The English playwright Thomas Heywood (ca.1573-1641) worked successfully in a wide range of dramatic forms. A competent craftsman, he lacked the brilliance of the greater Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists.

Thomas Heywood, in all probability the son of the clergyman Robert Heywood, was born in Lincolnshire. He attended Cambridge but left without a degree when his father died in 1593. He seems to have moved directly from Cambridge to London, where he soon became an actor and playwright. By 1598 he had done enough dramatic writing to impress a contemporary as one of the best comic writers of the time. Unfortunately, none of Heywood's plays from this early period of his career has survived.

Most of Heywood's significant literary activity was done between 1600 and 1620. In 1633, in the preface to his play The English Traveller (probably written about 1623), he claims to have had "either an entire hand, or at the least...