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.
Table of Content
Introduction: Thomas Heywood and ‘the antique world’
Janice Valls-Russell and Tania Demetriou 1 Intertextuality and Thomas Heywood’s early Ovid:
Oenone and Paris
Katherine Heavey 2 Thomas Heywood’s
Loves Schoole: emulation, adaptation, and anachronism
M. L. Stapleton 3 Rescripting classical stories of rape from page to stage: Lucrece and Callisto
Janice Valls-Russell 4 ‘Interlaced with sundry histories’: the open structure of
The Silver Age
Yves Peyré 5 A ‘glorious Greek’? Thomas Heywood and Hercules
Richard Rowland 6 The not-so-classical tradition: mythographic complexities in
1 Iron Age
Charlotte Coffin 7 Reading the classics, but how? mythographic paradigms and ‘ill-joined marquetry’
Yves Peyré 8 Compendious poetry: Homer and Ausonius in Thomas Heywood’s
Various History Concerninge Women
Tania Demetriou 9 ‘The scene lies in Hel’: the world of Lucian in Thomas Heywood’s ‘stage-poetry’
Camilla Temple 10 Acting like Greeks
Tanya Pollard 11 A theatre for the Iron Age: theorising practice in Thomas Heywood’s
Ages plays
Chloe Kathleen Preedy 12 The
Sovereign of the Seas: Thomas Heywood’s 3D engagement with the classics
Janice Valls-Russell
Appendix: Heywood’s works: a chronological table
Select bibliography
Index
About the author
Tania Demetriou is lecturer at the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge Janice Valls-Russell is a principal research associate of France’s National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) at the University Paul Valéry, Montpellier