author
Thomas Heywood
d. 1641
A prolific English playwright and actor of the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean stage, he was known in his own time for an astonishingly large output and a gift for bringing everyday life onto the stage. Best remembered now for A Woman Killed with Kindness and An Apology for Actors, he helped shape popular theatre in early 17th-century London.
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Thomas Heywood
by Thomas Heywood
About the author
Working in London’s theatre world around the turn of the 17th century, he wrote for the public stage, acted, and became associated with major playing companies. Sources agree that he was extraordinarily productive, with Heywood himself famously claiming a hand in some 200 plays, though only a fraction survive today.
His writing ranged widely across tragedy, comedy, pageants, and prose. He is especially remembered for A Woman Killed with Kindness, often noted as an early domestic tragedy, and for An Apology for Actors (1612), a lively defense of the theatre and the profession of acting.
Details of his early life remain uncertain, though he is generally linked with Lincolnshire and may have attended Cambridge. He died in London on August 16, 1641, leaving behind a body of work that offers a vivid picture of popular English drama in the years after Shakespeare.