The Golden Age

Thomas Heywood (c. 1573-1641) and the Queen Anne’s Men embarked on an exciting enterprise with the series of plays devoted to classical mythological and epos which were all staged at the Red Bull: The Golden Age (pr. 1611), The Silver Age, The Brazen Age, and the two parts of The Iron Age. It was a complicated business (for instance, a manuscript play, entitled The Escapes of Jupiter, now at the British Library – Egerton 1994, fos. 74-95 conflates scenes of The Golden Age with scenes of The Silver Age), and a daring one, since these plays often involve numerous characters and complex machinery. There is a strong, and sometimes hard to disentangle, intertextual relationship between Heywood’s Ages and Shakespeare’s late plays, both on a thematical and dramaturgical level. For example, all these plays conflate classical epic and romance; Homer in Heywood’s plays has a very similar choric function to Gower’s in Pericles; in The Golden Age Homer describes the passage of seventeen years in the same way as Time in The Winter’s Tale; and both The Golden Age and Cymbeline feature Jupiter descending on an eagle (with different companies possibly sharing props and machinery), see Wiggins  .

  Homer as Chorus does a lot of heavy work in The Golden Age, striving to connect disparate portions in nature and theme following the rise of Saturn and the life of young Jupiter, from Saturn becoming king of Crete instead of his older brother Titan to Jupiter’s birth, from the latter’s encounter with Lycaon to his seduction of Cal(l)isto and Danae, from Jupiter’s duel with Prince Ganymede to his becoming ruler of heaven. From the previous sentence, the reader may already have understood that Heywood, apart from mixing many different sources, from his own Troia Britannica (1609) to texts one expects such as Ovid’s Metamorphoses, was not following the versions of myths with which we have been most familiar since the eighteenth century. He was relying on the first books of William Caxton’s Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye or Recueil des Histoires de Troye (first published: 1464), a translation of Raoul Lefèvre’s Recoeil des histoires de Troyes, the initial sections of which were based on Giovanni Boccaccio’s Genealogia deorum gentilium. A political theme that is crucial in The Golden Age and which was quite topical in the Jacobean period was how one acquires power. Who decides who becomes a ruler? Is it divine providence and/or popular election? And when does a ruler risk becoming a tyrant? The early moderns looked at Graeco-Roman mythology as a prime site to reflect on these questions, and The Golden Age, given its generalised, but also problematised, euhemeristic view of how Jupiter and his relatives became gods, simply bristles with such issues.        

Works Cited

Wiggins, Martin, ed. (in association with Catherine Richardson). 2012. “The Golden Age”. In British Drama 1533-1642: a Catalogue, vol. 6: 133-41. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Bayer, Mark. 2014. “Heywood’s Epic Theater”. Comparative Drama 48 (4): 371-91.

Coffin, Charlotte. 2017. “Heywood’s Ages and Chapman’s Homer: Nothing in Common?”. Classical Receptions Journal 9.1: 55-78.

— 2005. “Théorie et pratique des mythes: les paradoxes de Thomas Heywood”. XVII-XVIII. Revue de la Société d'études anglo-américaines des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles 60: 63-76.

Demetriou, Tania, and Janice Valls-Russell, eds. 2021. Thomas Heywood and the Classical Tradition. Manchester: Manchester University Press.  

Holaday. Allan. 1946. “Heywood’s Troia Britannica and the Ages”. The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 45 (4): 430-9.

Oakley-Brown, Liz. 2019. “The Golden Age Rescored? Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Thomas Heywood’s The Ages”. In Ovid and Adaptation in Early Modern English Theatre, edited by Lisa S. Starks, 221-37. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.  

Schanzer, Ernest. 1960. “Heywood’s Ages and Shakespeare”. The Review of English Studies 11 (41): 18-28. 

The golden age. Or The liues of Iupiter and Saturne, with the deifying of the heathen gods. As it hath beene sundry times acted at the Red Bull, by the Queenes Maiesties Seruants. Written by Thomas Heyvvood (USTC no: 3004861) survives in sixteen copies, eight copies in the UK (Edinburgh: Advocates Library and National Library; London: Guildhall Library, British Library, and two at the Victoria and Albert Museum; Oxford: Bodleian and Worcester College) and eight in the USA (Houghton Library, Beinecke Library, Huntington Library, Illinois University Library, two at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, and two at the Folger Shakespeare Library). Occasionally, the title page reads “defining”, instead of “deifying”, and this is the case of the copy transcribed here, preserved at the Huntington Library (call number: 61426) and digitised here: https://archive.org/details/bim_early-english-books-1475-1640_the-golden-age-_heywood-thomas_1611/mode/1up. The book is in quarto format and consists of 72 pages (signatures: A² B-I⁴ K²). The binding is signed “F. Bedford” and bears a bookplate of the Huth Library. It is divided in acts, but not in scenes (each time, the act opens simply with a “scœna prima” which goes on until the end of the act). Stage directions are italicised and the play-text features a dramatis personae list. The text does not seem to contain any particular misprint.