HEYWOOD, Thomas, a voluminous English dramatist of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was born in Lincolnshire, and was educated at Cambridge, where he became a fellow of Peter-house. The dates of his birth and death are alike unknown, and the few facts of his life that are known have been gleaned chiefly from his own writings. He is first found writing for the stage in 1596, and is known to have been using his indefatigable pen in 1640; indeed his last-published piece did not appear till fifteen years after that date. Heywood was an actor as well as a play-writer, and to these employments he superadded that of a miscellaneous author. He is believed to be the most voluminous of English writers, and on that score has been likened to Lope de Vega, Kotzebue, and Alexandre Dumas. Putting out of account his non-dramatic works, which fill many folio and quarto volumes, he describes himself as "having an entire hand or at least a main-finger in two hundred and twenty plays." Of these only three-and-twenty survive, but they amply attest that had he chosen to concentrate instead of diffusing his powers, he might easily have ranked with the Massingers, Fords, and others of his great contemporaries. His facility and variety are almost without a parallel, his fancy was inexhaustible, and his invention boundless; but his taste was bad, and he delighted to excess in what he called "merry accidents, intermixed with apt and witty jests;" or, in other words, the broadest and coarsest farce. Many of the songs interspersed throughout his plays were singularly sweet and graceful. His best pieces, such as A Women Killed with Kindness; The Four Prentices of London; The English Traveller; A Challenge for Beauty; and Love's Mistress, lie chiefly in the department of what has been called the domestic tragedy, in which he is in some respects at least superior to Lillo. Charles Lamb hits his character in a single sentence:—"Heywood is a sort of prose Shakespeare; his scenes are to the full as natural and affecting; but we miss the poet—that which in Shakespeare always appears out and above the surface of the nature."