Thomas Heywood and the classical tradition

Bol Partner

This collection offers a groundbreaking study of Thomas Heywood’s fascinatingly individual engagement with the classics across his writing career. It considers the wide diversity of genres to which he contributed, including dramas, translations, compendia, and iconographical designs, and attends to the shaping role of classics in his authorial self-fashioning and idiosyncratic aesthetic. 'Thomas Heywood and the Classical Tradition addresses an important gap in our appreciation of how one of Shakespeare’s most prolific and unfairly denigrated contemporaries read and reworked the classics throughout his long literary career, which spanned the reigns of Elizabeth I, James I and Charles I. The scholars gathered in this book detect classical influence across the impressive range of forms mastered by Heywood, which included domestic tragedies, city comedies and mythological and historical plays, along with compendia, civic pageants, pamphlets, translations and a national epic.' Sonia Massai, Professor in Shakespeare Studies at King's College LondonClose readings demonstrate the depth and breadth of Heywood’s classicism, establishing the rich influence of continental editions and translations of Latin and Greek texts, early modern mythographies, chronicles and the medieval tradition of Troy as revived by the Tudors. The essays probe Heywood’s habit of juxtaposing different and often disjunctive layers of a capaciously conceived ‘classical tradition’ in thought-provoking ways, attend to his use of the multiplicitous logic of myth to interrogate gender and heroism, and consider the way he turns to antiquity not only to celebrate but also to defamiliarise the theatrical or political present. Contributions to the volume focus on A Woman Killed with Kindness, Oenone and Paris, Loves School, The Rape of Lucrece, Troia Britanica, the Ages plays, Gynaikeion, Dialogues and Dramma’s, Apology for Actors, Sovereign of the Seas. Classical reception thus provides an illuminating, productively cross-generic angle for approaching Heywood’s prolific output and idiosyncratic aesthetic that will be valuable to undergraduates as well as specialist researchers. This volume offers the first in-depth investigation of Thomas Heywood’s engagement with the classics. Its introduction and twelve essays trace how the classics shaped Heywood’s work in a variety of genres across a writing career of over forty years, ranging from drama, epic and epyllion, to translations, compendia and the design of a warship for Charles I. Close readings demonstrate the influence of a capaciously conceived classical tradition that included continental editions and translations of Latin and Greek texts, early modern mythographies and the medieval tradition of Troy. They attend to Heywood’s thought-provoking imitations and juxtapositions of these sources, his use of myth to interrogate gender and heroism, and his turn to antiquity to celebrate and defamiliarise the theatrical or political present. Heywood’s better-known works are discussed alongside critically neglected ones, making the collection valuable for undergraduates and researchers alike.

Bol

This volume offers the first in-depth investigation of Thomas Heywood’s engagement with the classics. Its introduction and twelve essays trace how the classics shaped Heywood’s work in a variety of genres across a writing career of over forty years, ranging from drama, epic and epyllion, to translations, compendia and the design of a warship for Charles I. Close readings demonstrate the influence of a capaciously conceived classical tradition that included continental editions and translations of Latin and Greek texts, early modern mythographies and the medieval tradition of Troy. They attend to Heywood’s thought-provoking imitations and juxtapositions of these sources, his use of myth to interrogate gender and heroism, and his turn to antiquity to celebrate and defamiliarise the theatrical or political present. Heywood’s better-known works are discussed alongside critically neglected ones, making the collection valuable for undergraduates and researchers alike.