Remarks by Thomas Heywood | V2Melody Quotations

“Playing is an ornament to the city, which strangers of all nations repairing hither report of in their countries.”

London's stages presented as a civic attraction to visitors · An Apology for Actors, 1612

“I here proclaim myself ever faithful to the first, and never guilty of the second sale.”

Loyalty claimed first to the theatre company, not to reprinting for extra profit · Preface to a printed play, as commonly excerpted

“I speak not in the defence of any lascivious shows, scurrilous jests or scandalous invectives. If there be any such, I banish them quite from my patronage.”

A limit drawn between honest playing and abuse of the stage · An Apology for Actors, 1612

“Briefly, there is neither tragedy, history, comedy, moral or pastoral, from which an infinite use cannot be gathered.”

Drama defended as a school of conduct in every genre · An Apology for Actors, 1612

“I have had either an entire hand, or at the least a main finger, in two hundred and twenty plays.”

His own account of a vast collaborative output, most of it lost · Address to the Reader, The English Traveller

“It never was any great ambition in me to be in this kind voluminously read.”

He preferred the stage to a bulky printed reputation · Address to the Reader, The English Traveller

“True it is that my plays are not exposed unto the world in volumes, to bear the title of works (as others).”

A modest refusal to package plays as monumental collected Works · Address to the Reader, The English Traveller

“He that denies then theatres should be, he may as well deny a world to me.”

Defence of the stage as inseparable from the world itself · An Apology for Actors, The Author to his Booke, 1612

“All men have parts, and each man acts his own.”

Every temperament finds its role on the world's stage · An Apology for Actors, The Author to his Booke, 1612

“The world's a theatre, the earth a stage, which God and Nature do with actors fill.”

Life framed as a divine play in which every person is cast · An Apology for Actors, The Author to his Booke, 1612

“Seven cities warred for Homer being dead, who living had no roof to shroud his head.”

On posthumous honour that arrives too late for the living poet · The Hierarchie of the Blessed Angells, 1635

“I hold he loves me best that calls me Tom.”

A preference for unforced familiarity over formal address · The Hierarchie of the Blessed Angells, 1635

“The world's a stage, on which all men are players: they have their exits and their entrances; and each man in his time plays many parts.”

A memorable meditation on the roles people assume throughout life, often associated with but predating Shakespeare's similar formulation · Essay, An Apology for Actors

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