the celebrated Spaniard
Lopez de Vega can vie with him. In his preface to one of his plays he
observes, that this Tragi-comedy is one preserved amongst two hundred
and twenty, "in which I have had either an entire hand, or at least a
main finger." Of this prodigious number, Winstanley, Langbaine, and
Jacob agree, that twenty-four only remain; the reason Heywood himself
gives is this; "That many of them by shifting and change of companies
have been negligently lost; others of them are still retained in the
hands of some actors, who think it against their profit to have them
come in print, and a third, that it was never any great ambition in me
to be voluminously read." These seem to be more plausible reasons than
Winstanley gives for their miscarriage; "It is said that he not only
acted himself every day, but also wrote each day a sheet; and that he
might lose no time, many of his plays were composed in the tavern, on
the backside of tavern bills, which may be the occasion that so many
of them are lost." That many of our author's plays might be plann'd,
and perhaps partly composed in a tavern is very probable, but that any
part of them was wrote on a tavern bill, seems incredible, the tavern
bill being seldom brought upon the table till the guests are going to
depart; besides as there is no account of Heywood's being poor, and
when his employment is considered, it is almost impossible he could
have been so; there is no necessity to suppose this very strange
account to be true. A poet not long dead was often obliged to study
in the fields, and write upon scraps of paper, which he occasionally
borrowed; but his case was poverty, and absolute want.[1] Langbaine
observes of our author, that he was a general scholar, and a tolerable
linguist, as his several translations from Lucian, Erasmus, Texert,
Beza, Buchanan, and other Latin and Italian authors sufficiently
manifest. Nay, further, says he, "in several of his plays, he has
borrowed many ornaments from the ancients, as more particularly in his
play called the Ages, he has interspersed several things borrowed from
Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Seneca, Plautus, which extremely set them off."
What opinion the wits of his age had of him, may appear from the
following verses, extracted from of one of the poets of those
times.[2]

The squibbing Middleton, and Heywood sage,
Th' apologetick Atlas of the stage;
Well of the golden age he could entreat,
But little of the metal he