Late Thomas Heywood and “insidiate”: Authorial Agency and The Second Part of the Theatre of God’s Judgements

Abstract

This essay argues that The Second Part of the Theatre of God’s Judgements, a long historical disquisition on the seven deadly sins and published in 1642 as the work of Thomas Taylor, was composed by Thomas Heywood, the dramatist and prose miscellanist. The evidence for the attribution lies in The Second Part’s use of distinctive items of latinate vocabulary, its deployment of passages used elsewhere by Heywood, its familiar and authorial allusion to Heywood’s native Lincolnshire, its alertness to the drama of forty to fifty years previously, and its pattern of verbal preferences. The argument is placed within the context of Heywood’s prolific final decade, and the article assesses the implications for our understanding of this late period of Heywood’s writing life and examines the prospect for further work on Heywood’s canon of writings.