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Rh Lamb called him a “prose Shakespeare”; Professor Ward, one of Heywood’s most sympathetic editors, points out that this epigrammatic statement can only be accepted with reservations. Heywood had a keen eye for dramatic situations and great constructive skill, but his powers of characterization were not on a par with his stagecraft. He delighted in what he called “merry accidents,” that is, in coarse, broad farce; his fancy and invention were inexhaustible. It was in the domestic drama of sentiment that he won his most distinctive success. For this he was especially fitted by his genuine tenderness and his freedom from affectation, by the sweetness and gentleness for which Lamb praised him. His masterpiece, A Woman kilde with kindnesse (acted 1603; printed 1607), is a type of the comédie larmoyante, and The English Traveller (1633) is a domestic tragedy scarcely inferior to it in pathos and in the elevation of its moral tone. His first play was probably The Foure Prentises of London: With the Conquest of Jerusalem (printed 1615, but acted some fifteen years earlier). This may have been intended as a burlesque of the old romances, but it is more likely that it was meant seriously to attract the apprentice public to whom it was dedicated, and its popularity was no doubt aimed at in Beaumont and Fletcher’s travesty of the City taste in drama in their Knight of the Burning Pestle. The two parts of King Edward the Fourth (printed 1600), and of If you know not me, you know no bodie; Or, The Troubles of Queene Elizabeth (1605 and 1606) are chronicle histories. His other comedies include: The Royall King, and the Loyall subject (acted c. 1600; printed 1637); the two parts of The Fair Maid of the West; Or, A Girle worth Gold (two parts, printed 1631); The Fayre Maid of the Exchange (printed anonymously 1607); The Late Lancashire Witches (1634), written with Richard Brome, and prompted by an actual trial in the preceding year; A Pleasant Comedy, called A Mayden-Head well lost (1634); A Challenge for Beautie (1636); The Wise-Woman of Hogsdon (printed 1638), the witchcraft in this case being matter for comedy, not seriously treated as in the Lancashire play; and Fortune by Land and Sea (printed 1655), with William Rowley. The five plays called respectively The Golden, The Silver, The Brazen and The Iron Age (the last in two parts), dated 1611, 1613, 1613, 1632, are series of classical stories strung together with no particular connexion except that “old Homer” introduces the performers of each act in turn. Loves Maistresse; Or, The Queens Masque (printed 1636) is on the story of Cupid and Psyche as told by Apuleius; and the tragedy of the Rape of Lucrece (1608) is varied by a “merry lord,” Valerius, who lightens the gloom of the situation by singing comic songs. A series of pageants, most of them devised for the City of London, or its guilds, by Heywood, were printed in 1637. In vol. iv. of his Collection of Old English Plays (1885), Mr A. H. Bullen printed for the first time a comedy by Heywood, The Captives, or The Lost Recovered (licensed 1624), and in vol. ii. of the same series, Dicke of Devonshire, which he tentatively assigns to the same hand.

Besides his dramatic works, twelve of which were reprinted by the “Shakespeare Society,” and were published by Mr John Pearson in a complete edition of six vols. with notes and illustrations in 1874, he was the author of Troia Britannica, or Great Britain’s Troy (1609), a poem in seventeen cantos “intermixed with many pleasant poetical tales” and “concluding with an universal chronicle from the creation until the present time”; An Apology for Actors, containing three brief treatises (1612) edited for the Shakespeare Society in 1841; or nine books of various history concerning women (1624); England’s Elizabeth, her Life and Troubles during her minority from the Cradle to the Crown (1631); The Hierarchy of the Blessed Angels (1635), a didactic poem in nine books; Pleasant Dialogue, and Dramas selected out of Lucian, &c. (1637; ed. W. Bang, Louvain, 1903); and The Life of Merlin surnamed Ambrosius (1641).

See A. W. Ward, ''History of English Dram. Lit.'' ii. 550 seq. (1899); the same author’s Introduction to A woman killed with kindness (“Temple Dramatists,” 1897); J. A. Symonds in the Introduction to Thomas Heywood in the “Mermaid” series (new issue, 1903).

HEYWOOD, a municipal borough in the Heywood parliamentary division of Lancashire, England, 9 m. N. of Manchester on the Lancashire and Yorkshire railway. Pop. (1901) 25,458. It is of modern growth and possesses several handsome churches, chapels and public buildings. The Queen’s Park, purchased and laid out at a cost of £11,000 with money which devolved to Queen Victoria in right of her duchy and county palatine of Lancaster, was opened in 1879. Heywood Hall in the neighbourhood of the town was the residence of Peter Heywood, who contributed to the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot. Heywood owes its rise to the enterprise of the Peels, its first manufactures having been introduced by the father of the first Sir Robert Peel. It is an important seat of the cotton manufacture, and there are power-loom factories, iron foundries, chemical works, boiler-works and railway wagon works. Coal is worked extensively in the neighbourhood. Heywood was incorporated in 1881, and the corporation consists of a mayor, 6 aldermen and 18 councillors. Area, 3660 acres.

HEZEKIAH (Heb. for “[my] strength is [of] Yah”), in the Bible son of Ahaz, one of the greatest of the kings of Judah. He flourished at the end of the 8th and beginning of the 7th century, when Palestine passed through one of the most eventful periods of its history. There is much that is uncertain in his reign, and with the exception of the great crisis of 701 its chronology has not been unanimously fixed. Whether he came to the throne before or after the fall of Samaria (722–721 ) is disputed, nor is it clear what share Judah took in the Assyrian conflicts down to 701. Shortly before this date the whole of western Asia was in a ferment; Sargon had died and Sennacherib had come to the throne (in 705); vassal kings plotted to recover their independence and Assyrian puppets were removed by their opponents. Judah was in touch with a general rising in S.W. Palestine, in which Ekron, Lachish, Ascalon (Ashkelon) and other towns of the Philistines were supported by the kings of Muṣri and Meluḥḥa. Sennacherib completely routed them at Eltekeh (a Danite city), and thence turned against Hezekiah, who had been in league with Ekron and had imprisoned its king Padi, an Assyrian vassal. In this invasion of Judah the Assyrian claims entire success; 46 towns of Judah were captured, 200,150 men and many herds of cattle were carried off among the spoil, and Jerusalem itself was closely invested. Hezekiah was imprisoned “like a bird in a cage” —to quote Sennacherib, and the Urbi (Arabian?) troops in Jerusalem laid down their arms. Thirty talents of gold, eight hundred of silver, precious stones, couches and seats of ivory—“all kinds of valuable treasure”,—the ladies of the court, male and female attendants (perhaps “singers”) were carried away to Nineveh. Here the Assyrian record ends somewhat abruptly, for, in the meanwhile, Babylonia had again revolted (700 ) and Sennacherib’s presence was urgently needed nearer home.

At what precise period the Babylonian Merodach (i.e. Marduk)-Baladan sent his embassy to Hezekiah is disputed. Although ostensibly to congratulate the king upon his recovery from a sickness, it was really sent in the hope of enlisting his support, and the excessive courtesy and complaisance with which it was received suggest that it found a ready ally in Judah (2 Kings xx. 12 sqq.; Isa. xxxix.). Merodach-Baladan was overthrown by Sargon in 710, but succeeded in making a fresh revolt some years later (704–703 ), and opinion is much divided whether his embassy was to secure the friendship of the