presents Sappho, and Amores I.15 in its entirety, to conclude Gynaikeion in honour of poetry and women poets.13 He also Englishes numerous relatively self-standing excerpts from the Metamorphoses, the Ars amatoria and De remedio amoris.14 A few such translations had featured in Troia.15 But the function, as well as the frequency and diversity, of this practice is different in Gynaikeion, and that is because Troia’s discursive interplay has been turned on its head. The prose collation of authorities, which largely occupies Heywood’s ‘notes’ on his epic, has been promoted to the primary mode of writing in his

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­ iscellaneous history; and, no longer engaged in versifying ‘wide and m loose histories’, Heywood channels his poetic invention into the multifarious short verse-pieces that intersperse Gynaikeion’s prose throughout. These include not only translations from classical poets, but also assorted original verse: a poem on sleep which Heywood ‘had once occasion to write’; a belated funeral ode to Queen Anne; an epigram to the reader on his decision to put different kinds of women side by side; an imagined epitaph on Queen Ethelburga; a poem on shrews and sheep he composed when asked by a gentleman to compare them; a ‘Sonnet’ to a mistress (to cover the topic of mistresses); and an epistle the prostitute Lais might have penned.16 In line with its epitomising approach to history, Gynaikeion’s literary attention is focused on a variety of ‘compendious’ forms, offering its readers a box of small jewels, to adapt another metaphor from the translator of Aelian.17 Many of these poems encapsulate a salient aspect of the topic or history under discussion, illustrating or particularising it through description and narration. Others are themselves anecdotes in verse, ficto-historical documents, memorable words to complement the memorable deeds of history and legend: epigrams, epitaphs, inscriptions, fictive epistles, verse invectives, recorded poems by women poets, the supposed or invented prophecies of the Sibyls. Unsurprisingly, two of  the classical poets Heywood most interacts with are celebrated epigrammatists: Martial and, much better known to Heywood’s contemporaries than he is to us, Ausonius, who was not just an epigrammatist but a prolific grandmaster of compendious verse. Heywood’s fascination with Ausonius in Gynaikeion is distinctive even within his own period. This fascination becomes his route to Homer. Heywood had worked with Chapman’s early versions of the Iliad for Troia, and may have consulted a further translation of that epic for The Iron Age.18 At this point in his creative career, however, he is brought to the great epic poet of archaic Greece by a compendious versifier from late Rome who shared the Greek interests of his contemporary Aelian, and something of his and Valerius’ epitomising outlook.

The poet Ausonius in Gynaikeion The corpus of the versatile and elegant Ausonius includes epigrams, epitaphs, verse puzzles, epistles and a fescennine cento among many other genres. Heywood cites or makes versions of many of these works in Gynaikeion. The affinity between Ausonius’ predilection for varied, short forms, and Heywood’s particular kind of poetic inventiveness at this time, must partly explain what drew him to the Roman poet. But his enthusiasm

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Compendious poetry in Gynaikeion 187

is far from eccentric. Ausonius, ‘the poet of the fourth century’ according to Moses Hadas, and exceptionally well regarded by his own contemporaries, was ranked by Francis Meres in 1598 with ‘Virgill, Ovid, Horace, Silius Italicus, Lucanus, Lucretius, … and Claudianus,’ out of the Romans.19 If the appearance of a late antique author like Claudian in Meres’ list seems surprising, this is because Claudian’s extraordinary popularity in the early modern period has only recently been properly excavated, with the benefit of concerted research into manuscript resources.20 As for Ausonius, according to Howard Felber and Sesto Prete ‘[t]he texts of few classical authors were as well known in the … Renaissance as were some of the works of Ausonius’.21 Roger Green has sketched the coordinates of his early modern reception, from the manuscript owned by Petrarch, to echoes of his works in Robert Herrick, George Herbert and Henry Vaughan.22 Some works attributed to Ausonius in the Renaissance are considered spurious by modern scholars, and some come from a specific multi-authored collection known as Epigrammata Bobiensia, centred around Ausonius’ younger contemporary, Junius Naucellius.23 It was this expanded corpus – the gift of the early editions – that was so popular in England. ‘Ausonius’ formed part of the curriculum in at least some English schools,24 and classical verse anthologies in print and manuscript give evidence of ubiquitous engagement with the poems, from Tottel’s Miscellany right through to the eighteenth century.25 Gynaikeion, whose poetic inclusions give it a distinct flavour of the verse miscellany, joins this tradition. Its numerous translations and references to Ausonius are detailed in Table 1. Like other contemporaries, Heywood Englishes many of the poet’s epigrams, the genre for which he was known above all, and uses part of the gnomic patchwork Septem sapientum sententiae (Sayings of the Seven Sages), perhaps more widely commonplaced than any other single composition. But he bypasses certain elegant pieces that were becoming favourites for translation, such as De rosis nascentibus (‘On budding roses’),26 Cupidus cruciatus (‘Cupid crucified’),27 or the eclogues ‘De viro bono’ (‘Of a good man’) and ‘De ambiguitate eligendae vitae’ (‘On the difficulty of choosing one’s life’), and explores instead an unusual gamut of Ausonian creations, from his mini-comedy Ludus septem sapientum (Masque of the Seven Sages), to his Virgilian Nuptial Cento, to his prose epitomes of Homer. Gynaikeion stands out among other engagements with this poet for its sheer variety. One of Heywood’s longest verse translations in the whole miscellany is from Ausonius’ Nuptial Cento, which appears in a section on marriage customs in Book VII, focused on women in familial roles.28 He does not name the author, but at the end of his rendition, archly addresses those familiar with this notorious work:

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Table 1  Heywood’s translations in Gynaikeion and corresponding poems in Elias Vinetus’ 1590 edition, and in the modern editions of Green (for Ausonius and pseudo-Ausonius) and Munari (for the Epigrammata Bobiensia).

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Gynaikeion Vinetus (1590) pages

Green/Munari

11–13

Appendix A, 6 §§ 521–22, 526–27, 544 (Periocha Odyssiae, 1 (lines (Periochae in Homeri Iliadem et Odysseam, Periocha[e] Odysseae I, 4–6), 2, 6–7, 24) XVII–XXIII)

19

§19A (Epigramma XX), ‘Nemesis e Graeco’

13.22 (Epigrammata)

59–60

§77 (Epigramma CXXXVIII), ‘Musarum inuenta, & numera’*

Appendix A, 5.3 (Moralia Varia: Catonis de Musis Versus)

93

§274 (Griphus ternarii numeri, Edyllium IIII)

15 (Griphus ternarii numeri)

121

§17 (Epigramma XVIII) ‘Ad vxorem suam’

13.40 (Epigrammata)

152–53

§61 (Epigramma CXI) ‘In Didus reginae imaginem’

Epigrammata Bobiensia, 45, ‘In Didonis imaginem ex Graeco’

164–65

§33A (Epigramma LIV) 13.60 (Epigrammata) ‘Lais dicans Veneri speculum suum’

193

§228 (Septem Sapientum Sententiae septenis versibus … explicatae)

Appendix A, 5.1 (Moralia Varia: Septem Sapientum Sententiae septenis versibus explicatae)

221

§78 (Epigramma CXXXIX) ‘Herculis labores’*

14.17 (Ecloga De aerumnis Herculis, line 6)

270

§56 (Epigramma CII), ‘In duas sorores diuersorum morum’

Appendix A, 4.10 (Epigrammata Varia)

277–79

§§ 521, 537–43 (Periocha[e] Odysseae I, XVII–XXIII)

Appendix A, 6 (Periocha Odyssiae, 1 (lines 6–10), 17–23)

290

§16 (Epigramma XVI), ‘De Myrone, & Laide’

13.18 (Epigrammata)

292–93

§57 (Epigramma CIIII), ‘In venerem Anadyomenem’

Epigrammata Bobiensia, 15, ‘In imaginem Veneris’

314 §211 (Ludus septem sapientum) (quotation) 333

§339 (Cento nuptialis, Edyllium XXIIX)

26 (Ludus septem sapientum, lines 217–18, 226) 18 (Cento nuptialis)

Compendious poetry in Gynaikeion 189



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Table 1 Continued Gynaikeion Vinetus (1590) pages

Green/Munari

352–53

§26 (Epigramma XXXV), ‘De Sabina textrice, carmina faciente’

13.28 (Epigrammata)

385 (reference)

§588 (‘Sulpiciae, De statu Reipublicae, et temporibus Domitiani’)

Epigrammata Bobiensia, 37

394

§23F (Epigramma XXXI), ‘In simulachrum Sapphus’

13.35 (Epigrammata)

404

§530 (Periocha Odysseae X)

Appendix A, 6 (Periocha Odyssiae, 10)

435

§41 (Epigramma LXXI), ‘De Achilla, qui dissecuit caluariam’

13.76 (Epigrammata)

*Heywood ascribes these two works to Virgil. They were included in the Appendix Vergiliana as well as among the poems of Ausonius. See [Virgil], Vergiliana opuscula familiariter exposita, ed. J. Bade and D. Calderino (Paris: Thielman Kerver for Jean Petit and Jean de Coblencz, 1501), fols 17v and 66v, and for a discussion of Heywood’s use of them, chapter 7 (Peyré). NB: Not all of Heywood’s (often creative) translations from Ausonius are attributed, so this list may not be exhaustive.

I dare proceede no further with the Author, whose conceit I have borrowed, but his words not altogether imitated; those that have read him I make no question, will say I have broke off and shooke hands with him in good time.29

The Cento, as Ausonius explains in a prefatory letter, was a jeu d’esprit (‘ludus’), which virtuosically chopped and rearranged Virgil’s lines, to twist them to quite other purposes. Heywood is referring to the fact that he has omitted its famously obscene final section, a detailed description of the sexual act. Like Ausonius but in reverse, he ‘borrows’ the poem’s ‘conceit’ for wildly different – staid and antiquarian – aims, yet insists placidly that he has not ‘derogated from [the poet’s] stile’.30 His comment on the translation captures the miscellany’s characteristic mode of including without fully engulfing its material: Heywood alludes to the poem out of its present context for those who know it, even has something of a private joke over it, yet keeps all this separate from the argument at hand, which proceeds unperturbedly, from the poem as he has rendered it, to a discussion of the ‘Nuptiall Pompe’. All this intriguingly mirrors the Cento’s intertextual play, the way its verses are and are not Virgil’s. Equally alive to the ludic qualities

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of Ausonius’ verse is Heywood’s decision to adapt Griphus ternarii numeri (Riddle of the Number Three) into the prophecy of the Sibylla Aegyptia on Christ’s coming.31 Griphus is another virtuosic experiment, ‘an epitome’, as Dunstan Lowe puts it, ‘on all threes available’ in ancient thought.32 Its final triad, ‘tris deus unus’ (‘God is three in one’), points to a possible Christian interpretation that was embraced by Ausonius’ early modern commentators and is elaborated on by Heywood here.33 But it is the densely contrived, ingenious texture of the poem that he responds to most. Heywood is invested in all manner of female poets in Gynaikeion and,34 when he presents the ancient Sibyls, he becomes drawn into a debate on their poetic mettle. Their extant verse oracles, he reports, had been criticised as ‘harsh, and not in smoothnesse of stile or elegancie of phrase to be compared with those of Hesiod or Homer’.35 Yet these oracles, Heywood answers, were ‘extemporall’ and ‘suddenly spoake’: with study and polish they might ‘in sweetenesse and smoothnesse … equall if not exceede the facunditie’ of those poets. Apparently, he decides to reconstruct what they might have been like under more favourable conditions, by imitating a verse-riddle which is nothing if not studied and polished. These longer examples from Heywood’s imitations demonstrate a creative alertness to Ausonius’ multifarious inventiveness. More frequently and more straightforwardly, it is to the epigrams that he turns, to enrich and illustrate his gendered exploration. In his preamble to Book VI, ‘Of Chast Women, and of Women Wantons’, Heywood critiques the ‘fantastique attyre and gawdie ornaments so much in use now adayes’, and this provides an occasion for translating ‘an elegant epigram’ he has read by Ausonius, on the whorishly dressed yet chaste Delia and her chastely dressed yet whorish sister.36 In the same book, writing about Lais, ‘a strumpet of Corinth’, he translates her witty refusal of a hopeful client of advanced years, as imagined in another epigram by this poet.37 He also Englishes her epitaph, as given in Athenaeus’ Learned Banqueters XIII (589b).38 To these verses, he adds his own piece of ficto-history: the epistle she might have addressed to the man who – as Aelian reports in Varia historia X.2 – played her false. The play of discourses is particularly interesting here, as Heywood’s composition develops the feisty personality Lais is given in Ausonius’ epigram in a way that quietly rebalances her demeaning presentation in Aelian’s story of the man who mocked her. Ausonius’ epigrams also gave Heywood material on history’s female creatives: one of his translations is about the excellent weaver and poet Sabina, and another is from ‘On an image of Sappho’, which casts her as the tenth Muse.39 Ausonius was a celebrated precursor of the lively early modern culture of translating Greek epigrams into Latin: his versions flanked those of acclaimed humanists in popular parallel editions printed in England and

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Compendious poetry in Gynaikeion 191

on the continent.40 These translations were not always rightly attributed to him: many are from the Epigrammata Bobiensia, whose authors shared Ausonius’ preference for the Greek over the Roman epigrammatic tradition.41 But it was Ausonius’ name that became identified with the practice, and associated especially with Latin incarnations of that characteristically Greek genre, the ‘ekphrastic’ epigram, or epigram on a work of art.42 Heywood, with his keen eye for ficto-documents, was drawn to some of these, like the one on Sappho just mentioned, or another on a statue of Nemesis, which he translates in Book I, describing it as ‘interpreted’ by ‘Ausonius from the Greeke’.43 In Book VI, writing about the beautiful Phryne, ‘a prostitute of Thespis’, he becomes very interested in the numerous stories that relate her to artists and works of art.44 After reporting Athenaeus’ testimony in Learned Banqueters XIII (591a) that the sculptor Apelles had modelled his ‘Aphrodite rising from the sea’ on her, he recalls that Ausonius ‘composed an epigram’ on this statue, and offers it to his readers in English.45 Yet another epigram on a statue appears in the history of Dido in Book III. Heywood dismisses Virgil’s account of this ‘illustrious queen’ with a one-line summary and the comment that ‘though it carry no great probabilitie of truth, yet all the Latin poets for the most part (in honour of the authour) have justified his opinion’.46 But he reports an exception to this univocal tradition: under an ancient statue of Dido were found certain verses ‘engraven in a Greeke character, interpreted into Latine by Ausonius’, which he sees fit to English ‘in the sacred memorie of so eminent a queene’. Here Dido gives the lie to Virgil – ‘Never (I protest) / Was that Aeneas, whom thou calst the best / Of men, in Lybia’ – and urges ‘Give faith to History, you that readers are, / Before this fabling Poesie’.47 A counterpoint to the great poet’s historical authority, the ‘Ausonian’ epigram inflected various writers’ attitude to Virgil in this period, from Joaquim du Bellay to George Sandys.48 In Gynaikeion, it creates a refined space in which Heywood’s revisionist recovery of female histories and voices coincides with his turning away from ‘wide and loose Histories’, in favour of ‘contracted and reduced’ ones, from epic poetry to compressed and compendious forms. Epic and epigram, however, are collocated very differently in the case of Homer as mediated in Gynaikeion by Ausonius’ Periochae Homeri Iliados et Odysseae (Epitomes of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey).

The compendious Homer and the gendered miscellany At least one modern critic has suggested that Ausonius’ engagement with the Greek epigram can be seen as continuous with his putative authorship of the Latin synopsis of Homer’s epics known as the Periochae.49 It consists

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of verse renditions of the first line of each book, followed by prose summaries of their content. Monique van Rossum-Steenbeek relates the prose parts to a number of Greek hypotheses, or ‘readers’ digests’ of individual Homeric books that survive in papyrus fragments from the ancient world.50 In antiquity, the hypotheses seem to have been used sometimes as aids for reading the poems and sometimes as quick-reference substitutes for them.51 One set, however, ended up as headings to the Homeric books in medieval codices of the epics, and these were very familiar to early modern readers, since they migrated from there to virtually all editions of Homer in Greek (see Figure  4). The Periochae, which may be linked to Ausonius’ teaching career, were treated by Renaissance editors as Latin equivalents to the hypotheses. While Latin translations of the hypotheses were included in word-for-word renditions of Homer’s poems (Figure 4), more literary versions often featured the Periochae of ‘Ausonius poeta’, either at the start of the volume, or split into argumenta before each book (see Figure 5).52 Today, these snippets of ancient scholarship are viewed in a technical light: often classified as ‘­subliterary’ writings, both the Ausonian Periochae and the Greek hypotheses are the province of specialist studies. But for early

Figure 4  The beginning of the Odyssey in Jean de Sponde’s edition, printed in Basel in 1583, and featuring the prose and verse hypotheses in Greek and translated word-for-word into Latin (detail).

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Compendious poetry in Gynaikeion 193

Figure 5  The beginning of the Odyssey in Raphael Volaterranus’ translation, printed by Gryphius in 1528 with Ausonius’ ‘Periocha’ of Odyssey I as the ‘Argumentum’.

modern readers, they were an integral part of the experience of reading Homer. They were as important for finding one’s way around the epics as the various early modern paratexts appended to them and carried an ancient authority the latter did not have. They also carried a certain poetic authority. The verse parts of the Periochae display considerable literary sophistication in a little room, as Ausonius’ early modern commentators were aware.53 This placed them in symmetry with another Greek counterpart: a set of deft, oneline hexameter summaries of the Homeric books attributed to Stephanus the grammarian, which also ended up as headings in medieval codices, and similarly passed over into early modern editions (see Figure 4). These verses were also transmitted together as an alphabetical, acrostic, epigram summary of Homer, and in this form they were translated into English verse at least once, in a collection that places ‘The Argument of Homer’s Iliad Translated’

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alongside renditions from Ausonius and other poets.54 The art of epitomising Homer was dignified by the reception of the related ancient practices of the synopsis and the epigram, and in this picture, Ausonius was often present. When Heywood, in Gynaikeion, turns twelve of Ausonius’ prose summaries of the Odyssey into English epigrams, he is working in his own way within this tradition. He had probably seen George Chapman’s 1611 Iliads and 1615 Odysses, where metrical English versions of the Greek prose hypotheses and hexameter summaries appeared as ‘arguments’ at the start of each book.55 He could also have come across an emblembook version of the Iliad which appeared in 1613. Adapting the popular tradition of emblem-book Metamorphoses, this featured epigram summaries of each book in Latin and French by Isaac de la Rivière, below engravings by Crispijn de Passe. De Passe had strong connections to the English book market and his son, Willem de Passe, was responsible for the title-page of Chapman’s last Homeric translation, The Crowne of All Homer’s Works, exactly contemporary with Gynaikeion.56 Linking back to an ancient precedent for his approach, Rivière had printed at the start of the volume: ‘Ausonii … poetae elegantissimi ingenii Periochae in Iliadem’ (‘The Periochae to the Iliad by Ausonius, poet of the finest talent’).57 The epitomes of this fine poet also attracted Heywood, who included metrical versions of them in three separate sections of Gynaikeion. In Book VI, ‘Of Chast Women, and of Women Wantons’, he ‘illustrate[d] the Historie of Penelope’ by versifying the synopses of Odyssey I and XVII–XXIII into a quasi-epyllion. In Book VIII, ‘Intreating of Women everie way Learned, of Poetesses, and Witches, etc.’, he narrated Ulysses’ adventure with Circe out of ‘the argument’ of the ‘tenth booke of [Homer’s] Odisses’. And in Book I, ‘Of Goddesses’, Heywood selected for translation those ‘arguments’ of Homer’s ‘Odissea’ which brought out the role of Minerva in the protagonist’s trials and triumphs.58 Martin referred to these uses of the Periochae in a spirit of disappointment. They proved an important scholarly failure on Heywood’s part and particularly a failure in Greek scholarship: ‘there is little [in Gynaikeion] to indicate a first-hand knowledge of Homer’s work and nothing at all to prove an acquaintance with it in the original Greek’, Martin wrote.59 Indeed, Heywood does not seem to have turned to Homer’s epics at this time, though he had previously worked with the Iliad in translation.60 Martin might have added to his point, that whenever the Iliad or the Odyssey are quoted in Latin in Gynaikeion, these quotations can be traced to citations in other books: Natale Conti’s Mythologia, Plutarch’s Moralia in Gulielmus Xylander’s translation and Athenaeus’ Learned Banqueters in Conti’s.61 But it is wrong to treat Heywood’s engagement with the Periochae simply as negative evidence. Heywood had no hesitations about

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Compendious poetry in Gynaikeion 195

approaching other works by Greek authors in Latin translations, some of them gargantuan: Athenaeus, Plutarch, Herodotus, Aelian. He did not go to these Homeric abstracts to compensate for a narrow Greek repertory, but because of his fascination with their author. And he was inspired to make use of them because of the kind of book Gynaikeion is. With the Periochae, Heywood’s beloved Ausonius joined the roster of those writers he admired for having ‘epitomised great and memorable acts, reducing and contracting into a compendious Method wide and loose Histories’. It was probably Ausonius’ example that gave him the idea of concluding his account of ancient goddesses in Book I with ‘a short Epitome’ consisting of ‘the arguments of all the Fables in Ovids Metamorphosis … expresse[d] … in verse’.62 Heywood offers a gendered rationale: he wants ‘to make my worke more succinct and  compendious’ to avoid tiring readers, especially since ‘my purpose is aimed at many, or most of that sexe, of what estate and condition soever’.63 But as with the invented oracle discussed above, women, in this case women of all classes, seem to afford Heywood a convenient excuse for imitating Ausonius’ example. The encounter with the Periochae was not remedial, but enabling: it prompted Heywood to reflect on Homer. It is often the case in this miscellany, that an account of a topic turns out to be skewed in a crucial or distinctive direction. Phryne is introduced under the banner of ‘Women Wantons’, but Heywood primarily reports anecdotes about her beauty. His account of Minerva similarly begins as a mythographic collage, but soon becomes almost wholly focused on Homer’s presentation of the goddess. The transition begins thus: The most famous of Poets, Homer, hee made Minerva a companion with Ulysses in all his travels; in whom hee personated the most wise man amongst the Grecians, who freed him from all daungers, labours, and ship-wreckes, and brought him in safetie to his Countrie, Parents, Queene, Sonne, and Subjects: thereby intimating, That by Wisedom and Knowledge all difficult things may he easily undergone.64

His translations from the Periochae serve to illustrate this strong, global reading of an important aspect of Homer’s epic: according to Heywood, the close companionship of Athene is not the cause of Odysseus’ wisdom, but an allegory for it. The relation between human resources and divine intervention was often discussed around this element of the poem. Homer’s most important early modern commentator, Jean de Sponde, saw in Homer a pious proto-Calvinist who understood that the gods underwrite all human capacity for good: Athene’s vital help was both a striking instance of how much the poet attributed to the gods, but also – close to Heywood’s idea  – an indication that prudentia (‘wisdom’) is supreme in human

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affairs.65 Chapman’s view was more wistful: his Odysses traced a complex relationship between humanity and the gods, in which Odysseus remains wise throughout, but is supported or abandoned by Athene arbitrarily at different points.66 These interpretations derived from different responses to the detail of the narrative, but Heywood, taking the bird’s-eye view of events afforded by the Periochae, sees the goddess entirely as an allegory for human capacities: ‘In all his negotiations and travels, Pallas was still his assistant, for Wisedome never forsakes anie man in necessities’.67 Something else adds to his analysis of Homer’s beliefs. After rendering the abstract to Odyssey XXIV, Heywood says, as though introducing a new author: ‘Pallas hath beene often invocated by Poets, but amongst infinite I will onelie instance one, and that for the elegancie’.68 In fact, what follows is Gynaikeion’s one translation proper from Homer’s works. The work in question is Caminus (‘The Furnace’), a short poem Heywood found in the ‘Life of Homer’ by pseudo-Herodotus, which was often printed with Herodotus’ History.69 This ‘Life’ also appeared frequently as a paratext to Homer, especially in the earlier editions of the epics, making popular its vivid presentation of the poet as itinerant and penniless in his lifetime.70 Part of its value was its testimony of numerous short poems supposedly by Homer, each recorded with a story about the circumstances in which it was composed. From the 1570s, these poems start to be extracted from it and printed as Homer’s opuscula or epigrammata, alongside his other works.71 For Heywood, then, ‘The Furnace’ is a short work, or more precisely an ‘extemperoll dittie’, by the great poet, which he is Englishing for the first time, at least in print.72 The supposed occasion of its composition was Homer’s encounter ‘in his long peregrination through Greece and other countries’ with certain potters at their furnace, who invite him to ‘sing them a fine song’ in exchange for payment out of their wares.73 Without hesitation, Homer – in Heywood’s translation – wittily calls upon Minerva to ‘inspire’ their ‘braines’ and assist ‘their trade’ if they keep their promise, or else for ‘this furnace’ to be struck by comically total disaster. The notion of the goddess ‘inspir[ing]’ the potters’ ‘braines’ is added by Heywood, elaborating on the poet’s simple plea in the original that she ‘hold [her] hand over this furnace’.74 His expansion makes this invocation of Athene raise similar questions about the conjunction of human and divine agency as her presentation in the Odyssey. ‘The former writers’, he concludes from these examples, ‘demonstrate … That humane actions are not altogether so governed by the force coelestiall, but that there is some place left for mans prudence, and wisedome.’75 Discovering continuities between Homer’s ‘ditty’ and his great epic is a highly unusual gesture: though the opuscula were often edited and translated, commentators paid them hardly any literary attention, since they were overshadowed by the epics and more substantial Homerica, like

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Compendious poetry in Gynaikeion 197

the Homeric Hymns or Batrachomyomachia. Precisely because he is not coming to Homer from an edition of Homer’s ‘works’, but from the Greek historians and Ausonius, Heywood takes a fresh view of the corpus and brings a new attention to the shortest poetic forms within it. The engagement with Ausonius evidently inspired Heywood to look for Homer in his historical reading. Pseudo-Herodotus’ was not the only account of the life of Homer he read attentively. Elsewhere in Gynaikeion, he finds occasion to narrate Homer’s biography in a nutshell out of pseudoPlutarch’s essay ‘De Homero’ (‘Of Homer’), cited in the margin.76 He will have found it in Xylander’s translation of Plutarch’s Moralia, but this essay, too, was a frequent and influential paratext in early Homeric editions.77 Heywood’s decision to turn to it as a source on Homer is not surprising. But the context in which he does so is. His narration appears in Book IV, ‘Of Women incestuous, of Adulteresses, and such as have come by strange deaths’. This book is written under the sign of Melpomene, who as ‘the Tragicke Muse’, obliges Heywood to turn to ‘Tragicall historie’ after the positive examples of women populating his first three books.78 He is uneasy as he embarks on this endeavour: each of these women, he assures his female readers, ‘hath … disgraced herselfe, not her Sex’, since the ‘abhominable action … stretch[es] no further than the delinquent’, and he ends the book’s preamble with an epigram on the moral utility of ‘setting by’ the fair and the foul for comparison.79 He proceeds to place, amidst a group of incestuous women, the mother of Homer, Crithaeis, who (according to pseudo-Plutarch) was either ‘vitiated’ by her uncle, or ‘deflowred by one of the Genius’s which used to daunce with the Muses’.80 Her story is not very long, for following this event, ‘after sporting herselfe by the bankes of Miletus [she] brought forth Homer, and instantly expired’.81 Here, having spoken of the mother, it seems to Heywood ‘not … impertinent to proceede a little of the sonne’.82 On the face of it, this Englishing of pseudo-Plutarch’s biography is a blatant digression, even more than Heywood’s earlier translation of ‘Ad uxorem’. Yet, as seen in that case, the miscellany achieves a great deal through affective detail and thought-provoking juxtaposition rather than structured discussion. Sometimes, it even allows the logic of juxtaposition to pull against its coherently articulated reasonings. Surprisingly, Heywood’s moral commentary can be simultaneously heavy-handed and light-touch, because he presents material he finds appealing even if it complicates his implied running argument. His gendered discourse is often at its subtlest when he refrains from comment in such instances, simply allowing the effects of juxtaposition to be. Other choices in the miscellany suggest that this holding back is not laziness or haphazardness, but a moral aesthetic. It is without overt commentary, for instance, that he composes an epistle on behalf of Lais, the prostitute known to history for having been

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put in her place by a man. And he likewise offers no moral justification for his interest in Phryne’s legendary beauty. This does not mean he approves of these ‘women wantons’, but it does mean that his interest in the figures and events of history is capacious, and his moral vision correspondingly giving. Gynaikeion is happy to allow surprising resonances and unsettling discords to emerge out of juxtaposition, and to let live suggestions that might not fit the moral scheme it lays out. Here, under ‘women incestuous’ he tells the stories of women who – appropriately, given the book’s tragic signing – have varied degrees of agency in the offences attached to them. Heywood does not remark on this; yet his preamble encourages reflection on whom the ‘disgrace’ of an ‘abhominable action’ should ‘stretch to’ and identifies the ‘setting by’ of different figures for readers to compare as his moral method. The women placed next to each other in this section range from the luxurious Semiramis, to the unwitting Jocasta, via Canace, whom Heywood describes as unable to escape her father’s anger like her incestuous brother because ‘of her greeneness and weake estate’ and therefore forced to commit suicide. Crithaeis, segueing from them, and just before the ‘stuperation’ of Doris and the ‘forc[ing]’ of Philomela are mentioned, is cast, indubitably, though without commentary, as a tragic victim.83 In telling the story of the son as part of the mother’s, Heywood nests the life of Homer within her tragedy. The actual events of Homer’s life are taken over from the skeletal account of pseudo-Plutarch, who is far more interested in going on to analyse Homer’s poetry.84 Pseudo-Plutarch reports the stories handed down about Homer’s birth, and the fact that he may have been forced to a wandering existence as a young orphan; he cites the oracles the grownup poet received when he asked about his origins, narrates how he died and quotes an epitaph by Antipater of Sidon which focuses on the seven cities claiming to be Homer’s birthplace, and ends by declaring him instead a force of nature: ‘Homer (wilt thou give me leave) I will / The spatious Earth for thy countrie chuse, / No mortall for thy mother, but a Muse’.85 Heywood renders all these anecdotes, the common theme of which is how little is known of the poet’s origins, with minimal additions or omissions. But recounted as part of the tragic story of Crithaeis, they acquire a new poignancy: the poet’s life and death seem painfully haunted by the woman who ‘brought forth Homer, and instantly expired’. On the other hand, before introducing Antipater’s epitaph, Heywood reflects on an irony: ‘This unmatchable Poet whom no man regarded in his life, yet when his works were better considered of after his death, hee had that honour that seven famous cities contended about the place of his birth’.86 In Heywood’s intertwining of the two histories, the mother’s biography bequeaths its tragic template to that of the son, but by the same token a strange healing

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light flows from Homer’s posthumous fame to Crithaeis’ trauma. In her capacity as Homer’s mother, the incestuous Crithaeis may as well have been ‘No mortall … but a Muse’. The long perspective of history gives a certain sublimity, even a movement of apotheosis, to her tragedy. All this clashes spectacularly with some of Heywood’s more moralising statements in the preamble to Book IV. Urging women to be vigilant, Heywood warns sternly that ‘virtue once violated, brings infamy and dishonour, not onely to the person offending, but contaminates the whole progenie’, since adultery ‘extends … to the posteritie which shall arise from so corrupt a seed, generated from unlawfull and adulterate copulation’.87 The complex emotions and strange, inconclusive ethics set in motion by the nested biographies produce a radically different tragedy of ‘adultery’ from the kind he has announced. Critics have seen such ethically productive contradiction as the stock-in-trade of Heywood the dramatist, who makes, for instance, Frankford in A Woman Killed with Kindness horrifyingly assert that the ‘shame’ of Anne’s adultery ‘is charactered’ on her children’s ‘brows …/ And grows in greatness as they wax in years’, yet go on to forgive her, long after the emotional texture of the play has allowed viewers to do the same.88 In Gynaikeion, moral complexity surrounding adultery comes to us courtesy of Heywood the miscellanist, with his tolerance of discursive remainders. The company of ‘women incestuous’ among whom Crithaeis is found comments more probingly on her ‘abhominable’ sexual status than Heywood does directly. And so does her son. Heywood may present his ‘Life of Homer’ as a diversion, but he has created a genre in which the play of relevance and irrelevance, discourse and digression yields possibilities over which he abdicates control. Or as he put it, defending the unusual, and for some, chaotic sequence in which Gynaikeion’s female figures appear: ‘The most cunning and curious Musick, is that which is made out of Discords’.89 Heywood’s encounter with Homer at this stage of his career was shaped by the distinctive enterprise and poetic enthusiasms of his gendered miscellany. His Homer was the wistful legendary figure of the varied Greek historians he devoured on the lookout for powerful stories of women, the witty extempore performer of pithy verse and the object of the epitomising attentions of that playful virtuoso of concise poetics, Ausonius. Looking through this set of mediating lenses, Heywood offers his readers a lessknown Homeric opusculum in English for the first time, pauses with originality over the interpretation of Homer’s gods and finds a new, haunting strangeness to his legend. If the prince of poets had never been approached quite like this before, this is not testimony to shortcomings in Heywood’s Greek scholarship, but the product of his innovative vernacular classicism and distinct ethical sensibility. Martin, unimpressed by Heywood’s Greek,

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speculated that ‘the great Casaubon’ would have smiled at the classical achievements of the author of Gynaikeion.90 George Eliot’s Mr Casaubon may well have done. But I like to think that, in such a surreal encounter, the great philologist might have been fairer to Heywood’s vernacular scholarship. He might, more aptly, have noted the considerable erudition of Heywood’s various history, observed the avid and generous curiosity with which he embraced the classical world through the recent achievements of humanism and perhaps, on occasion, even smiled with him.

Notes I am very grateful to Janice Valls-Russell for being an unfailing source of inspiration for all matters Heywoodian, Victoria Moul for invaluable help on primary sources for the study of the early modern Ausonius, Matthew Reynolds for comments and Olga Demetriou for completing an Ausonius mission in Durham Cathedral Library with great panache.

 1 Claudius Aelianus, A Registre of Hystories, trans. A. Fleming (London: for Thomas Woodcock, 1576), sig. ¶iiiv.   2 Thomas Heywood, Γυναικείον [Gynaikeion], or, Nine Bookes of Various History Concerninge Women, Inscribed by the names of the Nine Muses (London: Adam Islip, 1624), sig. A4v.   3 On ancient compendia, which were also a crucial precursor for the mythographers so important to Heywood, see Monique van Rossum-Steenbeek, Greek Readers’ Digests? Studies on a Selection of Subliterary Papyri (Leiden: Brill, 1998), pp. 157–9 and Charles W. Fornara, The Nature of History in Ancient Greece and Rome (Berkeley, CA: University of California, 1983), pp. 189–93, though the latter takes a bleak view of such modes of writing. For the relative popularity of ancient historians in the early modern period, see Freyja Cox Jensen, ‘The popularity of ancient historians, 1450–1600’, The Historical Journal, 61 (2018), 561–95, but Jensen does not consider Aelian.  4 Robert Grant Martin, ‘A critical study of Thomas Heywood’s Gunaikeion’, Studies in Philology, 20 (1923), 160–83 (p. 182).  5 Ibid.  6 See e.g. Tania Demetriou and Tanya Pollard, ‘Homer and Greek tragedy in early modern England’s theatres: an introduction’, in Tanya Pollard and Tania Demetriou (eds), Homer and Greek Tragedy in Early Modern England’s Theatres (= Classical Receptions Journal, 9:1 (2017)), 1–35.  7 Heywood, Gynaikeion, I, p. 11.  8 For an overview of Heywood’s trajectory as a classical writer, see the Introduction to this volume, and for the dates of Heywood’s known works, see the Appendix.  9 Heywood, Gynaikeion, III, p. 119. 10 Ibid., III, pp. 119–20.

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11 Ibid., III, p. 121, corresponding to Ausonius, The Works of Ausonius, ed. P.  H.  Green (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 13.40 and Ausonius, Opera, ed. E. Vinetus and J. J. Scaliger (Bordeaux: Simon Millanges, 1590), §17 (Epigramma XVIII). References to Ausonius’ works will henceforth be to Green’s edition, unless otherwise specified. On Vinetus’ important early modern edition, see Howard L. Felber and Sesto Prete, ‘Ausonius’, in F.E. Crantz and P.O. Kristeller (eds), Catalogus translationum et commentariorum, vol.  IV (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America, 1980), pp. 193–222 (pp. 204–11). 12 Ausonius, Epigrams, ed. N. M. Kay (London: Duckworth, 2001), p. 118. 13 Heywood, Gynaikeion, VIII, pp. 397–8, 389–94, IX, pp. 464–6. 14 E.g. ibid., I, pp. 42–3, II, pp. 88, 110–11, V, pp. 229, 247–8, VI, p. 282, VII, pp. 367, 368 (Metamorphoses), I, p. 9, V, pp. 216, 204 [i.e. 224], 246, 259–60 (Ars amatoria), and IX, p. 430 (De remedio amoris). Heywood mostly departs from his translation of Ars amatoria as printed in 1625, though the extract on V, p. 246 is close and some of the others bear similarities. M. L. Stapleton discusses this translation in chapter 2. 15 See Yves Peyré, ‘Heywood’s library: the books Thomas Heywood used when he wrote Troia Britanica’, in Thomas Heywood, Troia Britanica, ed. Yves Peyré et al. (2009–19), available at www.shakmyth.org, accessed 24 June 2020. 16 Heywood, Gynaikeion, II, pp. 115–16, III, pp. 123–5, IV, pp. 165, 191, V, pp. 234–5, VI, pp. 288–9, 290–1. 17 Aelianus, A Registre, sig. ¶iiiv. 18 See the editors’ notes to Cantos X and XIII in Heywood, Troia Britanica, ed. Peyré et al. and Charlotte Coffin, ‘Heywood’s Ages and Chapman’s Homer: nothing in common?’, in Pollard and Demetriou (eds), Homer and Greek Tragedy, 55–78. 19 Moses Hadas, A History of Latin Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952), p. 381; Ausonius, Works [ed. Green], pp. xxxii–xxxiii; Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia: Wits Treasury (London: Peter Short for Cuthbert Burbie, 1598), p. 280v. 20 Victoria Moul, ‘England’s Stilicho: Claudian’s political poetry in early modern England’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition, online publication 13 May 2019, doi.org/10.1007/s12138-019-00529-z. Moul is the lead ­investigator on the ground-breaking project ‘Neo-Latin poetry in English manuscript verse miscellanies, c. 1550–1700’ (2017–21), funded by The Leverhulme Trust. 21 Felber and Prete, ‘Ausonius’, p. 196. 22 See Ausonius, Works [ed. Green], pp. xxxv–xxxix and Roger Green, ‘Ausonius in the Renaissance’, in I. D. McFarlane (ed.), Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Sanctandreani/Proceedings of the Fifth International Congress of Neo-Latin Studies (Binghampton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1986), pp. 579–86. 23 Spurious works are printed in the appendices to Green’s Ausonius, while the Epigrammata Bobiensia are separately edited. See F. Munari (ed.), Epigrammata Bobiensia (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1955), and for an excellent

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account of the collection, Francesca Romana Nocchi (ed.), Commento agli ‘Epigrammata Bobiensia’ (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), pp. 3–38. 24 As we know from the notebook of William Badger, who was at Winchester in 1561–67: see London, British Library Additional MS 4379. 25 I owe this information to Victoria Moul, who very generously guided me to the sources that follow. Translations in printed anthologies include A. Holton and T.  MacFaul (eds), Tottel’s Miscellany: Songs and Sonnets of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Sir Thomas Wyatt and Others (London: Penguin, 2011) nos 124 and 271, respectively Sir Thomas Wyatt’s imitation of 13.23 (‘Qui laqueum collo …’), and Nicholas Grimald’s rendition of ‘Musarum inventa …’, i.e. Appendix A, 5.3 (Moralia Varia: Catonis de Musis Versus), and, closer to the date of Gynaikeion: John Ashmore, Certain Selected Odes of Horace, Englished … With Poems (Antient and Modern) of Divers Subiects, Translated (London: H. L. for Richard Moore, 1621), pp. 51–2 (‘To the Vertuous … Buds of Beautie … ex Ausonio’, i.e. Appendix A: 3 (De rosis nascentibus)) and 54–6 (‘Ausonius, ex graeco, de ambiguitate eligendae vitae. Edyl. 15’, i.e. 14.19); John Beaumont, Bosworth-field with … Other Poems (London: Felix Kyngston for Henry Seile, 1629), pp.  55–6 (‘Idyll 16’, i.e. 14.20 (Eclogae, ‘De viro bono’)); Thomas Stanley, Poems and Translations ([London]: for the author and his friends, 1647), pp. 23–34 (‘Cupid crucified’, i.e. 19 (Cupido cruciatus)); and Richard Fanshawe, Selected Parts of Horace … Concluding with a Piece out of Ausonius, and another out of Virgil (London: for M. M. Gabriel Bedell, and T. Collins, 1652), pp. 92–4 (‘Rosae Edyl. XIV’, i.e. Appendix A: 3 (De rosis nascentibus)). Manuscript miscellanies with quotations and translations include the early Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 346, fol. 117v (13.23 (‘Qui laqueum collo …’)) and, closer to the date of Gynaikeion: London, British Library, Royal MS 12 D VIII ‘Florum Flores’, a collection of classical Latin verse extracts prepared by the future Charles I for his father: fols 6r, 8r, 17v, 20v, 32r, 33v, 36v, 51r, 61r, 64r-65r, 75v, 78v, 84v (all from Appendix A: 1 (Septem sapientum sententiae)), 6v (Appendix A: 3 (De rosis nascentibus)), 23v, 46v (Appendix B: 3, 27.21 (Epistulae)), 31v, 40v, 41r, 59v, 63r (13.10, 13.56, 13.9, 13.93, 13.94, 13.92 (Epigrammata)), 32r (Epigrammata Bobiensia 69), 68v (25.7 (Technopaegnion: De inconexis)); BL Lansdowne MS 936, fols 206r, 208r, 201r (23 (Caesares)); BL Lansdowne MS 679, commonplace book of Samuel Fox: fols 14v (13.36 (‘Orta salo …’)), 15v (Appendix A: 1 (Septem sapientum sententiae) and 105r (13.10 (‘Toxica zelotypo …’)); BL Harley MS 6048, fol. 17r (13.23 (‘Qui laqueum collo …’)); BL Harley MS 1221, fol. 103r (13.23 (‘Qui laqueum collo …’)); BL, Additional MS 61744, fol. 48v (Epigrammata Bobiensia 14, ‘In venerem armatam’); Durham Cathedral Hunter MS 96, ‘Dictata magistri: Domini Cliffordi liber’: pp. 95–100 (13.6, 13.10 (‘Toxica zelotypo …’), 13.11, 13.39, 13.41, 13.59, 13.45, 13.46, 13.49, 13.50, 13.88, 13.89, 13.90 (Epigrammata), Appendix A, 4.10, 4.11, 4.13 (Epigrammata varia)); and Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Eng. poet. f. 17, ‘A Collection of Some Poems and Translations … by J. F.’: pp. 63–4 (‘The 24 Epistle of Ausonius’, i.e. 27.24), 69–70 (‘Ausonius his 15 Edyllium Of Humane

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Life’ i.e. 14.19 (Ecloga ‘De ambiguitate eligendae vitae’), 72–3 (‘Ausonius his 14 Idyllium. Roses’ i.e. Appendix A: 3 (De rosis nascentibus)) 133 (‘Ausonius Vir Bonus’ i.e. 14.20 (Ecloga ‘De viro bono’). 26 See Stuart Gillespie, ‘De rosis nascentibus from the Renaissance to the twentieth century: a collection of English translations’, Translation and Literature, 26 (2017), 73–94 (pp. 77–85). 27 See Gabriella Gruder-Poni, ‘Cupid in the garden’, in G. Sambras (ed.), New Perspectives on Andrew Marvell (Reims: ÉPURE, 2008), pp. 27–41 (pp. 36–40). 28 Heywood, Gynaikeion, VII, pp. 333–7 (see Table 1). 29 Ibid., p. 337. On the Cento’s early modern reception, see Sigrid Schottenius Cullhed, ‘In bed with Virgil: Ausonius’ Wedding Cento and its reception’, Greece & Rome, 63 (2016), 237–50 (pp. 239–42). 30 Heywood, Gynaikeion, VII, p. 337. Yves Peyré also discusses Heywood’s translation in chapter 4. 31 Heywood, Gynaikeion, II, p. 93 (see Table 1). 32 Dunstan Lowe, ‘Triple tipple: Ausonius’ Griphus ternarii numeri’, in J. Kwapisz et al. (eds), The Muse at Play: Riddles and Wordplay in Greek and Latin Poetry (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012), pp. 335–52 (p. 339). 33 Ausonius, Opera, §274. 34 He cannot help noting, for example, that he has ‘read, inserted amongst the Workes of Ausonius’ fragments of the poetry of Sulpicia: see Heywood, Gynaikeion, VIII, p. 385 and Table 1. 35 Ibid., II, p. 84. 36 Ibid., VI, pp. 269, 270 (see Table 1). 37 Ibid., VI, p. 290 (see Table 1). 38 The Latin translation of the epitaph Heywood quotes is Natale Conti’s: Athenaei Dipnosophistarum sive Coenae sapientum Libri XV (Basel: Henricpetrus, 1556), pp. 937–8. In chapter 12 Janice Valls-Russell shows that this was the edition Heywood used. For other uses of Conti’s Athenaeus in Heywood’s works, see Richard Rowland, Thomas Heywood’s Theatre, 1599–1639: Locations, Translations and Conflicts (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), p. 218, esp. n. 37. 39 Heywood, Gynaikeion, VII, pp. 352–3, VIII, p. 394 (see Table 1). Yves Peyré discusses the epigram on Sabina in more detail in chapter 7. 40 E.g. J. Cornarius (ed.), Selecta epigrammata Graeca Latine versa (Basel: J. Bebel, 1529) and John Stockwood (ed.), Progymnasma scholasticum. Hoc est, Epigrammatum Graecorum … Praxis (London: Adam Islip, 1597). On these collections, see Camilla Temple, ‘Inscription, ecphrasis and allegory: the reception of the ancient Greek epigram and the Renaissance emblem in early modern English literature’, PhD dissertation, University of Bristol, 2016, pp. 9–13. 41 Nocchi (ed.), Commento, pp. 14–15. 42 On Spenser’s interaction with ekphrastic epigrams in Greek and in Ausonius’ versions, see Camilla Temple, ‘The Greek anthology in the Renaissance: epigrammatic scenes of reading in Spenser’s Faerie Queene’, Studies in Philology, 115 (2018), 48–72. 43 Heywood, Gynaikeion, I, p. 19 (see Table 1).

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44 Ibid., VI, p. 292. 45 Ibid., VI, pp. 292–3 (see Table 1); cf. Athenaeus, Dipnosophistarum, p. 941. 46 Heywood, Gynaikeion, III, p. 152. 47 Ibid., III, pp. 152–3 (see Table 1). 48 Todd W. Reeser, ‘Du Bellay’s Dido and the translation of nation’, in P. J. Usher and I. Fernbach (eds), Virgilian Identities in the French Renaissance (London: Boydell and Brewer, 2012), pp. 213–35 (pp. 232–5); Sheldon Brammall, The English Aeneid: Translations of Virgil, 1555–1646 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), pp. 88, 138, 142. 49 J. M. Baños Baños, ‘Traducción y tradición literaria: las Periochae Homeri de Ausonio’, in M. Puig Rodríguez-Escalona (ed.), Tradició clàssica: Actes de l’XI simposi de la secció catalana de la SEEC (Andorra la Vella: Ministeri d’Educaciò, 1996), pp. 153–9 (pp. 153, 159 n. 13). Green considers the Periochae spurious and prints them in ‘Appendix A’, but most recent scholars are less sceptical. For a clear discussion of the manuscript evidence, see Ausonius, Obras, trans. and ed. A. Alvar Ezquerra, 2 vols (Madrid: Gredos, 1990), Kindle edition, vol. I, loc. 1500–1, vol. II, loc. 6576. 50 Rossum-Steenbeek, Greek Readers’ Digests?, p. 69. 51 Ibid., pp. 73–4. 52 See Helius Eobanus Hessus, Poetarum omnium seculorum longe principis Homeri Ilias (Basel: Robert Winter, 1540), sigs α5v-8v; Lorenzo Valla and Raphael Volterranus, Homeri poetarum principis cum Iliados, dum Odysseae libri XLVIII ([Antwerp]: Io. Grapheus, 1528), arguments to each book. 53 See Ausonius, Obras, II, loc. 6582–6608, Baños Baños, ‘Traducción’ and Lucia Di Salvo, ‘La traduzione degli incipit omerici in un opuscolo del Corpus Ausonianum: le periochae Homeri Iliados et Odyssiae’, FuturAntico, 1 (2003), 115–70 and the appreciative early modern notes on the Periochae by Vinetus in Ausonius, Opera, 495–544. His commentary had been preceded by Mariangelus Accursius, Diatribae [in Ausonium] (Rome: Marcellus Argenteus, 1524), sigs Cvr-Eiiv. 54 Kristoffel Demoen, ‘Epigrams on authors and books as text and paratext’, in M. Kanellou et al. (eds), Greek Epigram from the Hellenistic to the Early Byzantine Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 67–83 (p. 81); Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Eng. poet. f. 17, pp. 99–100, and see above, note 25 for the translations from Ausonius. 55 George Chapman, The Iliads of Homer, Prince of Poets (London: Richard Field for Nathaniel Butter, [1611]); George Chapman, Homers Odysses, Translated According to the Greeke (London: Richard Field for Nathaniell Butter, ­1614–15). On Heywood’s use of Chapman’s earlier translations, see above, note 18. 56 George Chapman, The Crowne of All Homers Workes (London: John Bill, 1624–5?). Pollard, A. W., G. R. Redgrave et al., A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, and Ireland, 3 vols, 2nd edn (London: Oxford University Press, 1976–91) suggest 1623 for the publication of this work, but this is convincingly revised to sometime between 13 January 1624

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and 6 September 1625 in L. A. Cummings, Geo: Chapman his Crowne and Conclusion: A Study of his Handwriting (Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universität Salzburg, 1989), pp. 132–3. 57 I. Hillaire de la Rivière, Speculum Heroicum … id est argumenta xxiiij librorum Iliados (Utrecht: J. Janssen, 1613). The Periochae are printed on sigs *2r-*4r. 58 Heywood, Gynaikeion, VI, pp. 277–9, VIII, p. 404, I, pp. 11–13 (see Table 1). 59 Martin, ‘Critical study’, p. 166. 60 See above, note 18. 61 These quotations are often lifted along with their context from other sources: see e.g. Heywood, Gynaikeion, II, p. 109 and Natale Conti, Mythologiae sive Explicationum Fabularum Libri X (Venice, 1581), p. 276; Heywood, Gynaikeion, III, p. 128 and Plutarch, Moralia quae usurpantur, trans. and ed. G. Xylander (Basel: Thomas Guarinus, 1570), p. 444; Heywood, Gynaikeion, V, p. 239 and Athenaeus, Dipnosophistarum, p. 8900 [i.e. 900]. On the other hand, at Heywood, Gynaikeion, VII, p. 316, he seems to have simply singled out Achilles’ famous words from Iliad IX, as quoted in Plutarch, Moralia [trans. Xylander], p. 64. 62 Heywood, Gynaikeion, I, p. 48; the ‘Epitome’ takes up pp. 48–56. See also chapter 9, where Camilla Temple notes Heywood’s attention to the verse arguments composed by Joannes Sambucus for Lucian’s dialogues. 63 Ibid., I, p. 48. 64 Ibid., I, p. 11. 65 Jean de Sponde (ed.), Homeri quae extant omnia, 2 vols (Basel: E. Episcopius, 1583), vol. II, pp. 197, 219. On Sponde’s grappling with Homer’s gods, see Christiane Deloince-Louette, Sponde: Commentateur d’Homère (Paris: Champion, 2001), pp. 305–74. 66 Tania Demetriou, ‘George Chapman’s Odysses: translation and allegory’, in L. Capodieci and P. Ford (eds), Homère à la Renaissance: Mythe et transfigurations (Rome: Académie de France à Rome, 2011), pp. 281–300. 67 Heywood, Gynaikeion, I, p. 12. 68 Ibid., I, p. 13. 69 E.g. in Herodotus, Historiae libri IX, et de vita Homeri libellus, trans. L. Valla and C. Heresbach, ed. H. Estienne ([Geneva]: Henri Estienne, 1566), pp. 252–3; Heywood may have used this edition or a reprint, because the Latin quoted at Heywood, Gynaikeion, III, p. 140 corresponds to Herodotus, [Historia], p. 18, and his version of Caminus agrees with Estienne’s, even though the poem’s Latin transmission is textually unstable. 70 Philip Ford, De Troie à Ithaque: Réception des épopées homériques à la Renaissance (Geneva: Droz, 2007), pp. 6, 16–24, 54–5, 138. See also Noémi Hepp, Homère en France au XVIIe siècle (Paris: C. Klincksieck, 1968), pp. 40–2. 71 The earliest edition to present them thus may have been Homer, Odyssea, eiusdem Batrachomyomachia, Hymni, aliaque eius opuscula, seu catalecta, ed. O. Giphanius (Basel: [E. Episcopius] for Thedosius Rihelius, [1570?]). 72 Chapman’s final Homeric translation, The Crowne of All Homer’s Works, included the ‘Epigramms and other poems’ but it will have appeared either at the same time or just after Gynaikeion: see above, note 56.

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73 Heywood, Gynaikeion, I, p. 13. 74 ‘ὑπείρεχε χεῖρα καμίνου’ or ‘dextraque foueto caminum’, in the close translation by Henri Estienne that Heywood may well have been looking at: see Herodotus, [Historia], p. 252 and above, note 69. 75 Heywood, Gynaikeion, I, p. 14. 76 Ibid., IV, pp. 173–5. 77 Plutarch, Moralia [trans. Xylander], pp. 30–70. See Ford, De Troie, pp. 6, 16–24, 55–8. 78 Heywood, Gynaikeion, IV, p. 165. 79 Ibid. 80 Ibid., IV, p. 173. 81 Ibid., IV, p. 174. 82 Ibid. 83 Ibid., IV, pp. 165–9, 171–3. 84 On pseudo-Plutarch’s concise biography, see Hepp, Homère, p. 42. 85 Plutarch, Moralia [trans. Xylander], pp. 30–31; the translation of Antipater’s verses is from Heywood, Gynaikeion, IV, p. 165. 86 Heywood, Gynaikeion, IV, p. 164. This is coloured by a memory of the poet’s perennial poverty from pseudo-Herodotus. 87 Ibid., IV, p. 164. 88 Thomas Heywood, A Woman Killed with Kindness, ed. Margaret Jane Kidnie (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 13.115–17. See also the Introduction to this volume. 89 Heywood, Gynaikeion, sig. A4v. 90 Martin, ‘Critical study’, p. 182.

9 ‘The scene lies in Hel’: the world of Lucian in Thomas Heywood’s stage poetry Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Camilla Temple

The Greek satirist and prose writer Lucian of Samosata (c. 125–180 ce) exerted widespread influence across Elizabethan and Jacobean literature. The following example from one of Christopher Marlowe’s plays establishes two of what I want to call the main ‘contours’ to the reception of Lucian in early modern drama. Marlowe memorably utilised the Dialogues of the Gods in the opening of The Tragedie of Dido, Queen of Carthage (1594).1 He begins the play with a depiction of Jupiter’s romantic dalliance  with Ganymede, an amorous scene which also appears in Lucian’s dialogue X.42: jupiter:

What is’t sweet wag I should deny thy youth, Whose face reflects such pleasure to mine eyes, As I exhaled with thy fire darting beams, Have oft driven backe the horses of the night. Whenas they would have haled thee from my sight? Sit on my knee, and call for thy content, Controle proud Fate, and cut the thread of time, Why are not all the Gods at thy command, And heaven and earth the bounds of thy delight?3

So great is Jupiter’s desire for Ganymede that he would ‘have oft driven backe the horses of the night’ to prolong their time together, thus echoing the scene of the prolonged night of love-making with Alcmena that is famously dramatised in Plautus’ Roman tragicomedy Amphitryon. Marlowe borrows from Lucian the characterisation of Jupiter but also the focus on the seduction of Ganymede, portraying Ganymede’s innocence as well as Jupiter’s manipulative nature in the service of his desire. As I will argue in this chapter, Lucian’s Dialogues offer Renaissance dramatists like Marlowe an arresting vision of what it means for the gods to be on stage. But Marlowe is also concerned with the broader theology that Lucian evoked in the Dialogues of the Dead. This is epitomised in the famous line about Helen from Dr Faustus:

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Was this the face that launched a thousand ships, And burnt the topless Towers of Ilium?4

I will explore the Lucianic background to these lines later in the chapter but what is significant for now is that we find these same two ‘contours’ of divine representation and theological reflection in the Lucianism of another Renaissance dramatist, Thomas Heywood. Lucian’s foolish and lustful gods once again appear alongside his dusty, skull-ridden hell from Dialogues of the Dead. The Lucianic representation of the afterlife and immortals opens up a new framework for the way action on the early modern stage is understood. When the Graeco-Roman gods are dramatised on stage they become literary rather than religious figures and a space opens up for experimenting with genre and theology. For example, in Dialogues of the Gods Lucian’s gods live in a comic world, and they therefore become subject to the kind of rules that operate in a Greek comedy. These literary possibilities were not lost on Heywood, and they were made richer and stranger by his contradictory and ultimately agnostic attitude to Lucian as a famously atheist author.

Dialogue and genre in Heywood and Lucian Heywood and Lucian have their most direct encounter in Heywood’s translation of a selection of fifteen of Lucian’s dialogues: this corpus ­ includes Misanthropos or The Man-Hater, nine pieces taken from the Dialogues of the Gods and five from the Dialogues of the Dead. These translations are printed in a collection entitled Pleasant Dialogues and Dramma’s, published towards the end of Heywood’s life in 1637.5 Like Marlowe, Heywood is interested here in the landscapes of Lucian’s immortals and that of the underworld across the writer’s work.6 Heywood’s Pleasant Dialogues brings together translations from different ancient and early modern authors and collects a variety of genres including dialogues, epigrams, emblematic dialogues, prologues, funeral elegies and epithalamia. The inclusion of the prologues and epilogues reflects an interest in the liminal spaces of the stage where performance and poetry are connected but not necessarily clearly divided. Heywood places his translations of Lucian after two dialogues by Erasmus, ‘The Ship-wracke’ (from which Shakespeare is supposed to have borrowed some lines for The Tempest)7 and ‘Procus and Puella’ (from which critics have suggested that Shakespeare took inspiration for the more outspoken heroines of All’s Well That Ends Well),8 and a third, ‘Earth and Age’, by Ravisius Textor ­(1470–1542), well known for his dramatic works.9 These potential borrowings by Shakespeare highlight the significance of the dialogue form,

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‘The scene lies in Hel’: the world of Lucian 209

of which Lucian was a ­privileged exponent, for early modern dramatists developing new characters and modes of expression. One of the distinguishing features of Lucian’s style is the elegant way in which he brings together written and spoken expression.10 The particular relationship that Lucian establishes between the dialogue and a tone of irreverence for the traditional authority of the gods, and Jupiter in particular, is also important for Heywood, who picks out a selection of dialogues that revolve centrally around Jupiter’s offspring and his infidelities. This is a central theme across Heywood’s works, as is also explored in chapters 3 and 4 of this volume. While dramatic traditions certainly provided much inspiration, the classical dialogue form and its complex tradition moving between Plato, Cicero and Lucian offered yet more unexpected voices and scenes.11 Heywood’s Ages plays, with their loosely connected mythological plots, in many ways approximate Lucian’s dialogues in an evocative form of drama, as I shall discuss below. As part of understanding Heywood and Lucian’s relationship, this chapter explores the significance of the dialogue form as it imagined an alternative kind of theatrical world for the Renaissance stage. The eclectic nature of Heywood’s Pleasant Dialogues reflects the creative nexus into which Lucian was placed in the early modern period and shows how his work was connected to other examples of the dialogue form; Heywood was alert to the way Lucian’s forms oscillated between genres. Lucian is particularly influential for any post-classical dramatist because his dialogues represented a hybrid between the different styles of Plato and Aristophanes. Plato’s form of philosophical dialogue is combined with the biting satire of Aristophanes to create a new Lucianic style. This was not lost on Heywood, who remarks of one Lucianic dialogue that it is written ‘after the manner of Plato, whom Lucian in his Dialogue seems most to imitate’.12 Lucian’s characterisation of the gods is especially redolent of Aristophanes’ absurd presentation of the relationship between divinities and mortals in plays such as Birds. The combination of these two forms serves to mock a more serious reading of Plato’s dialogues, as the result is used to satirise great philosophers in the Dialogues of the Dead and elevated deities in Dialogues of the Gods. Likewise, Aristophanes’ influence became more satirical and less crude when shifted into the Lucianic corpus. As Duncan suggests, Lucian’s writings offered ‘[t]he Aristophanic sting without the Aristophanic rudeness’.13 One source of humour, Bracht Branham suggests, is the fact that Lucian presents the mode of Platonic dialogue being used by figures, such as the Olympian gods, for whom it is wholly unfamiliar.14 The dialogue opens up a particular space where the nature of gods or mythic figures, for example Paris or Helen, can be explored without the pressure of sustaining a plot (epic, tragic, or comic). While Plato may not have had the

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same satirical purpose as Lucian, his dialogues represented a mode through which an alternative way of understanding the world could emerge. This was something which Lucian innovatively brought to bear on the Olympian pantheon. Lucian’s style is distinguished by the way it brings different genres and models together. But the act of mixing itself offers a crucial model for Heywood’s own syncretic style across his work; he combines a wide variety of influences from classical and medieval sources, often moving ideas across generic boundaries, for example incorporating material from dialogues into plays such as The Silver Age and The Iron Age. He is also inspired by Lucian’s satirical handling of mythical narratives, which he applies in his own dramatic works. In the last section of this chapter, I will focus on Heywood’s rendition of the story of Amphitryon and Alcmena in The Silver Age. I will explore how Heywood’s play differs from the best-known version of this myth at this time: Plautus’ Amphitryon. The comparison shows how Heywood relied on Lucian to create his own version of this story which is strikingly different to its Plautine antecedent.

Lucian’s reception across genres: The Hierarchie of Blessed Angells and Pleasant Dialogues In order to understand better Heywood’s engagement with Lucian we need first to briefly consider the culture around Lucian in this period. The editio princeps of Lucian was produced by Janus Lascaris in Florence in 1496.15 It was in fact part of a select group of texts, which included the Greek Anthology and four of Euripides’ plays, that were printed in an innovative Greek text designed by Lascaris and Lorenzo d’Alopa.16 This makes Lucian one of the first Greek texts to appear in print, most likely reflecting the author’s popularity with Renaissance Italians new to learning Greek as well as the popularity of Lucian in Byzantine literary culture. These factors probably explain why ‘by 1550 there were 270 printings of Lucian in circulation, including more than 60 editions of the Greek text’.17 Neil Rhodes also explains that the most successful Greek textbook of the time in England was a combination of Isocrates, Lucian and Plutarch, which appeared in five editions published by Henry Bynneman between 1581 and 1599.18 Not only was Lucian published early, but his work was also very popular. Prior to Heywood, Lucian was of great interest to the early humanists and was widely read as part of the educational curriculum of the sixteenth century in England. Thomas More and Desiderius Erasmus were deeply influenced by him, and by the time Heywood was writing Lucian was best understood through the prism of Erasmus and More. Most famously,

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‘The scene lies in Hel’: the world of Lucian 211

Lucian was an important influence on Erasmus’ In Praise of Folly (1509), and his significance is also evident in the dialogue form that Erasmus develops. For More, the influence is most prominent in Utopia (1516), which engages closely with Lucian’s A True History. Although sharing the dialogues’ satirical tone, A True History is a novel which recounts fantastical stories, most famously travel to outer space. In this respect Heywood is developing a different facet of Lucian’s reception to his predecessors; he is less interested in the fantastical element of the Lucianic corpus and more in its satirical and hybrid style.19 One of the central appeals of Lucian for More and Erasmus was the way in which Lucian ‘forged a wry, critical response to a defining feature of Greek culture in the Roman Empire: its self-conscious classicism’.20 This self-consciousness appealed to More and Erasmus as they attempted to fashion their own mode of relating to the classical world. Branham writes of More and Lucian that ‘both authors are interested in probing the durability of idealized cultural traditions in which they themselves are steeped, indeed, of which they themselves are products’.21 Lucian is working in what we might describe as a belated literary era and this mode offered Renaissance authors potent ways of innovating in the face of a shared sense of belatedness in relation to the ancient world. Heywood seems to have negotiated this challenge of belatedness by translating Lucian’s work amongst the varied setting of Pleasant Dialogues, which somewhat reduces the prominence of Lucian the author and instead foregrounds the literary form of the dialogue. The overall effect of this is to create a collection which erases the boundary between Renaissance and ancient authors and sets their work up on an equal footing.22 In fact, Heywood actively omits mention of the authors from whom he is translating, for example calling Erasmus ‘the author’ in his note to ‘Procus and Puella’.23 With this aside, Heywood distances himself from Erasmus and suggests an ignorance of the writers with whom he is clearly deeply engaged. On closer inspection, Lucian is by far the dominant author in terms of the dialogues and certainly seems to set the tone for Heywood’s translations and original compositions.24 Subsequent to this popularity with Erasmus and More, Lucian developed a more dangerous reputation as an atheist. Heywood was deeply concerned with this aspect of Lucian’s influence in his Hierarchie of the Blessed Angells, a long didactic poem with extensive prose additions on philosophical and theological topics.25 Pleasant Dialogues is connected to Hierarchie in that both were published towards the end of Heywood’s life in 1637 and 1635 respectively. This suggests a late interest in Lucian, but is somewhat complicated by the Lucianic influence present in the earlier The Silver Age, which will be discussed below. The Hierarchie offers an important context

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to Heywood’s translations of Lucian as it is in this text that Heywood writes directly about the author and his life:

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If we enquire of Lucian after these, Betwixt Menippus and Philonides; His dialogue will then expressely tell, How he and such like atheists jeast at Hell.26

In this work Heywood is preoccupied with an image of ‘the Atheist Lucian’ which contrasts with the way in which individual authors are downplayed in Pleasant Dialogues. This description introduces a Lucianic dialogue set in hell in the context of an extensive discussion of Christian hell. As a result, the pagan afterlife comes across as an exploration of the barren spiritual nature of hell and connected to (or possibly intended for) atheists, adding a new and complex dimension to the exploration of Christian hell. The inclusion of Lucian’s dialogue comes in Book VI of the Hierarchie but Lucian himself appears much earlier. Below I quote one account of Lucian’s life from Book I at some length as it gives a vivid picture of the tension, but also the attraction, that Heywood feels in responding to Lucian the author: The atheist Lucian held Gods sonne in scorne; And walking late, by dogs was piece-meale torne. Yet for the love I to his learning owe, This funeral farewell I on him bestow. Unhappy Lucian, what sad passionate verse Shall I bestow upon the marble stone That covers thee? How shall I deck thy herse? With bayes or cypresse? I do not bemone Thy death; but that thou dy’dst thus. Had thy creed As firme been, as thy wit fluent and high, All that have read thy works would have agreed, To have transfer’d thy soule above the sky, And sainted thee, But o, ’t is to be doubted, The God thou didst despise, will thee expel From his blest place; & since thou Heav’n hast flouted, Confine thy soule into thine owne made Hell.27

On one hand, Heywood clearly presents Lucian as an atheist and reads his death as a fitting punishment, but on the other hand he wishes to ‘bestow’ on him a ‘funeral farewell’. From the tone that Heywood uses here we can sense a strong connection, even a feeling of intimacy, towards Lucian. He continues: But if thou ever knew’st so great a deitie, A Saviour who created Heaven and thee;



‘The scene lies in Hel’: the world of Lucian 213

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And against him durst barke thy rude impietie, He judge thy cause, for it concerns not me. But for thy body, ’t is most just (say I) If all that so dare barke, by dogs should dy.28

Heywood is torn between wanting Lucian’s literary soul to be ‘transfer’d … above the sky’ and feeling that a violent death is appropriate for an atheist who ‘snarled against the Saviour of the world’.29 In his prose commentary on Book I, Heywood weighs up the possibility that Lucian might have been a Christian: Lucian (of whom I before gave a short character) was sirnamed Samosatensis, because borne in Samosata (a city not far from Euphrates) he was called Blasphemus, Maledicus, and Atheos. He lived in the time of Traianus Caesar, and was at first an advocate or lawyer, and practiced at Antioch, a city in Syria: but it seems, not thriving by his parsimonious and close-fisted clients; he forsook that profession, and retyred himselfe, though to a lesse profitable, yet a more pleasing study, namely to be a follower of the Muses. Volaterranus reports of him, That hee was a Christian, but after proved a renegade from that Faith: and being demanded, Why he turned apostata? his answer was, That he had gained nothing by that profession, more than one bare syllable added to his name, being Christened Lucianus, where before his name was plaine Lucius.30

Heywood follows this wandering conjecture with another account of Lucian’s death, this time including an epitaph borrowed from Lucian’s own Timon of Athens, also translated in Pleasant Dialogues: His death (as the best approved authors relate of him) was wretched and miserable: for walking late in the evening, hee was assaulted by band-dogs, and by them worried and torne to pieces. A most condigne punishment inflicted upon him, because in his life time he spared not to snarle against the Saviour of the world. And me-thinkes the epitaph which he composed upon his owne Timon of Athens, syrnamed Misanthropos, i.[e.] Man-hater, might not unproperly be conferred upon himself: Hic iaceo vita, miseraque inopique solutus Nomen ne quaeras, sed male tale peri. Here do I lie depriv’d of life, Most miserable and poore: Do not demand my name, I dy’de, Remember me no more.31

The repetition of this story of Lucian’s death suggests that this biographical detail preoccupied Heywood. This epitaph is taken from the argument which precedes the dialogue ‘Timon’ in various bilingual editions of Lucian,

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one of which Heywood relied on for his extensive use of the author in Hierarchie.32 This preoccupation extends to how Lucian is to be remembered, either as a discredited atheist or as a celebrated writer:33

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Shall I bestow upon the marble stone That covers thee? How shall I deck thy herse? With bayes or cypresse?34

Heywood’s admiration goes beyond the text and the relationship represents  something more personally troublesome for this early modern playwright.

The landscape of hell in Pleasant Dialogues Across the collection of Pleasant Dialogues the reader gets a strong sense of the landscape of the underworld as an underlying theme. This cuts across different authors and can be found in the translation of Textor’s dialogue as well as those from Lucian. It is also striking that this interest in the eerie landscape of hell ties in to Heywood’s later interest in the Hierarchie where the pagan hell comes to be used as an allegory for the barren spirituality of atheism. In Heywood’s translations of Textor’s ‘Earth and Age’ we see some of the same preoccupations that arise in the wider selection of Lucian’s Dialogues of the Dead: Dost thou not see Renowned Hector yeeld to Destinie? How great Achilles, after wars rough stormes, Despoil’d of life, to be the food for wormes?35

This image comes up again in relation to Helen: O Greece what preparation didst thou make, To fetch that flesh which now the worms forsake?36

Textor’s dialogue echoes Lucian’s famous description of Helen’s skull in a dialogue between the god Hermes and Lucian’s fellow satirist, Menippus. The two are surveying a pile of bones and skulls in the underworld, which Hermes claims are the remains of mythical heroes including Achilles, Narcissus and Helen: μενιππος:

Ὀστᾶ μόνα ὁρῶ καὶ κρανία τῶν σαρκῶν γυμνά, ὅμοια τὰ πολλά. μὴν ἐκεῖνά ἐστιν ἃ πάντες οἱ ποιηταὶ θαυμάζουσι τὰ ὀστᾶ, ὧν σὺ ἔοικας καταφρονεῖν. μενιππος: Ὅμως τὴν Ἑλένην μοι δεῖξον· οὐ γὰρ ἂν διαγνοίην ἔγωγε. ερμης: Τουτὶ τὸ κρανίον ἡ Ἑλένη ἐστίν. ερμης: Καὶ



‘The scene lies in Hel’: the world of Lucian 215 διὰ τοῦτο αἱ χίλιαι νῆες ἐπληρώθησαν ἐξ ἁπάσης τῆς Ἑλλάδος καὶ τοσοῦτοι ἔπεσον Ἕλληνές τε καὶ βάρβαροι καὶ τοσαῦται πόλεις ἀνάστατοι γεγόνασιν; (Dialogues of the Dead, V.409)

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μενιππος: Εἶτα

menippus: I can only see bones and bare skulls, most of them looking the same. hermes: Yet those are what all the poets admire, those bones which you seem to despise. menippus: But show me Helen. I can’t pick her out myself. hermes: This skull is Helen. menippus: Was it then for this that the thousand ships were manned from all Greece, for this that so many Greeks and barbarians fell, and so many cities were devastated?

These lines have now gained near-proverbial status through Marlowe’s use of them in these lines from Dr Faustus, which were mentioned at the opening of the chapter: Was this the face that launched a thousand ships, And burnt the topless towers of Ilium? (xii.89–90)

Read with Lucian’s lines in mind, Marlowe’s echo contains a double irony: in Lucian’s text Helen in the underworld is no longer beautiful (in fact she is just a skull), but the vision of Helen is conjured up just at the point when Faustus is starting to realise the proximity of his own damnation. As Rhodes has explored, Menippus’ rhetorical question mocks the loss of Helen’s mythical beauty, and also laughs at those who launched a thousand ships in pursuit of something so transient.37 A witty echo to this theme appears in Dialogue XXX, ‘Nireus. Thersites. Menippus’, which Heywood translated. Lucian’s Greek reads: μενιππος: Ἀλλ᾿ οὐχὶ καὶ ὑπὸ γῆν, ὡς οἶμαι, κάλλιστος ἦλθες, ἀλλὰ τὰ μὲν ὀστᾶ ὅμοια,

τὸ δὲ κρανίον ταύτῃ μόνον ἄρα διακρίνοιτο ἀπὸ τοῦ Θερσίτου κρανίου, ὅτι εὔθρυπτον τὸ σόν· ἀλαπαδνὸν γὰρ αὐτὸ καὶ οὐκ ἀνδρῶδες ἔχεις. (Dialogues of the Dead, XXX.433)

menippus: But not, methinks, the handsomest that has come to the lower world; your bones are no different here, and your skull can only be told from that of Thersites, by its brittleness. Your skull is fragile and unmanly.

The Greek-Latin edition Heywood was probably reading gives the following Latin translation: menippus: Atqui non ite[m] sub terram opinor, pulcherrimus venisti, quippe qui reliquis quide[m] ossib. aliis appareas assimilis, porro caluaria

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Thomas Heywood and the classical tradition hoc uno insigni a Thersitae caluaria dignosci possit, quod tua delicata est ac mollicula quandoquidem istuc habes effoeminatur ac neuti[?]qua[m] viro decoru[m].38

Heywood has made a free translation of these lines:

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menippus:

But Nereus know, None bring their beauty to these Vaults below. Of the fine flesh thou bragst of, wormes have fed, Leaving thee nought save bones, like us now dead.39

This brief but vivid dialogue explores the theme of the skull as an emblem of life’s transience and the inclusion of the voices of the dead themselves is especially memorable. This dialogue epitomises the barren world of the afterlife which Lucian so vividly realises in his Dialogues of the Dead but, as to Heywood’s engagement with Lucian’s Greek, it is difficult to tie his translation more closely to the Greek or the Latin on account of his relatively free translation style. Given that he was more likely using the Latin there is little in his free translation to suggest he drew on aspects exclusive to the Greek.40 Heywood also translated many of Joannes Sambucus’ Latin arguments to the dialogues, such as that to ‘Menippus and Aeacus’, which reads thus: Aeacus ostendis qui sunt in Ditis averno, Obscuros manes, sulphureosq[ue] locos. Dein etiam bello fortes, multosve sophorum, Quorum aliquot rides ipse Menippe miser.41

In the argument to ‘Menippus and Aeacus’ Heywood has: Judge Aeacus doth to Menippus show The obscure ghosts and sulphur vaults below. And after that he brings him to the plaine Where both the valiant and the wise remain: Who as the freenesse of his tongue him guides, (Wretched himself) their sorrowes he derides.42

Heywood has translated the argument relatively closely. We move seamlessly from Textor to Lucian with the effect of privileging Heywood as the translator in view of the different kinds of material marshalled under his own authorial voice. This elision of authors is also testament to Heywood’s thematic interest in these hellscapes across different authors. The effect is also to create a distinctly Heywoodian underworld drawn from a variety of authors. The introduction of Lucian’s hell in the Hierarchie suggests a conflicted and complex response on the part of Heywood. He uses a translation from the Dialogues of the Dead in a different context from the collected



‘The scene lies in Hel’: the world of Lucian 217

­ ialogues, therefore indicating the way in which Lucian is present across the d different genres he writes in. Heywood writes:

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And now being so far entered into Lucian (though not pertinent to the argument in hand) I will commend another of his Dialogues unto your reading. Incited thereunto by reason of the elegancie therof: and the rather, because the scene lies in Hel.43

This comment comes as Heywood is discussing the nature of hell in some detail and before he goes on (after this dialogue) to discuss different theological perspectives on the tortures of hell; the note in the margin for this section reads ‘Three reasons to prove the perpetuitie of the torments of the damned’.44 But despite this broader aim, Heywood decides to incorporate the entire dialogue into his main text. He does acknowledge the strangeness of the decision when he writes that the inclusion ‘is not pertinent to the argument in hand’ and instead wishes to include it on account of its ‘elegancie’. This acknowledgement does little to change the fact that a dialogue on the relative successes and status of different ancient military generals is in no real way suited to the subject of the torments of Christian hell. Heywood also mentions the remarks of Thomas More with some respect: To the Dialogue of Lucianus before recited, (intitled Nyceomantia [sic], or an answer from the Dead) the most learned and never to be forgotten Sr Thomas Moore hath left this Argument.45

This dialogue fits with Heywood’s supposed focus in the Hierarchie, but it represents a pagan hell and not a Christian one. Nonetheless there is a lengthy description of the dialogue: The maine and most illustrious things in this fable contained, are, The frivolous and uncertaine doctrines and documents of the philosophers; the superstition and power presupposed to be in magitions and magicke: The severall rooms and corners of Hell, with the torments and punishments inflicted upon the miserable and wretched ghosts, with the equalitie of the persons there …46

Lucian’s version of the underworld captured Heywood’s imagination and, contrary to the critique of his atheism elsewhere in the text, Heywood appears at this point to be in agreement with his criticisms of the ‘rich men of the world’. In particular, however, it is the ‘scene of Hel’ where the two authors overlap in their interests. Heywood’s enthusiasm for Lucian comes through even in this potentially inappropriate setting. Lucian is concerned with imagining the afterlife in a way that clearly inspires Heywood’s literary as well as philosophical imagination. Lucian’s form of atheism is vivid despite its problematic implications and in fact it is because of the atheism that his imaginings are so vivid. Atheism in the face of the pagan gods and atheism in the face of the Christian God are strikingly different concepts,

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but Heywood takes up Lucian’s approach because of the vital world it imagines, the significance of which goes beyond religious belief and into the realm of poetic creation.

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The Silver Age, dialogue and performance Among Lucian scholars, the relationship of the dialogue form to performance constitutes a longstanding area of critical discussion. David Marsh suggests that Lucian’s dialogues were ‘declaimed before literate audiences of his day’, which brings them closer to drama than Heywood’s printed translations might suggest.47 In considering the status of the dialogue in the early modern period, Branham argues that ‘in humanist circles little distinction seems to have been made between dialogues and plays, both being acted as part of holiday celebrations in colleges from the start of the century, if not earlier’.48 There is a porous boundary between the dialogue and performed drama in Lucian’s own contemporary context and in the early modern period. This is connected to Heywood’s decision to include different genres of writing in his Pleasant Dialogues such as epilogues and prologues to dramas. But Heywood remains interested in the dramatic possibilities of Lucian’s dialogues. In his opening ‘Note to the reader’ he writes: ‘For such as delight in stage-poetry, here are also divers dramma’s, never before published’.49 The category of ‘stage-poetry’ captures something of how Heywood saw Lucian’s own dialogic writing, and the special status of the dialogue form is clearly significant to Heywood’s interest in the ancient author. The presence of an argument before the dialogue is a noteworthy decision and as much as it likely reflects the edition from which Heywood works, it also sets the reader up to expect a longer poem, as arguments are traditionally introduced at the start of books of epic poems or individual plays in play collections.50 These literary ambitions are reflected more broadly by Heywood’s style as the register of the language is elevated in comparison to Lucian’s famously plain Greek. In the following example we can see how Heywood’s word order and use of rhyme combine to elevate the register of his language – Now even by Pluto I entreat thee show (O Aeacus) to me the vaults below51

– in comparison to the relatively plain Latin translation and Greek text: Per Plutone[m], o Aeace, expone mihi, quęso [quaeso], hic apud inferos sunt, omnia.52



‘The scene lies in Hel’: the world of Lucian 219 Πρὸς τοῦ Πλούτωνος, ὦ Αἰακέ, περιήγησαί μοι τὰ ἐν ᾅδου πάντα. (Dialogues of the Dead, VI.412)

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I ask you, Aeacus, in the name of Pluto, to conduct me round everything in Hades.

Heywood’s translations lend themselves to being read aloud while the arguments serve to place the dialogues in a more literary context that does not indicate a dramatic setting. In this collection, Heywood fashions a printed literary status for these works, while at the same time his interest in writing for performance comes through in the rhetorical nature of the translation. The idea of Lucian as atheist that emerges from the Dialogues of the Dead is more clearly controversial than his satires about the pagan gods. With this in mind it is significant that Heywood chose mainly to focus on the gods in his choices from the Dialogues of the Dead and there is a marked focus on Jupiter taken from the Dialogues of the Gods. This gives the dialogues a stronger connection to the mythical plays where Heywood weaves together a number of different narratives that focus on the GraecoRoman gods. The dialogue collections of Lucian structurally resemble the weaving together of myths in Heywood’s mythical drama cycle. The choices made from the Dialogues of the Gods develop a particular focus: ‘Jupiter and Ganimede’ is followed by ‘Jupiter and Juno’, in which Juno complains about Jupiter’s pursuit of Ganymede, thereby following a narrative progression across the dialogue. This order is also replicated in the 1576 edition of the dialogues (although neither of these dialogues have preceding arguments, which might suggest that Heywood composed his own arguments for these dialogues). ‘Jupiter and Cupid’ follows next and this is along a theme similar to the first two dialogues as it treats Jupiter’s exploits but it also follows the theme of Jupiter and child-like gods, previously Ganymede and now Cupid. In ‘Vulcan and Apollo’ the theme is Maia’s new baby (Mercury) and so again the focus is on a child god’s relationship with an adult. The theme of Zeus’ children is continued as Mercury asks the sun god to slow down his chariot while Zeus sleeps with Alcmena, this resulting in the birth of Alcides. This also relates to the theme of Amphitryon’s story in The Silver Age. In the same way as overlapping themes emerged between Textor and Lucian in Heywood’s translations, so the myths cross between drama and dialogue in imaginative ways. This theme of children continues when Mercury complains to his mother Maia about his duties in ‘Mercury and Maia’: At wrestlings I am present, at the bar, Where causes and law-suits determin’d ar’, Instruct such orators as fees desire; Sometimes supply the place of common crier.

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Nor would these things appeare so great a trouble, But that th’affaires of hell make them seem double.53

‘Vulcan and Apollo’ is also related to children and child-bearing as Jupiter begs Vulcan to split open his head so he can give birth to Athene. The final dialogue from the Dialogues of the Gods is also about Zeus giving birth and so the overall effect is of a strong focus on child-like gods and the children of Jupiter. The staging of Jupiter’s dialogues with Ganymede and Cupid, for example, serves to diminish his status as neither of these child gods fully understand who he is, and the same applies to Mercury. The choice of focus from Dialogues of the Gods results in a strong vision of a Lucianic and comic Jupiter. There is also a striking overlap between Heywood’s play The Silver Age and the dialogue ‘Mercury and Apollo’ in which Mercury instructs Apollo to slow the passing of night for the purposes of Jupiter’s love-making with Amphitryon’s wife, Alcmena. The mythical plays seem to have been written before Pleasant Dialogues,54 but there is a strong connection between the Jupiter that appeared in The Silver Age and the one that emerges from Pleasant Dialogues. This suggests that Lucian’s influence is at play throughout Heywood’s career, even if it only becomes more explicit later. Lucian’s dialogue ‘Hermes and Helios’ from Dialogues of the Gods can be understood to represent an imagined scene in Plautus’ drama, Amphitryon. The dialogue opens: Ὠ Ἥλιε, μὴ ἐλάσῃς τήμερον, ὁ Ζεύς φησι, μηδὲ αὔριον μηδὲ εἰς τρίτην ἡμέραν (Dialogues of the Dead, XIV.229) Zeus says you are not to go out driving today Mr Sun God, or tomorrow or the next day.

Heywood takes the performative possibilities of this myth and Plautus’ plot but shifts the tone to one that echoes Lucian. Heywood’s Jupiter is, like Lucian’s, at the mercy of the drives of any comic character, while in Plautus’ play it is Amphitryon who becomes the focus of the ridicule. In the prologue to The Silver Age, Heywood explains that all the stories are well known. The story of Alcmena is dramatised by Plautus, mentioned by Ovid and represents a well-known part of Graeco-Roman mythology. But Lucian’s Dialogues offer Heywood inspiration for presenting his own version of the story, in two main innovations: the development of Jupiter’s character and the inclusion of Ganymede rather than Mercury to impersonate Sosia. In Plautus’ play Mercury is not a child-like figure, although he is subordinate to Jupiter, whereas Ganymede brings a child-like quality to Heywood’s play. When comparing Heywood’s presentation of Alcmena’s story to that of Plautus, it is the development of the character of

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this Lucianic Jupiter in far more detail that stands out. Jupiter is the main focus of the set of dialogues that Heywood chooses to translate from the Dialogues of the Gods and he also emerges in The Silver Age as a clearly defined character whose own lustful desires are brought down to a human level. The focus on Jupiter in Heywood’s dialogues is closely connected to his earlier interest in representing Jupiter on stage. Heywood borrows from Lucian an interest in Jupiter’s character and his relationship with mortals. For example, Jupiter speaks to Alcmena personally: jupiter: Fairest of our Theban dames, accuse me not. I left the charge of soldiers to report The fortune of our battles first to thee; Which should the camp know, they will lay on me A grievous imputation, that the beauty Of my fair wife can with Amphitrio more Than can the charge of legions. As my coming Was secret and conceal’d, so my return, Which shall be short and sudden.55

The tone of Jupiter’s dialogue here is highly reminiscent of Lucian’s Jupiter, in particular the wheedling compliments to Alcmena, ‘Fairest of our Theban dames’, and the extent to which Jupiter takes responsibility for his own plotting. Lucian introduces a colloquial Jupiter into the literary tradition: jupiter: Oh, my sweet wife! of what I did in sport Condemn me not. If needs, then chide me for’t. … By this soft kiss, I swear, No lady living is to me like dear.56

Jupiter also becomes more involved in the deception and develops a trick of his own to play on Amphitryon, rather than leaving the trickery to Ganymede impersonating Sosia (in Plautus’ version Mercury takes on much of the deception). Jupiter even challenges the household directly in front of Amphitryon: jupiter:

Friends, I appeal to you. When have you known me mad? when rage and rave? Shall my humanity and mildness thus Be recompens’d? To be out-brav’d, out-faced By some deluding Fairy: to have my servants Beat from my gates; my general house disturb’d; My wife full grown and groaning, ready now To invoke Lucina, to be check’d and scorned? Examine all my deeds: Amphitrio’s mildness Had never reference to this juggler’s rage.57

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Jupiter’s tone here echoes his presentation across the translated Dialogues of the Gods, where Heywood’s choice shapes a character who is manipulative but also able to feign innocence and create a feeling of intimacy with the audience. Jupiter sets up a complex trick on Amphitryon which involves significant acting skill on his (and the actor’s) part. This kind of active deception is left to Mercury in Plautus’ play but in Heywood’s version we see a Jupiter from Lucian’s Dialogues who is more than happy to take the trickery into his own hands.58 Juno is also given a more active role in the drama: juno:

… and in this knot, Which, till their deaths, shall never be dissolved, I have power to strangle all the charms of hell. Nor powers of heaven shall straight me, till the deaths Of yon adultress and her mechal brats. Laugh, gods and men, sea, earth, and air, make joy, That Juno thus Alcmena can destroy.59

Juno does not appear in Plautus’ play but, by introducing her in The Silver Age, Heywood recentres the plot around the gods and their concerns.60 Juno also frequently appears in Lucian’s Dialogues so the point of focus is once again shifted towards the Lucianic world. The effect of this, however, is to lower the status of Jupiter and Juno to that of quarrelling husband and wife, and they lose some of their mystery and power as a result. As with the realisation of hell, the satirical perspective on Jupiter is developed by means of more detail and closer scrutiny. Just as Helen’s beauty is undermined by the visual evocation of her skull in the shift from Lucian to Marlowe, so Jupiter becomes a more ridiculous figure, whose divine power is undercut when the reality of his pursuit of Alcmena is realised on stage. Further to this, in a crucial change from Plautus, Heywood replaces Mercury with Ganymede as the impersonator of Sosia. This may have been suggested by Lucian’s dialogue, translated by Heywood, which shows Jupiter seducing Ganymede and opening up the possibility of an especially satirical position with regard to Jupiter.61 In Lucian’s account of the seduction of Ganymede by Jupiter, Ganymede is unaware of Jupiter’s identity. Heywood translates Ganymede’s lines as follows: But were you not that eagle, who late fear’d And snatcht me from my flocke? where is become That shape? you speake now, who but late were dumbe.62 Mi homo, an non aquila modo fuisti, ac deuolans rapuisiti me à medio ouili? Quo pacto igitur alae illae ablatae tibi sunt? tu verò ipse alius quispiam subitò appares.63



‘The scene lies in Hel’: the world of Lucian 223 Ἄνθρωπε, οὐκ ἀετὸς ἄρτι ἦσθα καὶ καταπτάμενος ἥρπασάς με ἀπὸ μέσου τοῦ ποιμνίου; πῶς οὖν τὰ μὲν πτερά σοι ἐκεῖνα ἐξερρύηκε, σὺ δὲ ἄλλος ἤδη ἀναπέφηνας;

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Mister man, weren’t you an eagle just now? Didn’t you swoop down, and carry me away from the middle of my flock? How, then, have your feathers moulted? You look quite different now.

Heywood makes a number of changes in his own translation, especially in the second and third sentences: ‘where is become  / That shape? you speake now, who but late were dumbe’, which do not correspond to the Latin or the Greek and which make it difficult to decide whether he was relying on the Greek directly or solely dependent on the Latin. Even when Jupiter announces that he is ‘king of all the Gods’,64 Ganymede is confused and thinks he is meant to be Pan: ‘What’s that you say? You are not Pan I know. / Where’s then your pipe?’;65 and later Jupiter remarks: ‘How simple is this innocent Lad? a mere / Innocuous childe’.66 This version of Ganymede makes him a striking choice to be part of the deception of Amphitryon and Alcmena, as Ganymede is himself closely aligned with Alcmena’s role as object of Jupiter’s desire. Plautus’ happy ending turned on Amphitryon acknowledging Jupiter’s superior power and forgiving Alcmena. In The Silver Age, however, Jupiter’s antics become more ridiculous and the Lucianic eye for the everyday details creeps into Heywood’s play. Plautus’ Amphitryon gives Mercury a powerful role: mer[curius]:  perge, Nox, ut occepisti; gere patri morem meo: optumo optume optumam operam das, datam pulchre locas. (lines 277–8) mer[cury]: (aside) Continue, Night, as you’ve begun. Oblige my father. You’re doing an excellent job for an excellent god in an excellent way, you’re investing your effort beautifully.67

Mercury here displays a highly developed sense of irony and shows a marked interest in the stage effects being used to shape our perception of the all-powerful gods slowing down time. Heywood’s version is less interested in the metatheatricality of the Mercury/Ganymede figure. For example, Ganymede’s opening speech in The Silver Age makes a more mundane impression: Before I knock, let me a little determine with myself. If I be accessary to Jupiter in his amorous purpose, I am little better than a parcel-gilt bawd, but must excuse myself thus: Ganimede is now not Ganimede; and if this imputation be put upon me, let it light upon Sosia, whom I am now to personate. But I am too long in the prologue of this merry play we are to act. I will knock, and the serving-men shall enter.

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The reference to being ‘too long’ in the prologue suggests itself as a veiled criticism, or joke, at the expense of Plautus’ play, where Mercury famously gives an extended prologue which sets up his position as a stage manager of the drama.68 In Heywood’s play, the figure of Ganymede carries more naïve connotations and it is clear from these lines that he is more interested in the action of ‘this merry play’ than in the omnipotent tricks and immortal powers that Mercury displays in Plautus’ play. Ganymede also adds a different gloss to this figure: far from being another omnipotent god, Ganymede himself was in the position of Alcmena not so long ago and so adds a reminder of Jupiter’s similar antics in another mythical situation. The reference to a ‘parcel-gilt bawd’ alerts the audience to the powerlessness of Jupiter’s victims and to Ganymede’s role as a servant figure and less of an ironic onlooker than Mercury. The focus on Ganymede keeps Jupiter’s lust at the forefront of the audience’s mind, making for a more comic and compromised Jupiter. But Ganymede’s description of himself as a ‘parcelgilt bawd’ is also significant to Jupiter’s fall in status. Plautus’ Amphitryon drew on the frisson of showing a god, or rather two gods, on stage and the implications for thinking about the nature of divinity in a performance. In Heywood, Ganymede is placed in a position of exploitation, which also manifests as a position of critic, especially if connected to his seduction by Jupiter in Lucian’s dialogue. Heywood’s relationship to Lucian represents a complex paradox across his career. With the Ages plays representing Heywood’s earlier work and The Hierarchie and Pleasant Dialogues emerging later in his career, Lucian’s influence recurs consistently across this diverse corpus. This reappearance in the diverse genres of Heywood’s writing suggests that he found creative possibilities in Lucian’s vivid world that go beyond the clear debt demonstrated in his translations. Heywood is fascinated by the  philosophical and religious implications of Lucian’s irreverence towards the Graeco-Roman gods, and he is engaged by the aesthetic possibilities that Lucian furnishes for formal experimentation. Though Lucian represents a form of atheism that is inimical to the Christian world, his vision is deeply resonant for Heywood’s experiments with the performance of divinity. Lucian provides Heywood with an imaginative structure that allows him to create dramatic worlds where classical myths collide with contemporary theologies in the moment of their realisation on stage. The resulting drama offers a strange clash of registers, and this productive dissonance enables Heywood to develop hellish scenes that he shapes for his own dramatic purposes.



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Notes  1 Douglas Duncan, Ben Jonson and the Lucianic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 111.   2 Lucian, The Works, trans. M. D. Macleod, 8 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1913–67), vol. VII, p. 281. Unless otherwise indicated, references to the Greek and translations into English are to and from this edition.   3 Christopher Marlowe, The Complete Plays, ed. Frank Romany and Robert Lindsey (London: Penguin, 2003), lines 23–31.   4 Christopher Marlowe, Dr Faustus, ed. Roma Gill, 3rd edn (London: Methuen Drama, 2008), xii.89–90.   5 Pleasant Dialogues and Dramma’s, Selected out of Lucian, Erasmus, Textor, Ovid &c. (London: R. O[oulton] for R. H[earne], 1637). Brenda M. Hosington points out that the publication was entered to Hearne two years before, in 1635: ‘“Compluria opuscula longe festivissima”: translations of Lucian in Renaissance England’, in Dirk Sacré and Jan Papy (eds), Syntagmatia: Essays on Neo-Latin Literature in Honour of Monique Mund-Dopchie and Dirk Tournoy (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2009), pp. 187–205 (p. 200).   6 The other dialogues include the Dialogues of the Sea-Gods and Dialogues of the Courtesans.   7 See John D. Rea, ‘A source for the storm in The Tempest’, Modern Philology, 17 (1919), 279–86.   8 Peggy Muñoz Simonds, ‘Sacred and sexual motifs in All’s Well That Ends Well’, Renaissance Quarterly, 42 (1989), 33–59.   9 On Textor’s dialogues, see Olivier Pédeflous, ‘Ravisius Textor’s school drama and its links to pedagogical literature in early modern France’, in Philip Ford and Andrew Taylor (eds), The Early Modern Cultures of Neo-Latin Drama (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2013), pp. 19–40 (pp. 30–33). See also chapter 7 (Yves Peyré) for a discussion of Heywood’s use of Textor elsewhere, and the editions he might have used. 10 For discussion of Lucian’s own reference to his style, see David Marsh, Lucian and the Latins: Humour and Humanism in the Early Renaissance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), p. 12. 11 Ibid., p. 195. 12 Thomas Heywood, The Hierarchie of the Blessed Angells (London: Adam Islip, 1635), p. 391. 13 Duncan, Ben Jonson and the Lucianic Tradition, p. 30. 14 R. Bracht Branham, Unruly Eloquence: Lucian and the Comedy of Traditions (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 80. 15 The Aldus edition appeared in 1503. For further discussion of the reception of Lucian see Hosington, ‘“Compluria opuscula longia festivissima”’; Eleni Bozia, Lucian and his Roman Voices: Cultural Exchanges and Conflicts in the Late Roman Empire (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), pp. 152–81, and Marsh, Lucian and the Latins.

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16 See Robert Proctor, The Printing of Greek in the Fifteenth Century (London: Bibliographical Society, 1900), pp. 78–81. 17 R. Bracht Branham, ‘Utopian laughter: Utopia and Thomas More’, Moreana, 86 (1985), 23–43 (p. 23). 18 Neil Rhodes, ‘Marlowe and the Greeks’, Renaissance Studies, 27 (2013), 199–218 (p. 205). 19 The interest of writers like Erasmus in Lucian is not lost on Heywood, who includes two translations of Erasmus’ dialogues alongside the majority by Lucian in Pleasant Dialogues. 20 Branham, ‘Utopian laughter’, p. 24. 21 Ibid., p. 25. 22 For Heywood’s synchronic approach to his sources, pulling in translations, commentaries and reworkings alongside his direct classical sources, see Peyré’s chapters 4 and 7, and Coffin’s chapter 6. 23 Heywood appears to refer to the air of controversy that surrounded Erasmus as far as he was connected with Lucian: ‘In this dialogue (to whose Author I am not able to give a meriting character)’, Pleasant Dialogues, p. 285. 24 It is worth noting that there are many more Lucianic dialogues than those contained in Pleasant Dialogues so the choice is significant. On a broad level, Heywood’s interest in the Dialogues of the Gods and the Dialogues of the Dead is clear, while the Dialogues of the Courtesans and the Dialogues of the SeaGods are evidently of less interest. 25 The layout of the book, with shorter comments in the margins, longer prose commentary at the end of each book and large images preceding some of the books, is reminiscent of George Sandys’ Ovid’s Metamorphosis Englished, Mythologizd, and Represented in Figures (Oxford: John Lichfield, 1632). 26 Heywood, Hierarchie, VI, p. 348. 27 Ibid., I, pp. 14–15. 28 Ibid., I, pp. 14–15. 29 Ibid., I, p. 33. 30 Ibid., I, p. 33. Maffeus Volaterranus, also known as Raffaello Maffei ­(1451–1522), wrote a commentary on Lucian which is included in certain editions, on which see Michael Zappala, Lucian of Samosata in the Two Hesperias: An Essay in Literary and Cultural Translation (Potomac, MD: Scripta Humanistica, 1990), p. 213. 31 Heywood, Hierarchie, I, pp. 33–4. 32 I am grateful to Yves Peyré for this suggestion. Many of the Latin arguments in these editions, which Heywood translated, are by Joannes Sambucus. They first appeared in his 1550 bilingual edition, Luciani Samosatensis dialogi coelestes, marini, et inferni … Menippus Timon, ed. Joannes Sambucus (Strasbourg: W.  Köpfel, 1550). They were often reprinted, e.g. in Luciani Samosatensis dialogi selectiores (Basel: Nicolaus Brylinger, 1576). 33 This is reminiscent of how Lucretius is described somewhat later, for example as an ‘atheist dog’ by Lucy Hutchinson, who had translated a considerable

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‘The scene lies in Hel’: the world of Lucian 227

­ roportion of his atheist text De Rerum Natura. See Reid Barbour, ‘Lucy p Hutchinson, atomism and the atheist dog’, in Lynette Hunter and Sarah Hutton (eds), Women, Science and Medicine 1500–1700: Mothers and Sisters of the Royal Society (Stroud: Sutton, 1997), pp. 122–36. 34 Heywood, Hierarchie, I, p. 14. 35 Heywood, Pleasant Dialogues, p. 48. 36 Ibid., p. 49. 37 See note 18. 38 See above, note 32. Luciani Samosatensis dialogi coelestes, p. 69r. The same translation reappears e.g. in the 1576 Basel edition, on p. 169. 39 Pleasant Dialogues, p. 139. 40 In addition, in this example the Greek starts a line earlier, making it difficult to follow a closely corresponding Latin and Greek relationship. 41 Luciani Samosatensis dialogi coelestes, p. 64r. In the 1576 Basel edition, it appears on p. 157. See chapter 8 (Demetriou), for Heywood’s attention to Ausonius’ ‘arguments’ to the Odyssey. 42 Heywood, Pleasant Dialogues, p. 133. 43 Heywood, Hierarchie, p. 391. 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid., p. 390. In Sambucus’ edition of Lucian, Necyomantia in Thomas More’s Latin version is prefaced thus: ‘Menippus seu Necyomantia. Thoma Moro interprete. Argumentum’ (Luciani Samosatensis dialogi coelestes, p. 75v). 46 Heywood, Hierarchie, p. 391. 47 Marsh, Lucian and the Latins, p. 1. 48 Branham, Unruly Eloquence, p. 98. 49 Heywood, Pleasant Dialogues, sig. A4v. Heywood’s own annotations and observations on his translations are included at the end of the book and although relatively brief these represent a notably early instance of self-commentary by a translator of Greek – even if through the Latin. 50 For example, Sandys, Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Heywood also uses arguments elsewhere in his work, for example in Troia Britanica. 51 Heywood, Pleasant Dialogues, p. 133. 52 Luciani Samosatensis dialogi coelestes, p. 157. 53 Heywood, Pleasant Dialogues, p. 114. 54 See the Introduction for a discussion of dates. 55 Heywood, The Golden Age and The Silver Age (London: The Shakespeare Society, 1851), p. 115. All references are to this edition. 56 Ibid., p. 123. 57 Ibid., p. 128. 58 In this he resembles the Jupiter Heywood found in Caxton, who impersonates a nymph while clad in women’s clothes in The Golden Age, as discussed in chapter 3 (Janice Valls-Russell). 59 Heywood, The Golden Age and The Silver Age, p. 132. For ‘mechal’, see Stapleton’s chapter 2 and (especially) Valls-Russell’s chapter 3. 60 On Juno’s role, as expanded by Heywood, see chapter 4 (Yves Peyré).

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61 Dialogue of the Gods, X, 4; also referred to in the opening of Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage. 62 Heywood, Pleasant Dialogues, p. 96. 63 Luciani Samosatensis dialogi selectiores (1576), p. 11. 64 Heywood, Pleasant Dialogues, p. 96. 65 Ibid. 66 Ibid. 67 Plautus, Amphitryon, ed. and trans. Wolfgang de Melo (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). 68 For discussion of Heywood’s reception of Plautus’ prologues in a different context, see Richard Rowland, Thomas Heywood’s Theatre 1599–1639: Locations, Translations and Conflicts (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), p. 168.

10 Acting like Greeks

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Tanya Pollard

When Heywood reflects on the theatre, his thoughts turn to the classical tradition, and especially to its Greek roots. Early in his Apology for Actors, he explains that, in response to complaints against plays, ‘I hold it not a misse to lay open some few Antiquities to approve the true use of them.’1 Reflecting on the theatre’s beginnings leads him to a catalogue of Greek tragic playwrights, including ‘Euripides: Menander, Sophocles, Eupolis, Eschilus, Aristophanes, Appollodorus, Anaxandrides, Nichomachus, Alexis, Tereus and others’ (sig. B2v). Yet unlike most of his contemporary commentators on the theatre, Heywood is more interested in the history of staged performance than literary history.2 Accordingly, he looks to Greece especially for the origins of acting, which he locates provocatively in the charged figure of Hercules.3 By shifting his focus from written texts to embodied performance, Heywood alters a familiar account of theatre’s Greek origins into a strange and unsettling model of imitation and its consequences. Heywood rests his defence of acting on a set of assumptions about imitation. If copying originals brings us closer to them, it can allow us to capture their power and prestige. For him, as for his contemporaries, origins reside in the ancient Greek world. Rome features prominently in his account of theatre history, but Romans, like the even more belated English, are already imitators, and as such they repeatedly and insistently point back to original models. In particular, Heywood describes Julius Caesar’s desire to emulate the Greek heroism rooted in Hercules: the first actor, who imitates his father, the king of the gods. If audiences imitate the figures they see onstage, Elizabethan spectators of Caesar find themselves unwittingly and inexorably pursuing a chain of imitation leading from Roman leaders to Greek heroes, from Greek heroes to Greek demigods, from Greek demigods to Greek gods, and ultimately to the father of all gods. As a boundary-crossing medium linking performer with performed, ancient with modern, English with foreign, and human with divine, acting offers a distinctively Hellenic model for far-reaching transformation.

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Theatre as Greek Heywood begins his defence ‘with the antiquity of acting comedies, tragedies, and hystories’, which he roots ‘first in the golden world’ (sig. B3r). ‘You see’, he tells his readers, ‘that touching the antiquity of actors and Acting, they have not beene new lately begot by any upstart invention, but I have derived them from the first Olimpiads’ (sig. C4r). He finds evidence for his historical argument in etymology: The word tragedy, is derived from the Greeke word τραγος, Caper a goat, because the goat being a beast most injurious to the vines, was sacrificed to Bacchus: Heer upon Diodorus writes, that tragedies had their first names from the oblations due to Bacchus; or else of τρυξ a kinde of painting, which the tragedians of the old time used to stayne their faces with. By the censure of Horace, Thespis was the first Tragicke writer. … But by the censure of Quintilian, Aeschiles was before him, but after them Sophocles and Euripides clothed their tragedies in better ornament. (sig. D1v)

Heywood’s etymological and historical details are in themselves fairly unremarkable: as he notes in this passage, his claims about Thespis and subsequent tragedians come directly from canonical Latin authorities, Horace and Quintilian, who would have been familiar from any basic grammar school education.4 Yet rendering his terms in Greek letters is a striking choice. Not only was Greek printing still rare in England at this time, but scholars have regularly insisted that early modern English playwrights would not have been aware of or interested in Greek: especially popular commercial playwrights, or at least popular commercial playwrights who were not Ben Jonson.5 Nicholas Okes, who printed Heywood’s Apology, mainly published light commercial fare, especially plays, so his access to Greek type is not to be taken for granted. Their appearance here shows a concerted emphasis on their Greek status. Tragedy was typically understood as the older and more prestigious of the ancient dramatic genres, so it is more striking that Heywood similarly derives comedy ‘from the Greeke word κομος a street, and οδη, Cantus, a song, a street song’ (sig. D2r), and cites ‘Aristophanes, Eupolis, and Cratinus … Menander and Philemon’ (sig. D2r) as the genre’s exemplars. His attention to the etymological and historical roots of both these dramatic contributes to his broader argument about the Greek origins of public theatrical performance. ‘The first publicke theatre’, he writes, was by Dionysius built in Athens. It was fashioned in the manner of a semi-­ circle, or halfe-moone, whose galleries & degrees were reared from the



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ground, their staires high, in the midst of which did arise the stage, beside, such a convenient distance from the earth, that the audience assembled might easily behold the whole project without impediment. (sigs D2r-v)

Although Heywood earlier refers to the god of theatre by the Roman name Bacchus, here he attributes the actual playhouse to the Greek name Dionysus, in keeping with his emphasis on its Athenian setting and architecture. These material details are important: as Chloe Preedy observes in chapter 11 in this volume, their structures establish a model for London’s amphitheatres. Their evocation of the earth and moon gestures towards topos of the theatrum mundi, suggesting the cosmological dimensions that Shakespeare would go on to invoke in his metatheatrical references to the Globe Theatre. For Heywood, theatre’s Greek roots point not only to the authority of notable authors and settings, but also to the power of a divine patron, and a corresponding cosmic significance. Heywood’s emphatic account of the theatre’s Greek origins echoed contemporary literary commentators. English writers, including George Puttenham and Thomas Lodge, turned to Greek etymologies to define dramatic genres, as did formal academic accounts of dramatic conventions.6 Early modern printings of the treatise De Tragoedia et Comoedia consistently departed from their usual Latin to present the etymological origin of tragedy as ‘ἀπό τοῦ τράγου’, from tragos (goat), and of comedy as ‘ἀπό τοῦ κωμάζειν’, from ‘kômazein’ (to revel).7 In positing Greece as the theatre’s point of origin, Heywood draws on a larger set of familiar Renaissance beliefs about Greek originality. Erasmus famously wrote, ‘[f]or whereas we Latins have but a few small streams, a few muddy pools, the Greeks possess crystal-clear springs and rivers that run with gold.’8 Writing of ‘Italian, and Latin it self, Spanishe, French, Douch, and Englishe,’ Roger Ascham similarly exhorted, ‘trewelie, if there be any good in them, it is either lerned, borowed, or stolne, from some one of those worthie wittes of Athens,’ adding in the margin, ‘Learnyng, chiefly conteined in the Greke, and in not other tong.’9 To Ascham, as to Erasmus, everything starts in Greece; Latin literature models the same forms of imitation that he prescribes for his contemporaries. Greek literature, accordingly – like theatre itself – intrinsically evoked imitation. As Tania Demetriou has shown of Renaissance encounters with Homer, Greek texts were intimately associated with the layers of literary imitation through which they were typically first encountered. ‘The discovery of Homer,’ she explains, ‘was first a “rediscovery backwards” of the Homer already known – referred to, quoted and imitated by other authors and completely “assimilated” by Virgil … In discovering Homer it is the known that is first rediscovered.’10 As the originals came into view,

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Renaissance humanists joined Romans in the literary project of recreating prior Greek models. Although Heywood was neither the only nor the first writer to link Greece with dramatic origins, he brought a distinctive perspective to these conversations. As a popular commercial playwright linked with the large public amphitheatres, he might seem an unexpected figure to ennoble the  theatre’s moral character by promoting its Greek prehistory. Both in this treatise and in his plays, his allusions translate the supposedly arcane and academic Greek dramatic tradition into the notoriously low realm of the popular playhouses. It is in keeping with this mediating role that Heywood focuses his attention not on Greece’s increasingly visible textual legacy, but on the more ephemeral arena of acting.

Acting as Greek In keeping with his habitual pattern of transplanting elite material into popular settings, Heywood modifies well-trodden accounts of theatre history in order to develop his emphasis on performance. On the origins of acting, he departs from familiar scripts. ‘In the first of the Olimpiads,’ he narrates, amongst many other active exercises in which Hercules ever trimph’d as victor, there was in his nonage presented unto him by his tutor in the fashion of a history, acted by the choyse of the nobility of Greece, the worthy and memorable acts of his father Jupiter. Which being personated with lively and well-spirited action, wrought such impression in his noble thoughts, that in meere emulation of his fathers valor (not at the behest of his Stepdame Juno) he perform’d his twelve labours: Him valiant Theseus followed, and Achilles, Theseus. Which bred in them such hawty and magnanimous attempts, that every succeeding age hath recorded their worths, unto fresh admiration. (sig. B3r)

This story of acting’s Herculean origins seems to be Heywood’s own invention, unmoored from the textual precedents that loomed behind his identifying Thespis as the first dramatic poet. Rooted in an ambitious son’s efforts to mimic his even more illustrious father, acting becomes not only a form of mimetic self-fashioning, but also a strategy for translating between earthly and supernatural realms. This passage offers an implicit philological interrogation of the concept of acting, repeatedly citing and varying the term – ‘active exercises’, ‘acted by’ nobility, ‘acts of his father Jupiter’, ‘wellspirited action’ – building a linguistic bridge between acting as theatrical performance and acting as purposeful agency, the achievement of deeds.11

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Derived from the Latin agere, actus, which in turn comes from Greek ἄγειν, the word ‘act’ held long historical precedent for tying stage performance to other forms of action.12 Other contemporary playwrights identified theatrical performance with passion, which semantically embeds the idea of passive suffering; coining a striking verb, Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus argues that he and Lavinia, ‘(poor creatures) want our hands, / And cannot passionate our tenfold grief / With folded arms’ (III.ii.5–7).13 For Heywood, however, acting entails strenuous effort towards accomplishing a set goal. These forms of the word ‘act’ acquire meaning from jostling not only against each other, but also against a larger vocabulary of theatrical representation: ‘presented’, ‘fashion’, ‘History’, ‘impression’, ‘emulation’, ‘perform’d’, and ‘recorded’. In particular, Jupiter’s acts reach Hercules by being ‘personated’, from the Latin persona: a mask used by a player, character in a play, dramatic role, the part played by a person in life.14 The verb is both implicitly and explicitly theatrical; it means to represent, depict, or enact a person’s part in a play. It can be sinister: in 1604, Robert Cawdrey defined it as ‘to counterfaite, anothers person.’15 It could also mean to render human – ‘to represent or imagine as a person; to give a human form or nature to’ – or to represent in a personal or bodily form, as when the soothsayer in Cymbeline interprets an oracle by explaining ‘The lofty cedar, royal Cymbeline, / Personates thee’ (V.vi.452–3). If acting is personating, it may bring humans closer to the divine, but it can also give human form and feeling to immortals and other non-human entities. Personating Jupiter involves not only representing him on the stage, but also humanising him, moving him from the realm of the gods towards that of mortals. This may be the defining trait of Hercules, whose birth – as the human son of the king of the gods – intrinsically translates immortality into mortality. As the focus of this anecdote, in which Hercules sets about trying to reproduce his father’s greatness on earth, this humanising strategy is a hallmark of Heywood’s, which he borrowed from medieval accounts such as William Caxton’s Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye. The Ages plays notoriously deflate Jupiter, who repeatedly enacts the rascal or clown. His main roles in The Golden Age and The Silver Age involve dressing up and lying about his identity in order to seduce mortal women, all of whom he goes on to abandon after up-ending their lives by impregnating them. Jupiter himself becomes an actor in these plays, creating an ongoing comedy of errors by assuming different temporary identities. Just as an actor impersonates him, he impersonates a woman to seduce Callisto, a jewellery peddler to seduce Danae, and the general Amphitryon to seduce his wife Alcmena.16 Heywood himself, meanwhile, imitates these antics by figuratively impersonating Plautus, who had previously dramatised the story of Amphitryon’s cuckolding by Jupiter; The Silver Age incorporates

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a near-translation of Plautus’ Amphitryo, which itself probably imitated a Greek tragedy on the same topic.17 Imitating gods is a risky business, and despite Heywood’s generally admiring account in Apology, the record is mixed on how much good it ultimately did for Hercules. Plautus ends Amphitryo with the hero’s birth, but Heywood extends his dramatic scope to depict Hercules grown into his full strength and great labours. Many of the hero’s feats involve trying to rescue women, such as Hippodamia and Proserpine, from the sorts of abductions and rapes carried out by his father, but he also imitates Jupiter in creating havoc by seducing women. Although he succeeds at most of his projects, his adventures do not end happily, and his depictions in classical plays are mixed, as is his status more broadly. Hercules features in comedies such as Aristophanes’ Frogs as a lusty glutton, but more often his sufferings provided the stuff of tragedy, as seen in Sophocles’ Trachiniae, and the Hercules Furens plays of both Euripides and Seneca.18 Hercules’ generic legacy has a similarly ambivalent status on the early modern stage, where he veers between tragic masculine heroism and comic erotic infatuation.19 In Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost (c. 1595), Hercules is staged as one of the Nine Worthies, but is first invoked as an analogue for giddy infatuation; when Don Armado asks ‘Comfort, me, boy: what great men have been in love?’, Moth replies ‘Hercules, master’ (I.ii.52– 3). In Much Ado About Nothing, he represents mocking versions of valour: Don Pedro vows to ‘undertake one of Hercules’ labours, which is to bring Signor Benedick and the Lady Beatrice into a mountain of affection th’one with th’other’ (II.i.276–7), and Beatrice complains that ‘He is now as valiant as Hercules that only tells a lie and swears it’ (IV.i.307–8). In Antony and Cleopatra, Hercules represents both the comic pleasures of Antony’s valour and erotic excess, and their tragic denouement. Shortly before his death, his soldiers respond to mysterious music by noting ‘’Tis the god Hercules, whom Antony lov’d,  / Now leaves him’ (xxviii[IV.iii].15–16);20 later, Antony himself prefaces his suicide attempt by announcing ‘The shirt of Nessus is upon me. Teach me,  / Alcides, thou mine ancestor, thy rage’ (xxxviii[IV. xiii].43–4). The Brazen Age, in this vein, features triumphant victories but ends with Hercules’ madness, pain, and death: far from the unambiguous glory Heywood describes in Apology.21 Richard Rowland demonstrates in chapter 5 that ‘it is through his depictions of the women who come into the orbit of Hercules that Heywood destabilises the play’s representation of the protagonist’s inexorable progress from heroic deeds to deification’. Both Jupiter and Hercules, then, fare differently in Heywood’s dramatic practice than in his dramatic theory. Just as acting mediates, or translates, between the realms of mortals and gods, it similarly suggests points of contact between opposing ethical categories, offering a wide spectrum of



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ambiguity. In highlighting the very human failings of gods and demigods, it translates between these mythic realms and our own earthly experience. This translation between mythic and human is of particular interest to Heywood. ‘Aristotle’, he explains, … having the tuition of young Alexander, caused the destruction of Troy to be acted before his pupill, in which the valor of Achilles was so naturally exprest, that it imprest the hart of Alexander, in so much that all his succeeding actions were meerly shaped after that patterne, and it may be imagined had Achilles never lived, Alexander had never conquered the whole world. The like assertion may be made of that ever-renowned Roman Julius Caesar. Who, after the like representation of Alexander in the temple of Hercules standing in Gades was never in any peace of thoughts, till by his memorable exployts, hee had purchas’d to himselfe the name of Alexander: as Alexander till hee thought himselfe of desert to be called Achilles: Achilles Theseus, Theseus till he had sufficiently Imitated the acts of Hercules, and Hercules till hee held himselfe worthy to bee called the son of Jupiter. (sigs B3r-v)

Just as Hercules’ tutor taught him heroism through theatrical depictions of Jupiter’s deeds, similarly Aristotle teaches Alexander heroism through a theatrical depiction of Troy’s destruction. The performance of Achilles, in particular, makes such a powerful impression on him ‘that all his succeeding actions were meerly shaped after that patterne.’ Heywood suggests that, ‘had Achilles never lived, Alexander had never conquered the whole world,’ but Alexander never actually encounters a living Achilles, who may or may not have been an actual historical figure. Instead, this anecdote demonstrates the potent effect of the actor, through whom the mythic hero’s valour was ‘so naturally exprest.’ It is a theatrical enactment of Troy, not Troy itself, that shapes Alexander’s heart, and that accordingly leads to his triumphant takeover. Alexander’s enactment of heroism, in turn, has the same power to inspire imitation: just as Alexander longs to recreate Achilles, ‘that ever-renowned Roman Julius Caesar’ is similarly affected by ‘the like representation of Alexander.’ Heywood traces this chain of imaginative influence both backward and forward from Alexander: forward to Julius Caesar, with implications for his own later audiences, and backward not simply to Achilles, but to Theseus, who similarly inspires Achilles, and from him to Hercules and Jupiter: explicitly mythic figures, whom Heywood was unlikely to believe genuinely fit into the same ontological frame as the demonstrably real Alexander and Caesar. Because theatre, in Heywood’s account, transforms both actors and audience members to ideal original forms, it offers a model of shaping identity that is simultaneously ancient and new, mythic and real. Heywood argues that the moving, embodied figures of the theatre have a special

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power, beyond those of words or images alone, ‘to moove the spirits of the beholder to admiration.’ ‘[B]ut to see a souldier shap’d like a souldier, walke, speake, act like a souldier,’ he exhorts: to see a Hector all besmered in blood, trampling upon the bulkes of kinges. A Troylus returning from the field in the sight of his father Priam as if man and horse even from the steeds rough fetlockes to the plume in the champions helmet had bene together plunged into a purple Ocean: To see a Pompey ride in triumph, then a Caesar conquer that Pompey: labouring Hanniball alive, hewing his passage through the Alpes. To see as I have seene, Hercules in his owne shape hunting the boare, knocking downe the bull, taming the Hart, fighting with Hydra, murdering Gerion, slaughtring Diomed, wounding the Stimphalides, killing the Centaurs, pashing the Lion, squeezing the Dragon, dragging Cerberus in chaynes, and lastly, on his high pyramides writing Nilultra, Oh these were sights to make an Alexander. (sigs B3v-B4r)

Heywood’s imagined models, Hector, Troilus, and Priam, return to the original birthplace of both epic and drama, the Trojan War. Yet from there they move again, both forward in time to Pompey, Caesar, and Hannibal, and backward to the iconic Hercules and his labours. His theatre creates what some critics have described as a queer temporality, elastic in its mobility between, and collapse of, moments separated in time.22 The same is true in this period of the newly excavated realm of Greek, which occupied a paradoxical temporal position. Simultaneously familiar and strange, authoritative and unsettlingly new, prior and belated, it offered both a c­ orrective response to Roman models, and a point of origin for them. Within this chronologically collapsed world, acting becomes a shared point that connects these proliferating heroic figures; the liminally charged Hercules becomes another. Just as Heywood earlier turned to Hercules as a crucial transitional figure linking later imitators to an earlier world of mythic action, here his catalogue of mobilising theatrical sights culminates with seeing ‘Hercules in his owne shape.’ Similarly, when he goes on to recount the theatre’s attractions for Roman emperors, he turns again to this figure’s galvanising effects. ‘Julius Caesar himselfe for his pleasure became an Actor,’ he explains, being in shape, state, voyce, judgement, and all other occurrents, exterior and interior excellent. Amongst many other parts acted by him in person, it is recorded of him, that with generall applause in his owne theater he played Hercules Furens, and amongst many other arguments of his compleatnesse, excellence, and extraordinary care in his action, it is thus reported of him: being in the depth of a passion, one of his servants (as his part then fell out) presenting Lychas, who before had from Deianeira brought him the poysoned shirt, dipt in the bloud of the centaure Nessus: he in the middest of his torture



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and fury, finding this Lychas hid in a remote corner (appoynted him to creep into of purpose) although he was, as our tragedians use, but seemingly to kill him by some false imagined wound, yet was Caesar so extremely carryed away with the violence of his practised fury, and by the perfect shape of the madnesse of Hercules, to which he had fashioned all his active spirits, that he slew him dead at his foot, & after swoong him terq; quaterq; (as the poet sayes) about his head. (sig. E3v)

Like his earlier story about Hercules’ labours, Heywood’s account of Caesar’s murderous performance is not attested elsewhere. It revises an anecdote from Suetonius’ ‘Life of Nero’, in which Nero’s performance as the maddened Hercules prompted a naïve bystander to rush to his aid on seeing him bound in chains.23 Strikingly, Heywood turns the emperor-actor from a passive object of theatrical confusion into an active, and violently murderous, subject. As Richard Rowland notes of this episode, ‘it is difficult to imagine how even [Heywood] could have believed that this anecdote would enhance the credibility of his defence of the theatrical profession.’24 Yet rather than necessarily either indicting or defending, this anecdote highlights the mobilising force that Heywood ascribes to the theatre. The medium’s ability to sweep both actors and spectators into a transformative identification with a hero, even one who is morally ambivalent at best, consistently proves its most potent characteristic: a trait apparently worth not only advertising but even exaggerating. To achieve the fullest effects, this theatrical identification requires a hero who can capture the imagination, one rooted in mythic greatness. Its recurring models, accordingly, must be Greek: Alexander, Theseus, and especially Hercules. If recreating the original Greek hero could have such a transformative impact on Roman emperors, what effects might it have exerted on Heywood’s own contemporaries? Heywood’s claim to have seen Hercules ‘in his owne shape’ has prompted questions from theatre historians, some of whom have speculated on whether this account might refer to his own Ages plays, not yet printed at the time he wrote Apology, but possibly already written. Douglas Arrell has suggested that a mention in Henslowe’s Diary of two new plays, 1 and 2 Hercules, in 1595 and 1596, could refer to earlier Heywood plays, which he later partially revised in the Silver and Bronze Ages.25 Whether or not this is the case, the link that Heywood draws between Hercules, Greece, and theatrical inspiration seems to have captured other contemporary playwrights’ imagination as well. Hercules had a vivid presence in early modern theatres; Shakespeare refers to him forty-eight times (including by his patronymic, Alcides), and his name similarly recurs throughout plays by Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Philip Massinger, George Chapman, Thomas Middleton, Thomas Dekker, John

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Marston, and many others.26 His mythic heroism, violence, and appetites, which together offered an affectively disorienting mingling of tragic and comic genres, clearly exerted a potent appeal for both playwrights and audiences. For some of them, moreover, Hercules similarly conjured not only multivalent passionate intensity but especially the theatrical possibilities that Heywood also associated with the figure. Perhaps most strikingly, in The Roman Actor (1626), Philip Massinger presents Hercules as a symbol of acting. Called upon to defend the moral power of the theatre, the eponymous actor, Paris, proposes to ‘Let a good actor in a loftie sceane / Show great Alcides honour’d in the sweate / Of his twelve labours’ (I.iii.84–6). Imagining other Roman heroes, he insists that, If done to the life, As if they saw their dangers, and their glories, And did partake with them in their rewardes, All that have any sparke of Roman in them The slothfull artes layd by, contend to bee Like those they see presented. (The Roman Actor, I.iii.90–5)27

For real actors – those imitators with ‘any spark of Roman in them’ – acting the role of Hercules automatically confers some of that role’s intrinsic glory, since actors will ‘contend to bee / Like those they see presented.’ These theatrical re-enactments will inexorably re-enact themselves in the minds and bodies of those who enter their fictions. Whether or not enacting Hercules inevitably inspires heroism, his legacy has repeatedly sparked literary imitation. In Apology, Heywood’s recurring references to Hercules suggest that his theatrical prominence is rooted precisely in his liminal status between gods and men. As Jupiter’s son, he is uniquely well positioned both to imitate his father, and to translate this imitation to a chain of heroic mortals. Similarly, as the son of god, partaking of both divine glory and human suffering, and dying betrayed by one he loved, he offers a pagan corollary to another prominent liminal figure who could not legally be represented on the early modern English stage. While the violent, lustful Hercules may not at first glance appear an obvious analogue for Christ, his magnetic appeal for theatrical attention may profit from their shared status as go-betweens linking human and divine realms.28

From ancient to modern In the passages examined above, Heywood focuses primarily on the consequences of heroic personations within the ancient world: the impact of

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Jupiter on Hercules, of Hercules on Theseus, and so forth down to Julius Caesar. His ultimate emphasis, however, lies on the transitive value of these figures for the modern age: if Romans can make productive use of Hercules in the theatre, early moderns can too. ‘Why should not the lives of these worthyes, presented in these our days,’ he asks, ‘effect the like wonders in the Princes of our times, which can no way bee so exquisitly demonstrated, nor so liuely portrayed as by action?’ (sig. B3v). His rhetorical question presents action, or acting, as the form of imitation best qualified to mobilise performers and onlookers alike. It is the embodied recreation of heroes – of Hercules ‘in his owne shape’ – that will inspire the princes of modern times as it did the princes of past times. According to Heywood, this embodied recreation finds its roots in Greece, in the original mimetic response of Hercules and his followers. Yet the same model continues to animate the English stage, which can transform actors and audiences alike not simply into these idealised Greek figures, but into new English heroes as well. Moving from classical antiquity ‘to our domesticke hystories,’ Heywood famously asks what English blood seeing the person of any bold English man presented and doth not hugge his fame, and hunnye at his valor, pursuing him in his enterprise with his best wishes, and as beeing wrapt in contemplation, offers to him in his hart all prosperous performance, as if the personater were the man personated, so bewitching a thing is lively and well spirited action, that it hath power to new mold the harts of the spectators and fashion them to the shape of any noble and notable attempt. (sig. B4r)

With his attention to ordinary London citizens, domestic histories, and other quintessentially English figures and settings, Heywood is deeply embedded in his own time and place. Critical attention to Heywood typically emphasises his domestic interests; Jean Howard has titled him ‘Thomas Heywood: Dramatist of London,’ and Richard Rowland has similarly highlighted his uses of local landscapes and geography.29 Renewed attention to the literary impact of the period’s classical debts, however, has underscored the shaping importance of Heywood’s recurring engagement with the ancient past.30 As titles such as Troia Britanica suggest, Heywood mingles and moves his English settings imaginatively through time and space, freely bestowing on them the literary and moral prestige of classical antiquity, and of Greece in particular.31 For Heywood, the theatre offers an exemplary medium for this mingling. As he suggests, in acting ‘the personater’ can become ‘the man personated’: English actors can become mythic Greek heroes, even demigods like Hercules. Spectators too can act like Greeks, imitating the heroism

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they watch: ‘so bewitching a thing is lively and well spirited action, that it hath power to new mold the harts of the spectators.’ In acting, according to Heywood, we all become like Greeks. Whether we become heroic, predatory, promiscuous, wrathful, and/or maddened, these transformative identifications can translate us into strange and foreign realms – other moments, other places, maybe even into the realm of the gods – for better and for worse.

Notes  1 Thomas Heywood, An Apology for Actors (London: Nicholas Okes, 1612), sig. B1r.   2 See chapter 11 (Chloe Preedy) in this volume.   3 On the complexity of Hercules’ meanings for Heywood, see chapters 5 (Richard Rowland) and 7 (Yves Peyré) in this volume; also, Rowland, Killing Hercules: Deianira and the Politics of Domestic Violence, from Sophocles to the War on Terror (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017).   4 Heywood’s claim in the above passage, ‘By the censure of Horace, Thespis was the first tragicke writer’, refers to Horace’s observation that ‘Ignotum tragicae genus invenisse Camenae / dicitur … Thespis’ (‘Thespis is said to have discovered the Tragic Muse, a type unknown before’: The Art of Poetry, 275–6, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926)). Similarly, Heywood’s subsequent reference, ‘But by the censure of Quintilian, Aeschiles was before him’, cites Quintilian’s account that ‘Tragoedias primus in lucem Aeschylus protulit’ (‘As to Tragedy, it was Aeschylus who first brought it into world’: The Orator’s Education, X.i.67–8, ed. and trans. Donald A. Russell, 5 vols, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002 [2001])). On the circulation of Cicero and Horace in English grammar school curricula, see T. W. Baldwin, William Shakspere’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke, 2 vols (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1944).   5 On England’s Greek printing, see Kirsty Milne, ‘The forgotten Greek books of Elizabethan England’, Literature Compass, 4:3 (2007), 677–87. For overviews of, and responses to, critical arguments against commercial playwrights’ familiarity with Greek, see Tanya Pollard, Greek Tragic Women on Shakespearean Stages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), Tania Demetriou and Tanya Pollard, ‘Homer and Greek tragedy in early modern England’s theatres: an introduction’, in Tanya Pollard and Tania Demetriou (eds), Homer and Greek Tragedy in Early Modern England’s Theatres (= Classical Receptions Journal, 9:1 (2017)), 1–35.  6 George Puttenham wrote ‘forasmuch as a goate in Greeke is called Tragos, therfore these stately playes were called Tragedies’: The Arte of English Poesie (London: Richard Field, 1589), p.  27; Thomas Lodge similarly

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attributed ‘the name of tragedy … to his original of tragos, hircus, et ode, cantus  …’:  A Reply to Stephen Gosson’s School of Abuse, in Defence of Poetry, Music, and Stage Plays (London: np, 1579), p.  35. Latin accounts include Benedictus Philologus, ‘De Tragoedia’, in Senecæ tragœdiæ, ed. Benedictus Philologus (Florence,  1506),  sig. aiiiir; Jacobus Micyllus, ‘De Tragoedia et Eivs Partibus  προλεγομενα’, in Euripides Poeta Tragicorum princeps (Basel: Johannes Oporinus, 1562), pp.  671–9 (p.  672); and Philipp Nicodemus Frischlin, ‘De Veteri Comoedia Eiusque Partibus’, in Aristophanes Veteris Comoediae Princeps (Frankfurt: Johann Spies, 1586), fol. 16r. For an overview, see Tanya Pollard, ‘Greek playbooks and dramatic forms in early modern England’, in Allison Deutermann and András Kiséry (eds), Formal Matters: Reading the Materials of English Renaissance Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), pp. 99–123.   7 This widely circulating treatise conflated Donatus’ De Comoedia with Evanthius’ De Fabula. See ‘De tragoedia et comoedia’, in Aeschylus et al., Tragoediae selectae Aeschyli, Sophoclis, Euripidis (Geneva: Henricus Stephanus, 1567), pp. 118–28 (p. 118).  8 Erasmus, Epistle 149, in Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. II, trans. Roger Aubrey Baskerville Mynors and Douglas Ferguson Scott Thomson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1975), pp. 24–7 (p. 25). On the metaphor of the spring, see David Quint, Origin and Originality in Renaissance Literature: Versions of the Source (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983).   9 Roger Ascham, The Scholemaster (London: John Daye, 1571), fol. 17v. 10 See Tania Demetriou, ‘“Strange appearance”: the reception of Homer in Renaissance England’ (PhD dissertation, University of Cambridge, 2008), pp. 33–4. 11 On the evolution of the word ‘act’ into the notion of theatricality during this period, see Andrew Gurr, ‘Elizabethan action’, Studies in Philology, 63:2 (1966), 144–56. 12 See ‘act’, Oxford English Dictionary, for details of the word’s historical evolution and meanings. 13 All references to Shakespeare are to Gary Taylor, John Jowett, Terri Bourus and Gabriel Egan (gen. eds), The New Oxford Shakespeare, The Complete Works: Modern Critical Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017 [2016]). 14 For the details and definitions that follow, see ‘personate’ in Oxford English Dictionary. 15 Robert Cawdrey, A Table Alphabetical (London: I. R[oberts] for Edmund Weaver, 1604), sig. G4r. 16 Heywood’s fascination with these multiple impersonations features also in his Troia Britanica, in which he narrated these escapades before dramatising them in his Ages plays. On Heywood’s engagement with classical sources in Troia Britanica, see especially Yves Peyré, ‘Heywood’s library’, in Peyré (gen. ed.), Troia Britanica (2009–19), available at www.shakmyth.org, accessed 24 June 2020. Janice Valls-Russell discusses Jupiter and Callisto in chapter 3. 17 Heywood similarly rewrote Plautus’ Rudens in The Captives: see Richard

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Rowland, ‘The Captives: Thomas Heywood’s “whole monopoly off mischeiff”’, Modern Language Review, 90:3 (1995), 585–602. On Heywood’s interest in Plautus, see also Allan H. Gilbert, ‘Thomas Heywood’s debt to Plautus’, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 12:4 (1913), 59–611; and Bruce R. Smith, Ancient Scripts and Modern Experience on the English Stage, 1500–1700 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), p. 178. 18 On Hercules and generic ambiguity, see Michael Silk, ‘Heracles and Greek tragedy’, Greece and Rome, 32 (1985), 1–22. 19 James Yoch argues ‘[t]he story of Hercules, central in ancient tragicomedies such as the Amphitryon and the Alcestis, is an example for Renaissance writers of tragicomedies converting sorrow to joy’: Yoch, ‘The Renaissance dramatization of temperance: the Italian revival of tragicomedy, and The Faithful Shepherdess’, in Nancy Klein Maguire (ed.), Renaissance Tragicomedy: Explorations in Genre and Politics (New York: AMS, 1987), 115–38 (p. 122). 20 The division in acts and scenes (also provided in The New Oxford Shakespeare edition) is indicated in square brackets. 21 Of Heywood’s theatrical depictions of Hercules, Rowland writes ‘for all of its spectacular visual pyrotechnics, and despite the fact that Heywood had insisted in Apology that watching the exploits of Hercules was an unequivocally uplifting experience that would make any spectator aspire to emulate such deeds, the picture of the hero that emerges from his own play is a troubling one’: Rowland, Killing Hercules, p. 133. See also chapter 5 in this volume (Rowland). 22 Describing early modern theatrical uses of the past, Lucy Munro writes ‘the past can be a number of things. It can be historical, mythical or fictional; it may be a site of memory, subjectivity or nostalgia; it can be dynastic or popular in its concerns; the past may even turn out to be simultaneously the present, or even the future’: Munro, ‘Shakespeare and the uses of the past: critical approaches and current debates’, Shakespeare, 7:1 (2011), 102–25 (p. 105). See also Munro, Archaic Style in English Literature, 1590–1674 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); and Carolyn Dinshaw, Lee Edelman, Roderick A. Ferguson et al., ‘Theorising queer temporalities: a roundtable discussion’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 13 (2007), 177–95. 23 ‘He likewise sang tragedies in a mask; the visors of the heroes and gods, as also of the heroines and goddesses, being formed into a resemblance of his own face, and that of any woman he was in love with. Amongst the rest, he sung “Canace in Labour”, “Orestes the Murderer of his Mother”, “Oedipus Blinded”, and “Hercules Mad”. In the last tragedy, it is said that a young sentinel, posted at the entrance of the stage, seeing him in a prison dress and bound with fetters, as the fable of the play required, ran to his assistance’: C. Suetonius Tranquillus, ‘Life of Nero’, 21.3, in The Lives of the Twelve Caesars, trans. Alexander Thomson (London: George Bell, 1893), pp. 351–2. 24 Rowland, Killing Hercules, p. 137. 25 Douglas Arrell, ‘Heywood, Henslowe and Hercules: tracking 1 and 2 Hercules in Heywood’s Silver and Brazen Ages’, Early Modern Literary Studies, 17:1 (2014),

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1–21. The debate on the dating of the plays is discussed in the Introduction to this volume. 26 For details on Hercules’ early modern afterlife, see especially Charlotte Coffin, ‘Hercules’ (2009), in Yves Peyré (ed.), A Dictionary of Shakespeare’s Classical Mythology (2009–), available at www.shakmyth.org, accessed 24 June 2020. 27 Philip Edwards and Colin Gibson (eds), The Plays and Poems of Philip Massinger, 5 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), vol III, p. 31. 28 Suggestively, John Foxe invoked Hercules as an analog for ‘the labours of thys most holy martyr John Hus, the author and witnes this story: with whome the labors of Hercules are not to be compared: for that auncient hercules slew a few monsters: but this our hercules with a moste stout and valiant courage hath subdued even the worlde it selfe, the mother of all monsters and cruell beastes’; see Foxe, Actes and Monuments (London: [John Daye], 1583), p. 625. See also www.dhi.ac.uk/foxe/index.php?realm=text&gototype=&edition=1583&pagei d=649&anchor=hercules#kw, accessed 17 July 2020. 29 Jean Howard, ‘Thomas Heywood: dramatist of London and playwright of the passions’, in Ton Hoenselaars (ed.), The Cambridge Companion on Shakespeare and Contemporary Dramatists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp.  120–33; Richard Rowland, Thomas Heywood’s Theatre, 1599–1639: Locations, Translations, and Conflicts (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010). 30 See, for instance, Charlotte Coffin, ‘Heywood’s Ages and Chapman’s Homer: nothing in common?’, in Pollard and Demetriou (eds), Homer and Greek Tragedy in Early Modern English Theatres, 55–78, and Claire Kenward, ‘Sights to make an Alexander? Reading Homer on the early modern stage’, in ibid., 79–102. 31 On Heywood’s engagement with classical sources in Troia Britanica, see especially Peyré, ‘Heywood’s library’.

11 A theatre for the Iron Age: theorising practice in Thomas Heywood’s Ages plays Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Chloe Kathleen Preedy

In a prefatory dedication to his 1612 Apology for Actors, Thomas Heywood claims that the antecedents of contemporary drama can be traced ‘from more then two thousand yeeres agoe, successively to this age’, asserting ‘the antiquity, the ancient dignity, and the true use of actors, and their quality’.1 The importance of historical precedent to his defence of the early modern theatres is evident from the outset, as the tragic Muse Melpomene laments the contrast between the present-day abuse she suffers and the golden days of ancient Greek and Roman theatre: Oh these [those] were times Fit for you bards to vent your golden rymes. Then did I tread on arras, cloth of tissue, Hung round the fore-front of my stage: the pillers That did support the roofe of my large frame Double apparreld in pure ophir gold: Whilst the round circle of my spacious orbe Was throng’d with princes, dukes and senators.2

In this passage, Heywood introduces several key concepts that recur in his prose defence: the involvement of noble and powerful figures, known for their political and military achievements, with the theatre of antiquity; the quality of the plays written and performed during this period; the wealth and celebrated reputation of the playhouses; and their grand architectural proportions. The emphasis upon the physical attributes of the playhouse is especially interesting, as it facilitates a form of engagement with the past that is informed by spatial as well as temporal markers. At the same time, the venue described by Melpomene shares many of its reported design features with the theatres of early modern London, as Heywood stresses later in his Apology; the mystical Golden Age invoked by Melpomene is rendered vivid through imagery that simultaneously relates past practice to current use. Melpomene’s present-tense complaint furthers the effect, as she concludes:



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But now’s the Iron Age, and black-mouth’d curres, Barke at the vertues of the former world. Such with their breath have blasted my fresh roabe, Pluckt at my flowry chaplet, towsd my tresses. Nay some whom for their basenesse hist and skorn’d The stage, as loathsome, hath long-since spyed out, Have watcht their time to cast invenom’d inke To stayne my garments with.3

Such ‘black-mouth’d curres’, ‘hist’ from the stage, may include the former playwright turned anti-theatricalist Stephen Gosson, who boasted in his tract The Schoole of Abuse (1579) of having ‘give[n] them [the players] a volley of prophane writers to beginne the skirmishe, and doone my indevour to beate them from their holdes with their owne weapons’.4 Gosson’s claim highlights how the early modern theatre’s detractors not only followed the Christian church fathers in attacking drama’s ‘heathen’ origins,5 but also sought to appropriate antique sources to their cause. Gosson, for example, cites Plato’s exposure of the poet and playwright as ‘unprofitable members, and utter enimies to vertue’, concluding in the Schoole of Abuse that it is no ‘marveyle though Plato shut them out of his Schoole, and banished them quite from his common wealth’.6 Gosson’s polemic, which was countered by the dramatist Thomas Lodge in his 1579 Defence,7 perhaps also provoked the writing of what is arguably the best-known and most influential work of literary criticism from this period: Sir Philip Sidney’s own Defence of Poesy (c. 1580). Published in 1595, Sidney’s text pre-empts Heywood’s Apology in outlining a classical lineage for early modern literature, and in utilising the Graeco-Roman notion of the Four Ages to conceptualise the potential of imaginative fiction. Famously, Sidney celebrates the power of poetry over that of nature, arguing that Nature never set forth the earth in so rich tapestry as diverse poets have done, neither with so pleasant rivers, fruitful trees, sweet-smelling flowers, nor whatsoever else may make the too-much-loved earth more lovely: her world is brazen, the poets only deliver a golden.8

Developing Julius Scaliger’s claim in Poetices libri septem (1561) that the poet-creator presents ‘quite another sort of nature’, fashioning ‘images more beautiful than life’,9 Sidney underlines his argument through reference to the mythical ‘Golden Age’ described in classical works such as Hesiod’s Works and Days and Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Ovid’s well-known assertion that the Golden Age ‘maintained, / The truth and right of everything unforced and unconstrained’ (I.103–4) complements Sidney’s ongoing argument for the moral force of poetry.10 Yet, as Jean E. Howard and Robert Matz have noted, there is an implied elitism to Sidney’s model. Aligning the poet

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who disdains ‘subjection’ with an age that is associated with freedom from toil, Sidney arguably identifies poetry as a privileged leisure activity fit for the aristocratic courtier; thus, in Matz’s words, the ‘golden world that the poet delivers has a local habitation in the golden worlds of the Elizabethan nobility’.11 In contrast Heywood, whose own poetry depicted the Golden Age as enmeshed with an Iron Age of hired labour, tyranny and fraud,12 champions the comparatively egalitarian potential of performed drama. As Benedict Scott Robinson has demonstrated, Heywood’s prefaces and dedications to his printed works consistently articulate a desire to bring the humanist riches of Graeco-Roman literary culture to those ‘not frequent in poetry’ (The Iron Age, sig. A2v), who have not had the leisure to gain an education in the classics.13 Heywood further develops this point about theatre as civic pedagogy in Apology, arguing that plays have ‘taught the unlearned the knowledge of many famous histories, [and] instructed such as ca[n]not reade in the discovery of all our English Chronicles’.14 While Apology is regularly compared to Sidney’s Defence of Poesy, there are also important differences in their theorisation of imaginative composition. Perhaps responding to Sidney’s example, Heywood adapts the trope of the Four Ages to evoke a ‘golden’ poetic state and establish a classical, even aristocratic, lineage for his creative endeavours: in the dedicatory epistle ‘To the Right Honourable Edward, Earl of Worcester’, his patron’s inheritance of ‘all the vertues and endowments of nobility, which florisht in their height of eminence in your ancestors’, is implicitly compared to Heywood’s almost genealogical focus on theatre’s ancestral ‘Dignity’.15 If both Sidney and Heywood present themselves as unworthy recorders of literature’s classical heritage,16 however, their accounts of its ‘Iron Age’ decline diverge sharply. For Sidney, promoting an exclusive model of literary endeavour, the waning status of poetry is attributable as much to its contemporary practitioners as to its detractors. He argues that ‘base men with servile wits’ have brought English literature into disrepute by commercialising their work and, thinking it ‘enough if they can be rewarded of the printer’, disregarding the proper forms of ‘art, imitation, and exercise’.17 Sidney accuses dramatists in particular of neglecting the ‘assured rank’ of literary decorum, denouncing contemporary tragedies and comedies as ‘faulty both in time and place’; he suggests that, by depicting ‘many days and many places’ in the course of one production, such authors disobey ‘Aristotle’s precept’ that ‘the stage should always represent but one place, and … but one day’.18 Heywood, on the other hand, emphasises the external threat to English literature. If Sidney confesses fault and advocates reform, especially of contemporary theatrical practice, Heywood’s besieged stage suffers the envious assaults of those it ‘hath long-since spued out’.19 Whereas Sidney favours a neo-classical mode reminiscent of early modern French and Italian dramatic

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practice, Heywood, referring his readers to Francis Meres’s 1598 catalogue of English literary achievements, actively celebrates his drama’s departure from the neo-classical unities as a source of performative ‘fulnesse’.20 Henry S. Turner attributes a similar position to Heywood’s contemporary Thomas Dekker, arguing that the ‘public’ prologue to Old Fortunatus (1599) exposes the inadequacy of existing ‘lawes of Poesy’ for a theatre ‘that was trying to claim an extraordinary authority and mimetic freedom’.21 As this comparison hints, Heywood and Dekker’s shared repudiation of formal constraints in favour of a temporally and spatially flexible drama is importantly inflected by their experience as professional authors; Kathleen E. McLuskie points out that, in sharp contrast to Sidney’s expressed distaste for commercial theatre, Dekker and Heywood’s ‘primary relationship to their art was one dominated by the marketplace’.22 In particular, Heywood insists on the legitimacy of the artistic judgements that playhouse audiences pass on staged works.23 In the process, he develops an alternative model of aesthetic merit, in which live performance is valued as much or more than the printed text. In fact, Heywood’s prefaces to his published plays present the performed work as ‘trew’ and the printed text as a distortion: a stolen and mangled version or, at best, an inadequate representation of the real thing.24 Thus, whereas Sidney in his Defence employs Golden Age imagery to envisage a poetic imagination that is ‘unforst and unconstrainde’, Heywood’s works conversely register the practical constraints of performance as qualities that embed his fictions in everyday reality and thereby secure the ‘authentique’ status that he desires for his drama.25 With Heywood investing in performance as a marker of authenticity, the content and style of his plays are as central to his theorisation of theatre as the prose arguments expressed in Apology and the prefaces to his printed works. While various critics have noted that many of Heywood’s reflections on the identity and purpose of early modern drama are worked out through the medium of his plays,26 those that directly engage with a classical theatrical legacy remain somewhat neglected in comparison with his city comedies and the domestic tragedy A Woman Killed with Kindness. One exception to this trend is Kathleen McLuskie’s 1994 study, which argues that the cycle of five plays in which Heywood covers the Four Ages illustrates the enormous variety of the playhouse repertoire and reveals the intellectual and ideological questions which this theatre addressed; another is Richard Rowland’s ground-breaking Thomas Heywood’s Theatre, ­1599–1639 (2010), which highlighted Heywood’s sustained interest in and engagement with Roman comedy.27 Following upon Janice Valls-Russell’s discussion of the Callisto and Jupiter story in The Golden Age (chapter 3) and Yves Peyré’s tracing of Heywood’s experimentation with mythographic material in The Silver Age (chapter 4), Rowland offers in this volume a detailed reading of The

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Brazen Age (chapter 5), demonstrating how Heywood rewrote his mythological material to foreground the women destroyed by Hercules. Similarly, in chapter 10 Tanya Pollard considers Heywood’s development of an ancient Greek lineage for contemporary acting, drawing some illuminating comparisons between Heywood’s Apology and his Ages plays.28 The relationship between these works is especially intriguing, given their shared investment in the mythology of the Four Ages. Indeed, while there is some uncertainty about whether the Golden, Silver and Brazen Age plays were first performed in the late 1590s or during the period in which Heywood composed the Apology, Heywood’s substantial interest in the mythology of the Four Ages is evident across these works.29 As we have seen, Heywood’s prose defence of acting begins ‘in the golden world’.30 Developing an antique, mythologised history, Heywood’s Apology reports that: [i]n the first of the Olimpiads, amongst many other active exercises in which Hercules ever trimph’d as victor, there was in his nonage presented unto him by his tutor in the fashion of a History, acted by the choyse of the nobility of Greece, the worthy and memorable acts of his father Jupiter.31

The plot of this stage ‘History’, which Heywood credits with inspiring Hercules to undertake his twelve labours, recalls Heywood’s depiction of the ‘worthy and memorable acts of … Jupiter’ in The Golden Age, while The Silver Age portrays Hercules’ reputed involvement with the first Olympics. As Pollard and Rowland elaborate, such echoes signal the close relationship between Heywood’s prose Apology and his Ages plays. Like Melpomene’s previous account of Golden Age theatrical performance, the Olympiad episode, with its conflation of mythological and historical narrative, acts to ‘instance by History’ that early modern theatrical practice is ‘authentique’, providing a humanist endorsement for the practices of the early modern companies.32 In the same way, as previously noted, Heywood regularly alludes to spatial markers of continuity in his Apology, emphasising the affinity that he perceives between the amphitheatres of ancient Greece and Rome and the Jacobean playhouses and narrating the architectural history of these buildings. Noting how ‘in the noone-tide of their glory, and height of all their honor’, the Roman Empire ‘edified theaters, and amphi-theaters’, Heywood implicitly aligns the martial achievements of ancient Rome with its dramatic output.33 The point is developed subsequently, with Heywood announcing that ‘I introduce these famous edifices’ as a material indication of Roman drama’s quality and high standing: rebutting the contemporary slurs cast on drama’s antique reputation, Heywood’s assertion that ‘among the Romans they [theatres] were in highest reputation’ indirectly counters arguments made by the early modern theatre’s detractors.34

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Heywood’s emphasis on the historical evolution, physical composition and monetary value of the playhouses and theatre practices that he describes is intriguing, as he apparently employs such references to establish the ‘authentique’ theatre that he has advertised to his readers. While Sidney’s privileged golden world of poetry implicitly promises a quasi-divine existence beyond nature’s limits, purged of Iron Age faults but observing the formal ‘lawes of poesy’, Heywood’s drama conversely profits by negotiating everyday temporal and spatial markers and acknowledging material constraints (including commercial considerations) even as it disregards neoclassical views on structure and form. In the process Heywood, as his friend and fellow dramatist John Webster recognises, offers his readers and spectators the ‘equall view’ of a ‘full state’: populated by poets, in a riposte to Plato, but with a concrete architectural substance and even ‘ruines’ that add temporal and spatial coordinates.35 Rather than presenting a dematerialised ‘golden age’, Heywood’s classically inspired drama embeds itself in time and place; it is upon these ‘recited’ foundations that the imaginative worlds of plays such as the Ages rest. Integral to Heywood’s understanding of theatre, this concept of embedded presence centrally informs his case for the English drama: as Heywood’s preface to the Apology declares, ‘He that denyes then theaters should be, / He may as well deny a world to me’.36 Yet, although critics have devoted considerable attention to the significance of economic imagery in Heywood’s drama,37 his innovative deployment of spatial, temporal and even elemental coordinates to theorise present-day theatrical experience remains under-appreciated. Drawing upon recent findings about how evolving mapping techniques influenced imaginative practice during the early modern period,38 and expanding upon Rowland’s important suggestion that Heywood thinks differently from his contemporaries about the space of the stage,39 this chapter will further suggest that Heywood uses the temporal and spatial markers of the Ages plays to embed the classical narratives that he depicts within the performative conditions of the early modern playhouse, in accordance with his vision of an ‘authentique’ theatre. Through this embedded mapping of the spatial and temporal coordinates of the early modern amphitheatres, Heywood as dramatist is able to engage with and reassess the theories of theatrical performance and imaginative composition that early modern authors inherited from their classical predecessors, developing a new theory of drama for the Iron Age present.

Temporal coordinates: poetic tradition and historical narrative By beginning Apology with an imaginative report of his encounter with Melpomene, Heywood mimics the epic convention of invoking the Muses

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to authorise the subsequent narrative.40 Given epic’s conventional associations with empire-building and foundational mythologies, and during a period when the concept of translatio imperii asserted a political and cultural continuity from classical to early modern Europe, this format aptly prefaces the Apology’s investigation into the cultural and material origins of the English theatre. The trope is equally important within Heywood’s The Golden Age, where Homer’s choric presence is deployed to even greater effect. Performed at the Red Bull Theatre in the early seventeenth century, and published in 1611, The Golden Age is the first play in the Ages series.41 The main subject of the drama is Jupiter, with the episodic narrative depicting his birth, marriage, amorous adventures and ascension to the throne of heaven. At the same time, Homer’s presiding role serves to emphasise the process whereby this mythological material has been recorded and transmitted across time – including through Heywood’s verse epic Troia Britanica (1609). In presenting mythography as an ongoing process, Heywood’s play anticipates the Apology’s concern with theatrical history; in that treatise, Homer is introduced as an early dramatist, who ‘composed his Illiads in the shape of a tragedy, his Odisseas like a comedy’.42 From the start, the dramatic plot of The Golden Age is presented as both historical event and historically transmitted narrative. Heywood’s Homer, introduced as ‘the man / That flourish’d in the worlds first infancy’,43 figures the temporal continuum that reaches from Heywood’s early modern play to ancient Greece and beyond, all the way back to a mythological Golden Age. By ahistorically positioning Homer as a contemporary witness to Jupiter’s birth, Heywood stretches the implied lineage of literary and dramatic composition that culminates in his Jacobean play: a work that is simultaneously witness to and implicated in the process of cultural transmission.44 Identifying his fictional Homer with the very origins of human ‘speech’ and ‘understanding’ (sig. Br), Heywood complicates an etiological tradition that dates back at least to Horace’s Ars Poetica, in which ‘godlike poets’ are celebrated as the founders of human civilisation – although not the later-born narrator of the Iliad, a retrospective epic of Iron Age conflict.45 According to Heywood’s contemporary Thomas Lodge, in his 1579 retort to Stephen Gosson, it was mythological authors such as Orpheus and Amphion who ‘were the first raysors of cities, prescribers of good lawes, mayntayners of religion … [and] the very fot-paths to knowledge and understanding’.46 Thus while the invention of architecture is credited in Heywood’s drama to Saturn, who teaches his people to draw and fashion ‘formes of cities, townes and towers’ (B4r), it is the temporally translated Homer who shapes the play’s cosmic structure, raising up the new generation of Graeco-Roman deities and ‘authoring’ the progression from Golden to Silver Age that Heywood’s play depicts.



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In The Golden Age, Homer’s song and pen jointly represent poetry’s power to create whole ‘worlds’; a term that denoted the entire cosmos in early modern English. As Heywood’s poet boasts: … I am he That by my pen gave heaven to Jupiter, Made Neptunes trident calme, the curled waves, Gave Aeolus lordship ore the warring winds; Created blacke hair’d Pluto king of ghosts, And regent ore the kingdomes fixt below. (The Golden Age, sig. Br)

Homer’s claims are implicitly upheld by the future deities of the classical pantheon, exacerbating the complex temporality of Heywood’s play. Announcing his translation from mortal ruler to heavenly monarch, Jupiter notes that ‘Opinion, that makes Gods, must style us higher.  / The next you see us, we in state must shine,  / Eternized with honours more divine’ (sig. K2r); ‘Opinion’, in this context, seems to refer to both the onstage reception of Jupiter’s deeds by Heywood’s fictional characters and the extra-textual expectations of early modern audiences, who could have recognised Jupiter as the future head of the ancient Roman pantheon. Through its ability to influence public opinion, Homer’s song (and, by implication, Heywood’s theatre) participates in the process of deification, demonstrating the effects of historical and narrative tradition while simultaneously eliding the ­temporal distance between the Golden and Iron Ages by enabling present-day audience expectations to inform the progression of an ancient narrative.47 If Heywood’s Homer stands before the temporal span of Jupiter’s reign, a poet already mature in ‘the worlds first infancy’, he is simultaneously subject to and constrained by both time and the gods of his imagining. It is the same deities that his words ‘rais’d / Out of the earth’ that have given ‘old Homer leave to view the world’ before the start of the play (sig. Br), complicating this narrative of mythological origins by placing the act of permission prior to the arrival of the poet who witnessed their birth. Homer’s prologue may be unusual in that it does not invite the spectators to be transported back to an earlier period,48 but he still insists that his (Heywood’s) audience recognise the passage of time; not only within the play’s fiction (for example, the passing of seventeen years as narrated by the chorus), but also between the Golden Age depicted, the Iron Age that preceded the birth of the Iliadic Homer and the ‘decrepit’ Iron Age London of the Red Bull playhouse: … Oh then suffer me, You that are in the worlds decrepit Age, When it is neere his universall grave,

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To sing an old song; and in this Iron Age Shew you the state of the first golden world.

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(The Golden Age, sig. Bv)

By recognising this distance, and stressing the ‘old’ age of Homer, the world, and the story he sings, Heywood underscores the significance of narrative transmission. For, while the Ages often privilege the very lack of unity that many critics have seen as their greatest fault,49 it is not true to say that The Golden Age stands outside time. Rather, this play participates actively in time’s progress, as Heywood radically complicates the concepts of narrative and temporality, linear and cyclical modes, as well as his own extra-textual literary identity: as the author of the Homeric epic Troia Britanica, which was published in 1609, Heywood the writer is both creator of and heir to Homer and the Homeric legacy in a manner that parallels his fictional Homer’s complex relationship to Jupiter.50 Homer is not the only character in this play to experience a complex historical positioning. Saturn, guilty of infanticide, seeks to resist the process of myth-making that is being enacted by Heywood’s drama, as he urges: Be ever dumbe, let everlasting silence Tong-tye the world, all humane voyce henceforth, Turne to confus’d, and undistinguisht sound, Of barking hounds, hoarse beares, & howling wolves, To stop all rumour that may fil the world With Saturnes tyranies against his sonnes. (The Golden Age, sig. Cr)

Rumour, or Fame, appears in Book XII of Ovid’s Metamorphoses to herald the Trojan War narrated by Homer in his Iliad; the reference also recalls Virgil’s Aeneid and the process of oral mythography in general, as well perhaps as Heywood’s verse epic Troia Britanica.51 Saturn’s outpacing by Rumour adds further temporal perspective to the narrative, as does Jupiter’s subsequent reaction to the voices that have reported his own deeds (sig. K2r). That the power of narrative transmission here belongs to Heywood’s drama, at the opposite end of the temporal span from Homer’s foundational song, is underscored by the following lines, in which Homer anticipates the next Ages play: ‘Of Danae Perseus was that night begot, / Perseus that fought with the Gorgonian shield, / Whose fortunes to pursue Time suffers not. / For that, we have prepar’d an ampler field’ (sig. K2r). Heywood’s plot briefly defies the passage of time through a primarily visual episode in which Jupiter, Neptune and Pluto acquire dominion over the heavens (sig. K2v), confirming Heywood’s claim in Apology for the cosmographical reach of the playhouse.52 Nonetheless, the theatrical frame envisaged by Heywood does not represent unlimited ‘free’ space: rather, it uses comparative coordinates

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to establish his characters’ – and his drama’s – embeddedness within time. Instead of drifting within a dematerialised, atemporal space, Heywood’s fictional creations shift between (or concurrently occupy) demarcated times, in what Pollard aptly defines as a ‘queer temporality’ that is ‘elastic in its mobility between, and collapse of, moments separated in time’53 – even as these moments themselves remain carefully delineated. We might compare Heywood’s use of acoustic perspective to signal movement on and beyond the stage:54 during Diana’s Golden Age hunt, for instance, the offstage sound of horns evokes the continued movement of Heywood’s departing characters, establishing a sense of his fiction’s spatial depth. In this instance, the Satyrs’ dialogue reinforces the effect, as they advise each other (and Heywood’s audience) that since the departing goddess and her companions ‘out-strip our eyes’, their ongoing progress must be charted ‘by their noates, that from their Bugles rise’ (sig. Ev). If Homer sang of the first Golden Age, then, Heywood’s drama enacts the second, implicitly marking the start and end of Jupiter’s entire reception history to date: whether or not old ‘eylesse’ Homer will be permitted to return now rests not with the classical gods, but with Heywood’s audience, as the play firmly registers its situation within the Iron Age present of the commercial playhouse. Heywood’s emphasis on his drama’s participation in historical process is also evident in the plays that follow The Golden Age chronologically to present the story of Four Ages: as Heywood puts it, ‘wee begunne with Gold, follow with Silver, proceede with Brasse, and purpose … to end with Iron’.55 In the prologue to The Silver Age, which depicts Jupiter’s continuing adventures alongside those of his son Perseus, Heywood proclaims his drama’s ability to transport ancient Homer into the present ‘to unlocke the casket long time shut’. The implication is that Heywood’s play offers a rare glimpse of antiquity that contrasts with the usual practice of ‘moderne Authors’, who ‘moderne things have trac’t, / Serching our chronicles from end to end’ (sig. Br). Already anchored in relation to the present by Homer’s choric interventions and its advertised relationship to Heywood’s other Ages plays, this multi-temporal drama presents a revived classical heritage that postdates – and surpasses – the work of Heywood’s ‘moderne’ rivals, and perhaps Heywood’s own previous history plays, even as it reworks for the stage material used by Heywood in his verse epic Troia Britanica.56 While Heywood’s Homer implies that chronicle time, which moves ‘from end to end’, may be narratively linear (chronological) despite the possibility of repeated textual encounters, the temporal dramaturgy of Heywood’s Ages plays also recalls the scriptural tradition of Christian historiography which, according to Anthony Kemp, attempted to bring the past into the present.57 When the character of Jupiter disrupts standard diurnal progression by putting three nights into one to ‘take our fill  / Of daliance’ with

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Alcmena (sig. C3r), he connects his actions to a famous biblical instance of temporal manipulation:

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Now at this houre is fought By Josua Duke unto the Hebrew Nation, (Who are indeede the Antipodes to us) His famous battle ’gainst the Cananites, And at his orison the Sunne stands still, That he may have there slaughter. (sig. C3v)

In performance, this advertised instance of conflated time would draw attention to the rapidity with which Heywood’s entire dramatic plot progresses, as the audience are carried quickly from one mythological episode to the next. As Homer puts it earlier in the same play, ‘earths joyes are but short-liv’d, and last / But like a puffe of breath which (thus) is past’ (sig. C2r); his audiences, like the readers of his Troia Britanica, participate in a ‘running voyage’ that self-consciously registers the authorial manipulation of narrative time.58 As with The Golden Age, Heywood stages these negotiations between the present depiction of an earlier age and the progression of the dramatic action in a way that draws attention to the performance conditions in which his spectators encounter the play: the fast-moving actor’s huffed breath physically underscores his role in advancing the narrative through his words. Rather than seeking to present an enclosed, temporally coherent fiction, Heywood instead provides a series of coordinates which rely not on his audience’s ability to imaginatively project themselves into the past, but to identify the markers that situate this play in relation to the performed trajectory of Heywood’s Ages plays. By the time his spectators encounter the prologue of the third play in the sequence, the chronological progression from one age to the next is being connected with the reportorial journey from portraying ‘loves and harmlesse lusts’ to presenting ‘tyrants and fierce oppressors’ that characterises Heywood’s own dramatic sequence.59 Indeed, as Rowland demonstrates in chapter 5, temporally inflected questions of source selection and transmission self-consciously frame The Brazen Age’s revisionist interpretation of Hercules. Through Heywood’s sustained emphasis on the process of his own theatrical history-making, which leads him to compare his role as dramatist to that of historiographer in the preface to 1 Iron Age (sig. A4r), the temporal limitations faced by his Iron Age drama in fact work to promote the narrative strengths of that theatre. Whereas the narrator of Heywood’s verse epic Troia Britanica apologetically attributes the breaks between his ‘diurnal’ cantos to bodily shortcomings, from ‘tired hand[s]’ to the narrator’s and readers’ shared



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need to ‘breathe’ (V, stanza 112; VI, stanza 110), the choral commentary that frames the stops and starts of Heywood’s drama gives greater and more positive weight to the audience’s shaping role. In The Brazen Age, in particular, the need for the action to progress quickly onstage is advertised as an advantage: Homer informs the spectators that ‘Our last act comes, which lest it tedious grow, / What is too long in word, accept in show’ (sig. I3v), and promises Heywood’s audiences a spectacle that will ‘(with some mixtures) passe, / So you sit pleas’d in this our Age of Brasse’ (sig. B1v).

Spatial coordinates: guiding the narrative Heywood’s innovative approach to narrative temporality extends beyond the Ages plays to his other dramatic works. Paulina Kewes, for example, considers Heywood’s The Rape of Lucrece (c.  1607) to be ‘alone among late Elizabethan and early Jacobean Roman plays in its blatant renunciation of historical authenticity’, while Nora Corrigan offers an intriguing account of how Heywood ‘seems to stretch the definition of history to the breaking point’ in 1 and 2 King Edward the Fourth (1599).60 However, Heywood’s temporal embedding of his narrative in the Ages plays, complemented by the use of spatial and architectural reference points, most closely resembles his theorising of theatrical practice in Apology.61 In the latter work, Heywood’s attention to the history of acting is matched by his interest in the location and architectural design of the classical theatres. For Heywood, there is no suggestion that the Golden Age of the theatre should involve withdrawal into a protected imaginative sphere. On the contrary, his Apology stresses the prominent placement of amphitheatres and playhouses within the ancient cities that he describes, as part of his wider argument that theatrical playing should be considered ‘an ornament to the citty’.62 As with his use of temporal markers, his plays regularly use spatial and elemental references to problematise any sense of a contained fictional narrative, instead embedding his dramatic plots within the physical and environmental reality of the early modern playhouses. In The Golden Age, for example, Heywood’s use of architectural imagery celebrates the visual appeal of his company’s playhouse, while at the same time registering the commercial constraints upon that company’s theatrical practice. A key episode is Jupiter’s encounter with Perseus’ mother, Danae: characterised as a rape in classical mythology but treated light-heartedly within Heywood’s play, in which Danae consents to Jupiter’s advances.63 The tower within which Danae has been imprisoned to preserve her chastity, which would presumably be imaginatively mapped onto the structure of Heywood’s Red Bull playhouse by spectators, is described by her father

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as uniquely valuable: ‘so rich a structure  / For beauty, or for state, the world affoords not’; ‘The architectur’s sumptuous’ (sig. Hv). Such language anticipates Heywood’s descriptions of the Golden Age theatres in his Apology, which stress the ‘sumptuous and gorgious’ appearance of these buildings and the expense lavished on structures ‘as costly as the Pantheon or Capitols’.64 The question of costs is also highlighted within The Golden Age, in which the shower of golden rain whereby Jupiter is reputed to have impregnated Danae is interpreted literally, with Jupiter able to visit the coyly welcoming Danae after bribing her female guards with coins and jewels. In using gold to buy access to Danae, rather than penetrate her unwilling body as in the mythological tradition, Jupiter’s actions potentially echo those of the theatre spectator who pays to cross through the gatehouse into the interior of the early modern playhouse. Yet if the literal use of robes and ornaments to augment Jupiter’s appearance so that he will ‘shine in gold’ when he meets Danae provides a glorious stage spectacle for the paying audience (sig. Iv), Heywood also seems to register the more negative implications of the theatre’s reliance upon these spectators for its profits. By omitting the overtly sexual connotations that gold acquired in the mythological tradition, Heywood perhaps seeks to acknowledge the economic exchange whereby the playhouse sold sensuous spectacles for the income needed to maintain its ‘sumptuous’ façade, while simultaneously managing the common anti-theatrical charge that the drama promoted illicit sexuality. For, despite the bawdy overtones, gold in this episode facilitates a pleasure that is productive (rather than merely financially profitable) in its outcome: the hero Perseus is conceived. Heywood’s engagement with contemporary anti-theatrical discourse can be seen more fully through the way he deploys navigational language within the Ages plays. At times, such terminology serves the practical purpose of enabling the audience to locate the dramatic actions along a geographical trajectory; as, for instance, when an encounter between Perseus and Bellerophon in The Silver Age leads to an exchange in which the latter announces his city of origin and his destination: perseus: bellerophon: perseus: bellerophon:

Whence are you gentle knight? I am of Arges. But your adventure? The infernall monster, Cal’d the Chimera bred in Cisily. (The Silver Age, sig. B4r)

Such references also establish the spatial reach of the playhouse stage, and its ability to transport its spectators swiftly from one location to the next: an effect that is especially pronounced in the case of speeches about

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magical flight, such as Mercury’s account of his search for the missing Proserpine later in the same play (sig. Hr). As David Mann points out, however, there are comparatively few (if any) instances in which The Silver Age appears to require a staged flight across the stage.65 Instead, despite regular in-dialogue references to modes of aerial transportation, from Pluto’s chariot to the winged horse Pegasus, the play’s stage directions focus upon the descent of characters from above or, in certain cases, their ascent from below the stage platform. Jupiter’s own dialogue underscores this staging effect, when he comments after his descent from Olympus in Act II that ‘Earth before heaven, we once more have preferd’ (sig.  C3r). The effect is to embed any sense of spatial expansiveness within the physical place of the playhouse. Whereas a playwright such as Christopher Marlowe stresses the potential for the theatrical sphere to expand beyond the boundaries of its staged setting, Heywood conversely turns the physical dimensions of his theatre to advantage by implying that the whole cosmos can be readily contained within this one locale. As Heywood puts it in Apology, ‘in that little compasse were comprehended the perfect modell of the firmament, the whole frame of the heavens, with all grounds of astronomicall conjecture’.66 As the latter reference to ‘astronomicall conjecture’ illustrates, however, Heywood’s imagining of theatrical space is by no means empty. In addition to the specific geographical coordinates provided by characters such as Perseus, Bellerophon and especially Hercules, as they move from one location-specific adventure to the next, his Ages plays contain frequent references to navigational aids: from the stars above to the topographical and built features of the landscape. Anti-theatricalists from Gosson to Sidney compared plays to journeys that lacked direction,67 but Heywood implicitly addresses such charges by providing his plays with a set of spatial coordinates that complement his emphasis on the embedded temporality of his dramatic narratives, even as his plays themselves readily ‘transcend’ any neo-classical unity of place.68 His characters regularly use map-making terminology to characterise their movements on the stage. Ganymede, for example, is sent by Jupiter to ‘survey / Amphitrioes pallace’ in The Silver Age (sig. C3r), while Pluto’s encounter with Proserpine in the same play occurs after he travels to earth to ‘take a free survey / Whether the worlds foundations be still firme’ (G4r). Hercules in particular is credited with extensive navigational ability, by virtue of his ‘astronomicke skill, [and] knowledge in starres’ (Brazen Age, sig. C2v): knowledge needed to successfully map a course at sea during this period. Achilles and Ulysses are also implicitly credited with such abilities in 1 Iron Age, as Ulysses asserts his right to the former’s armour by mocking Ajax’s inability to comprehend the shield’s emblazoned device of the cosmos: ‘’Tis a description c­ osmographicall / Of

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all the earth, the ayre, the sea and heaven, / What are the Hyades? or grim Orion; / Hee pleads, or what’s Arcton? thy rude hand / Would lift a shield, thou canst not understand’ (sigs K4r-v). Indeed, Heywood’s adaptation of his Ovidian source specifically stresses Ulysses’ prospective ability to interpret and apply this universal map; where the speech made by Ovid’s Ulysses moves straight from ‘clipei caelamina’ (the engraving on the shield) to the ‘Oceanum et terras’ (sea and lands) depicted thereon (Metamorphoses, XIII.291–2), Heywood advertises his speaker’s expertise by inserting the new term ‘cosmographicall’.69 Heywood’s use of such terminology suggests that, as Turner, Bernhard Klein and D. K. Smith argue, the early modern period’s increased reliance upon mathematical techniques of mapping produced an important shift in how space was imagined.70 Gosson aggressively exploited such developments, likening literary creation to sailing and accusing contemporary dramatists of leading their audiences astray: ‘I will beare a lowe sayle, and rowe neere the shore, least I chaunce to bee carried beyonde my reache, or runne a grounde in those coasts which I never knewe’.71 His related hinting at poor weather conditions may have resonated especially strongly with Heywood, whose plays were usually staged at a partially unroofed ­amphitheatre venue (the Red Bull) in which standing playgoers would be exposed to the vagaries of the English weather.72 In a possible riposte, Heywood’s Homer conversely advertises his extra-textual ability to direct the events of the Ages plays and shelter playgoers, announcing towards the end of The Golden Age that ‘We grow now towards our port and wished bay’ (sig. I3v), and advertising the events of The Silver Age with the claim that Likewise how Jove with faire Alcmena lay: Of Hercules, and of his famous deeds: How Pluto did faire Proserpine betray: Of these my Muse (now travel’d) next proceedes. (The Silver Age, sig. K2r)

Similarly, the preface to the 1632 edition of 1 Iron Age promises Heywood’s readers that it ‘beginneth where the other left, holding on, a plaine and direct course’ (sig. A4r). At the same time, as with his temporal practice, Heywood continues simultaneously to stress the constraints of live performance, highlighting the necessary participation of his spectators in the dramatic events that they are witnessing. In The Golden Age, for instance, Homer’s anticipated arrival at port is immediately followed by a request to the audience for ‘your love, and Homer cannot stray’ (sig. I3v). The navigational contribution of the spectators is made more explicit in the epilogue to The Silver Age, in which (in another allusion to the commercial



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c­ onsiderations that influenced professional playing companies) Homer confesses his dependence on the playhouse audience’s guidance: Poore Homer’s left blinde, and hath lost his way, And knowes not if he wander or go right, Unlesse your favours their cleare beames display. But if you daine to guide me through this night, The acts of Hercules I shall pursue, And bring him to the thrice-raz’d wals of Troy: His labours and his death I’le shew to you. But if what’s past your riper judgements cloy, Here I have done: if ill, too much: if well, Pray with your hands guide Homer out of hell. (The Silver Age, sig. Lv)

Heywood’s use of temporal coordinates emphasises the process of constructing history and narrative above theatre’s capacity to project its audience back into a coherent imaginative vision of the past. Similarly, his spatial references embed his drama within the physical parameters of his Iron Age playhouse while simultaneously registering its vast navigational scope. In the process, Heywood establishes a sense of the theatrical imagination’s practical limitations, and the constraints upon it, in order to prioritise the audience’s experiential relationship to the live performance. Rather than conceiving of imaginative composition in detached, dematerialised terms, Heywood’s dramaturgy relies on complex temporal and spatial markers that define theatrical space through reference to time, place and use: an understanding that loosely anticipates much later developments in the theorisation of produced space, as well as reflecting contemporary developments in how space was conceptualised within an early modern map-making culture.73

Conclusion: mapping the Four Ages Geography, Ortelius wrote in the preface to his widely read Theatrum orbis terrarum, is ‘the eye of History’;74 Heywood’s joint employment of temporal and spatial coordinates reflects an understanding of mapping that was influential during the early modern period. However, his practice varies sharply from the theories of imaginative composition favoured by many of his contemporaries. Heywood’s approach differs from Sidney’s in stressing the material embeddedness of his fictional creations; from those dramatists  (such as Marlowe) who focused on the ability of theatrical fiction to surpass the limits of the playhouse, by instead prioritising the status of the playhouse as microcosm; and from contemporary playwrights

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such as Francis Beaumont and John Webster in valuing live performance and respecting the judgements of the commercial playhouse audience. Moreover, Heywood’s is a drama that does not automatically seek to transcend Nature with Sidney’s ideal poet, but rather establishes an atmospheric and elemental existence. Understandably for a working playwright at an open-air theatre, Heywood’s writings quite frequently reference storms and tempests as a source of anxiety: for example, his preface to the 1611 edition of The Golden Age claims a reluctance to see this volume ‘thrust naked into the world, to abide the fury of all weathers’ (A2r). In plays such as The Brazen Age and 1 Iron Age, Heywood’s characters express anxiety about storms and wind direction to an extent that might again remind spectators of the atmospheric conditions in which these plays were being performed, and their dependency upon various external factors – including the weather. Indeed, such experiences were reframed for the open-air theatre’s benefit in the much later Loves Maistresse (1634), with Heywood’s Cockpit prologue wryly comparing the ‘artificiall cloudes’ and manufactured ‘unroofing’ that accompanied the play’s court performance to the actual openness of the ‘publike’ playhouse in which it is now to be staged.75 More centrally, through Heywood’s deployment of temporal and spatial coordinates to create a complex dramatic experience that audiences navigate with Homer’s assistance, the Ages plays depict a theatre ‘state’ that gains presence through its implication in a network of social and economic exchanges. At the heart of this commercial theatre network are the play­ goers who buy access to a staged performance: that is, to a designated place for a set (albeit approximate) period of time. Participating in the ongoing reportage and fashioning of history and myth, in the economic transactions and value negotiations of the cultural and financial marketplace, and alluding to weather conditions that might sometimes be experienced by spectators, Heywood’s classical plays utilise Graeco-Roman myth to fashion a theatrical ‘world’ that, in contrast to Sidney’s transcendent poetic fiction, remains ‘present’ within everyday Iron Age experience. If Heywood’s Apology might be said to address his character Jupiter’s fear that ‘am I nothing … till I know whence my descent hath ben’, his plays continue that project by filling in the airy vision of imaginative fiction inherited by early modern authors with ‘essentiall substance’.76 By providing temporal, economic, cultural and elemental coordinates, Heywood presents what he terms an ‘authentique’ theatre, which his audiences can actively engage with, respond to and pass judgement upon. Thus, through the Ages plays, Heywood crafts a theatrical ‘world’ that seeks to offer his audiences access to a ‘full state’,77 the temporal and spatial dimensions of which are mapped by the diverse historical, geographical and generic markers of theatrical ­narrative: a ‘full state’ of poets, players and paying spectators.



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Notes   1 Thomas Heywood, An Apology for Actors (London: Nicholas Okes, 1612), sigs A2v-A3r. On Heywood’s assertion of a classical lineage for playing, see chapter 10 (Tanya Pollard).   2 Heywood, Apology, sig. B2v.   3 Ibid., sig. B2v.   4 Stephen Gosson, The Schoole of Abuse (London: Thomas Woodcocke, 1579), sig. Dr.  5 See for example Philip Stubbes, The Anatomie of Abuses (London: [John Kingston for] Richard Jones, 1583), sig. L6v.   6 Gosson, Schoole, sigs A2v-3r.   7 See Thomas Lodge, A Defence of Poetry, in G. Gregory Smith (ed.), Elizabethan Critical Essays, 2 vols (London: Oxford University Press, 1904), vol. I, pp. 61–86 (esp. pp. 64–6).  8 Sir Philip Sidney, The Defence of Poesy, in Gavin Alexander (ed.), Sidney’s ‘Defence of Poesy’ and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism (London: Penguin, 2004), p. 9.  9 Julius Caesar Scaliger, Select Translations from Scaliger’s ‘Poetics’, trans. Frederick Morgan Padelford (New York: Holt, 1905), p. 8. 10 Ovid’s Metamorphoses, trans. Arthur Golding, ed. Madeleine Forey (London: Penguin, 2002). All references to Golding are to this edition. 11 Robert Matz, Defending Literature in Early Modern England: Renaissance Literary Theory in Social Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 66–7; see also Jean E. Howard, The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 42–3. 12 Thomas Heywood, Troia Britanica (London: W. Jaggard, 1609). All references are to Yves Peyré (gen. ed.), Troia Britanica (2009–2019), available at www. shakmyth.org, accessed 24 June 2020. 13 Benedict Scott Robinson, ‘Thomas Heywood and the cultural politics of play ­collections’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 42 (2002), 361–80 (p. 362). 14 Heywood, Apology, sig. F3r. 15 Ibid., sig. A2r. 16 See for example Sidney, Defence, 43; Heywood, Apology, sig. Bv. 17 Sidney, Defence, pp. 42–3. 18 Ibid., pp. 44–5. 19 Heywood, Apology, sig. B2v. 20 Heywood, Apology, sigs E3r-v; Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia, Wits Treasury (London: P. Short for Cuthbert Burbie, 1598), esp. sigs Oo3r-v; Thomas Heywood, The Iron Age (London: Nicholas Okes, 1632), sig. A3r. Unless specified otherwise, all subsequent quotations from 1 Iron Age are taken from this edition. 21 Henry S. Turner, The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics, and the

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Practical Spatial Arts, 1580–1630 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 5. 22 Kathleen E. McLuskie, Dekker and Heywood: Professional Dramatists (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994), pp. 1–2. 23 For a more detailed consideration of Heywood’s insistence on the legitimacy of his audiences’ artistic judgements, see Richard Rowland, Thomas Heywood’s Theatre, 1599–1639: Locations, Translations, and Conflicts (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), esp. pp. 334–40 and pp. 360–9; also Richard Rowland, ‘“Speaking some words, but of no importance”? Stage directions, Thomas Heywood, and Edward IV’, Medieval & Renaissance Drama in England, 18 (2005), 104–22 (p. 104). 24 Robinson, ‘Thomas Heywood’, p. 365; Thomas Heywood, Pleasant Dialogues and Dramma’s, Selected out of Lucian, Erasmus, Textor, Ovid, &c. … (London: R. O[ulton] for R. H[earne], 1637), sig. R5r. 25 Heywood, Apology, sig. A3r. 26 See for example Daniel R. Gibbons, ‘Thomas Heywood in the house of the wise-woman’, Studies in English Literature, 49:2 (2009), 391–416 (pp. 391–2); Paula McQuade, ‘“A labyrinth of sin”: marriage and moral capacity in Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness’, Modern Philology, 98:2 (2000), 231–50 (pp. 231–4); Rowland, Thomas Heywood’s Theatre, esp. pp. 203–29; Rowland, ‘Stage directions’. 27 McLuskie, Dekker and Heywood, p. 15; Rowland, Thomas Heywood’s Theatre, esp. pp. 173–201. 28 Pollard suggests that Jupiter’s sequential adoption of multiple disguises and roles establishes him as an actorly model for his son Hercules. 29 Some critics posit that the Silver and Brazen Ages may have existed in some form by between 1595 and 1598, based on the records kept by Henslowe and the Admiral’s Men company. Others, including Martin Wiggins and Catherine Richardson, follow existing scholarly convention in dating them to between 1611 and 1613. For a more detailed dating discussion, see David Mann, ‘Heywood’s Silver Age: a flight too far?’, Medieval & Renaissance Drama in England, 26 (2013), 184–203 (pp.  185–9); Martin Wiggins and Catherine Richardson, British Drama 1533–1642: A Catalogue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011–18), vol. VI, pp. 134, 158, 191, 297 and 316. The dating of the plays is also discussed in the Introduction to this volume; see also the chronological table of Heywood’s writings in the Appendix. 30 Heywood, Apology, sig. B3r. 31 Ibid., sig. B3r. 32 Ibid., sig. A3r. 33 Ibid., sig. Cr. While Heywood’s use of ‘edified’ primarily signals construction, its capacity to denote figurative support and spiritual/moral profit may also be relevant (OED ‘edify’ v. 1, 2c, 3). 34 Heywood, Apology, sigs D3r, Ev. The anti-theatricalist Stephen Gosson for instance cites the Romans Scipio Nasica and Valerius Maximus, arguing that his readers may see ‘by ye examples of the Romans, that playes are ratsbane to the governement of commonweales, and that Players by the judgement of them, are

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infamous persons, unworthy of the credite of honest Citizens’: Playes Confuted (London: Thomas Gosson, 1582), sigs C2v-C3r, E2r. 35 John Webster, ‘To his beloved friend Maister Thomas Heywod’. In Heywood, Apology, sig. A2v. 36 Heywood, Apology, sig. A4v. 37 See for example David Hawkes, ‘Thomas Gresham’s law, Jane Shore’s mercy: value and class in the plays of Thomas Heywood’, English Literary History, 77:1 (2010), 25–44; Richard Rowland, ‘The Captives: Thomas Heywood’s “whole monopoly off mischieff”’, Modern Language Review, 90 (1995), 585–602; Theodora A. Jankowski, ‘Historicizing and legitimating capitalism: Thomas Heywood’s Edward IV and If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody’, Medieval & Renaissance Drama in England, 7 (1995), 305–37. 38 See for example D. K. Smith, The Cartographic Imagination in Early Modern England: Re-writing the World in Marlowe, Spenser, Raleigh and Marvell (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), esp. pp. 1–12; Bernhard Klein, Maps and the Writing of Space in Early Modern England and Ireland (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), esp. chapter 1; Turner, The English Renaissance Stage, esp. pp. 1–33. 39 Rowland, Thomas Heywood’s Theatre, pp. 21–84 (esp. pp. 23–4); Rowland, ‘Stage directions’, p. 107. 40 Cf. Troia Britanica, I, stanza 6; V, stanzas 1–4. 41 Despite the continued debates about which play was written first (see footnote 29 and the Introduction to this volume), The Golden Age can still be considered first in terms of the sequential narrative told by the Ages plays. 42 Heywood, Apology, sig. E4r. 43 Thomas Heywood, The Golden Age (London: [Nicholas Okes] for William Barrenger, 1611), sig. Br. Unless specified otherwise, all subsequent quotations from The Golden Age use this edition. 44 I am grateful to Tania Demetriou for her insightful comments about how Heywood uses Homer to figure this especially complex transmission process. See also Tania Demetriou, ‘“Strange appearance”: the reception of Homer in Renaissance England’ (PhD dissertation, University of Cambridge, 2008), pp. 33–4. 45 Horace, Horace his Arte of Poetrie, Pistles, and Satyrs Englished, trans. Thomas Drant (London: Thomas Marshe, 1567), sig. B5r. 46 Lodge, Defence, p. 75. 47 In chapter 10 Tanya Pollard discusses how Heywood simultaneously humanises the character of Jupiter. 48 See Mark Bayer, ‘Heywood’s epic theater’, Comparative Drama, 48:4 (2014), 371–91 (p. 386). 49 Ibid., p. 377. 50 I would like to thank Janice Valls-Russell for drawing my attention to this aspect. 51 Cf. Heywood, Troia Britanica, V, 54 and VI, 55. 52 Heywood, Apology, sig. D3r. 53 Chapter 10 (Tanya Pollard).

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54 See for instance the 1606 stage direction in Heywood’s 2 If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody, which calls for off-stage ‘trumpets’ that sound as though they are ‘a farre off’, or Dekker’s use of ‘hornes within’ to signal that his fictional Marquess pursues a deer onto and off the stage in Patient Grisill. Thomas Heywood, The Second Part of, If You Know Not Me, You Know No Bodie (London: [Thomas Purfoot] for Nathaniel Butter, 1606), sig. Hr; Thomas Dekker, The Pleasant Comodie of Patient Grisill (London: [E. Allde] for Henry Rocket, 1603), sigs A2r, A3r. 55 Thomas Heywood, The Silver Age (London: Nicholas Okes, 1613), sig. A2r. Unless specified otherwise, all subsequent quotations from The Silver Age are taken from this edition. 56 See for example Heywood, Troia Britanica, VI. If Mann is right to identify The Silver Age and The Bronze Age with the 1 and 2 Hercules marked as new in Henslowe’s Diary in 1595, the temporal relationship between the Ages plays and Troia Britanica becomes even more complicated (‘Heywood’s Silver Age’, p. 185), although Heywood’s dismissive 1609 reference to the birth and labours of Hercules as ‘tales too often told’ and placed on ‘common sale’ would be surprising in this scenario (Troia, VI, 88), especially since the earliest surviving editions of The Silver Age and The Brazen Age date to 1613. 57 Anthony Kemp, The Estrangement of the Past: A Study in the Origins of Modern Historical Consciousness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 6; cited by Graham Hammill, ‘Instituting modern time: citizen comedy and Heywood’s Wise Woman of Hogsdon’, Renaissance Drama, 29 (1998), 73–105 (p. 75). 58 Heywood, Troia Britanica, VI, stanza 88, line 2. 59 Thomas Heywood, The Brazen Age (London: Nicholas Okes for Samuel Rand, 1613), sig. Br. Unless specified otherwise, all subsequent quotations from The Brazen Age are taken from this edition. 60 Paulina Kewes, ‘Roman history and early Stuart drama: Thomas Heywood’s The Rape of Lucrece’, English Literary Renaissance, 32:2 (2002), 239–67 (p. 250); Nora L. Corrigan, ‘The merry tanner, the mayor’s feast, and the king’s mistress: Thomas Heywood’s 1 Edward IV and the ballad tradition’, Medieval & Renaissance Drama in England, 22 (2009), 27–41 (p. 27). In chapter 3, Janice Valls-Russell discusses Heywood’s The Rape of Lucrece from a mythological, rather than historical, perspective. 61 See also chapter 10 (Tanya Pollard). 62 Heywood, Apology, sig. F3r. 63 For a fuller analysis of this episode, see chapter 4 (Yves Peyré); Mary Bly, ‘Bait for the imagination: Danae and consummation in Petrarch and Heywood’, Comparative Literature Studies 32:3 (1995), 343–59. 64 Heywood, Apology, sigs D2v, D3r. 65 Mann, ‘Heywood’s Silver Age’, pp. 193–5. 66 Heywood, Apology, sig. D3r. 67 See for example Sidney, Defence, pp. 44–5. 68 Heywood, 1 Iron Age, sig. A3r.

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69 Comparison noted by Tania Demetriou. Golding’s 1567 translation renders the initial lines as: ‘He knows not what / The things engraven on the shield do mean. Of ocean sea, / Of land, of heaven, and of the stars no skill at all hath he’ (XIII, 352–4). The OED dates the first use of ‘cosmographical’ to 1559 (adj.). 70 Smith, The Cartographic Imagination, pp. 1–10; also Klein, Maps and the Writing of Space, p. 85. 71 Gosson, School, sigs A6r-v. 72 See Gwilym Jones, Shakespeare’s Storms (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), esp. pp. 9–10. 73 See Smith, The Cartographic Imagination, pp. 11–12. 74 Abraham Ortelius, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (London: John Norton, 1606 [1608?]), n. pag.; cited by Klein, Maps and the Writing of Space, p. 17. 75 Thomas Heywood, Loves Maistresse: or, The Queens Masque (London: Robert Raworth for John Crowch, 1636), sig. A3r; Rowland, Thomas Heywood’s Theatre, pp. 238–40. I am grateful to Richard Rowland for suggesting this ­connection. 76 Heywood, Apology, sig. F3r. 77 Webster, ‘To his beloved’, in Heywood, Apology, sig. A2v.

12 The Sovereign of the Seas: Thomas Heywood’s 3D engagement with the classics Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Janice Valls-Russell

Thomas Heywood died in 1641, outliving his contemporary William Shakespeare by a quarter of a century. As the introduction and preceding chapters of this volume have demonstrated, Heywood’s active, crossgeneric interest in the classics runs through his long and prolific career, from his earliest publications in the mid-1590s to the end of the 1630s. During that last creative decade, he published Loves Maistresse and 1 and 2 Iron Age; and he pursued his writing of voluminous compendia with Pleasant Dialogues and Dramma’s, and The Hierarchie of the Blessed Angells. What sets the 1630s apart in his career is that he also devised no less than seven civic pageants for the annual Lord Mayor’s Shows between 1631 and 1639. As in his Ages plays, his dramatist’s sense of the visual enabled him to ‘translate’ mythographic and historiographic concerns of the kind that shaped his compendia into three-dimensional plastic works. In the accounts he published of his pageants, he focused on the tableaux that in his view were the highlights of the show, leaving aside moments he considered of less interest, and provided a scholarly framework, thus producing a reading experience that was different from the spectating experience.1 This was also the decade in which he helped devise the iconological programme of the largest ship ever built until then, the Sovereign of the Seas, providing a written account in A True Description of his Majesties Royall Ship, which he published in 1637, to mark the launch.2 Historians have discussed the ship in connection with Charles I’s political and diplomatic campaign to assert British supremacy over the seas in a Research on this essay was funded by an international mobility grant (2019) from the Humanities and Social Sciences Institute of France’s National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). I am deeply grateful to the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, for allowing me access to their library and wonderful archives. This essay could not have been completed without the invaluable scholarship, advice and support of Yves Peyré. I am warmly grateful to Charlotte Coffin and Tania Demetriou for their suggestions and friendship.

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context of international tension. Through Hugo Grotius, author of Mare Liberum, the Dutch defended the principle of the freedom of the seas against the Portuguese and the British, who championed the idea that seas should come under national jurisdiction. In Britain, John Selden’s Mare Clausum, which was published as a riposte to Grotius, looked back on the maritime history of Britain to argue that states could exercise sovereignty over the seas.3 The unprecedented cost of building the ship and the discontent aroused by the king’s attempt to extend the levying of the Ship Money tax to the inland counties without parliamentary approval,4 are considered to have contributed to his growing unpopularity and the tensions that led to the Civil War. Charles’s ship has mainly been studied by naval historians such as James Sephton, whose Sovereign of the Seas: The Seventeenth Century Warship offers an exhaustive account of the ship’s building, design, military features and history, illustrated with numerous plates.5 She has received relatively confidential attention from scholars working on the early modern reception of the classics or on Heywood. Alan R. Young published a critical edition of the pamphlet in 1990. Julie Saunders has discussed the building of the ship as an instance of connections between ‘the working world of the docks and that of theatrical spectacular, not least river-based in this period, [that were] closer together than we might have imagined at first glance’.6 Geoffrey Callender has focused principally on the painting of the ship attributed to Peter Lely.7 Hendrik Busmann offers a detailed investigation of the building of the ship, traces the artistic record of master carvers John and Mathias Christmas, and studies Heywood’s role in Sovereign of the Seas, Die Skulpturen des Britischen Königsshiffes von 1637.8 In Speaking Pictures: English Emblem Books and Renaissance Culture, Michael Bath looks at the political semiotics of the emblematic art which designers of triumphal arches, civic pageants and royal ships used for their mythological and symbolical devices. It is from that perspective that he views Sovereign of the Seas: This was a prestige-ship, whose iconographic programme must be read as a symbolic statement of the claim to which its name pretended, for since 1631 Charles had attempted to force foreign ships to lower their flags in deference to English sovereignty of the seas. The claim was a renovation of the imperial pretensions of King Edgar, whom chroniclers recorded as dividing his kingdom into the four compass points, and circumnavigating it annually in order to justify his title ‘Lord of the four Seas’. The idea of sovereignty provides the symbolic and ideological focus for most of the carvings on Charles’s ship, which at one stage was going to be named the Edgar.9

The Sovereign, however, also offers a unique opportunity to investigate Heywood’s interest in, and mastery of, classical material in a variety of forms and its materialisation in a mytho-historiographic building programme.

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The ship itself, which was launched on 13 October 1637 (after an unsuccessful attempt on 25 September, to which Heywood refers in his 1638 edition, sig. Hr) and remained in service until the late 1690s, has not survived, but we do have visual and textual evidence of what it looked like.10 A large hand-coloured engraving by John Payne was printed as ‘the true portraicture of His Maties Royall Ship the Soveraigne of the Seas built in the year 1637’, ‘extructae delineatio expressissima’, and printed ‘Cum privilegio ad imprimendum solum’ (see Figure 6).11 Heywood refers to this print and praises its quality in the 1638 edition of his pamphlet (sig. Hv). The engraving shows the port side of the ship from stem to stern (or the starboard side if it was printed in reverse), with sails and pennants, in finely delineated detail. An earlier drawing coloured with tempera and accented in gold (c. 1635) shows the starboard side of the hull.12 The painting discussed by Callender, Peter Lely’s ‘Peter Pett and the Sovereign of the Seas’ (c. 1645–50), shows the stern as it might be viewed by an observer on land watching the ship sailing away over the sea, with Pett, who built her under the guidance of his father Phineas, facing the viewer (see the cover of this volume and Figure 1). The gilded carvings on black ground are finely painted, as appears from the detail on the cover of this volume. Other documents include a line drawing of the ship, possibly by William van de Velde the Elder, an engraving that unfolds on three pages inside the third, 1653 edition of A True Description, and the frontispiece drawing of the 1637 edition, which is the least realistic representation. Reduced models of the ship also exist, and it is depicted, surrounded by gods and allegorical figures, on the ceiling of the Commissioner’s House in Chatham Dockyard, which was built after 1700: if, as alleged, this panelling was salvaged from the ship’s great cabin, it would give an idea of the lavish interior decoration, which Heywood does not describe, even though he claims, towards the end of the pamphlet, to have described ‘her inward and outward decorements’ (sig. G3r). Importantly, major aspects of the engraving and the painting match the description given by Heywood himself, whereas later representations provide less reliable detail, or reflect alterations made during the Commonwealth and after the Restoration. While reading over Heywood’s shoulder as he writes, therefore, I shall also be looking at Payne’s engraving, the van de Welde the Elder drawing and Lely’s painting – thereby approaching the Sovereign and A True Description as an experiment in Heywood’s three-dimensional engagement with the classics. The fifty-six-page pamphlet is a careful packaging of the launching of the ship and the king’s claims to British dominance over the seas – past and present, if one follows the logic of Heywood’s approach. He seeks to provide a historiographic and mythological rationale for a naval project that encountered opposition, mainly on financial grounds as he a­ cknowledges indirectly,

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when he invites ‘faithfull and loving subjects to bee liberall and willing contributaries towards the Ship-money’ (sig. G3v); to flag its historical and technical importance; to uphold British ambitions to maritime hegemony; and to defend his iconographic programme and elucidate its symbolism. A True Description opens with a frontispiece facing the title page. What is clear from the full-page illustration is that this is an impressive three-master. One glimpses in profile what looks like a child on a shaggy beast, to which I shall be returning; and some of the figures described by Heywood are featured on the stern. The inaccurate proportions, the clumsy, skewed perspective and absence of elaborate detail suggest that the artist had not seen the actual ship or preparatory drawings or models, and that he was working from Heywood’s text. The title page, which does not carry Heywood’s name, states the encomiastic nature of the project, both of a ship built ‘to the great glory of our English nation, and not paraleld in the whole Christian world’ and, indirectly, of the document itself. The legitimacy of this written record is established by the terms ‘Published by Authoritie’. Heywood’s authorship is established on the next page, below a dedication in large capitals to ‘The high and mightie monarch Charles the First of that Name, King of Great Brittaine, France and Ireland, Defender of the Faith, &c.’: ‘Consecrateth these his humble endevours, Thomas Heywood’. Following a dedication by the playwright and poet Shackerley Marmion,13 above an imprimatur which states that the pamphlet is printed ‘with permission likewise by Peter Pett, Master-Builder’, the contents are as follows: • A history of navigation. This account, which mentions Noah and his Ark, as well as Jason and the Argo, is followed by ‘a large catalogue of many worthy and brave sea-men’ (sig. D3v) which leads into praise of the king. • ‘An epigram upon his Majesties great ship, lying in the dock at Woollwitch’. Heywood insists that it takes the help of the gods to build such a ship: ‘Troyes horse’ is ‘but a toy, (compared)’; the Argo was no better than ‘this ships long boat’ (sig. E2r). • A description of the ship’s ‘decorements’ (sig. E3r). • The ship’s ‘exact dimension’ (sig. G3v). • The names of all those involved in the building of the ship. This chapter focuses on the two main sections of A True Description, the history of navigation and the description of the ship’s ‘decorements’.

The history of navigation Heywood begins his history of navigation with Noah, and on a seeming paradox: at the time of Noah and his Ark, ‘[o]ne ship at once contained all

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Figure 6  [John Payne], ‘Sovereign of the Seas’ or ‘The True Portraicture of His Maties Royall Ship the Soveraigne of the Seas …’, 1637 (engraving).

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the living people of the World, but now what a multitude of ships doth the world containe?’ (sig. Br). What this opening tends towards, of course, is to show that this new ship, the Sovereign of the Seas, outshines that ‘multitude of ships’. After referring to Mount Ararat, Heywood goes on to note that ‘all the ethnicke and gentile writers call Noah Janus, because he first planted the vine’. Further on, he refers to ‘a second inundation which hapned in Greece’ (sig. B2r) and, after briefly recalling the foundation of Athens, he tells how people fled the city ‘in skiffes and boates’ into Thessaly, where they were ‘gently received’ by Deucalion and Pyrrha (sig. B3v). Only then does he proceed to give a ‘summary relation of such severall kindes of vessels as were used of old by sundry nations’ (sig. B4r). This in turn is followed by ‘the names of some of the most famous devisers of ships’ (sig. C4v), a list of the ‘great navigators’ of old (sig. Dr), and the names of ships (sig. D2v), closing with a ‘large catalogue of many worthy and brave sea-men of our later times, as well forraigne as home-bred’ (sig. D3v) which leads into praise for Charles’ ship. In the lists of navigators and ships (central to which are Jason and his Argo), technical names, and classical references, Heywood demonstrates his fondness for catalogues and signposts his knowledge in ways familiar from his practice in Troia Britanica. A pattern gradually emerges here. He structures his text, not around the profusion of alleged sources (‘Haitonus Armenus’, ‘Quintus Fabior Pictor’, ‘Nonnius’, ‘Varro’, ‘Budaeus’, ‘Gellius’, etc.)14 that pepper his text, but around two main, uncited sources, into which he splices material borrowed from elsewhere, or sections which he pens himself: Justin and Ravisius Textor. The information about Noah, Janus and the flooding of Greece is drawn mostly from an edition of Justin’s second-century ce epitome of Trogus’ Philippic Histories, which was available in Renaissance editions such as the one printed with commentaries in Basel in 1539, Justini ex Trogo Pompeio Historia.15 If one reads Heywood against this edition (not necessarily the one he used), it appears that he is following the commentary (p. 22) for the information he gives on Mount Ararat and Janus, and that he draws on Justin’s own text (p. 31) for the flooding of Greece and the Athenians’ exile to Thessaly. Leaving aside Justin, Heywood then turns to Ravisius Textor’s Theatrum poeticum atque historicum, also known as Officina, first published in 1520, several editions of which circulated, including the one printed by Gryphius in Lyons in 1560. Textor provides the main structure for the rest of the section on navigation. Textor’s ultimate source was the Nonius Heywood refers to (sig. B4r): Nonius Marcellus’ ‘De genere navigationem’, in Book XIII of De Compendiosa Doctrina Libros XX. Heywood follows Textor’s lists and he includes the references Textor himself provides, but he does not switch directly from one source to

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another. Instead, he bridges the two excerpts from Justin (the commentary and the text) by tying up a few loose ends. He rounds off the story about Janus and the wine by observing that ‘he [Noah] who was preserved in the waters, was the first that taught the use of wine’, thereby reconnecting a seeming digression with the main story about the flood. He then proceeds by way of Ovid’s Fasti (I, 233–40), which he acknowledges, quoting the lines in Latin and then translating them (‘[t]hus interpreted’), to explain why Janus is depicted on one side of an old Roman coin and a ship on the other – in rather the same way as the Sovereign was featured on coins in the second half of the seventeenth century.16 Similarly, he rounds off his brief account of the Athenians’ exile to Thessaly by dating the flood they survived in relation to Noah’s deluge, in the tradition of the universal chronicles that provide a double chronology in Troia. The way Heywood handles Textor is in keeping with his weaving intertextual methodology which Yves Peyré discusses in chapter 7. He follows Textor closely, as when he lists ‘the names of severall vessels used in navigation’ (sig. B4v), copying the Latin names to the extent of reproducing an error that appears in Textor, ‘carrae’ for ‘cattae’. Further on Heywood invents an etymology for ‘carrae’. Having looked up in his dictionary carrae and not cattae, and found no reference to navigation, he proposes what he hopes is a plausible explanation: ‘Carrae takes the denomination of carras, currum, or currus, that is a waggon or a chariot, because in such as in our barges they were rowed upon the water for pleasure’ (sig. Cv).17 To provide English equivalents for the Latin names, he draws on definitions such as those he could find, for instance, under the entry ‘A boate’ in John Rider, Riders Dictionary augmented by Francis Holyoke (1626, sig. C3v), a later edition of which Heywood refers to further on in the pamphlet:18 ‘Baris, was no other then Cymba, a small boate, and in such as … the Egyptians used to ferry the bodies of their dead to their places of burial’ (sig. B4r; Rider: ‘a boat in Egypt, wherein they carried dead bodies to burning’); ‘hippagines … ferry boates to carry over horse-men’ (sig. Cr; Rider: ‘A ferry boat, to carrie over horses … hippago, f.’), ‘scapha or scaphula … a small boate or wherry’ (sig. Cv; Rider: ‘A little boate … scaphula, f.’). ‘Gescortae’, probably a misprint for ‘geseoretae’, are, Heywood tells us, ‘a kind of spie-boates which waited upon a fleete at sea’ (sig. Cv; Rider: ‘A kinde of spie boates … geseoreta, n.’), and ‘pontones … ferry-boates’ (sig. Cv; Rider: ‘A ferry boate… ponto, m.’). Moving away from the dictionary, Heywood returns to Textor to insert a reference to the story of Venus and Phaon the ferryman: ‘in such a one, Phaon transported Venus over the river’ (sig. Cv). A departure from these two sources comes in the form of an expansion Heywood introduces in his list after Textor’s reference to Ptolemy’s ship.

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Heywood suggests that he is referring here to Callixeinus’ Alexandria, I, but in fact he is switching at this point from Textor to Athenaeus’ Deipnosophistae, or Learned Banqueters, V.vi, which was available in Greek (1535) as well as Latin editions. Once again, Heywood does not directly acknowledge his source. Yet a marginal note to his ‘Mendaeum wine’ in his epigram upon the ship refers the reader to ‘poeta Craecus, … lib. de Dypnosop. pag. 50’ (sig. E2v): from this exceptional page reference it is possible to establish that he used Natale Conti’s translation of the text, Athenaei Dipnosophistarum, in the edition printed in Basel in 1556.19 After a paragraph about Ptolemy Philopator’s ship, mainly centred on its proportions which he borrows from a much longer description by Athenaeus (who refers to an account by Callixeinus),20 Heywood – still following Athenaeus – goes on to provide a detailed description of the Syracusia, which was built for Hieron of Syracuse. He connects the two with a warning of his own that there is much in all this that is ‘unbeleeveable’, given the Greeks’ tendency to ‘hyperbolize in all things’ (sig. C2r). Over more than three pages (sigs C2v-C4r), Heywood selects the most striking details about the Syracusia from Athenaeus. Mount Etna provided the timber, Spain the ‘cordage’, ‘hempen sayles’ were brought down the Rhone. Three hundred carpenters were needed to build the ship, which would not have sailed but for the help of Archimedes and the engines he devised. Its hall, parlour and banqueting rooms are ‘paved with achates, emeralds and other precious stones’ (sig. C3r). The ship also has: a wellfurnished kitchen; a gigantic pantry with cisterns containing fish; bathtubs made of brass; a schoolhouse, a library, cabins, stables and storage space for ‘hay and provender’; a garden and an orchard. But, again, Heywood sounds a nationalist warning note: surely that ‘unweildy bulk’ would have been defeated by a couple of ‘smal whelps’ belonging to the English fleet (sig. C4r). Heywood then returns to another section of Textor to provide ‘the names of the most famous devisers of ships’, who include Argus, the ‘architector’ of the Argo (sig. C4v), and the inventors of various parts (‘Icarus, the saile, Dedalus, the mast’, sig. Dr). Still following Textor, he then lists the ‘great navigators of old, remembered by the historians and poets’ (sig. Dr) and he closes this section with additional material from Lucan’s Pharsalia, which he quotes in Latin and translates: the idea of looking in Lucan is possibly inspired by Textor’s own reference to the poet, which Heywood includes earlier. He then returns one last time to Textor for the names of ships which naturally include the Argo. Heywood closes this list by declaring that ‘it is high time that I now change my course, and steere neerer home’ (sig. D3v), after a final, auspicious addition of his own that combines biblical and classical mythology: ‘Of the ship named Castor and Pollux we read in the Acts of the Apostles,

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&c.’ (sig. D3r-v). The reference is to Acts 28:11, which reads as follows in the King James Bible: ‘And after three months we departed in a ship of Alexandria, which had wintered in the isle, whose sign was Castor and Pollux’. Represented both as divinities and as stars, Castor and Pollux were credited with assisting sailors and warding off shipwrecks. In his Imagines Deorum, which he first published in 1556 and extensively revised in 1571, Vincenzo Cartari explains how ‘the Castors were carved into [the] base’ of a statue of Neptune ‘because they were supposed to be gods who were helpful to ships and to boatmen. They were also thought to be stars or lights which … appear in the sky in a time of good fortune … in the air’,21 as in Andrea Alciato’s emblem ‘Spes proxima’, showing Castor and Pollux in the sky blowing winds on a ship, which invites a syncretic reading of the myth.22 Castor and Pollux provide a transition to ‘a large catalogue of many worthy and brave sea-men’ (sig. D3v) which leads into praise of the king. Heywood returns to Castor and Pollux at the end of the pamphlet, with Latin verse that places the Sovereign of the Seas under the auspices of the ‘Tyndaridae … gemelli’ (the Tyndarid twins, sig. G4v). The ship and the king are thereby placed under a twofold protection, mythological and biblical, in a compact version of the methodology he developed in Hierarchie. Stepping out of Textor to provide the reader with a description of the Syracusia, the largest ship of the ancient world, is obviously intended as a foil for the pending description of the Sovereign of the Seas, the largest ship of the modern world, and heralds its elevation to mythical status. What Heywood leaves out are features with which Charles’s ship could not compete in terms of naval one-upmanship, such as the flooring, which, Athenaeus claims, illustrated the entire story of the Iliad. And it ends on self-serving considerations that are already present in Athenaeus: the poet who composed an epigram in praise of the Syracusia, ‘conteyning onely nine couplets, eighteen lines in all’ (sig. C4v), had been generously rewarded by the king. To readers of Shakespeare, the most spectacular ship of the ancient world is, of course, Cleopatra’s barge, but it does not feature in this account of the history of navigation, even though Heywood knew both Plutarch and Shakespeare. One possible reason is that it was not mentioned in the sources he was using – although he does not hesitate to draw other material into his writing and to indulge in inventive additions. Another reason may be that Cleopatra lost her kingdom to the Romans, and that the focus here is on the glorification of the king and the idea of sovereignty – over land and sea. Yet, as we shall see, Heywood may have slipped in an indirect reference to her barge elsewhere.

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The ship’s ‘decorements’ Heywood’s description of the ship works in similar ways to the ones described in the previous section. Just as he drew on a number of texts to write the section on the art of navigation, he approaches the iconographic programme of the ship through a combination of sources that include visual mythographers such as Cartari and Cesare Ripa. As with his epic Troia, his compendia and his pageants, the two kinds of borrowing, merging and updating (in writing and in 3D), are one continuous methodology for Heywood. The pamphlet and the design of the ship provide both an illustration and a confirmation of this. He selects ‘symboles, emblemes, and impresses appertaining to the art of navigation’ (sig. G3r) to describe and gloss – justify, even – some of his choices:23 It is necessary that I make some satisfaction to the world concerning those decorements which beautifie and adorn her, and to render a faire account of mine owne invention and fancy concerning the carving worke, the figures, and mottoes upon them, which some have too liberally taxed: Thus therefore to any who have formerly either doubted of their property, or are at this present desirous to understand their imagined obscurity, I thus freely deliver my selfe. (sig. E3r)

Starting with the stern, which Lely shows in his painting, the central figure is Victory (see cover). Here is how Heywood describes her, as if he were guiding a party of visitors and helping them unravel the symbolism of what they can see and read: I come now to the stearn, where you may perceive upon the upright of the upper counter, standeth Victory in the middle of a frontispiece, with this generall motto, Validis incumbite remis: it is so plain, that I shall not need to give it an English interpretation: Her wings are equally displayed; on one arme she weareth a crowne, on the other a lawrel, which imply riches and honour (sig. Gr-v)

If one compares his text with the design on the painting, one sees a central figure of a winged Victory, arms outstretched, with a horn of plenty by her left foot and arrows by her right foot. The wings and the laurel are attributes of Victory, as Cartari explains: The ancients usually depicted Victory with wings and in the shape of a beautiful young girl. She flies through the air while she holds out the laurel crown (or a crown of white olive) in one hand, and grasps a palm branch in the other … Sometimes we see her just with the crown, and sometimes with just the palm branch.24

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The combination of a laurel wreath and a crown points to Cartari’s Victory; at least, to the one whom commentators, he tells us, chose to represent ‘with a happy and joyful look’.25 With what could be a bow slung across her chest, and arrows by her right foot, she is also suggestive of Diana, who is occasionally represented with wings.26 With her horn of plenty, Victory bears some kinship with some of Ripa’s figures in his Iconologia, another source of inspiration for the ship’s iconographic programme: Abundance; and Piety, who also has wings. There is also something of Fortune in her, with a horn of plenty and a laurel leaf, Ripa’s description giving Fortune a maritime connotation by placing her hand on the helm.27 Another figure to whom Vixtory bears a kinship, with her wings and garland of laurel, is perhaps Virtue: Ripa notes that ‘il lauro è sempre verde, & non è mai tocco da fulmine’28 (the laurel is always green, and it is never struck by thunder) – a wise insurance against storms, which may account for the presence of another Victory at the opposite end of the ship, bearing a garland of laurel. She stands on the bulkhead alongside Virtue holding ‘a sphearicall globe’ (sig. F4v), as in another description of that figure in Ripa, in the company of four other emblematic figures (Council, Care, Industry and Force), the group being framed by two satyrs.29 The combination of Heywood’s text and the resulting design for the stern, as apparent in Lely’s painting, therefore suggest a composite Victory, an allegory created for this specific iconological programme, that seems to draw for inspiration on various figures in Cartari and Ripa. Building their own allegory, Heywood and the carver assemble different elements with recognisable meaning, to compose a dynamic, hopeful figure, holding unfurled banners that seem to flutter in the wind. The art of composing an allegory, Ripa writes in his proemium to the reader, requires, besides noting the figures’ human proportions, ‘auvertire sono tutti le parti essentiali della cosa istessa; & di queste sarà necessario guardar minutamente le dispositioni, & le qualità’30 (to ensure that the essential parts of the thing one represents are all there; the dispositions and qualities of which it will be necessary to respect minutely): posture, expression, head, hair, arms, legs, feet, clothes and so forth. New as the result might be, the significance of each component should be known and identifiable. In the tradition of emblematic art, Heywood appends a motto, Validis incumbite remis, which he borrows from Virgil’s Aeneid X.294 (‘bend to your stout oars’).31 Besides following Ripa, who considered that his figures and mottos were self-explanatory and did not need glossing, Heywood seemed to think that his readers would understand the line and felt he could dispense with a translation. Heywood’s Victory points with her left hand to Hercules, who is holding his club upright in his right hand, with the Nemean lion’s skin draped over

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his left shoulder. Hercules’ proximity to a Virtue-like Victory recalls his proximity to Virtue in Ripa, as emblematic of Heroic Virtue, the knots on the club signifying the difficulties to be faced on all parts.32 As one of the Argonauts, he is a companion to Jason, whom he faces across the stern. Jason was familiar with all those who attended civic shows, since he was associated with the drapers and, more widely, the prosperity of London: he is a central feature in Heywood’s 1638 and 1639 pageants and Thomas Middleton associates him with Hercules in a pageant he devised in 1621 for the Drapers’ Guild, The Sunne in Aries.33 Victory is pointing with her right hand to Jason, who stands with the Golden Fleece slung over his right arm, wearing a crown. The oar he holds in his left hand is symmetrical to Hercules’ club on the other side of Victory, as if, Heywood writes, she were saying: ‘O Hercules, be thou as valiant with thy club upon the land, as Jason is industrious with his oare upon the water’ (sig. G2r). Below that triad sit Neptune, on a seahorse, and Aeolus, Jupiter-like on an eagle. As Heywood knew from Natale Conti, Aeolus was a protector of sailors, credited with being a skilled astronomer, able to predict the winds.34 That, crucially, the two gods complement one another is indicated by Aeolus pointing to the skies while Neptune bends down towards the seas. It is also evidenced by the fact that they reappear, in the company of Jupiter and Mars, seated at the hances of the deck: ‘Mars with his sword and target, a foxe being his emblem’ (sig. Gr) (a predatory beast akin to the wolves in Cartari’s description); Neptune, again on a seahorse, carrying his trident and in the company of a dolphin; Jupiter on his eagle and Aeolus, this time seated on a ‘camelion’ – ‘a beaste that liveth onely by the ayre’ (sig. Gr), Heywood explains in true mythographic fashion. The details of those figures are difficult to make out on the engraving and drawings: the two gods on the port side, in Payne’s engraving, could be Mars and Neptune. A change seems to have intervened in the course of designing the ship, since the 1635 drawing of the starboard side shows Hercules, with his club clearly visible against the skyline and a lion’s head over his own where one of the gods should be seated, according to Heywood. Turning to the prow, visible in fine detail in Payne’s engraving, one recognises on the stem head the child riding on a lion’s back that also features on the frontispiece engraving in Heywood’s pamphlet (see Figure 7). The sculpture stands alone, clearly visible against the skyline, before the six emblematic figures on the bulkhead, whose massive size and height dwarf the sailors (four of them are visible in Figure 7). This, Heywood tells us, is ‘Cupid, or a child resembling him, bestriding, and bridling a lyon’. Once again, he offers an interpretation:



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which importeth, that sufferance may curbe insolence, and innocence restraine violence; which alludeth to the great mercy of the King, whose type is a proper emblem of that great Majesty, whose mercy is above all workes. (sig. F4v)

Figure 7  The prow, with Cupid riding the lion and King Edgar trampling the kings. [John Payne], ‘Sovereign of the Seas’, 1637 (engraving, detail).

The topos of Cupid mastering lions was a familiar one with European emblem writers, usually in connection with the power of human or divine love, as in Andrea Alciato’s emblem ‘potentissimus affectus Amor’ (Love, a very powerful emotion).35 Often represented on a chariot drawn by one or two lions, as in Alciato’s or Geoffrey Whitney’s emblems, Cupid was less frequently depicted riding a lion. One example is Daniel Heinsius’s opening emblem, in his Emblemata Amatoria, first published in 1601.36 This may have influenced Jacob Cats’s own version, which shows Cupid riding a blinded lion, in Cats’s popular collection of emblems Sinneen Minnebeelden, several editions of which appeared from 1618 onwards. Heywood knew Cats’s work, since he rounds off each of the nine books of Hierarchie with a discussion of one of his emblems, and translated an ‘Emblematicall Dialogue’ in Pleasant Dialogues and Dramma’s. Wherever he (or the carver) may have turned to for inspiration, the message is adapted  to the context in which this Cupid is represented, as it resonates with the other emblematic mottoes with which the overall design is associated.

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The detached elegance of this sculpture is enhanced by the contrast between its poised, if vulnerable, resolution of opposite forces and the powerful group composing the stem. The figurehead is a king in armour on horseback, sword raised, trampling crowned figures underfoot (see Figure 7). Their faces appear between the hooves in Payne’s engraving and other drawings, with one of them trying to crawl out from under the horse. The power of the design combines martial energy and an emblematically significant composition. The source here is not mythological, but historical. This, Heywood tells us, is ‘royall King Edgar’ (sig. E3r), a pre-Norman king whom a medieval and Renaissance historiographic tradition built up into a figure of domination on land and sea. He is credited with having unified Britain by obtaining the submission of the various kings of Scotland, Wales and other parts of the country – six to eight according to diverse traditions – and with having warded off pirates and would-be invaders by dividing his massive fleet (3,600 to 4,000 ships, according to different sources) in four to defend the ‘four seas’; hence his title, Heywood tells us, of ‘Lorde of the Foure Seas’ (sig. Fr). Heywood already referred to Edgar and his exploits in Troia (Canto XVI, stanzas 85–7), and he returns to him briefly in an account of the lives of two pirates, Purser and Clinton,37 but he gives the king pride of place in his pamphlet. Proceeding as he did with the Syracusia in his presentation of the art of navigation, he steps aside from his description of the ship to expand his narrative of Edgar’s exploits to ten pages, that is to say one-fifth of the whole pamphlet. Edgar’s reign is recorded in innumerable chronicles and accounts of navigation published in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that draw on earlier medieval material.38 Heywood himself refers to a miscellany of authors: Polidore Virgill, Guido, Ranulphus Hidgim in his Polycronicon, Gulielmus Malmsbury, Florentius, Landulphus, Marianus, Hovedaine, Harding, Mathew Paris, Mathew of Westminster, Froysart, Fabian, Holinshed, Speed, &c. (all of them authentick and approved chronologers,) … (sigs Fr-v, italics are mine)

This list is in itself revealing of Heywood’s way of working: he inserts into it the one he found (italicised in the quotation above) in John Speed’s History of Great Britain, which had been published in 1611.39 Heywood, no doubt working fast, may have transcribed Landulphus for Randulphus, missing the fact that he had named him earlier in his list, as Ranulphus Hidgim – an obvious misprint for Higden, whose Polychronicon Heywood knew. Some of the other names appear in Speed’s marginal notes. Heywood also follows Speed virtually word for word in the paragraph explaining how Edgar came to the throne. He also lifts from Speed the names, in the right

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order, of the seven kings (whose names come in a variety of spellings in different sources of the time), to the extent of also using some of the same epithets, such as ‘petty king of Wales’, which in Heywood takes a plural, and ‘arch-pirate’.40 The composition and action of Edgar’s fleet are covered along similar lines in several accounts of his life, as is the story about the annual tribute of 300 wolf-skins, but the wording of Heywood’s account of the eradication of wolves in Wales closely follows Robert Fabyan’s Cronycle. His brief account of Edgar’s coronation starts from Speed and segues explicitly in mid-sentence into Fabyan: ‘… according to Fabian, and other, 940, in the fift yeere of Lotharius King of France …’41 And in his account of a virgin who tried to avoid Edgar’s advances, Heywood is closer to Fabyan, toning down his ‘saynte Wylfryth’ (fol. CXVIIv) to a ‘beauteous virgin called Wilfryd’ (sig. E4r). Where Heywood, in other writings, is not averse to recalling divine or human amorous undertakings, he limits Edgar’s multiple instances of lechery with different women, as recounted by Speed or Fabyan, to this single episode. Within that long section on Edgar, Heywood inserts an anecdote, heavily expanded from Fabyan, about the Scottish king Kynadus, who mocked Edgar for his low stature. In Fabyan’s, and other accounts, the story begins at a banquet or feast, after which Edgar takes Kynadus out of the castle into the countryside, where he challenges him. Kynadus prefers to owe him allegiance. Heywood expands this, and begins the story on a barge, ‘rowing upon the river’ (sig. F2v). This seems to be an invention, in keeping with the navigation theme of the pamphlet, perhaps. It also connects this story with an earlier act of submission of eight kings on the river Dee – the seven, whom Edgar dramatically tramples on the stem of the Sovereign of the Seas, the eighth, seemingly unrepresented, but named by Heywood, being Maxentius, ‘a prince of the Romans … and … the greatest arch-pirate that those times afforded’ (sig. E4v), also named by Speed. The eight kings rowed Edgar’s barge while he steered at the helm ‘to let the world know that hee was Lord and King of so many provinces’ (sig. E4v). Here again, Heywood’s creativity and powerfully visual sense of detail reassert themselves: the palace and the church between which they rowed there and back were ‘distant three miles’; and this was ‘a most princely barge, which was to be rowed with oares, which were silvered all over’. This barge, rowed with silver oars, was of the kind that might be seen on the Thames in royal or civic pageants such as Middleton’s,42 or on the Nile, if one remembers Plutarch and Shakespeare. Heywood rounds off his account of Edgar’s life with an epitaph ‘by one Henricus historiographer, in old English’ with which Fabyan ends his chapter of Edgar, attributing the lines to ‘Henricus the hystographer’ (fol. CXVIIIv), the twelfth-century historian Henry of Huntingdon, author of Historia

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Anglorum. The lines, quoted here in Heywood’s spelling, compare Edgar to ‘Salomon, that for wisdom above all shone: / A father of peace, a lyon to his fone’ (sig. F4r). Heywood is using his sources not only to establish the reliability of what he writes and his own credentials as a historiographer, as it were, but also to shore up Charles’s legitimacy and defend his maritime ambitions: visually and symbolically, Edgar is the figurehead of Charles’s ambitions, and the model he represents is recorded throughout the structure, since the guns were adorned with the motto ‘Carolus Edgari sceptrum stabilivit aquarum’ (Charles has established Edgar’s sceptre of the waters).43 The historical legitimacy is given a biblical resonance through the reference to Solomon that neatly concludes a portrait that began with a reminder that Edgar was ‘the thirteenth king from Brute’ (sig. E3v) – almost certainly one of the numerous misprints in the pamphlet, since Speed, and Heywood elsewhere in his work, like other chroniclers, present Edgar as the thirtieth king after Brutus.44 This genealogy in turn reconnects the various components of the True Description, historical, mythological and emblematic. As with the court masques, the pageants involved close collaboration between the poets who devised them and the architects or artisans – those Arthur Melville Clark calls the ‘coadjutor[s]’ – whose ‘office’ was ‘as requisite’ as the poets’ while being ‘completely subordinate to that of the inventor of the show’.45 Records show first the carver Gerard Christmas, then his sons John and Matthias, bidding with Heywood for pageants, and their close working relationship seems to be attested in Heywood’s frequent praise of their work and possible connections between the families.46 Indeed, he closes the 1638 edition of A True Description with a tribute to Pett, for building the ship, to the Christmases for their artwork and to all who contributed to the success of the enterprise, besides commending John Payne for the quality of his engraving.47 What reads at a first glance like praise conventionally embellished with an apt mythological analogy turns out to be a complex mythographic vignette, offering yet another insight into Heywood’s reading practices. He compares Peter Pett, ‘the most ingenuous sonne of so much improved a father’, to ‘Argus, that famous ship-master’, recalling that he ‘built the great Argo in which the Grecian Princesse [sic] rowed through the Hellespont to fetch the Golden Fleece from Colchos’. Applying to Pett the words he claims Horace wrote of Argus (‘I may truly say, as Horace did of Argus’), he quotes the following lines: Ad Charum Tritonia Devolat Argum, Moliri hanc puppim iubet. (sig. G4r)



The Sovereign of the Seas 283

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(To her well-loved Argus Pallas flies lightly down; she bids him labour to fashion a ship and fell the timber with his axe.)48

In fact, those lines are from Valerius Flaccus’ Argonautica, I, 93–4. This could be due to a not infrequent confusion between Horace, whose full name was Quintus Horatius Flaccus, and Valerius, often referred to as Val. Flaccus, as in Textor’s own citing of those two lines, in the chapter Heywood used for the list of ships, with the masculine ‘hunc puppem’, instead of the feminine ‘hanc puppim’. One finds the same, truncated quotation as Heywood’s, albeit with ‘hunc’ instead of ‘hanc’, and with the same layout, attributed to ‘Flac.’, under the definition ‘Argus’ in the 1579 edition of Estienne’s dictionary: Argus, architectus eius nauis, qua Iason, reliquique Argonautae Colchos nauigarunt. Flac. ii.i. A[r]gon. —ad charum Tritonia deuolat Argum, Moliri hunc puppim iubet, &c.49

Through this classical tribute, Heywood invites the reader to consider how much is owed to the craftsmen: the historical significance of the building of this ship and of the king’s ambitious vision that he had previously illustrated through mythological analogies would be idle dreams without those who make them possible. Another thing that attracts the reader’s attention is that where one might expect a reference to the Grecian princes journeying across the Hellespont to fetch the Golden Fleece, the text reads ‘princesse’ (and this is not corrected in the 1638 edition). While one might be tempted to dismiss this as a printer’s error, or to see in it an odd shadow of Medea, conflated with the Golden Fleece, the mythographers trace an analogy between the story of Helle who, riding a golden ram with her brother Phrixus, fell and drowned in the strait that was henceforth named the Hellespont. Phrixus reached Colchis and sacrificed the ram to Jupiter, giving Aeetes the Golden Fleece. One of his sons was named Argus, like the builder of the Argo. The myth of Jason – with his oar – and the Argo structures the text, running like a thread through the various parts of A True Description, and linking it to some of Heywood’s other works, such as the 1638 and 1639 pageants. Another thread he weaves through the volume is the reference to Castor and Pollux, as a syncretic motif, applying to this text what commentators wrote of them as protectors of sailors. His pamphlet closes with the following Latin verse: Navis vade, undae fremitum posuere minaces Et freta Tindaridae spondent secura gemelli

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Dessuetamque iubent pelago decurrere puppim Auster & optatas afflabit molliter auras (sig. G4v)

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(Go, ship, the threatening billows have ceased their roar, and the Tyndarid twins promise safe passages, and order the ship unaccustomed to the sea to journey. The south wind softly blows favourable breezes.)

These lines are silently adapted (switching the original plural ‘Ite rates’, ‘go, ships’ and ‘desuetasque … puppes’) from Latin verse in Joannes Bochius’ celebration of the entry of Archduke Albert of Austria and Isabella in Antwerp in 1599: the lines are an inscription commenting one of the stations, a ship erected on the corn-market square. Published in 1602, Bochius’s account is illustrated with engravings of the main stations, some of which bear resemblance to the emblematic group on the bulkhead of the Sovereign, or the figure of a knight in armour – possibly Charles I – placed in a niche below the Victory group at the centre of the stern. This would suggest that Heywood,50 who was designing his own pageants at the time he worked on the Sovereign project, was alert to similar undertakings elsewhere than in Britain.

‘Navis vade’ The way Heywood works, whether he is writing or designing visual artefacts, is shaped by his mythological and historical reading. As Yves Peyré has shown in the edition of Troia he has coordinated, Heywood consulted a wide range of books – and they were not necessarily those he references.51 Besides directly accessing the classics and chronicles, he used what one might term intermediary texts, such as dictionaries and mythographers’ compilations or emblems. Some of the books he turned to for A True Description, such as Textor, Athenaeus, Conti or Fabyan, were familiar working tools, which he complemented with contemporary English and continental publications. As in Troia, Gynaikeion, his pageants and elsewhere, one finds references copied from more ‘covert’, encyclopaedic sources. Others point to works he has directly consulted or remembered, such as Ovid, Lucan and Erasmus. He also writes by omission, to adapt the title of Coffin’s essay on Heywood’s pageants, withholding references that may resurface elsewhere.52 He ‘invents’ like a mythographer, selecting material to stitch together, in combination with a structuring historical perspective. He uses this approach in works as far apart as Hierarchie and a pamphlet also published in 1635, Philocothonista, or The Drunkard, which anticipates the method used in A True Description, approaching ‘sobrietie’

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and ‘ebrietas’ from a historical and mythological perspective before moving to ‘our English drunkards’.53 A True Description reads like a pocket mytho-historiography that nods towards performance: a compact (quarto) reduction of expansive (folio) volumes such as Troia or Gynaikeion or Hierarchie, organised as if it could be readily adapted for a succession of dramatised tableaux. Saunders describes the ship as ‘one of the more complex works of “theatre” in the period’, in terms both of design and political significance. Charles was personally involved in the project, first discussing it with Pett in June 1634, visiting the shipyard regularly, intervening in the choice of designs and mottoes, and building up expectations by having a full-scale model on display at Hampton Court, for courtiers and ambassadors, from 1635 onwards.54 Heywood too comes across as very much involved personally, commenting on his own text, diverging, returning to the main subject and promoting the pamphlet in his 1638 pageant.55 Combining personal involvement and scholarly detachment, playing on effects of revealing and concealing, as when he uses Conti in Troia, Heywood’s writing reveals a knowledgeability founded on a wide-ranging curiosity and a fascination for facts scientific, linguistic, historic and mythological, combined with an eye for dramatic effects. Even when he is listing ships and navigators, the writing process is similar to that of the mythographers, a process of cataloguing and organising a plurality of available versions, with occasional expansions. When it comes to describing the ship, he moves into the company of mythographers such as Cartari who approach knowledge through figures, that they describe and, on occasion, illustrate. This in turn brings into the descriptions something of the atmosphere of pageants and triumphal shows. Simultaneously, through his first-person narratorial touch, Heywood displays a form of mythological debunking familiar from his Ages cycle, that seems to undercut, indirectly, the grandeur and political dimension of his venture: the Greeks, he writes, are not entirely to be trusted since they ‘were held to bee the greatest fablers of the world, of everie moale-hill apt to make a mountaine’ (sig. C4r). How then, should his own panegyric praise be understood? As with his last, 1639 pageant, which was also the last Lord Mayor’s Show before Charles’s execution in 1649, Heywood was writing at a time of uncertainties: whereas in the pageant he indirectly referred to the dangers of civil strife, here he is engaging in celebratory art. The ship itself, and its overall size and design, survived the transition from the monarchy to the Commonwealth, as did his text. The ship kept its name, but the title of Heywood’s pamphlet, which was reduced to thirty-two pages, was renamed The Common-Wealths Great Ship Commonly Called the Soveraigne of the Seas, built in the Yeare, 1637.56

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What Heywood could not know is that his involvement in the design of this ship for a king would set a precedent for the iconographical design of another ship. Oliver Cromwell’s Naseby, named after parliament’s victory over Charles I in 1645, was launched in 1655: ‘ironically, and illustrating his own supremacy’, the laurel-crowned figurehead on the prow was ‘carved in his likeness, on horseback trampling down the six nations (Scotland, Ireland, England, Holland, Spain and France)’, in an evident parallel with Heywood’s design.57 Like the Sovereign, the Naseby was built at Woolwich, by Peter Pett, son of Phineas. The master carver was Matthias Christmas’s son-in-law, one John Fletcher. And Cupid riding the lion survived the transition to the Commonwealth with a vengeance: Cromwell’s ship had not one, but two such figures, also sculpted on the bulkhead. In the event, Cromwell’s ambitions of supremacy proved as short-lived as those of Charles I. Cromwell died in 1658. In May 1660, reversing the removal of royal arms and mottoes from the Sovereign after 1649, the Naseby was hastily refurbished with royal insignia and the figurehead removed, to welcome Charles II and his party on board. It was renamed HMS Royal Charles.58 The afterlife of the iconography designed for the Sovereign is also the afterlife of Heywood’s drive to mythologise and emblematise power by reconnecting with classical material while anchoring it in history past and present. Heywood approached the present by drawing on myth, but the way he did so for the Sovereign participated in the elaboration of new myths. Heywood was no Shakespeare. In his way of thinking about myth and the classics more generally, he did not have the same poetic virtuosity and labile turn of mind. His approach was structural. Nonetheless, what Jonathan Bate writes about Shakespeare may tentatively be adapted here to Heywood’s design of the ship as an illustration of his lifelong, enthusiastic engagement with the classics: ‘the arc … curves from [Heywood] and the classical tradition to [Heywood] becoming [a] classical tradition’.59

Notes  1 ‘Heywood’s written documents systematically add an interpretative development in-between the recapitulation of a scene and the transcription of the associated speech. Those inserted passages may actually expand to the point of taking up half the text.’ Charlotte Coffin, ‘From pageant to text: the silent discourse of Heywood’s omissions’, Cahiers Charles V, 43 (2007): 71–96 (p. 73), available at www.persee.fr/doc/cchav_0184-1025_2007_num_43_1_1502, accessed 24 June 2020.

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  2 Thomas Heywood, A True Description of his Majesties Royall Ship, Built This Year 1637. At Wooll-witch in Kent (London: John Okes for John Aston, 1637). A second edition was published the following year, A True Discription of his Majesties Royall and Most Stately Ship called the Soveraign of the Seas, Built at Woolwitch in Kent 1637 (London: J. Okes, 1638), providing additional information about the launching of the ship, its officers and the team who worked on the ship. Unless otherwise indicated, all references are to the 1637 edition. A third edition, published in 1653, after Heywood’s death in 1641 (and Charles’s execution in 1649), was amended in conformity with the new political context of the Commonwealth. On differences between the editions, see Alan R. Young, His Majesty’s Royal Ship: A Critical Edition of Thomas Heywood’s ‘A True Description of His Majesties Royall Ship’ (New York: AMS Press, c. 1990), pp. xxix–xxxi.   3 Hugo Grotius, Mare Liberum (Leiden: Elzevier, 1609); John Selden, Ioannis Seldeni Mare clausum seu De dominio maris libri duo… (London: Will. Stanesbeius, for Richard Meighen, 1635). Selden discusses King Edgar, a prominent feature of the Sovereign of the Seas, on pp. 165–8. Heywood refers the reader to Selden and ‘that exquisite and absolute worke of his called Mare Clausum, &c.’, A True Description, sig. F4r.  4 On the financial aspects, see Arthur Melville Clark, Thomas Heywood, Playwright and Miscellanist (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1931), pp. 175–7, 178; and James Sephton, Sovereign of the Seas: The Seventeenth Century Warship (Stroud: Amberley Publishing, 2013 [2011]), pp. 76–7.   5 Sephton, Sovereign of the Seas, pp. 285, 143.   6 Julie Saunders, The Cultural Geography of Early Modern Drama, 1620–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 29–33 (p. 30).   7 Geoffrey Callender, The Portrait of Peter Pett and The Sovereign of the Seas (Newport, Isle of Wight: Yelf Brothers Ltd, 1930).   8 Hendrik Busmann, Sovereign of the Seas, Die Skulpturen des britischen Königsshiffes von 1637 (Hamburg, Deutsches Schiffahrtsmuseum: Bremerhaven und Convent Verlag, 2002).   9 Michael Bath, Speaking Pictures: English Emblem Books and Renaissance Culture (London: Longman, 1994), p. 25. 10 Busmann, Sovereign of the Seas, Die Skulpturen, and Sephton, Sovereign of the Seas, have identified a great number of engravings, drawings, paintings, models and coins, over a period ranging from the 1630s to the present day. 11 I shall be working from the copy held at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, Caird Collection, PAJ2441. 12 Unidentified artist, ‘Sovereign of the seas’ (about 1635), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 32.192. 13 Shackerley Marmion also produced commendatory verse for Pleasant Dialogues and Dramma’s, and The Phoenix of These Late Times: Or The Life of Mr Henry Welby, Esq. (London: N. Okes, 1637). On Marmion, see John Drakakis, ‘Marmion, Shackerly (1603–1639)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004, doi.org.10.1093/ref:odnb/18083.

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14 Heywood, A True Description, sigs Bv (Haitonus Armenus for Hayton of Corykos), B2r (Pictor), B4r (Nonnius for Nonius Marcellus, Varro, Budaeus for Budé), B4v (Gellius for Aulus Gellius). 15 Justini ex Trogo Pompeio Historia (Basel: Michaeles Isingrinius, 1539). 16 At the time, Fasti had not been translated into English. The lines quoted by Heywood do not follow the order of modern editions of Ovid. 17 Carrus and currus both feature in John Rider’s Dictionarie (1626). See note 18. 18 John Rider, Riders Dictionarie as it was heretofore corrected and with the addition of above five hundred words enriched: hereunto is annexed a dictionary etymologicall deriving every word from his native fountaine with reasons of the derivations and many Roman antiquities never any extant in that kinde before. By Francis Holyoke (London: Adam Islip, 1626). On p. 42, Heywood refers to ‘Riders last edition of his Dictionary, corrected, and greatly augmented by Mr  Francis Holy-oke’ in his discussion of the word navo. This would be the 1633 edition, Riders dictionarie corrected and augmented with the addition of many hundred words, both out of the law, and out of the Latine, French, and other languages …: hereunto are anexed [sic] certaine tables explaining the names, weights, and valuations of antient and moderne coynes, as also a table of the Hebrew, Greeke, and Latine measures …: whereunto is ioyned a dictionarie etymologicall …/ now newly corrected and greatly augmented by Francis HolyOke (London: Adam Islip and Felix Kyngston, 1633). Heywood could also have looked up the Latin names directly in the 1633 edition. 19 ‘Cratinus de vino Mendaeo’, Athenaei Dipnosophistarum sive Coenae sapientum, trans. Natale Conti (Basel: Henricpetrus, 1556), I, xxvi, p. 50. 20 Heywood leaves out the embellishments and figures at the stern and bow (which, precisely, he dwells upon in his description of the Sovereign), the indoor adornments (precious woods inlaid with ivory and gold) and the combination of Greek and Egyptian styles in the design. 21 John Mulryan (ed.), Vincenzo Cartari’s ‘Images of the Gods and the Ancients’: The First Italian Mythography (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2012), p. 145. The translation is Mulryan’s. 22 Andrea Alciato, ‘Spes proxima’, Livret des emblemes (Paris: Chrestian Wechel, 1536), sigs E7v-E8r, available at www.emblems.arts.gla.ac.uk/french/emblem. php?id=FALa034, accessed 24 June 2020. Other versions of this emblem show a single figure in the sky, or no figure at all. 23 As mentioned earlier, the project had come under attack for financial reasons, with Pett – with whom Heywood sided – being the butt of much of the criticism. See note 4 and related text. 24 Mulryan (ed.), Vincenzo Cartari’s ‘Images’, p. 316. 25 Ibid., p. 319. 26 Ibid., p. 85. 27 Cesare Ripa, Iconologia Overo Descrittione di Diverse Imagini Cavate Dall’Antichità, & di Propria Inventione (Rome: Lepido Faci, 1603), pp.  1 (Abondanza), 401 (Pietà), 171 (Fortuna). 28 Ripa, Iconologia, pp. 510–12 (pp. 511 for the illustration, 512 for the quotation).

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29 Ibid., p. 508 for the description of Virtue with a globe. For the identification of the six figures on the bulkhead, we need to rely on Heywood’s account (sigs F4v-Gr), since the details of the figures’ attributes are not sufficiently visible in the engraving and drawings. Victory is hidden by a mast. One barely makes out Virtue’s globe and, possibly, the sea compass Care holds on the end of a cord. Vis (‘force or strength’) holds a sword, as in Ripa’s description of Forza, Iconologia, p. 173. 30 Ibid., sig. †r. 31 Virgil, Aeneid, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough, rev. G. P. Goold, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999 and 2001). 32 Ripa, ‘Virtù heroica’, Iconologia, pp. 506–7 (p. 507). 33 Thomas Middleton, The Sun in Aries (London: Ed. All-de for H. G[osson], 1621), sig. A3r-v. 34 References to Natale Conti are to Natalis Comitis Mythologiae, sive explicationum fabularum libri decem (Paris: Arnold Sittart, 1583). 35 Alciato, Livret des emblemes, sigs. B4v-B5r, ‘French emblems at Glasgow’, available at www.emblems.arts.gla.ac.uk/french/emblem.php?id=FALa007, accessed 24 June 2020. This is just one of many versions of this emblem, all of which show Cupid on a chariot. 36 Daniel Heinsius’s collection of emblems, which he signed Theocritus à Ganda (Theocritus of Gand), was first published under the title Quaeris quid sit amor (Amsterdam: 1601). Written in Latin, Dutch and French, this emblem book seems to have been intended for an international market, as was Jacob Cats’s equally trilingual, and popular, Sinne- en Minnebeelden, first published in 1618 under the title Silenus Alcibiadis, sive Proteus – Sinne- en Minne-beelden (Middleburg: ex officina I. Hellenij, 1618). Both collections are digitally available at ‘Dutch love emblems of the seventeenth century’. Heinsius’s emblem I, ‘Omnia vincit amor’ (Love conquers all) may be viewed here: http://emblems. let.uu.nl/he1601001.html, accessed 22 July 2020. Cats’s emblem X, ‘Captis oculis, capitur bellua’ (When the eyes are conquered, the beast is conquered), may be viewed here: http://emblems.let.uu.nl/c162710.html, accessed 22 July 2020. 37 Heywood, A True Relation, of the Lives and Deaths of Two Most Famous English Pyrats, Purser, and Clinton Who Lived in the Reigne of Queene Elizabeth (London: John Okes, 1639), sigs A5v-A6r. 38 To understand the complex medieval fashioning of Edgar’s fame, see for instance David E. Thornton, ‘Edgar and the Eight Kings, ad 973: textus et dramatis personae’, Early Modern Europe 10:1 (2001), 49–79, and Sebastian I. Sobecki, ‘Introduction: Edgar’s archipelago’, in Sobecki (ed.), The Sea and Englishness in the Middle Ages: Maritime Narratives, Identity and Culture (Martlesham: Boydell & Brewer, 2011), pp. 1–30. 39 John Speed, The History of Great Britaine Under the Conquests of Ye Romans, Saxons, Danes and Normans … (London: William Hall and John Beale, 1611). The section on Edgar covers pp. 369–72. The list appears on p. 370. 40 Speed, The History, p. 370.

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41 Heywood, A True Description, sig. E4r. Parallels between English and French history are a hallmark of Fabyan’s chronicle. The date Heywood provides is the one given by Fabyan, not Speed. Robert Fabyan, Fabyans Cronycle (London: William Rastell, 1533), fols CXVIv-CXIXr for the section on Edgar (fol. CXVIv for the reference to Lotharius). 42 Thomas Middleton, The Sun in Aries, sig. B1v; Civitatis Amor: The citie’s love (London: Nicholas Okes for Thomas Archer, 1616), sig. Bv; The Triumphs of Integrity (London: Nicholas Okes, 1623), sig. Br; The Triumphs of Health and Prosperity (London: Nicholas Okes, 1626), sig. Bv. 43 Sephton, Sovereign of the Seas, p. 325. 44 Speed, The History, p. 369; Heywood, A True Relation, sig. A5v. 45 Clark, Thomas Heywood, p. 116. 46 Ibid., pp. 155, 175. 47 A True Description (1638), sigs. G3v-H1v. 48 The translation is from Valerius Flaccus, Argonautica, I, 93–4, trans. J. H. Mozley (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1934). 49 Carolus Stephanus (Charles Estienne), Dictionarium historicum, ac poeticum (Lyons: Hercules Gallus, 1579). In the later, 1590 edition, the quotation is complete and attributed to Val. Flaccus under the entry ‘Argo’. Estienne may have taken it from one of several editions of Ambrogio Calepino’s Dictionarium Latinum (Modena: Dionysius Berthocus, 1502), where the quotation is attributed to ‘Flaccus’ in his entry ‘Argo’: ‘Argo … nauis quam Jason duxit ab Argo architect. De quo Flaccus Ad charum Tritani deuolat argum molliri. Hunc puppem iubet & demittere ferro robora’ (Argo … a ship which Jason commanded, from the architect Argus. Of which Flaccus To her well-loved Argus Pallas flies lightly down; she bids him labour to fashion a ship and fell the timber with his axe). 50 Joannes Bochius, Historica narratio profectionis et inaugurationis serenissimorum Belgii Principum Alberti et Isabellae Austriae Archiducum … Auctore Joanne Bochio S.P.Q.A. à Secretis (Antwerp: Plantin, apud Johannem Moretum, 1602), p. 281. 51 Yves Peyré, ‘Heywood’s library: the books Thomas Heywood used when he wrote Troia Britanica’, in Thomas Heywood, Troia Britanica, ed. Y. Peyré et al. (2009–19), available at www.shakmyth.org, accessed 24 June 2020. 52 Coffin, ‘From pageant to text’. 53 Heywood, Philocothonista, or The Drunkard, Opened, Dissected and Anatomized (London: Robert Raworth, 1635). 54 Saunders, The Cultural Geography, p. 30; The Autobiography of Phineas Pett, ed. W. G. Perrin ([London]: Navy Records Society, 1918), pp. 156–7; Sephton, Sovereign of the Seas, p. 116–17. 55 Coffin discusses this self-promotion briefly in ‘From pageant to text’, pp. 85–6. 56 Printed by M. Simmons, for Tho: Jenner, 1653. 57 Andy Peters, Ship Decoration: 1630–1780 (Barnsley, S. Yorks.: Seaforth Publishing, 2013), p. 98. 58 In his diary, Samuel Pepys describes some of the alterations that were made to the British fleet and the renaming of the Naseby. See for instance the entries for



The Sovereign of the Seas 291

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13 and 23 May 1660, in Henry B. Wheatley (ed.), The Diary of Samuel Pepys, 9 vols (London: George Bell and Sons, 1904), vol. I, pp. 127, 145. 59 Bate’s text reads: ‘the arc … curves from Shakespeare and the classical tradition to Shakespeare becoming the classical tradition’. Jonathan Bate, How the Classics Made Shakespeare (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), p. 16.

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Appendix Heywood’s works: a chronological table

This chronological table of Thomas Heywood’s known dramatic and printed production falls far short of the 200 or so plays in which he claimed to have a finger and does not aim to be definitive. We have listed only those writings for which a consensus seems to have emerged over their attribution to Heywood, and may have missed some of his numerous pamphlets. The chronology follows the dates of first performance (known or estimated) for the plays, and the earliest known or estimated date of publication or time of writing for his other works. For the plays, column 1 (W&R) follows Wiggins and Richardson, British Drama 1533–1642: A Catalogue. We also provide dates, when they differ: in column 2 (B&M), from Berger and Massai (eds), Paratexts in English Printed Drama to 1642; in column 3 (H/S), from Harbage, Annals of English Drama 975–1700. Column 4 provides dates of earliest known publication, checked against Wiggins and Richardson, Berger and Massai, and the English Short Title Catalogue.1

Title

First performance (plays) W&R

First performance (plays) B&M

First performance (plays) H/S

Oenone and Paris Art of Love

First publication 1594 1599–1620 (1625)1

Joan as Good as My Lady [lost]

1599

nr2

1599

1 and 2 Edward IV

1599

1599 [1592–99]

1592–99

1599

How a Man May Chuse a Good Wife From a Bad

1601 [1595–1602]

1602 [c. 1601–02]

1601–02

1602

The Fair Maid of the Exchange

1602 [1601–07]

1602 [1601–02]

1607



Heywood’s works: a chronological table 293

Title

First performance (plays) W&R

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The Royal King and the Loyall Subject

First performance (plays) B&M

First performance (plays) H/S

First publication

1602

1602–18

1637

1594

1594

1615

The Four Prentices of London

1602 [1601–07]

A Woman Kilde with Kindness

1603

If You Know Not Me, You Know No Bodie

c. 1604

1604 [1604–05]

1604–05

1605

2 If You Know Not Me, You Know No Bodie

1604 [1603–05]

1605 [1604–05]

1604–05

1606

1604?

1604?

1638

The Wise-woman of Hogsdon (How to Learn of a Woman to Woo) The Rape of Lucrece

1607

1607

1608

Sallust: The Conspiracy of Catiline

1608

Troia Britanica

1609

1 The Fair Maid of the West

1610 [1609–11]

1604 [1597–1604]

1597–1604

1631

The Golden Age

1611

1610 [1609–11]

1609–11

1611

The Silver Age

1611

1611 [1610–12]

1610–12

1613

The Brazen Age

1611

1611 [1610–11]

1610–11

1613

An Apology for Actors

1612

Funerall Elegie Upon the Death of … Henry, Prince of Wales

1613

Marriage Triumphe 1 and 2 The Iron Age

1613 1613 [1612–32]

1612 [1612–13]

1612–13

1632 (Continued)

294

Heywood’s works: a chronological table

Title

First performance (plays) W&R

First performance (plays) B&M

First performance (plays) H/S

First publication

The Escapes of Jupiter

1617–22

nr2

c. 1625

(MS)

Remedy of Love

1620

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The Captives

1624

?1624 (MS)

Γυναικείον [Gynaikeion]

1624

Funeral Elegie, Upon the Much Lamented Death of … King James

1625

[Dick of Devonshire]

1626

nr2

1626

?1626 (MS)

2 The Fair Maid of the West

1630 [1621–31]

1631 [c. 1630–31]

c. 1630–31

1631

Englands Elizabeth her Life and Troubles London Jus Honorarium

1631

1631

Londini … Scaturigo

1631 1632

1632

1632

The English Traveller

1624 [1623–24]

c. 1627

c. 1627

1633

Londini Emporia

nr2

1633

1633

1633

1633 [c. 1625–34]

c. 1625–34

1634

A Mayden-heade Well Lost The Hierarchie of the Blessed Angells Londini Sinus Salutis

1635 1635

1635

1635

Philocothonista, or, The Drunkard, Opened, Dissected and Anatomized

1635

The Wonder of This Age: or, the Picture of a Man Living

1635



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Title

First performance (plays) W&R

First performance (plays) B&M

First performance (plays) H/S

First publication

Pleasant Dialogues and Dramma’s

nr2

16353

1637

A Challenge for Beautie

1635

1634

1636

Loves Maistresse

1634

1634

1636

A True Discourse of The Two Infamous Upstart Prophets

1636

A Curtaine Lecture

1637

Londini Speculum

1637

1637

1637

A True Description of His Majesties Royall Ship

1637

The phoenix of these late times: or the life of Mr. Henry Welby, Esq

1637

Porta Pietatis

nr2

1638

1638

Londini Status Pacatus

1639

1639

1639

A True Relation, of the Lives and Deaths of Two … English Pyrats

1639

Exemplary Lives

1640

A Chronographicall History

1641

The Life of Merlin

1641

The Rat-Trap, or, The Jesuites Taken In Their Owne Net &c.

1641

A Dialogue … Betwixt Mr. Alderman Abell and Richard Kilvert

1641

(Continued)

296

Heywood’s works: a chronological table

Title

First performance (plays) W&R

First performance (plays) B&M

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Machiavel, As he Lately Appeared to His Deare Sons

First performance (plays) H/S

First publication 1641

1  See chapter 2 (M. L. Stapleton). 2  Nr = not referenced. 3 Schoenbaum notes that this miscellany includes ‘playlets, some of which may have been part of lost dramas’.

Note 1 Martin Wiggins and Catherine Richardson, British Drama 1533–1642: A  Catalogue, 9 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011–18); Thomas L. Berger and Sonia Massai (eds), Paratexts in English Printed Drama to 1642, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Alfred Harbage, Annals of English Drama 975–1700, rev. S. Schoenbaum, 3rd edn, rev Sylvia Stoler Wagonheim (London: Routledge, 1989 [1964]).

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Select bibliography

Works by Thomas Heywood (Attributed titles are given in square brackets. Please note that listing is alphabetical, by first significant word.)

Manuscripts The Captives, British Library, Egerton MS 1994. [Dick of Devonshire], British Library, Egerton MS 1994. The Escapes of Jupiter, British Library, Egerton MS 1994.

Early printed editions An Apology for Actors Containing Three Briefe Treatises (London: Nicholas Okes, 1612). The Brazen Age (London: Nicholas Okes for Samuel Rand, 1613). A Challenge for Beautie (London: R. Raworth, 1636). A Chronographicall History of All the Kings, and Memorable Passages of this Kingdome; from Brute to the Reigne of our Royall Soveraigne King Charles. With the Life and Predictions of Merlin … (London: J. Okes, 1641). The Common-Wealths Great Ship Commonly Called the Soveraigne of the Seas, built in the Yeare, 1637 (London: Printed by M. Simmons, for Tho: Jenner, 1653). A Curtaine Lecture (London: Robert Young for John Aston, 1637). Englands Elizabeth her Life and Troubles, During Her Minoritie, from the Cradle to the Crowne (London: John Beale for Philip Waterhouse, 1631). The English Traveller (London: Robert Raworth, 1633). The Exemplary Lives and Memorable Acts of Nine the Most Worthy Women in the World. Three Jewes. Three Gentiles. Three Christians (London: Tho[mas] Cotes for Richard Royston, 1640). The Fair Maid of the Exchange (London: [Valentine Simmes] for Henry Rockit, 1607). The Foure Prentices of London. With the Conquest of Jerusalem (London: [Nicholas Okes] for I. W[right], 1615). A Funeral Elegie, Upon the Much Lamented Death of the Trespuissant and

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298

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Unmatchable King, King James, King of Great Britaine, France and Ireland, Defender of the Faith (London: printed [at Eliot’s Court Press] for Thomas Harper, 1625). A Funerall Elegie Upon the Death of the Late Most Hopefull and Illustrious Prince, Henry, Prince of Wales (London: William Welbie, 1613). The Golden Age (London: [Nicholas Okes] for William Barrenger, 1611). Γυναικείον [Gynaikeion], or, Nine Bookes of Various History Concerninge Women (London: Adam Islip, 1624). The Hierarchie of the Blessed Angells. Their Names, Orders and Offices. The Fall of Lucifer with his Angells (London: Adam Islip, 1635). If You Know Not Me, You Know No Bodie: Or, The Troubles of Queene Elizabeth (London: [Thomas Purfoot] for Nathaniel Butter, 1605). The Iron Age (London: Nicholas Okes, 1632) [also contains The Second Part of the Iron Age]. The Life of Merlin, Sirnamed Ambrosius his Prophesies and Predictions Interpreted, and their Truth Made Good by our English Annalls… (London: J. Okes, 1641). Londini Artium & Scientiarum Scaturigo. Or, Londons Fountaine of Arts and Sciences Exprest in Sundry Triumphs, Pageants, and Showes (London: Nicholas Okes, 1632). Londini Emporia, or Londons Mercatura. Exprest in Sundry Triumphs, Pageants and Showes (London: Nicholas Okes, 1633). Londini Sinus Salutis; or, Londons Harbour of Health, and Happiness. Epressed [sic] in Sundry Triumphs, Pageants and Showes (London: Robert Raworth, 1635). Londini Speculum: or, Londons Mirror, Exprest in Sundry Triumphs, Pageants, and Showes (London: J. Okes, 1637). Londini Status Pacatus: or, Londons Peaceable Estate. Exprest in Sundry Triumphs, Pageants, and Shewes … (London: John Okes, 1639). London Jus Honorarium Exprest in Sundry Triumphs, Pagiants, and Shewes … (London: Nicholas Okes, 1631). Loves Maistresse: or, The Queens Masque (London: Robert Raworth for John Crowch, 1636). A Marriage Triumphe Solemnized in an Epithalamium, In Memorie of the Happie Nuptials Betwixt the High and Mightie Prince Count Palatine. And the Most Excellent Princesse the Lady Elizabeth (London: [N. Okes] for Edward Marchant, 1613). Oenone and Paris (London: R. Jones, 1594). Philocothonista, or, The Drunkard, Opened, Dissected and Anatomized (London: Robert Raworth, 1635). A Pleasant Comedy, Called A Mayden-heade Well Lost (London: Nicholas Okes for John Jackson and Francis Church, 1634). [A Pleasant Conceited Comedie, Wherein is Shewed How a Man May Chuse a Good Wife From a Bad (London: Mathew Lane, 1602)]. Pleasant Dialogues and Dramma’s, Selected out of Lucian, Erasmus, Textor, Ovid, &c. (London: R. O[ulton] for R. H[earne], 1637). Porta Pietatis, or The Port or Harbour of Piety. Exprest in Sundry Triumphs, Pageants, and Showes (London: J. Okes, 1638). The Rape of Lucrece a True Roman Tragedie (London: [E. Allde] for I. B[usby], 1608).

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Select bibliography 299

The Rape of Lucrece a True Roman Tragedie … The Copy revised, and Sundry Songs Before Omitted, Now Inserted in Their Right Places. Acted by Her Majesties Servants at the Red-Bull. The Fifth Impression (London: John Raworth for Nathaniel Butter, 1638). The Royall King and the Loyall Subject, As it Hath Beene Acted with Great Applause by the Queenes Maiesties Servants (London: Nich. and John Okes for James Becket, 1637). The Second Part of, If You Know Not Me, You Know No Bodie (London: [Thomas Purfoot] for Nathaniel Butter, 1606). The Silver Age (London: Nicholas Okes, 1613). Troia Britanica (London: W. Jaggard, 1609). A True Description of His Majesties Royall Ship, Built this Year 1637. At Woolwitch in Kent … Published by Authoritie (London: John Okes for John Aston, 1637). A True Discription of his Majesties Royall and Most Stately Ship called the Soveraign of the Seas, Built at Wolwitch in Kent 1637 … Published by Authority (London: J. Okes, 1638). A True Relation, of the Lives and Deaths of Two Most Famous English Pyrats, Purser, and Clinton Who Lived in the Reigne of Queene Elizabeth (London: John Okes, 1639). The Two Most Worthy and Notable Histories Which Remaine Unmained to Posterity (viz:) the Conspiracie of Catiline, Undertaken Against the Government of the Senate of Rome, and the Warre Which Jugurth for Many Years Maintained Against the Same State. Both Written by C. C. Salustius (London: [William Jaggard] for John Jaggard, 1608 [i.e.1609]). See also: Heywood, Sallust. The Wise-woman of Hogsdon (London: M.P[arsons] for Henry Shephard, 1638). A Woman Kilde with Kindnesse (London: William Jaggard for John Hodges, 1607).

Modern editions ‘An Apology for Actors 1612’, in Tanya Pollard (ed.), Shakespeare’s Theater: A Source Book (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 213–54. The Captives, ed. Arthur Brown, Malone Society Reprints (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953). The Dramatic Works of Thomas Heywood, ed. Richard Herne Shepherd, 6 vols (London: John Pearson, 1874; repr. New York: Russell and Russell, 1964). The Escapes of Jupiter, ed. Henry D. Janzen, Malone Society Reprints (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978 [1976]). The Fair Maid of the West Parts I and II, ed. Robert K. Turner, Jr, Regents Renaissance Drama Series (London: Edward Arnold, 1968). ‘The first and second part of The Remedy of Love [attr. Sir Thomas Overbury]’, ed. M. L. Stapleton, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 43:1 (2001), 93–115.] The First and Second Parts of King Edward IV, ed. Richard Rowland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005). The Four Prentices of London By Thomas Heywood, in Ladan Niayesh (ed.), Three Romances of Eastern Conquest (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018). The Golden Age and The Silver Age (London: The Shakespeare Society, 1851).

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300

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His Majesty’s Royal Ship: A Critical Edition of Thomas Heywood’s ‘A True Description of His Majesties Royall Ship’, ed. Alan R. Young (New York: AMS Press, c. 1990). If You Know Not Me, You Know No Bodie: Or, The Troubles of Queene Elizabeth, ed. Madeleine Doran, Malone Society Reprints, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1935). The Iron Age, ed. Arlene W. Weiner as Thomas Heywood’s ‘The Iron Age’, Renaissance drama: a collection of critical editions (New York, Garland, 1979; published version of PhD dissertation, Brandeis University, 1971). Love’s Mistress, or The Queen’s Masque, ed. Raymond Shady (Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, 1977). Oenone and Paris, by T.H. Reprinted from the unique copy in the Folger Shakespeare Library, ed. Joseph Quincy Adams (Washington DC: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1943). Thomas Heywood’s ‘Art of Love’: The First Complete English Translation of Ovid’s ‘Ars Amatoria’, ed. M. L. Stapleton (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000). Thomas Heywood’s Pageants: A Critical Edition, ed. David M. Bergeron (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019 [1986]). Thomas Heywood’s ‘The Rape of Lucrece’, ed. Allan Holaday, Illinois Studies in Language and Literature, XXXIV:3 (Urbana: The University of Illinois Press, 1950), pp. i–viii, 1–186. Sallust: The Conspiracy of Catiline; The War of Jugurtha. Translated into English by Thomas Heywood, Anno 1608, intr. Charles Whibley (London: Constable, 1924). Three Marriage Plays [The Wise-woman of Hogsdon, The English Traveller, The Captives], ed. Paul Merchant (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996). Troia Britanica, ed. Yves Peyré et al. (2009–19), available at www.shakmyth.org, accessed 23 June 2020. A Woman Killed with Kindness, ed. A. W. Ward (London: Dent, 1897). A Woman Killed with Kindness, ed. Margaret Jane Kidnie, Arden Early Modern Drama (London: Bloomsbury, 2017).

Other primary sources Manuscripts Durham, Durham Cathedral Library, Hunter MS 96 London, British Library, Additional MS 4379 London, British Library, Additional MS 61744 London, British Library, Harley MS 1221 London, British Library, Harley MS 6048 London, British Library, Lansdowne MS 936 London, British Library, Royal MS 12 D VIII Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 346 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Eng. poet. f. 17



Select bibliography 301

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Printed books Accursius, Mariangelus, Diatribae [in Ausonium] (Rome: Marcellus Argenteus, 1524). Aelianus, Claudius, A Registre of Hystories, trans. A. Fleming (London: for Thomas Woodcock, 1576). Aeschylus et al., Tragoediae selectae Aeschyli, Sophoclis, Euripidis (Geneva: Henricus Stephanus, 1567). Alabaster, William, Roxana, ed. Dana F. Sutton, available at www.philological. bham.ac.uk/alabaster/, accessed 24 June 2020. Albricus, Allegoriae poeticae (Paris: de Marnef, 1520). Alciato, Andrea, Livret des emblemes (Paris: Chrestian Wechel, 1536). Aneau, Barthélemy, Picta poesis (Lyons: Macé Bonhomme, 1552). Anon., Tom Tyler and His Wife, ed. George Charles Moore Smith, Malone Society Reprints (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1910). —, The Tragedy of Locrine, ed. R. B. McKerrow, Malone Society Reprints (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1908). Apollodorus, The Library, trans. James G. Frazer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1921). —, Apollodorus’ ‘Library’ and Hyginus’ ‘Fabulae’, ed. and trans. R. Scott Smith and Stephen M. Trzaskoma (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 2007). Aristophanes, Aristophanes veteris comoediae princeps (Frankfurt: Johann Spies, 1586). Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Stephen Halliwell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). Ascham, Roger, The Scholemaster (London: John Daye, 1571). Ashmore, John, Certain Selected Odes of Horace, Englished … With Poems (Antient and Modern) of Divers Subiects, Translated (London: H. L. for Richard Moore, 1621). Athenaeus, Athenaei Dipnosophistarum sive Coenae sapientum Libri XV, trans. Natale Conti (Basel: Henricpetrus, 1556). Augustine, St, St. Augustine, Of the Citie of God With the Learned Comments of Jo. Lod. Vives, trans. John Healey (London: George Eld, 1610). Ausonius, Ausonius, ed. and trans. Hugh G. Evelyn-White, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1919–21). —, D. Magni Ausonii Burdigalensis … opera, ed. Joseph Juste Scaliger and Élie Vinet (Geneva: Jacob Stoer, 1588). —, Epigrams, ed. N. M. Kay (London: Duckworth, 2001). —, Obras, trans. and ed. A. Alvar Ezquerra, 2 vols (Madrid: Gredos, 1990), Kindle edition. —, Opera, ed. E. Vinetus and J. J. Scaliger (Bordeaux: Simon Millanges, 1590). See also 1588 edition, above. —, The Works of Ausonius, ed. P. H. Green (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). Baehrens, Aemilius (ed.), Fragmenta poetarum romanorum (Leipzig: Teubner, 1886). Beaumont, Francis, and John Fletcher, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, ed. Cyrus Hoy, in Fredson Bowers (gen. ed.), The Dramatic Works of the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), vol. I, pp. 1–110.

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302

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Beaumont, John, Bosworth-field with … Other Poems (London: Felix Kyngston for Henry Seile, 1629). Boccaccio, Giovanni, De claris mulieribus (Bern: Mathias Apiarus, 1539). —, [Genealogia deorum gentilium] De montium, silvarum, fontium, lacuum, fluviorum, stagnorum et marium nominibus Joannis bocatii peri genealogias deorum, libri quindecim, cum annotationibus Jacobi micylli (Basel: Johannes Herwagen, 1532). Bochius, Joannes, Historica narratio profectionis et inaugurationis serenissimorum Belgii Principum Alberti et Isabellae Austriae Archiducum … Auctore Joanne Bochio S.P.Q.A. à Secretis (Antwerp: Plantin, apud Johannem Moretum, 1602). Bossewell, John, Workes of Armorie (London: Richard Totell, 1572). Budé, Guillaume, Lexicon sive dictionarium graecolatinum G. Budaei, I. Tusani, R. Constantini (Geneva: Jean Crespin, 1562). Calepino, Ambrogio, Dictionarium Latinum (Modena: Dionysius Berthocus, 1502). Cartari, Vincenzo, Imagines deorum, qui ab antiquis colebantur, trans. Antoine Du Verdier (Lyons: B. Honoratum, 1581). —, Vincenzo Cartari’s ‘Images of the Gods and the Ancients’: The First Italian Mythography, ed. John Mulryan (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2012). Cats, Jacob, Silenus Alcibiadis, sive Proteus – Sinne-en Minne-beelden (Middleburg: ex officina I. Hellenij, 1618). Catullus, see: Propertius. Cawdrey, Robert, A Table Alphabetical (London: I. R[oberts] for Edmund Weaver, 1604). Caxton, William, The Recuile of the Histories of Troie … Translated out of Frenche by Wyllyam Caxton (London: William Copland, 1553). —, The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye (?Ghent: ?David Aubert for William Caxton, 1473/74). —, The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, ed. H. Oskar Sommer, 2 vols (London: David Nutt, 1894). See also: Raoul Lefèvre. Chapman, George, Achilles Shield. Translated As the Other Seven Bookes of Homer, Out of his Eighteenth Booke of Iliades (London: John Windet, 1598). —, The Crowne of All Homers Workes (London: John Bill, 1624–25?). —, Homers Odysses, Translated According to the Greeke (London: Richard Field for Nathaniell Butter, 1614–15). —, The Iliads of Homer, Prince of Poets (London: Richard Field for Nathaniel Butter, [1611]). —, Seaven Bookes of the Iliades of Homere, Prince of Poets, Translated According to the Greeke, in Judgement of his Best Commentaries (London: John Windet, 1598). Chaucer, Geoffrey, The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry Benson, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1933). Claudian, Claudian, trans. M. Platnauer, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1922). Colonne, Guido delle, Historia destructionis Troiae, trans. and ed. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1974).

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Conti, Natale, Natalis Comitis mythologiae, sive explicationum fabularum libri decem (Paris: Arnold Sittart, 1583). —, Natale Conti’s ‘Mythologiae’, trans. and ed. John Mulryan and Steven Brown, 2 vols (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2006). —, see also: Athenaeus. Cooper, Thomas, Thesaurus linguae romanae et britannicae (London: [Henry Denham], 1578). Cornarius, J. (ed.), Selecta epigrammata Graeca Latine versa (Basel: J. Bebel, 1529). Cunningham, Peter (ed.), Extracts from the Accounts of the Revels at Court, in the Reigns of Queen Elizabeth and King James I: From the Original Office Books of the Masters and Yeomen (London: Shakespeare Society, 1842). Dekker, Thomas, The Pleasant Comodie of Patient Grisill (London: [E. Allde] for Henry Rocket, 1603). Deloney, Thomas, The Works of Thomas Deloney, ed. Francis Oscar Mann (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912). Dio Cassius, History, trans. Earnest Cary with Herbert B. Foster (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914). Diodorus Siculus, Library of History, Volume II: Books 2.35–4.58, trans. C. H. Oldfather (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1935). Dutch love emblems of the seventeenth century, available at http://emblems.let. uu.nl, accessed 24 June 2020. Erasmus, Collected Works of Erasmus, ed. Craig Thompson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974–), The Correspondance of Erasmus: Letters 142 to 297 (1501 to 1514), vol. II (1975), and Literary and Educational Writings 2: De Copia. De Ratione Studii, vol. XXIV (1978). Estienne, Charles, Dictionarium historicum, ac poeticum (Lyons: Hercules Gallus, 1579). —, Dictionarium historicum, geographicum, historicum (Geneva: Jacob Stoer, 1590). Euripides, Euripides poeta tragicorum princeps (Basel: Johannes Oporinus, 1562). Fabyan, Robert, Fabyans Cronycle (London: William Rastell, 1533). Fanshawe, Richard, Selected Parts of Horace … Concluding with a Piece out of Ausonius, and another out of Virgil (London: for M. M. Gabriel Bedell, and T. Collins, 1652). Fenne, Thomas, Fennes Frutes (London: [T. Orwin] for Richard Oliffe, 1590). Foxe, John, Actes and Monuments (London: [John Daye], 1583). Fraunce, Abraham, The Third Part of the Countesse of Pembrokes Yvychurch: Entituled, Amintas Dale (London: [Thomas Orwyn] for Thomas Woodcocke, 1592). Giraldi, Lilio Gregorio, Lilii Graegorii Ziraldi Ferrariensis syntagma de musis (Strasbourg: Matthias Schurerius, 1511). —, Lilii Greg. Gyraldi Ferrariensis operum, quae extant, omnium (Basel: Thomas Guarin, 1580). Glasgow University emblem website, available at www.emblems.arts.gla.ac.uk, accessed 24 June 2020. Gosson, Stephen, Playes Confuted (London: Thomas Gosson, 1582). —, The Schoole of Abuse (London: Thomas Woodcocke, 1579). Gower, John, John Gower: Confessio Amantis, ed. Russell A. Peck, 3 vols (Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University Press, 2000–03).

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Grange, John, The Golden Aphroditis (London: Bynneman, 1577). Grotius, Hugo, Mare Liberum (Leiden: Elzevier, 1609). Guarini, Battista, Il Pastor Fido: or The Faithfull Shepheard, trans. John(?) or Charles(?) Dymock (London: [Thomas Creede] for Simon Waterson, 1602). Gwinne, Matthew, Nero tragædia nova (London: Edward Blount, 1603). Hall, Arthur, Ten Bookes of Homers Iliades, Translated out of French (London: [Henry Bynneman?] for Ralphe Newberie, 1581). Hazlitt, William, Lectures Chiefly on the Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth (London: Stodart and Steuart, 1820). Heinsius, Daniel [Theocritus à Ganda], Quaeris quid sit amor (Amsterdam: 1601). Henslowe, Philip, Henslowe’s Diary ed. R. A. Foakes, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Herodotus, Historiae libri IX, et de vita Homeri libellus, trans. L. Valla and C. Heresbach, ed. H. Estienne ([Geneva]: Henri Estienne, 1566). Hesiod, The Shield. Catalogue of Women. Other Fragments, ed. and trans. Glenn W. Most (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018). Hessus, Helius Eobanus, Poetarum omnium seculorum longe principis Homeri Ilias (Basel: Robert Winter, 1540). Holland, Philemon, The Philosophie Commonlie called the Morals Written by the Learned Philosopher Plutarch of Chaeronea (London: Arnold Hatfield, 1603). —, The Romane Historie Written by T. Livius of Padua … Translated out of Latine into English (London: Adam Islip, 1600). Holton, A. and T. MacFaul (eds), Tottel’s Miscellany: Songs and Sonnets of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Sir Thomas Wyatt and Others (London: Penguin, 2011). Homer, Odyssea, eiusdem Batrachomyomachia, Hymni, aliaque eius opuscula, seu catalecta, ed. O. Giphanius (Basel: [E. Episcopius] for Thedosius Rihelius, [1570?]). Horace, Horace his Arte of Poetrie, Pistles, and Satyrs Englished, trans. Thomas Drant (London: Thomas Marshe, 1567). —, Satires. Epistles. The Art of Poetry, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926). Hyginus, Fabulae, in R. Scott Smith and Stephen M. Trzaskoma (eds and trans.), Apollodorus’ ‘Library’ and Hyginus’ ‘Fabulae’ (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 2007). —, C. Julii Hygini Augusti liberti fabularum liber, ed. Jacobus Micyllus (Basel: Johannes Herwagen, 1535). —, Mythologici latini, ed. Hieronymus Commelinus (Heidelberg: Hieronymus Commelinus (heirs of), 1599). Jonson, Ben, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, ed. David Bevington, Martin Butler and Ian Donaldson, 7 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Justin, Justini ex Trogo Pompeio Historia (Basel: Michaeles Isingrinius, 1539). King, John (Bishop of London), Vitis Palatina: A Sermon Appointed to be Preached at Whitehall Upon the Tuesday After the Mariage of the Ladie Elizabeth her Grace (London: [Eliot’s Court Press] for John Bill, 1614). Lamb, Charles, Specimens of English Dramatic Poets: Who Lived About the Time of Shakespeare, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013 [1808]). Lanquet, Thomas and Thomas Cooper, An Epitome of Chronicles (London: William Seres, 1559).

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Lefèvre, Raoul, Le Recueil des histoires de Troyes [c. 1464] [?Ghent: ?David Aubert for William Caxton, c. 1474/75]. See also: Caxton. Linocier, Geoffroy, Mythologiae Musarum Libellus (Paris: Sittart, 1582). Livy, History of Rome, Volume I (Books 1–2), trans. B. O. Foster (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1919). —, The Romane Historie Written by T. Livius of Padua, trans. Philemon Holland (London: Adam Islip, 1600). —, Titi Livii Patavani Romanae historiae principis, libri omnes quotquot ad nostram aetatem pervenerunt, post varias doctorum virorum emendationes (London: Edmund Bollifant, 1598). Lodge, Thomas, A Defence of Poetry, in G. Gregory Smith (ed.), Elizabethan Critical Essays, 2 vols (London: Oxford University Press, 1904), vol. I, pp. 61–86. —, A Reply to Stephen Gosson’s School of Abuse, in Defence of Poetry, Music, and Stage Plays (London: np, 1579). Lucian, Luciani Samosatensis dialogi coelestes, marini, et inferni … Menippus Timon, ed. Joannes Sambucus (Strasbourg: W. Köpfel, 1550). —, The Works, trans. M. D. Macleod, 8 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1913–67). Lysias, Lysias Eratosthenes, hoc est, brevis et luculenta defensio Lysiae pro caede Eratosthenis, with a commentary by Andrew Downes (Cambridge: John Legate, 1593). Marlowe, Christopher, The Collected Poems, ed. Patrick Cheney and Brian J. Striar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). —, The Complete Plays, ed. Frank Romany and Robert Lindsey (London: Penguin, 2003). —, The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe, ed. Roma Gill, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987–98). —, The Tragedy of the Rich Jew of Malta. As it was Playd before the King and Queene, In His Majesties Theatre at White-Hall, by Her Majesties Servants at the Cock-pit (London: Nicholas Vavasour, 1633). Massinger, Philip, The Plays and Poems of Philip Massinger, ed. Philip Edwards and Colin Gibson, 5 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976). Meres, Francis, Palladis Tamia, Wits Treasury (London: P. Short for Cuthbert Burbie, 1598). Middleton, Thomas, Civitatis Amor: The citie’s love (London: Nicholas Okes for Thomas Archer, 1616). —, The Ghost of Lucrece (London: Valentine Simmes, 1600). —, The Ghost of Lucrece, ed. G. B. Shand, in Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (gen. eds), The Collected Works of Thomas Middleton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 1985–98. —, The Sun in Aries (London: Ed. All-de for H. G[osson], 1621). —, The Triumphs of Health and Prosperity (London: Nicholas Okes, 1626). —, The Triumphs of Integrity (London: Nicholas Okes, 1623). Montaigne, Michel de, Les Essais de Michel de Montaigne (Paris: Club Français du Livre, 1962). —, Montaigne’s Essays translated by John Florio, ed. L. C. Harmer, 3 vols (London: Dent, 1965 [1910]). Munari, F. (ed.), Epigrammata Bobiensia (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1955).

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Natta, Marcantonio, Marci Antonii Nattae Astensis De Deo libri XV (Venice: Paul Manutius, 1560). Noot, Jan van der, A Theatre Wherein be Represented As Wel the Miseries & Calamities that Follow the Voluptuous Worldlings, As Also the Greate Joyes and Plesures Which the Faithfull do Enjoy (London: Henry Bynneman, 1569). Ovid, Amores. See Heroides. —, Art of Love. Cosmetics. Remedies for Love. Ibis. Walnut Tree. Sea Fishing. Consolation, trans. J. H. Mozley, rev. G. P. Goold (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1929). —, The .xv. Bookes of P. Ovidius Naso, Entytuled Metamorphosis…, trans. Arthur Golding (London: Willyam Seres, 1567). —, The .xv. Bookes of P. Ovidius Naso, Entytuled Metamorphosis…, trans. Arthur Golding, facsimile of the 1567 edition, ed. W. H. D. Rouse (London: Centaur Press, 1961). —, Fasti, trans. James George Frazer, rev. G. P. Goold (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931). —, Fastorum libri VI. Tristium V. De Ponto III. In Ibin. (Basel: Johannes Herwagen, 1550). —, Fastorum lib.  VI; Tristium Lib.v.; De Ponto lib. iiii; In Ibim; Ad Liviam. (London: Thomas Vautrollier, 1583). —, Heroides. Amores, trans. Grant Showerman, rev. G. P. Goold (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977 [1914]). —, The Heroycall Epistles of the Learned Poet Publius Ovidius Naso, trans. George Turberville (London: Henrie Denham, 1567). —, Metamorphoses, trans. Frank Justus Miller, rev. G. P. Goold, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999 [1916]). —, Ovid’s Art of Love, in Three Books, Translated by Mr. Dryden, Mr. Congreve, &c, Together with the Remedy of Love, to Which Are Added, The Court of Love, A Tale from Chaucer, and the History of Love, Adornd with Cuts (London: Jacob Tonson, 1692). —, Ovids Heroicall Epistles, Englished by W[ye].S[altonstall] (London: R[ichard] B[adger] for M[ichael] Sparke, 1637). —, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, trans. Arthur Golding, ed. Madeleine Forey (London: Penguin, 2002). —, Publii Ovidii Nasonis heroidum epistolae (Venice, 1502). —, Publii Ovidii Nasonis poetae sulmonensis, heroides epistolae: cum interpretibus Hubertino (Venice: np, 1587). —, The Three First Bookes of Ovid de Tristibus Translated into English, trans. Thomas Churchyard (London: Thomas Marsh, 1580 [1572]). —, Tristia. Ex Ponto, trans. A. L. Wheeler, rev. G. P. Goold (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988 [1924]). Painter, William, The Palace of Pleasure Beautified… (London: [John Kingston and] Henry Denham for Richard Tottell and William Jones, 1566). Pausanias, Description of Greece, trans. W. H. S. Jones, 5 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1918–35). Peele, George, A Farewell, Entituled to the Famous and Fortunate Generalls of our English Forces. Whereunto is Annexed A Tale of Troy (London: J[ohn] C[harlewood], 1589).

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—, The Life and Works of George Peele, ed. Charles Tyler Prouty, 3 vols (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970). Pepys, Samuel, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Henry B. Wheatley, 9 vols (London: George Bell and Sons, 1904). Perkins, William, A Commentarie or Exposition, upon the Five First Chapters of the Epistle to the Galatians ([Cambridge]: John Legate, 1604). Petrarch, Letters on Familiar Matters, trans. Aldo S. Bernardo, 3 vols (New York: Italica Press, 2005). Pett, Phineas, The Autobiography of Phineas Pett, ed. W. G. Perrin ([London]: Navy Records Society, 1918). Plautus, Amphitryon, ed. and trans. Wolfgang de Melo (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). Plutarch, The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romanes, trans. Sir Thomas North (London: Thomas Vautroullier and John Wight, 1579). —, Moralia, trans. Frank Cole Babbitt et al., 16 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927–2004). —, Moralia quae usurpantur, trans. and ed. G. Xylander (Basel: Thomas Guarinus, 1570). —, Les Oeuvres morales & meslees de Plutarque translatees du grec en françois par Messire Jacques Amyot (Paris: M. de Vascosan, 1572). Propertius, C. Val. Catulli, Albii Tibulli, Sex. Avr. Propertii, opera omnia quae exstant (Paris: Claudius Morellus, 1604). Puttenham, George, The Arte of English Poesie (London: Richard Field, 1589). Quintilian, The Orator’s Education, ed. and trans. Donald A. Russell, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002 [2001]). Quintus Smyrnaeus, The Fall of Troy, trans. Arthur S. Way (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1913). Rabelais, Œuvres complètes, ed. Pierre Jourda, 2 vols (Paris: Garnier, 1962). Rider, John, Riders Dictionarie as it was heretofore corrected and with the addition of above five hundred words enriched: hereunto is annexed a dictionary etymologicall deriving every word from his native fountaine with reasons of the derivations and many Roman antiquities never any extant in that kinde before. By Francis Holyoke (London: Adam Islip, 1626). —, Riders dictionarie corrected and augmented with the addition of many hundred words, both out of the law, and out of the Latine, French, and other languages …: hereunto are anexed [sic] certaine tables explaining the names, weights, and valuations of antient and moderne coynes, as also a table of the Hebrew, Greeke, and Latine measures …: whereunto is ioyned a dictionarie etymologicall … / now newly corrected and greatly augmented by Francis Holy-Oke (London: Adam Islip and Felix Kyngston, 1633). Ripa, Cesare, Iconologia Overo Descrittione di Diverse Imagini Cavate Dall’Antichità, & di Propria Inventione (Rome: Lepido Faci, 1603). Rivière, I. Hillaire de la, Speculum Heroicum … id est argumenta xxiiij librorum Iliados (Utrecht: J. Janssen, 1613). Sallust, L’Histoire de C. Crispe Saluste touchant la conjuration de L. Serge Catelin … ensemble la guerre jugurthine … par Loys Meigret Lyonnois (Paris: Chrétien Wechel, 1547). —, C. Salustii Crispi de conjuratione Catilinae et de bello jugurthino historiae

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(Venice: Laurentius Bertellus, 1590). See also: Heywood, Sallust and The Two Most Worthy and Notable Histories. —, Sallust: The Conspiracy of Catiline; The War of Jugurtha. Translated into English by Thomas Heywood, Anno 1608, ed. Charles Whibley (London: Constable & Co, 1924). Sandys, George, Ovid’s Metamorphosis Englished, Mythologizd, and Represented in Figures (Oxford: John Lichfield, 1632). Scaliger, Julius Caesar, Select Translations from Scaliger’s ‘Poetics’, trans. Frederick Morgan Padelford (New York: Holt, 1905). Selden, John, Ioannis Seldeni Mare clausum seu De dominio maris libri duo… (London: Will. Stanesbeius, for Richard Meighen, 1635). Seneca, Senecæ tragœdiæ, ed. Benedictus Philologus (Florence, 1506). —, Seneca his Tenne Tragedies (London, Thomas Marsh, 1581). —, Tragedies, ed. and trans. John G. Fitch, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018 [2002]). Servius, Servii grammatici qui feruntur in Vergilii Bucolica et Georgica commentarii, ed. Georg Thilo (Leipzig: Teubner, 1887). Shakespeare, William, Complete Sonnets and Poems, ed. Colin Burrow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). —, Cymbeline, ed. Valerie Wayne (London: Bloomsbury, 2017). —, The New Oxford Shakespeare, The Complete Works: Modern Critical Edition, ed. Gary Taylor, John Jowett, Terri Bourus and Gabriel Egan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017 [2016]). —, The Passionate Pilgrime, Or Certaine Amorous Sonnets, between Venus and Adonis, Newly Corrected and Augmented. By W. Shakespere. The Third Edition. Where-unto is Newly Added two Love-Epistles, the First from Paris to Hellen, and Hellens Answere Backe Againe to Paris ([London]: W. Jaggard, 1612). —, et al., Sir Thomas More, ed. John Jowett, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Bloomsbury, 2011). Sidney, Sir Philip, Sidney’s ‘Defence of Poesy’ and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism, ed. Gavin Alexander (London: Penguin, 2004). —, Sir Philip Sidney: The Major Works, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Silius Italicus, Punica, trans. J. D. Duff (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1934). Sophocles, Ajax. Electra. Oedipus Tyrannus, ed. and trans. Hugh Lloyd-Jones (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994). —, The Women of Trachis, ed. and trans. Hugh Lloyd-Jones (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). Spenser, Edmund, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton (London: Longman, 1977). Sponde, Jean, de (ed.), Homeri quae extant omnia, 2 vols (Basel: E. Episcopius, 1583). Stanley, Thomas, Poems and Translations ([London]: for the author and his friends, 1647). Statius, Thebaid, ed. and trans. D. R. Shackleton Bailey, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). Stockwood, John (ed.), Progymnasma scholasticum. Hoc est, Epigrammatum Graecorum … Praxis (London: Adam Islip, 1597).

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Stubbes, Philip, The Anatomie of Abuses (London: [John Kingston for] Richard Jones, 1583). Suetonius, Lives of the Caesars. VI, Nero, trans. J. C. Rolfe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914). —, The Historie of Twelve Caesars, trans. Philemon Holland (London: [H. Lownes and G. Snowdon] for Matthew Lownes, 1606). Terence, The Comedies of Terence, trans. Frederick W. Clayton (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2006). Textor, Johannes Ravisius, Theatrum poeticum et historicum, sive officina Io. Ravisii, ed. Conrad Lycosthenes (Basel: Leonard Ostenius, 1592). Theodolus, Liber Theodoli (London: Wynkyn de Worde, 1515). Tibullus, see: Propertius. Valerius Flaccus, Argonautica, trans. J. H. Mozley (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1934). Valla, Lorenzo and Raphael Volterranus, Homeri poetarum principis cum Iliados, dum Odysseae libri XLVIII ([Antwerp]: Io. Grapheus, 1528). Varro, On the Latin Language, trans. Roland G. Kent (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1938). Vatican Mythographers, Scriptores rerum mythicarum latini tres Romae nuper reperti, ed. G. H. Bode (Celle: Schulze, 1834). —, The Vatican Mythographers, trans. Ronald E. Pepin (New York, Fordham University Press, 2008). Walbancke, Matthew, Annalia Dubrensia: Upon the Yeerely Celebration of M Robert Dovers Olimpick Games Upon Cotswold-Hills (London: Robert Raworth for Mathewe Walbancke, 1636). Warner, William, Albions England or Historicall Map of the Same Island (London: Edm. Bollisant for George Potter, 1602). —, A Continuance of Albions England (London: Felix Kyngston for George Potter, 1606). [?Whitney, Isabella], The Copy of a Letter, Lately Written in Meeter, by a Yonge Gentilwoman, to her Unconstant Lover (London: Richard Jones, 1567). Willet, Andrew, A Treatise of Salomons Marriage (London: Felix Kingston for Thomas Man and William Welby, 1612 [i.e. 1613]). Wilson, Thomas, The Arte of Rhetorique For the Use of All Such as Are Studious of Eloquence, Sette Forth in English by Thomas Wilson ([London]: Richard Grafton, [1553]).

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Studies, 19:1 (2016), 1–22, available at https://extra.shu.ac.uk/emls/journal/ index.php/emls/article/view/267, accessed 24 June 2020. Baines, Barbara J., Thomas Heywood (Boston, MA: Twayne, 1984). Baldwin, T. W., William Shakspere’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke, 2 vols (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1944). Baños Baños, J. M., ‘Traducción y tradición literaria: las Periochae Homeri de Ausonio’, in M. Puig Rodríguez-Escalona (ed.), Tradició clàssica: Actes de l’XI simposi de la secció catalana de la SEEC (Andorra la Vella: Ministeri d’Educaciò, 1996), pp. 153–9. Barbour, Reid, ‘Lucy Hutchinson, atomism and the atheist dog’, in Lynette Hunter and Sarah Hutton (eds), Women, Science and Medicine 1500–1700: Mothers and Sisters of the Royal Society (Stroud: Sutton, 1997), pp. 122–36. Barkan, Leonard, The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986). Bartsch, Shadi, Actors in the Audience: Theatricality and Doublespeak from Nero to Hadrian (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994). Bate, Jonathan, How the Classics Made Shakespeare (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019). —, Shakespeare and Ovid (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). Bath, Michael, Speaking Pictures: English Emblem Books and Renaissance Culture (London: Longman, 1994). Bayer, Mark, ‘Heywood’s epic theater’, Comparative Drama, 48:4 (2014), 371–91. —, ‘Popular classical drama: the case of Heywood’s Ages’, in Sean Keilen and Nick Moschovakis (eds), The Routledge Research Companion to Shakespeare and Classical Literature (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), pp. 227–35. Benson, C. D., The History of Troy in Middle English Literature: Guido delle Colonne’s ‘Historia Destructionis Troiae’ in Medieval England (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 1980). Berger, Thomas L. and Sonia Massai (eds), Paratexts in English Printed Drama to 1642, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Bergeron, David M., English Civic Pageantry 1558–1642, rev. edn (London: Edward Arnold, 2003 [1971]). —, Textual Patronage in English Drama, 1570–1640 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006). —, Shakespeare’s London 1613 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017). Bly, Mary, ‘Bait for the imagination: Danae and consummation in Petrarch and Heywood’, Comparative Literature Studies, 32:3 (1995), 343–59. Bozia, Eleni, Lucian and his Roman Voices: Cultural Exchanges and Conflicts in the Late Roman Empire (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014). Bradbrook, Muriel C., The Growth and Structure of Elizabethan Comedy (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1963 [1955]). —, The Living Monument: Shakespeare and the Theatre of his Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). —, Shakespeare and Elizabethan Poetry: A Study of his Earlier Work in Relation to the Poetry of his Time (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1964 [1951]). —, Themes and Conventions of Elizabethan Tragedy (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1964 [1935]). —, ‘Thomas Heywood, Shakespeare’s shadow: “a description is only a shadow, received by the ear” (An Apology for Actors)’, in Marie-Thérèse Jones-Davies (ed.), Du texte à la scène: langages du théâtre, Actes des congrès de la Société

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française Shakespeare (Paris: Jean Touzot, 1983), pp. 13–34, available at http:// journals.openedition.org/shakespeare/457, accessed 24 June 2020. Braden, Gordon, Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradition: Anger’s Privilege (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985). Brammall, Sheldon, The English Aeneid: Translations of Virgil, 1555–1646 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015). Branham, R. Bracht, Unruly Eloquence: Lucian and the Comedy of Traditions (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). —, ‘Utopian laughter: Utopia and Thomas More’, Moreana, 86 (1985), 23–43. Brooke, Tucker, and Mathias A. Shaaber, The Renaissance, 1500–1660, in Albert C. Baugh (ed.), A Literary History of England (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967 [1948]), vol. II. Brooks, Douglas A., From Playhouse to Printing House: Drama and Authorship in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Brown, Georgia, Redefining Elizabethan Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Brown, Pamela Allen, Better a Shrew than a Sheep: Women, Drama, and the Culture of Jest in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003). Burrow, Colin, Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Bush, Douglas, Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition in English Poetry, new revised edn (New York: Norton, 1963 [1932]). Busmann, Hendrik, Sovereign of the Seas, Die Skulpturen des britischen Königsshiffes von 1637 (Hamburg, Deutsches Schiffahrtsmuseum: Bremerhaven und Convent Verlag, 2002). Callender, Geoffrey, The Portrait of Peter Pett and The Sovereign of the Seas (Newport, Isle of Wight: Yelf Brothers Ltd, 1930). Camino, Mercedes Maroto, ‘“My honour I’ll bequeath unto the knife”: public heroism, private sacrifice, and early modern rapes of Lucrece’, in Jonathan Hart (ed.), Imagining Culture: Essays in Early Modern History and Literature (London: Routledge, 2015 [1996]), pp. 95–107. Cartelli, Thomas, Repositioning Shakespeare: National Formations, Postcolonial Appropriations (London: Routledge, 1999). Carter, Sarah, ‘Early modern intertextuality: post structuralism, narrative systems, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, Literature Compass, 13:2 (2016), 47–57. —, Ovidian Myth and Sexual Deviance in Early Modern English Literature (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Chapman, Alison A., ‘Writing outside the theatre’, in Susan Gossett (ed.), Thomas Middleton in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 243–9. Chernaik, Warren, The Myth of Rome in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Clark, Arthur Melville, Thomas Heywood, Playwright and Miscellanist (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1931). Clark, Sandra (ed.), Amorous Rites: Elizabethan Erotic Verse (London: Everyman, 1994). Clogan, Paul M., The Medieval Achilleid (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1968). Coffin, Charlotte, ‘Burlesque or neoplatonic? Popular or elite? The shifting value of classical mythology in Love’s Mistress’, in Janice Valls-Russell, Agnès

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Lafont and Charlotte Coffin (eds), Interweaving Myths in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), pp. 216–38. —, ‘From pageant to text: the silent discourse of Heywood’s omissions’, Cahiers Charles V, 43 (2007), 71–96, available at www.persee.fr/doc/cchav_01841025_2007_num_43_1_1502, accessed 24 June 2020. —, ‘Hercules’ (2009), in Yves Peyré (ed.), A Dictionary of Shakespeare’s Classical Mythology (2009–), available at www.shakmyth.org, accessed 24 June 2020. —, ‘Heywood’s Ages and Chapman’s Homer: nothing in common?’, in Tanya Pollard and Tania Demetriou (eds), Homer and Greek Tragedy in Early Modern England’s Theatres (Classical Receptions Journal, 9:1 (2017)), 55–78. Coldiron, A. E. B., ‘The mediated “medieval” and Shakespeare’, in Ruth Morse, Helen Cooper and Peter Holland (eds), Medieval Shakespeare: Pasts and Presents (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 55–77. Connor, Francis X., Literary Folios and Ideas of the Book in Early Modern England (London: Palgrave, 2014). Conte, Gian Biagio, The Rhetoric of Imitation: Genre and Poetic Memory in Virgil and Other Latin Poets, ed. and trans. rev. Charles Segal (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986). Cook, Trevor, ‘The scourge of plagiary: perversions of imitation in the English Renaissance’, University of Toronto Quarterly, 81 (2014), 39–63. Corrigan, Nora L., ‘The merry tanner, the mayor’s feast, and the king’s mistress: Thomas Heywood’s 1 Edward IV and the ballad tradition’, Medieval & Renaissance Drama in England, 22 (2009), 27–41. Cox Jensen, Freyja, ‘The popularity of ancient historians, 1450–1600’, The Historical Journal, 61 (2018), 561–95. Cross, F. L. and E. A. Livingstone (eds), The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Culhane, Peter, ‘Livy in early Jacobean drama’, Translation and Literature, 14:1 (2005), 21–44. Cullhed, Sigrid Schottenius, ‘In bed with Virgil: Ausonius’ Wedding Cento and its reception’, Greece & Rome, 63 (2016), 237–50. Cummings, L. A., Geo: Chapman his Crowne and Conclusion: A Study of his Handwriting (Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universität Salzburg, 1989). Deloince-Louette, Christiane, Sponde: Commentateur d’Homère (Paris: Champion, 2001). Demetriou, Tania, ‘George Chapman’s Odysses: translation and allegory’, in L. Capodieci and P. Ford (eds), Homère à la Renaissance: Mythe et transfigur­ ations (Rome: Académie de France à Rome, 2011), pp. 281–300. —, ‘The non-Ovidian Elizabethan epyllion: Thomas Watson, Christopher Marlowe, Richard Barnfield’, in Janice Valls-Russell, Agnès Lafont and Charlotte Coffin (eds), Interweaving Myths in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), pp. 41–64. — and Tanya Pollard, ‘Homer and Greek tragedy in early modern England’s ­theatres: an introduction’, in Demetriou and Pollard (eds), Homer and Greek Tragedy in Early Modern England’s Theatres, special issue of Classical Receptions Journal, 9:1 (2017), 1–35. Demoen, Kristoffel, ‘Epigrams on authors and books as text and paratext’, in

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M.  Kanellou et al. (eds), Greek Epigram from the Hellenistic to the Early Byzantine Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 67–83. Dessen, Alan C., Elizabethan Drama and the Viewer’s Eye (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1977). —, Elizabethan Stage Conventions and Modern Interpreters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). Dickson, Vernon Guy, ‘“A pattern, precedent, and lively warrant”: emulation, rhetoric, and cruel propriety in Titus Andronicus’, Renaissance Quarterly, 62 (2009), 376–409. Dinshaw, Carolyn, Lee Edelman, Roderick A. Ferguson et al., ‘Theorising queer temporalities: a roundtable discussion’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 13 (2007): 177–95. Di Salvo, Lucia, ‘La traduzione degli incipit omerici in un opuscolo del Corpus Ausonianum: le periochae Homeri Iliados et Odyssiae’, FuturAntico, 1 (2003), 115–70. Donaldson, Ian, The Rapes of Lucretia: A Myth and its Transformations (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1982). Drakakis, John, ‘Marmion, Shackerly (1603–1639)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004, doi.org.10.1093/ref:odnb/18083. Duncan, Douglas, Ben Jonson and the Lucianic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). Duncan-Jones, Katherine, ‘Much ado with red and white: the earliest readers of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis (1593)’, The Review of English Studies, 44 (1993), 479–501. Dutton, Richard, ‘Thomas Heywood and the publishing of The Jew of Malta’, in Kirk Melnikoff and Roslyn L. Knutson (eds), Christopher Marlowe, Theatrical Commerce, and the Book Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2018), pp. 182–94. Ehrhart, Margaret J., The Judgment of the Trojan Prince Paris in Medieval Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987). Eliot, T. S., ‘Thomas Heywood’, Elizabethan Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1968 [1963]). Enterline, Lynn, ‘Elizabethan minor epic’, in Patrick Cheney and Philip Hardie (eds), The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, volume 2: 1558–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 253–71. —, Shakespeare’s Schoolroom: Rhetoric, Discipline, Emotion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). Erne, Lukas, Shakespeare and the Book Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Fehrenbach, R. J. and E. S. Leedham-Green (eds), Private Libraries in Renaissance England: A Collection and Catalogue of Tudor and Early Stuart Book-Lists, 5 vols (Binghamton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1992–2004). Felber, Howard L. and Sesto Prete, ‘Ausonius’, in F. E. Crantz and P. O. Kristeller (eds), Catalogus translationum et commentariorum, vol. IV (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America, 1980), pp. 193–222. Ford, Philip, De Troie à Ithaque: Réception des épopées homériques à la Renaissance (Geneva: Droz, 2007). Fornara, Charles W., The Nature of History in Ancient Greece and Rome (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1983).

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Fry, Gérard (ed. and trans.), Récits inédits sur la guerre de Troie (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1998). Fuentes, Carlos, Myself with Others, Selected Essays (London: André Deutsch, 1988). Gantz, Timothy, Early Greek Myth: A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources, 2 vols (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). Gibbons, Daniel R., ‘Thomas Heywood in the house of the wise-woman’, Studies in English Literature, 49:2 (2009), 391–416. Gilbert, Allan H., ‘Thomas Heywood’s debt to Plautus’, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 12:4 (1913), 59–611. Gillespie, Stuart, ‘De rosis nascentibus from the Renaissance to the twentieth century: a collection of English translations’, Translation and Literature, 26 (2017), 73–94. Girard, René, A Theatre of Envy: William Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). Goy-Blanquet, Dominique, ‘“This realm is an empire”: tales of origins in medieval and early modern France and England’, in Janice Valls-Russell, Agnès Lafont and Charlotte Coffin (eds), Interweaving Myths in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), pp. 65–85. Green, Roger, ‘Ausonius in the Renaissance’, in I. D. McFarlane (ed.), Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Sanctandreani / Proceedings of the Fifth International Congress of Neo-Latin Studies (Binghampton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1986), pp. 579–86. Greene, Thomas M., The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982). Griffith, Eva, A Jacobean Company and its Playhouse: The Queen’s Servants at the Red Bull (c. 1605–1619) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Grivelet, Michel, Thomas Heywood et le drame domestique élisabéthain (Paris: José Corti, 1957). Gruder-Poni, Gabriella, ‘Cupid in the garden’, in G. Sambras (ed.), New Perspectives on Andrew Marvell (Reims: ÉPURE, 2008), pp. 27–41. Gurr, Andrew, ‘Elizabethan action’, Studies in Philology, 63:2 (1966), 144–56. Hadas, Moses, A History of Latin Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952). Hagedorn, Suzanne C., Abandoned Women: Rewriting the Classics in Dante, Boccaccio and Chaucer (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004). Hammill, Graham, ‘Instituting modern time: citizen comedy and Heywood’s Wise Woman of Hogsdon’, Renaissance Drama, 29 (1998), 73–105. Harbage, Alfred, Annals of English Drama 975–1700, rev. S. Schoenbaum, 3rd edn rev. Sylvia Stoler Wagonheim (London: Routledge, 1989 [1964]). Hartmann, Anna-Maria, English Mythography in its European Context 1500–1650 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). Hawkes, David, ‘Thomas Gresham’s law, Jane Shore’s mercy: value and class in the plays of Thomas Heywood’, English Literary History, 77:1 (2010), 25–44. Heavey, Katherine, ‘“Properer men”: myth, manhood and the Trojan War in Greene, Shakespeare and Heywood’, Journal of the Northern Renaissance, 7 (2015), 1–18, available at www.northernrenaissance.org/properer-men-mythmanhood-and-the-trojan-war-in-greene-shakespeare-and-heywood/, accessed 24 June 2020.

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Henderson, Diana E., ‘Many mansions: reconstructing A Woman Killed with Kindness’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 26:2 (1986), 277–94. — ‘A Woman Killed with Kindness and domesticity, false or true: a response to Lisa Hopkins’, Connotations, 5:1 (1995–6), 49–54, available at www.connotations. de/article/diana-e-henderson-a-woman-killed-with-kindness-and-domesticityfalse-or-true-a-response-to-lisa-hopkins/, accessed 24 June 2020. Hepp, Noémi, Homère en France au XVIIe siècle (Paris: C. Klincksieck, 1968). Hill, Tracey, Pageantry and Power: A Cultural History of the Early Modern Lord Mayor’s Show 1585–1639 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011). Hinds, Stephen, Allusion and Intertext: Dynamics of Appropriation in Roman Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Holaday, Allan, ‘Heywood’s Troia Britannica and the Ages’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 14 (1946): 430–9. Hopkins, Lisa, ‘The false domesticity of A Woman Killed with Kindness’, Connotations, 4:1 (1994–95), 1–7, available at www.connotations.de/article/ lisa-hopkins-the-false-domesticity-of-a-woman-killed-with-kindness/, accessed 24 June 2020. Hosington, Brenda M., ‘“Compluria opuscula longe festivissima”: translations of Lucian in Renaissance England’, in Dirk Sacré and Jan Papy (eds), Syntagmatia: Essays on Neo-Latin Literature in Honour of Monique Mund-Dopchie and Dirk Tournoy (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2009), pp. 187–205. Howard, Jean E., ‘Interrupting the Lucrece effect? The performance of rape on the early modern stage’, in Valerie Traub (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 657–72. —, The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England (London and New York: Routledge, 1994). —, ‘Thomas Heywood: dramatist of London and playwright of the passions’, in Ton Hoenselaars (ed.), The Cambridge Companion on Shakespeare and Contemporary Dramatists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 120–33. Hutcheon, Linda, A Theory of Adaptation, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2012). Jankowski, Theodora A., ‘Historicizing and legitimating capitalism: Thomas Heywood’s Edward IV and If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody’, Medieval & Renaissance Drama in England, 7 (1995), 305–37. Johnson, Nora, The Actor as Playwright in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Jones, Gwilym, Shakespeare’s Storms (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015). Kamps, Ivo, Historiography and Ideology in Stuart Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Kathman, David, ‘Edward Pudsey (bap. 1573, d. 1612/13)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2018, doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/71298. —, ‘Thomas Heywood (c. 1573–1641)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2014, doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/13190. Kean, Margaret, ‘A harmless distemper: accessing the classical underworld in Heywood’s The Silver Age’, in Fiona Macintosh, Justine McConnell, Stephen Harrison and Claire Kenward (eds), Epic Performances from the Middle Ages into the Twenty-First Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 181–94.

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Keilen, Sean and Nick Moschovakis (eds), The Routledge Research Companion to Shakespeare and Classical Literature (London: Routledge, 2017). Kenward, Claire, ‘“Of arms and the man”: Thersites in early modern English drama’, in Fiona Macintosh et al. (eds), Epic Performances from the Middle Ages into the Twenty-First Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 421–38. —, ‘Sights to make an Alexander? Reading Homer on the early modern stage’, in Tanya Pollard and Tania Demetriou (eds), Homer and Greek Tragedy in Early Modern England’s Theatres (= Classical Receptions Journal, 9:1 (2017)), 79–102. Kerrigan, John (ed.), Motives of Woe: Shakespeare and ‘Female Complaint’: A Critical Anthology (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991). Kewes, Paulina, ‘Roman history and early Stuart drama: Thomas Heywood’s The Rape of Lucrece’, English Literary Renaissance, 32:2 (2002), 239–67. Kidnie, Margaret Jane, Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation (New York: Routledge, 2008). Klein, Bernhard, Maps and the Writing of Space in Early Modern England and Ireland (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001). Knights, L. C., Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1962 [1937]). Kuskin, William, Recursive Origins: Writing at the Transition to Modernity (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013). —, Symbolic Caxton: Literary Culture and Print Capitalism (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008). Kyriakou, Poulheria, The Past in Aeschylus and Sophocles (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2011). Lea, K. M., Italian Popular Comedy: A Study in the Commedia Dell’Arte, ­1560–1620, with Special Reference to the English Stage, 2 vols (New York: Russell & Russell, 1962 [1934]). Leggatt, Alexander, ‘The audience as patron: The Knight of the Burning Pestle’, in Paul Whitfield White and Suzanne R. Westfall (eds), Shakespeare and Theatrical Patronage in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 295–315. Leitch, Thomas (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). Levin, Harry, The Myth of the Golden Age in the Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972 [1969]). Lively, Genevieve, ‘Teaching rape in Roman elegy, part I’, in Barbara K. Gold (ed.), A Companion to Roman Love Elegy (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), pp. 541–8. Lowe, Dunstan, ‘Triple tipple: Ausonius’ Griphus ternarii numeri’, in J. Kwapisz et al. (eds), The Muse at Play: Riddles and Wordplay in Greek and Latin Poetry (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012), pp. 335–52. Lyne, Raphael, ‘Writing back to Ovid in the 1560s and 1570s’, Translation and Literature, 13 (2004), 143–64. Mann, David, ‘Heywood’s Silver Age: a flight too far?’, Medieval & Renaissance Drama in England, 26 (2013), 184–203. Marsden, Jean, The Appropriation of Shakespeare: Post-Renaissance Reconstructions of the Works and the Myth (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991).

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Marsh, David, Lucian and the Latins: Humour and Humanism in the Early Renaissance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998). Martin, Robert Grant, ‘A critical study of Thomas Heywood’s Gunaikeion’, Studies in Philology, 20 (1923), 160–83. —, ‘Notes on Thomas Heywood’s Ages’, Modern Language Notes, 33 (1918), 23–9. Matz, Robert, Defending Literature in Early Modern England: Renaissance Literary Theory in Social Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). McIntyre, Jeanne, ‘Shore’s wife and The Shoemaker’s Holiday’, Cahiers Élisabéthains, 39:1 (1991), 17–28. McLuskie, Kathleen E., Dekker and Heywood: Professional Dramatists (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994). McMullan, Gordon and David Matthews (eds), Reading the Medieval in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). McQuade, Paula, ‘“A labyrinth of sin”: marriage and moral capacity in Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness’, Modern Philology, 98:2 (2000), 231–50. Milne, Kirsty, ‘The forgotten Greek books of Elizabethan England’, Literature Compass, 4:3 (2007), 677–87. Miola, Robert S., Shakespeare and Classical Tragedy: The Influence of Seneca (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). Morse, Ruth, Helen Cooper and Peter Holland (eds), Medieval Shakespeare: Pasts and Presents (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Moss, Ann, Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). Moss, Daniel D., The Ovidian Vogue: Literary Fashion and Imitative Practice in Late Elizabethan England (London: University of Toronto Press, 2014). Moul, Victoria, ‘England’s Stilicho: Claudian’s political poetry in early modern England’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition, online publication 13 May 2019, doi.org/10.1007/s12138-019-00529-z, accessed 24 June 2020. Mukherji, Subha, Law and Representation in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Munro, Lucy, Archaic Style in English Literature, 1590–1674 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). —, ‘Shakespeare and the uses of the past: critical approaches and current debates’, Shakespeare, 7:1 (2011), 102–25. Murphy, James J. (ed.), A Short History of Writing Instruction from Ancient Greece to Modern America, 3rd edn (New York: Routledge, 2012). Musgrove, S., ‘Some manuscripts of Heywood’s Art of Love’, The Library, s5-1:2 (1946), 106–12. Newlands, Carole E., Statius, Poet Between Rome and Naples (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 2012). Nocchi, Romana (ed.), Commento agli ‘Epigrammata Bobiensia’ (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016). Orlin, Lena Cowen, Private Matters and Public Culture in Post-Reformation England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994). Ortiz, Joseph M., ‘Epic Oenone, pastoral Paris: undoing the Virgilian rota in Thomas Heywood’s Oenone and Paris’, in Lynn Enterline (ed.), Elizabethan Narrative Poems (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), pp. 71–94.

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Pédeflous, Olivier, ‘Ravisius Textor’s school drama and its links to pedagogical literature in early modern France’, in Philip Ford and Andrew Taylor (eds), The Early Modern Cultures of Neo-Latin Drama (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2013), pp. 19–40. Perry, Curtis and John Watkins (eds), Shakespeare and the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Peters, Andy, Ship Decoration: 1630–1780 (Barnsley, S. Yorks.: Seaforth Publishing, 2013). Peyré, Yves, ‘Heywood’s library: the books Thomas Heywood used when he wrote Troia Britanica’, in Thomas Heywood, Troia Britanica, ed. Y. Peyré et al. ­(2009–19), available at www.shakmyth.org, accessed 24 June 2020. —, ‘Shakespeare’s mythological feuilletage: a methodological induction’, in Janice Valls-Russell, Agnès Lafont and Charlotte Coffin (eds), Interweaving Myths in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), pp. 25–40. Pfister, Manfred, The Theory and Analysis of Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Pigman III, George, ‘Versions of imitation in the Renaissance’, Renaissance Quarterly, 33 (1980), 1–32. Pollard, A. W., G. R. Redgrave et al., A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, and Ireland, 3 vols, 2nd edn (London: Oxford University Press, 1976–91). Pollard, Tanya, ‘Greek playbooks and dramatic forms in early modern England’, in Allison Deutermann and András Kiséry (eds), Formal Matters: Reading the Materials of English Renaissance Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), pp. 99–123. —, Greek Tragic Women on Shakespearean Stages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). —, (ed.), Shakespeare’s Theater: A Sourcebook (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004). Proctor, Robert, The Printing of Greek in the Fifteenth Century (London: Bibliographical Society, 1900). Purkis, James, Shakespeare and Manuscript Drama: Canon, Collaboration and Text (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). Quint, David, Origin and Originality in Renaissance Literature: Versions of the Source (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983). Rea, John D., ‘A source for the storm in The Tempest’, Modern Philology, 17 (1919), 279–86. Reeser, Todd W., ‘Du Bellay’s Dido and the translation of nation’, in P. J. Usher and I. Fernbach (eds), Virgilian Identities in the French Renaissance (London: Boydell and Brewer, 2012), pp. 213–35. Reeves, John D., ‘The judgment of Paris as a device of Tudor flattery’, Notes and Queries, 199 (1954), 7–11. Reid, Lindsay Ann, ‘Oenone and Colin Clout’, Translation and Literature, 25 (2016), 298–314. —, Ovidian Bibliofictions and the Tudor Book: Metamorphosing Classical Heroines in Late Medieval and Renaissance England (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014). Reynolds, George Fulmer, The Staging of Elizabethan Plays at the Red Bull Theater 1605–1625 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1940).

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Rhodes, Neil, ‘Marlowe and the Greeks’, Renaissance Studies, 27 (2013), 199–218. Richardson, Catherine, Domestic Life and Domestic Tragedy in Early Modern England: The Material Life of the Household (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006). Rivère de Carles, Nathalie, ‘“Seest thou not what a deformed theefe this fashion is?” Le costume-piège dans le théâtre renaissant’, Actes des congrès de la Société Française Shakespeare, 26 (2008), 122–39, available at http://journals.openedition.org/shakespeare/1470, accessed 24 June 2020. Roberts, Sasha, ‘“Let me the curtains draw”: the dramatic and symbolic properties of the bed in Shakespearean tragedy’, in Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda (eds), Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 153–74. Robinson, Benedict Scott, ‘Thomas Heywood and the cultural politics of play collections’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 42 (2002), 361–80. Rosenthal, Lisa, Gender, Politics, and Allegory in the Art of Rubens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Rossum-Steenbeek, Monique, van, Greek Readers’ Digests? Studies on a Selection of Subliterary Papyri (Leiden: Brill, 1998). Rowland, Richard, ‘The Captives: Thomas Heywood’s “whole monopoly off mischeiff”’, Modern Language Review, 90:3 (1995), 585–602. —, Killing Hercules: Deianira and the Politics of Domestic Violence, from Sophocles to the War on Terror (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017). —, ‘“Speaking some words, but of no importance”? Stage directions, Thomas Heywood, and Edward IV’, Medieval & Renaissance Drama in England, 18 (2005), 104–22. —, Thomas Heywood’s Theatre, 1599–1639: Locations, Translations and Conflicts (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010). Rutter, Carol Chillington, Documents of the Rose Playhouse (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999). Saunders, Julie, The Cultural Geography of Early Modern Drama, 1620–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Schmitz, Götz, The Fall of Women in Early English Narrative Verse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Secci, Davide A., ‘Ovid Met. 9.1–97: through the eyes of Achelous’, Greece & Rome, 56:1 (2009), 34–54. Sephton, James, Sovereign of the Seas: The Seventeenth Century Warship (Stroud: Amberley Publishing, 2013 [2011]). Silk, Michael, ‘Heracles and Greek tragedy’, Greece and Rome, 32 (1985), 1–22. Simonds, Peggy Muñoz, ‘Sacred and sexual motifs in All’s Well That Ends Well’, Renaissance Quarterly, 42 (1989), 33–59. Simons, Patricia, ‘Hercules in Italian Renaissance art: masculine labour and homoerotic libido’, Art History, 31:5 (2008), 632–64. Slaney, Helen, The Senecan Aesthetic: A Performance History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). Smith, Bruce R., Ancient Scripts and Modern Experience on the English Stage, 1500–1700 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988). Smith, D. K., The Cartographic Imagination in Early Modern England: Re-writing the World in Marlowe, Spenser, Raleigh and Marvell (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008).

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Smith, Susan L., The Power of Women: A Topos in Medieval Art and Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995). Sobecki, Sebastian I. (ed.), The Sea and Englishness in the Middle Ages: Maritime Narratives, Identity and Culture (Martlesham: Boydell & Brewer, 2011). Speed, John, The History of Great Britaine Under the Conquests of Ye Romans, Saxons, Danes and Normans… (London: William Hall and John Beale, 1611). Stapleton, M. L., ‘A Remedy for Heywood?’ Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 43:1 (2001), 74–92. —, ‘Edmund Spenser, George Turberville, and Isabella Whitney read Ovid’s Heroides’, Studies in Philology, 105 (2008), 487–519. Stevenson, Tom, ‘Women of early Rome as exempla in Livy, Ab urbe condita, book 1’, The Classical World, 104:2 (2011), 175–89. Straznicky, Marta, ‘The Red Bull repertory in print, 1605–60’, Early Theatre, 9:2 (2006), 144–56. Swinburne, Charles Algernon, The Age of Shakespeare (New York: Harper, 1908). Sullivan, Ceri, ‘Armin, Shakespeare and Heywood on dramatic empathy’, Notes and Queries, 62:4 (2015), 560–2. Sullivan, Dale L., ‘Attitudes toward imitation: classical culture and the modern temper’, Rhetoric Review, 8 (1989), 5–21. Tatlock, John S. P., ‘The chief problem in Shakespeare’, The Sewanee Review, 24:2 (April 1916), 129–47. —, ‘The siege of Troy in Elizabethan literature, especially in Shakespeare and Heywood’, Proceedings of the Modern Language Association, 30:4 (1915), 673–770. Temple, Camilla, ‘The Greek anthology in the Renaissance: epigrammatic scenes of reading in Spenser’s Faerie Queene’, Studies in Philology, 115 (2018), 48–72. —, ‘Inscription, ecphrasis and allegory: The reception of the ancient Greek epigram and the renaissance emblem in early modern English literature’ (PhD dissertation, University of Bristol, 2016). Thornton, David E., ‘Edgar and the Eight Kings, ad 973: textus et dramatis personae’, Early Modern Europe, 10:1 (2001), 49–79. Turner, Henry S., The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics, and the Practical Spatial Arts, 1580–1630 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Valls-Russell, Janice, ‘Ravishing the bride from the classical page to the early modern stage: Thomas Heywood’s The Rape of Lucrece’, Scènes de lit/Bedchamber Scenes, co-ed. Sujata Iyengar, Sarah Mayo and Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin, Arrêt sur scène/Scene Focus, 8 (2019), pp. 101–16, available at www.ircl.cnrs.fr/pro ductions%20electroniques/arret_scene/8_2019/ASF8_2019_09_vallsrussell.pdf, accessed 24 June 2020. —, Agnès Lafont and Charlotte Coffin (eds), Interweaving Myths in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017). Velte, Friedrich Mowbray, The Bourgeois Elements in the Dramas of Thomas Heywood (New York: Haskell House, 1966). Verity, A. Wilson (ed.), Thomas Heywood, intr. John Addington Symonds, The Mermaid Series (London: Vizetelly & Co, 1888). Wall, Kathleen, The Callisto Myth from Ovid to Atwood (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1988). Wall, Wendy, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993).

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Weaver, William P., Untutored Lines: The Making of the English Epyllion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012). Wentworth, Michael, ‘Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness and the genetics of genre formation: a response to Lisa Hopkins’, Connotations, 5:1 (1995–6), 55–68, available at www.connotations.de/article/michael-wentworththomas-heywoods-a-woman-killed-with-kindness-and-the-genetics-of-genre-for mation-a-response-to-lisa-hopkins/, accessed 26 June 2020. Whipday, Emma, Shakespeare’s Domestic Tragedies: Violence in the Early Modern Home (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). White, Paul, Renaissance Postscripts: Responding to Ovid’s ‘Heroides’ in SixteenthCentury France (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2009). Whittington, Leah, Renaissance Suppliants: Poetry, Antiquity, Reconciliation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). Wiggins, Martin and Catherine Richardson, British Drama 1533–1642: A Catalogue, 9 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011–18). Willis, Ika, Reception (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018). Womersley, David, Divinity and State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). Yoch, James, ‘The Renaissance dramatization of temperance: the Italian revival of tragicomedy, and The Faithful Shepherdess’, in Nancy Klein Maguire (ed.), Renaissance Tragicomedy: Explorations in Genre and Politics (New York: AMS, 1987), pp. 115–38. Zappala, Michael, Lucian of Samosata in the Two Hesperias: An Essay in Literary and Cultural Translation (Potomac, MD: Scripta Humanistica, 1990).

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Index

This index does not include references in the notes. Illustrations are indicated in bold. Single-mention references have not been included. Achilles 5–6, 38–9, 80–1, 87, 145, 149–50, 154–7, 168, 214, 232, 235, 257 Acrisius 101, 104–5, 109, 114–15 Admiral’s Men 17, 124 Aeacus 216, 218–19 Aelian 22, 169, 182, 186, 190, 195 Aeneas 71, 133, 147, 151, 191 Aeolus 251, 278 Agamemnon 6–7, 150, 156, 166 Ajax 12–13, 39, 131, 146–7, 155–6, 257 Alcestis 184–5 Alciato, Andrea 275, 279 Alcmena 101–3, 105–6, 109, 114–15, 207, 210, 219–24, 233, 254, 258 Alexander the Great 235–7 Althaea 171–3, 175 Amazons 166–8 Amphitryon (also Amphitrio) 101, 102–3, 105, 114, 207, 210, ­ 219–24, 233–4, 257 Andromeda 104–5, 114, 131 Anon. 1 and 2 Hercules 17, 237 Locrine 127–8 Tom Tyler and his Wife 128–9 Troye 17 Apollo 20, 38–9, 59, 64, 71, 219–20 see also Phoebus Apollodorus 127, 167, 174

Apuleius 16, 116 Arcas 70–1, 85 Argus 104, 274, 282–3 Aristophanes 131, 209, 229–30, 234 Aristotle 116, 235, 246 Athenaeus 10, 22, 169, 190–1, 194–5, 274–5, 284 Athene see Minerva Athens 230–1, 272 Ausonius 165, 171, 183–97, 199 Cento nuptialis 110, 187–9 epigram(s) 166, 170, 184, 186–91, 193–4 Griphus ternarii numeri 188, 190 Ludus septem sapientum 187–8 Periochae Homeri Iliados et Odysseae 187–8, 191–6, 193 see also Epigrammata Bobiensia; pseudo-Ausonius Austin, Henry 18, 55 Bacchus 110–11, 114, 230–1 Beaumont, Francis 259–60 Bellerophon 101, 103–4, 115, 256–7 Benoît de Sainte-Maure 141, 143 Boccaccio 102, 163–4, 169, 171 Brutus Lucius Junius 73, 163 Brutus of Troy 71, 151, 282 Callisto 70–2, 74–6, 79–88, 90–1, 109, 233, 247

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Index 323

Cambridge 12–14, 131 Cartari, Vincenzo 69, 163, 275–8, 285 Cassandra 40, 145–8 Castor and Pollux 173, 274–5, 283 Caxton, William 70, 99–102, 109, 141–4, 166, 168, 172 Recuyell 11, 75–6, 81, 85–6, 90–1, 102, 105–7, 110–15, 123, 130, 132, 139–57, 168, 171, 174, 233 Centaur(s) 106–8, 114, 124, 125, 132, 236, 237 Centauromachia 103, 107–9, 114 Ceres 109, 111–12, 115 Chapman, George 17, 20, 115, 237 The Crowne of All Homer’s Works 194 Iliads 20, 139, 194 Odysses 194, 196 Seaven Bookes of the Iliades of Homer 99, 140 translation of the Iliad 17, 139, 186 Charles I 16, 133, 163, 266–7, 269, 272, 275, 282, 284–6 Charles II 55, 286 Chaucer 6, 130, 141–2, 168 Christmas family (Gerard, John, Mathias, Christmases), 267, 282, 286 Cicero 171, 175, 185, 209 Clark, Arthur Melville 9, 15, 282 Claudian 112–13, 115, 187 Colluthus 32, 45–6 Congreve, William 55, 125 Conti, Natale 22, 41, 43, 76, 99, 102, 107–8, 110, 112, 163–4, 167, 169, 171, 194, 274, 278, 284–5 Cooper, Thomas 42, 103, 154, 164 Cressida 6, 141–2, 168 Crithaeis 197–9 Cupid 16, 46, 56, 59, 219–20, 278–9, 286 Danae 101, 104–5, 110, 114–15, 153, 233, 252, 255–6 Daphne 59, 64, 88 Dares Phrygius 140–2, 144, 149, 152, 154, 156

Deianira 125–7, 129–32, 174 Deidamia 81, 87 Dekker, Thomas 1, 237, 247 Diana 70, 74–6, 79–80, 82, 86, 88, 103, 109, 253, 277 Dictys Cretensis 140–1, 149, 154, 156 Diodorus, Siculus 173–4, 230 Diomedes 153, 168, 236 Dionysus see Bacchus Dryden, John 55, 125 Edgar, King 267, 279–82 Eliot, T.S., 7, 9 Epigrammata Bobiensia 187–9, 191 Erasmus, Desiderius 43, 57, 72, 208, 210–11, 231, 284 Essex, Earl of 123, 172 Estienne, Charles 110, 283 Euripides 116, 210, 229–30, 234 Eurytus 107, 173–4 Fabyan, Robert 281, 284 Flaccus, Valerius 166, 283 Florio, John 170, 175 Fuentes, Carlos 162, 176 Galantis 101, 106, 115 Ganymede 101, 207, 219–24, 257 Giraldi, Lilio Gregorio 164–7, 169, 176 Golden Fleece 171–2, 278, 282–3 Golding, Arthur 21, 38, 59, 104 Gosson, Stephen 245, 250, 257–8 Greece 15, 35, 146–7, 151, 186, 196, 214–15, 229, 231–2, 237, 239, 248, 250, 272 Guido delle Colonne 141, 143–4, 146, 148–50, 280 Hector 5, 12–13, 38–9, 145–51, 154–7, 168, 214, 236 Helen 4–5, 18, 32–5, 38–40, 42–7, 90, 109, 145, 148, 150–4, 157, 207, 209, 214–15, 222 hell 89, 112–13, 115, 123, 128, 208, 212, 214, 216–17, 220, 222, 259

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Henryson, Robert 141, 168 Henslowe, Philip 12, 17, 124, 237 Hercules 6, 15, 22, 46, 90, 101–2, 106–8, 114, 123–33, 173–5, 233–9, 254, 257, 258, 277–8 as actor 15, 229, 233, 238–9 as analogue for Christ 238 birth of 101–2, 105–6, 109–10, 114–15, 219, 233–4 capture of Iole 125, 173–4 deification of 126, 236 demise of 124–5, 132 and destruction of Oechalia 173–5 of Troy 123, 174, 259 enslaved by Omphale 46, 80, 127–9, 173 see also Omphale imitator of Jupiter 15, 232–5, 238–9, 248 labours of 101, 103, 124–5, 128, 166, 171, 232, 234, 236–8, 248, 259 madness of 132, 234, 237 and the Olympiads 106, 230, 232, 248 rape of Pyrene 132, 173 Hermes see Mercury Herodotus 10, 164, 166, 182, 195–6 see also pseudo-Herodotus Hesiod 125, 190, 245 Hesione 126–7, 150–1, 174–5 Heywood, Thomas passim Ages plays 4, 10–11, 15–18, 21, 99–101, 111, 113, 116, 146, 162, 164, 176, 209, 224, 233, 237, 244–60, 266, 285 An Apology for Actors 10, 12, 15, 18, 124, 132–3, 229–30, 234, 237–8, 244–50, 252, 255–7, 260, 293 as historiographer 254, 282 as mythographer 91, 102–16, 152, 162–4, 167–8, 174–5, 195, 278, 282, 284–5 mythographic reading of 11, 20–3, 102, 108, 115, 131, 139–44, 163, 167–9, 183–4, 282

mythography (use of) in plays 101, 112–14, 148, 163, 171, 175, 247, 250, 266 as scholar xiv, 18–19, 99, 157, 183, 194, 199–200, 266, 285 as translator 4–5, 10–11, 14–16, 18, 33, 40–5, 54–8, 61–2, 64–5, 87, 99, 112, 125, 152, 164–5, 172, 185–90, 194–5, 196, 208, 211–16, 218–19, 221–3, 234, 273–4, 279 see also Remedia Amoris audience(s) (also spectators) of 1, 6, 33–5, 40, 44, 48, 64, 70, 72–3, 75, 76, 80, 85, 87–9, 91, 101, 110, 115, 126, 127, 129, 146–9, 155–6, 171, 222, 224, 229, 231, 235, 237–40, 247, 251, 253–6, 258–60 in plays 8, 33, 74 diverse 9, 19, 20, 34, 101, 195 see also reader(ship) The Brazen Age 6, 17–19, 55, 80, 100, 124–32, 171–5, 234, 248, 254–5, 257, 260, 293 The Captives 9, 295 A Curtaine Lecture 4, 55, 295 dating of his classical plays 17–18 epithalamium/a 11, 110–11, 208 epitomes 187, 194–5 The Escapes of Jupiter 16, 70, 103, 126, 294 euhemerism 90, 110 Exemplary Lives and Memorable Acts of Nine the Most Worthy Women 4, 16, 18, 19, 20, 55, 295 The Fair Maid of the Exchange 162, 292 1 and 2 The Fair Maid of the West 11, 60–1, 123–4, 293–4 folio format and 18–19, 285 The Four Prentices of London 133, 293 gendered discourse of 190, 195, 197, 199 The Golden Age 5, 16, 18, 70–2, 75–6, 80–3, 85–7, 89–90, 101, 153, 171, 233, 247–56, 258, 260, 293

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Index 325 Gynaikeion 4, 10, 15, 18–19, 21–3, 55, 60, 69–70, 87–8, 100, 107, 110–12, 116, 131, 133, 163–7, 169–73, 182–91, 194–200, 284–5, 294 Hierarchie of the Blessed Angels 15–16, 18–20, 100, 131, 164, 171, 210–12, 214, 216–17, 224, 266, 275, 279, 284–5, 294 How a Man May Chuse a Good Wife from a Bad 55, 292 1 and 2 If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody 16, 123, 293 The Iron Age 5–6, 10, 12, 13–14, 16–17, 19, 34, 48, 100, 113–14, 131, 186, 210, 246 1 Iron Age 17, 33, 39, 47, 100, 139–57, 254, 257–8, 260, 266, 293 2 Iron Age 4, 12, 14, 17, 19, 100, 146, 168, 266, 293 1 and 2 King Edward IV 55, 58, 61, 255, 292 Life of Merlin 19, 295 Londini Artium 163, 294 Londini Emporia 163, 294 Londini Status Pacatus 172, 295 Loves Maistresse or The Queen’s Masque 16, 19, 260, 266, 295 Loves Schoole see Heywood as translator Marriage Triumphe 5, 293 Oenone and Paris 4–5, 14, 23, 32–48, 99, 292 pageant(s), 1, 10, 11, 12, 16, 89, 163, 164, 172–3, 266, 276, 278, 282, 283–5 Pleasant Dialogues and Dramma’s 10, 16, 19, 43, 45, 55, 90, 208–14, 218, 220, 224, 266, 279, 295 The Rape of Lucrece 2–4, 8, 11, 15–17, 21, 58, 60–3, 70, 72–80, 83–91, 99, 163–4, 255, 293 reader(ship) of 5, 8, 15, 18–20, 21, 32–3, 34–9, 42–8, 64, 69, 80, 87–8, 100, 168, 171, 174, 182,

185–6, 198, 199, 214, 218, 230, 247, 249, 254, 258, 274, 275, 277, 283 female 195, 197 see also audience(s) Remedia amoris, The First and Second Part of the Remedy of Love 10, 18, 55, 63–4, 294 see also Heywood as translator The Silver Age 16–17, 19, 70–1, 76, 99–116, 126, 163–4, 171, 175, 210–11, 218–24, 233–4, 237, 247–8, 253, 256–9, 293 Sovereign of the Seas 2, 10–12, 16, 22, 163, 266–86, 270–1, 279 Troia Britanica xiv, 4–5, 10–11, 15, 18–23, 33–4, 44, 47–8, 55, 70–1, 75–6, 80–2, 84, 86, 90, 99–100, 103, 123–4, 130, 132–3, 139–41, 151–2, 155, 162–4, 169, 172, 184–6, 239, 250, 252–4, 272–3, 276, 280, 284–5, 293 A Woman Killed with Kindness 1–4, 6–8, 11, 17, 21, 55–7, 199, 247, 293 Higden, Ranulf 166, 280 Hippodamia (also Hypodamia) 103, 106–10, 114, 234 Holland, Philemon 84, 116 Homer 10, 19, 33, 139–42, 144, 149, 153–4, 182–200, 231, 250–5, 258–60 as choric commentator 109, 115, 130, 146, 250–5, 258–60 as early dramatist 250 Ausonius’ synopsis of 187–8, 191–2, 195, 197 early modern editions of 45, 99, 192–4, 197 Iliad 140–1, 149–50, 154–6, 194, 252 mother of see Crithaeis Odyssey 194, 196, 250 opuscula 196, 199 see also pseudo-Homer Horace 163, 187, 230, 250, 282–3

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Hyginus 127, 166–9, 171–2, 173–5 Hypodamia see Hippodamia

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Iole 46, 125, 173–5 Jaggard, William 18, 99, 123 Janus 166, 272–3 Jason 124, 126, 129–32, 171–3, 269, 272, 278, 283 Jonson, Ben 20, 54, 58, 113, 115, 163, 230, 237 Joshua 102–3 Jove see Jupiter Julius Caesar 229, 235–7, 239 Juno 43, 75, 84, 101–2, 105–6, 108–9, 114, 219, 222, 232 Jupiter (also Jove), 3, 15, 22, 46, 70–1, 74–7, 79–86, 88, 90–1, 101–3, 105–10, 112–15, 124, 151, 153, 207, 209, 219–24, 232–5, 238–9, 247–8, 250–3, 255–8, 260, 278, 283 impersonation disguise cross-dressing by 74, 76, 80–2, 86, 88, 233 as rapist 70–1, 74–5, 81–3, 85–6, 88, 91, 255–6 Justin 166, 272–3 King’s Men 111, 114 Lefèvre, Raoul 70, 75, 81, 85, 90, 102, 115, 130, 141, 143–4, 148, 168, 171, 174 Lely, Peter 2, 12, 267–8, 276–7 Libellus de imaginibus deorum 167 Lichas (also Lychas) 125, 132–3, 236–7 Linocier 164–6 Livy 8, 62–3, 70, 72–3, 78, 83–4, 90, 163–4 Lodge, Thomas 34, 231, 245, 250 London 14, 16, 99–100, 151, 163, 231, 239, 244, 251, 278 Lucan 187, 274, 284 Lucian of Samosata 10, 16, 32, 43, 85, 90, 127, 207–24 as atheist 208, 211–14, 217, 224 as Christian 213

Dialogues of the Dead 207–9, 214–20 Dialogues of the Gods 45–6, 102, 207–9, 219–22 editio princeps 210 Greek-Latin edition 10, 213–16, 218–19, 222–3 Lucina 105–6, 110–11, 221 Lucrece 3–4, 8, 58–63, 69–75, 77–9, 83–6, 88–91, 163–4, 166 Lycaon 71, 74–6, 88 Lychas see Lichas Lydgate John 141–2 Margareton 148, 151 Marlowe Christopher 36, 207–8, 215, 222, 237, 257, 259 Dr Faustus 109, 207–8, 215 The Tragedie of Dido, Queen of Carthage 207 Mars 38, 124, 278 Massinger, Philip 133, 237–8 Medea 124, 172–3, 175, 283 Melpomene 89, 165, 197, 244, 248–9 Menelaus 38, 150, 152–3 Menippus 212, 214–16 Mercury (also Hermes) 42, 45, 163, 214–15, 219–24, 257 Middleton, Thomas 88, 90–1, 237, 278, 281 Minerva (also Athene Pallas) 43, 80, 194, 195–6, 220, 283 Montaigne, Michel de 169–70, 175–6 More, Thomas 210–11, 217 Moses 109–10 Muses 1, 15, 20, 56, 69, 100, 141, 164–5, 182, 190, 197–9, 213, 244, 249, 258 Myrmidons 155–6 Neoptolemus see Pyrrhus Neptune 38, 79, 251–2, 275, 278 Nero 132, 237 Nessus 124–5, 130, 132, 234, 236 Noah 269, 272–3 Odysseus see Ulysses Oechalia 173–5

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Index 327

Oenone 5, 32–3, 35–7, 39–48 Omphale 46, 80, 125, 127–30, 173 Orpheus 7–8, 21, 250 Ovid 5, 8, 10, 18, 20–1, 23, 32–4, 48, 54–62, 65, 70, 72, 75, 90, 99, 102, 114–15, 125, 139, 140, 142, 144, 152, 163, 166, 173, 187, 220, 284 Amores 20, 59, 61, 185 Ars amatoria 4, 15, 16, 18, 54–60, 62–4, 87, 125, 166, 185 Fasti 70, 72–4, 77, 83, 163–4, 172, 273 Heroides 18, 32–5, 37–8, 40–7, 72, 90, 125–8, 130, 139–40, 152, 166, 185 Metamorphoses 8, 38, 40, 58–9, 70, 72, 74–6, 81–2, 104–9, 113, 115, 125–6, 132, 139–41, 156, 170, 172–3, 175, 185, 194–5, 245, 252, 258 Remedia amoris 18, 55, 63–4 ‘Sabinus’ epistles 46–7 Tristia 20–1, 59, 109, 185 Pallas see Minerva Paris 5–6, 18, 32–48, 90, 145–6, 148, 150–7, 209 see also Oenone Payne, John 268, 270, 278–80, 279, 280, 282 Peele, George 41–2, 45, 48 Penelope 64, 194 Penthesilea 166–8 Perithous 106–10, 114 Perseus 101, 103–4, 252–3, 255–7 Petrarch 54, 58, 61, 169, 187 Pett, Peter 2, 12, 268–9, 282, 285–6 Phoebus 102–3, 165 see also Apollo Phryne 191, 195, 198 Plato 209, 245, 249 Plautus 9, 102, 105–6, 114–15, 164, 207, 210, 220–4, 233–4 Plutarch 10, 21, 116, 127, 169, 174, 194–5, 197, 210, 275, 281 see also pseudo-Plutarch

Pluto 101–2, 106, 112–14, 218–19, 251–2, 257–8 Polyxena 4, 145, 149 Priam 145, 147–8, 151, 168, 236 Propertius 108, 166 Proserpine 101, 103, 106–9, 111–15, 123, 164, 171, 234, 257–8 pseudo-Ausonius 187–8 see also Epigrammata Bobiensia pseudo-Herodotus 196–7 pseudo-Homer 196–7 Caminus (The Furnace) 196 pseudo-Plutarch 174, 197–8 pseudo-Seneca 125, 174–5 pseudo-Virgil 111, 165, 189 Pyrene 131–2, 173 Pyrrhus 4, 39, 168 Queen Anne’s Men 12, 70, 114, 124 Quintilian 43, 54, 56, 230 Red Bull Theatre 9, 12, 16, 71, 101, 124, 133, 250–1, 255, 258 Ripa, Cesare 276–8 Rome 59, 70, 73, 86, 125, 151, 163, 186, 229, 248 Sallust 15, 18, 99, 125 Sandys, George 109, 191 Sappho 37, 185, 190–1 Saturn 108, 250, 252 Satyrs 40, 74, 253, 277 Semele 101–2, 106, 109–11, 114–15 Seneca 6–7, 79, 88, 102, 163, 166, 174, 234 see also pseudo-Seneca Shakespeare, William 1, 15, 18, 20–1, 23, 32, 54, 90, 115, 140, 168, 175, 231, 237, 266, 286 All’s Well That Ends Well 208 Antony and Cleopatra 234, 275, 281 As You Like It 1 Cymbeline 71, 77, 111, 233 Hamlet 10

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Shakespeare, William (cont.) Love’s Labour’s Lost 234 Macbeth 17, 77, 79, 163 A Midsummer Night’s Dream 69, 114 Much Ado about Nothing 234 Othello 64, 78 Pericles 9 The Rape of Lucrece 3, 17, 77–8, 84, 88, 90–1 The Tempest 111, 208 Titus Andronicus 146, 233 Troilus and Cressida 6, 168 Venus and Adonis 5, 20, 23, 32, 34–41, 47, 87, 162 The Winter’s Tale 111–12 Sibyls 186, 190 Sidney, Philip 127–8, 245–7, 249, 257, 259–60 Defence of Poesy 245–7 Silius, Italicus 131–2, 173, 187 Sophocles 116, 125–6, 131, 174, 229–30, 234 Speed, John 19, 280–2 Spenser, Edmund 42, 102, 129 Statius 86, 102 Studley, John 6, 79 Swinburne, Algernon Charles 1, 9, 113 Telamon 126–7, 173–4 Textor, Johannes Ravisius 107, 163–4, 166, 168–70, 173–4, 208, 214, 216, 219, 272–5, 283–4

Thersites 146, 155–7, 215 Theseus 106–7, 114, 232, 235, 237, 239 Thespis 191, 230, 232 Thespius, daughters of 126, 130–1 Troilus 6, 141–2, 148–50, 154–6, 236 Troy (incl. Trojan stories, Trojan War), 12–15, 13–14, 17, 32–3, 36–44, 47–8, 70, 74–5, 81, 90, 102, 123, 126, 130, 139–42, 144–8, 150–1, 153–7, 168, 174, 235–6, 252, 259, 269 Tullia 163, 166 Turberville, George 34, 38, 40–1, 43, 46, 126 Ulysses (also Odysseus) 155–6, 194–6, 257–8 Valerius, Maximus 22, 169, 182, 185–6 Venus 5, 35–9, 42–5, 56, 104, 109, 124, 273 Virgil 33, 70, 99, 140, 142, 147, 166, 168, 187, 189, 191, 231, 252, 277 see also pseudo-Virgil Volaterranus, Raphael 193, 213 Vulcan 219–20 Warner, William 75, 81, 90 Webster, John 1, 249, 260 Wilson, Thomas 56–7 Xylander, Gulielmus 194, 197