The Golden Age Rescored?: Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Thomas Heywood’s The Ages

In 1908, Felix Emmanuel Schelling stated that Thomas Heywood ‘sat’ with a ‘copy of the Metamorphoses on his left hand and translated it into five plays, omitting little and extenuating nothing’. However, Heywood’s so-called Ages (1610-1612) – The Golden Age, The Silver Age, The Brazen Age, The Iron Age (parts 1 and 2) – make no obvious non-verbal or verbal reference to Ovid’s poem. This essay considers how the Ages’ fundamental engagement with the Metamorphoses is related to structure rather than mythic content itself and argues that the plays are Ovidian adaptations before-the-letter. If Ben Jonson conceived of The Golden Age Restor’d (1615),these five plays are Heywood’s golden age rescored.

Writing for the Inner Eye

Abraham Cowley reacted against the tradition of divine poetry that Du Bartas embodied, arguing that scriptural poets needed to have technical expertise and spiritual insight. As later seventeenth-century poets like Thomas Heywood, John Perrot, and Samuel Pordage became aware of the limits of simply describing literal truths from the Bible and natural world, they reverted to allegorical and other figurative narrative structures that could accommodate higher truths to the human imagination and describe psychological experience. John Milton had known Sylvester’s translation since he was a teenager, but Paradise Lost makes purposeful allusions that surpass Devine Weekes, showing how difficult it is to apprehend divine truth, and how interpretation depends on our point of view. Lucy Hutchinson’s meditations on Genesis revise Du Bartas’ poetics to strip away extraneous material that distracts from scriptural truth.

Margaret Jane Kidnie, ed. A Woman Killed with Kindness, by Thomas Heywood. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. Pp xviii, 301. Paperback £14.99. ISBN: 9781904271581

This review considers A Woman Killed with Kindness.

The theatrical adaptation of Merry More

The early modern play Sir Thomas More, written by Anthony Munday, Henry Chettle, Thomas Dekker, Thomas Heywood, and William Shakespeare, takes an ecumenical viewpoint of the play's Catholic hero in order to conform to the expectations of the Master of the Revels and to appeal to a cross-confessional audience. The playwrights carefully construct the play within the confines of censorship by centering the play's action around More's dynamic personality instead of giving a full exposition of historical plot. More's personality and famous wit function together as a means for diverting attention away from the controversy surrounding More's silent opposition to Henrician policy while subtly validating his martyrdom. The argument of this article examines the adaptation of the play's ideologically diverse source material, the playwrights’ use of martyrological conventions, and the subtle traces of Erasmian allusion and recusant rhetoric in its reading of the play.