Introduction: Entire Hands and Main Fingers

The ten-volume edition of The Collected Works of Thomas Heywood, forthcoming from Oxford University Press from 2015 to 2022, will attempt to place Heywood s plays, poetry, and prose back where they belong: at the centre of the study of early modern English literature, drama, and theatre history. Especially as an actor, playwright, reviser, editor, and historical chronicler, Heywood had the longest and widest-ranging career of his contemporaries and thus can reveal how sixteenth-and seventeenth-century authors and theatrical and literary audiences came to see the practice and production of drama.