Besides his plays Heywood wrote a _Dialogue Conteyning the Number of the Effectuall Prouerbes in the Englishe Tonge_, _Six Hundred Epigrams_, and a tedious allegory _The Spider and the Flie_, printed, with a woodcut of the author, in 1556. =Heywood's Place in English Comedy.=--The early history of English comedy is a record of successive efforts and experiments apparently leading to no result. The comic scenes in the miracle plays culminate in the really masterly sheep-stealing plot of the _Secunda Pastorum_ in the Towneley Cycle; but the step which seems to us so obvious, the separation of the Pastoral Comedy from its religious surroundings, was never taken, and the _Secunda Pastorum_ stands by itself, a solitary masterpiece. In the earlier moralities there are flashes of humour as in the miracle plays; in the later moralities we find scenes in which the effort to paint the riotous course of Youth, though not very amusing to modern readers, is sufficiently faithful to bring us within sight of a possible comedy of manners. But the morality-writer was far from entertaining any conception of comedy as an end in itself. His aim remained to the last purely didactic. It did not, indeed, occur to him, as it occurred to didactic writers of a later period, to represent dissipation as so unattractive as to make it miraculous that it should attract. He would show it as bitter of digestion, but neither playwright nor audience were concerned to deny that it was pleasant in the mouth, and it is improbable that readiness to acquiesce in the sober moral of a play diminished in the least the applause with which, we may be sure, any approach to gayety in the tavern scenes would be attended. After all, though we may sometimes be inclined to doubt it, audiences both at miracle plays and moralities were human. To the very real strain imposed on their emotions in the miracle plays they needed what seem to us these incongruous interludes of humour by way of dramatic relief, and in the moralities it is difficult not to believe that the humour supplied the gilding without which the didactic pill, at a much earlier date, must have been found nauseating. It remains, however, certain that alike in the miracle plays, the moralities, and the moral interludes such humour as can be found is merely incidental, and this is the justification for assigning to John Heywood the honourable position which he occupies in this collection of English comedies. As far as we know, he was the first English dramatist to understand that a play might be constructed with no other objects than satire and amusement, and if such epithets were not fortunately a little discredited, we might dub him on this score the "Father" of English comedy. Paternity, however, cannot be predicated without some evidence of offspring, and it would be extremely difficult, I think, to show that Heywood exercised sufficient influence on any subsequent dramatist to be reckoned as his literary father.