SOURCE: Rowland, Richard. “‘Thou teachest me humanitie’: Thomas Heywood's The English Traveller.” In English Comedy, edited by Michael Cordner, Peter Holland, and John Kerrigan, pp. 137-57. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

In the following essay, Rowland considers The English Traveller as a response to Philip Massinger's play The Roman Actor.

At the Blackfriars theatre in 1626 the King's Men gave several performances of Philip Massinger's tragedy The Roman Actor, a play which Anne Barton has rightly characterised as ‘more pessimistic about the power of art to correct and inform its audience than any other play written between 1580 and 1642’.¹ It seems likely that as avid a playgoer as Thomas Heywood would have made the short trip from his home in Clerkenwell to see it. If he did, the experience may have been a disconcerting one. He would have heard Joseph Taylor as the eponymous hero defending the theatre, eloquently and at...