HEYWOOD, THOMAS. - English playwright and polygraph, born in Lincolnshire to a well-to-do family; he lived between 1573 and August 1641. He studied at Cambridge and soon entered the theatrical milieu as both author and actor.
He wrote, alone and in collaboration, about 220 plays (only 24 survive), but also tried his hand at every literary genre, publishing translations, adaptations, poems, scholarly works in prose and verse, and pamphlets of various kinds. From 1631 he was annually commissioned to write the *pageants* for the Lord Mayor’s procession in London. Heywood was a man of the theatre, endowed with modesty and a simple faith in Christian virtues such as kindness, piety, and forgiveness; he understood his audience and catered to its bourgeois tastes.