Heywood, unlike many of his contemporaries, and in this respect notably unlike Dekker, seems to have kept tolerably free from joint composition. Of twenty-four plays, only two, _The Late Lancashire Witches_ and _Fortune by Land and Sea_, were produced by him in collaboration, the former with Brome, and the latter with W. Rowley. Of all the playwrights of that period he was the most prolific. In 1633 he owned to having “had either an entire hand or at least a main finger” in two hundred and twenty dramas; and after that date others were printed, which may perhaps be reckoned in augmentation of this number. His literary fertility is proved by his _Nine Books of Various History concerning Women_, a folio of 466 pages, which appeared in 1624 with this memorandum: “Opus excogitatum inchoatum, explicitum, et typographo excusum inter septemdecem septimanas.” Kirkman, the book-seller, in his advertisement to the reader at the end of the second edition of his catalogue of plays, observes of Heywood that “he was very laborious; for he not only acted almost every day, but also obliged himself to write a sheet every day for several years together.” Besides composing dramas, he delighted in the labour of compilation, and had for some time on hand a Biographical Dictionary of all the poets, from the most remote period of the world’s history down to his own time. The loss of his MS. collections for this book is greatly to be regretted, since there was no man of that century better qualified by geniality and honesty of purpose for the task than the old playwright, who put into the lips of Apuleius:-- “Not only whatsoever’s mine, But all true poets’ raptures are divine.” Even as it is, the few lines in Heywood’s _Hierarchy of Angels_ on the nicknames of the poets of his day are among the raciest scraps of information which we possess about those dramatists. The miscellaneous nature of Heywood’s literary labours justifies us in classing him, together with Robert Greene, among the earliest professional _littérateurs_ of our language. His criticism is often quite as valuable as his dramatic poetry. The whole of the running dialogue between Apuleius and Midas in _Love’s Mistress_, for example, contains a theory of the relation of poets to the public, while the prologues to _A Challenge for Beauty_ and _The Royal King and Loyal Subject_ are interesting as showing to what extent the dramatists of the Elizabethan age pursued their art with conscious purpose and comparison.