Edited by Tania Demetriou and Janice Valls-Russell, Thomas Heywood and the Classical Tradition expands the critical consideration given to the copious literary output of Heywood, taking as its unifying theme the early modern playwright's prodigious use and adaptation of classical sources. The twelve contributors examine a wide range of Heywood's work, and their impressive coverage speaks to both their own and Heywood's intellectual depth and creative breadth. The scholars deftly demonstrate how Heywood skillfully adapts his classical sources and interweaves others throughout many of his plays, histories, treatises, and masques, often in surprising ways. In their introduction, Demetriou and Valls-Russell illustrate what they refer to as this porous relationship between Heywood and his classical knowledge when they map the story of Lucrece's rape and Heywood's dramatic adaptation onto his well-known domestic tragedy, A Woman Killed with Kindness, revealing how Heywood makes both these plays question domestic gender ideology (4). This analysis, like so many in the collection, highlights new ideas about previously examined works while bringing Heywood's less well-known texts to the forefront.
The detailed comparison among these plays and classical antecedents results in a new view of the complexities of Heywood's characters, women in particular, even as he uses familiar characters and plots. All of the contributors offer similar new perspectives on old tales and Heywood's work, beginning with Katherine Heavey, who examines how Heywood blends Ovid and other early modern perceptions of classical stories in the epyllion Oenone and Paris to create new versions of these characters who are more complex and sympathetic to the abandoned nymph. Focusing on another of Heywood's interactions with Ovid, M. L. Stapleton reveals how Heywood reworks the classical author's misogynistic writings in the translation Loves Schoole to produce a version much friendlier to women. Similarly sympathetic portrayals of women feature in Valls-Russell's analysis of Heywood's plays The Rape of Lucrece and The Golden Age, where Lucrece and Callisto become more fully realized and dynamic characters. Yves Peyré argues that, although The Silver Age seems like a disparate grouping of multiple myths, a pattern emerges whereby all of the stories feature a tension between female fertility and forms of imprisonment combated by male heroes. A critical examination of heroics features in Richard Rowland's chapter about Heywood's Hercules, especially in The Brazen Age, which illustrates the demigod's dual nature of beneficent strength and cruel violence, especially regarding women.
Analysis of the Age plays continues with Charlotte Coffin's chapter on 1 Iron Age, which details how Heywood draws heavily on William Caxton's Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye to produce a dramatic version of the epic tale preoccupied with forward-looking but bleak views of Troy's legacy. Peyré's second offering in the volume looks again at seemingly disjointed elements that form a meaningful pattern, this time across a range of Heywood's works that draw on both classical texts and a cumulative early modern understanding of those stories in order to create new versions. This fluid use of the classics can be seen in Demetriou's chapter on Gynaikeion, which Heywood bases not on The Iliad or The Odyssey themselves but on the Roman writer Ausonius's summaries of the Homeric epics, a miscellany-like compilation whose multifarious construction invites readers to make their own connections and commentary. Camilla Temple examines how the dialogues of Lucian, in particular on the underworld, appear not only as translations in Heywood's Pleasant Dialogues and Dramma's and The Hierarchie of the Blessed Angells but also as an influence for the satirical reworking of the Olympians in The Silver Age. Returning to ancient Greek culture, Tanya Pollard illustrates how Heywood conceives of acting as an important inheritance from ancient Greece that bequeaths ideas of heroic action to his dramatic characters and the audience. Continuing this study of the theater, Chloe Kathleen Preedy examines how Heywood in his Ages plays uses drama to bring classical knowledge to the populace, firmly grounding the world of his mythological stories in the physical reality of the playhouse. In the last chapter, Valls-Russell interrogates a pamphlet on Charles I's ship Sovereign of the Seas to demonstrate Heywood's use of mythological, biblical, and historical sources to describe the vessel's decorations and how they assert the king's—and thus Britain's—superiority. To Demetriou and Valls-Russell's credit, Heywood and the Classical Tradition benefits from the way the chapters are often in conversation, with various authors referring to their fellow contributors’ arguments, further unifying the issues discussed even beyond the subject matter alone. The result is a collection of analyses interwoven as thoughtfully as are the classical sources in Heywood's work.
Ultimately, Thomas Heywood and the Classical Tradition follows the strategy of its subject, bringing together a multitude of creative works and their sources to present the reader with a wide-ranging examination that conveys not only how prolific and creative Heywood was, but also the far-reaching and varied presence of the classical tradition in early modern England. Because of the scope of the texts covered, from various authors of antiquity to medieval and other Renaissance versions of the classics,, Heywood and other early modern creators, Demetriou and Valls-Russell's collection, with its many detailed, nuanced considerations of how these texts blend, contrast, and inform each other will be useful even beyond readers interested in Heywood's use of classical sources.
