A Remedy for Heywood?

In his preface to his mythological pageant play The Brazen Age (1613), Thomas Heywood complains bitterly of an act of literary piracy perpetrated against him by one Henry Austin, a shadowy itinerant figure in the netherworld of the Jacobean book trade. To Heywood, Austin is merely

a Pedant about this Towne, who, when all trades fail'd, turn'd Pedagogue, & once insinuating with me, borrowed from me certaine Translations of Ouid, as his three books De Arte Amandi, & two De Remedio Amoris, which since, his most brazen face hath most impudently challenged as his own, wherefore I must needs proclaime it as far as Ham, where he now keeps schoole, Hos ego versiculos feci tulit alter honores, they were things which out of my iuniority and want of iudgement, I committed to the view of some priuate friends, but with no purpose of publishing, or further communicating them. Therfore I wold entreate that Austin, for so his name is, to acknowledge his wrong to me in shewing them, & his own impudence, & ignorance in challenging them. ¹

The brazen-faced bookseller's answer does not survive, nor does the precise nature of his ignorant challenge to Heywood's authorship, but that he impudently stole the translation of the Ars amatoria is beyond doubt. In league with a Dutch publisher named Nicholas Janz Visscher, he printed this rendering of Ovid in Amsterdam unattributed and undated as PUBLII OVIDII DE ARTE AMANDI, Or, The Art of Loue, sometimes subtitled Loues Schoole, at least six times between the second decade of the seventeenth century and the outbreak of the Puritan Revolution in 1641, the year of Heywood's death. It is the first complete translation of the Ars in English and with one exception was the only version of it in our language until a loose paraphrase of Ovid's comic treatise appeared at the end of the century courtesy of the Augustan literary establishment: Ovid's Art of Love, in Three Books, Translated by Mr. Dryden, Mr. Congreve &c. (1698). ² Heywood (fortunately) did not survive to see the reason for the Dryden-Congreve-Tate version. At the Restoration his poem was co-opted into a popular pornographic miscellany (again unattributed to him, this time with no publisher named on the title page) that went through multiple editions: 1662 (twice), 1672, 1677, 1682, 1684. ³ Austin's gross act of plagiarism became Heywood's bête noir; it made him so angry that he attempted to reclaim his poem by including revised excerpts from it in many of his subsequent writings--An Apology for Actors (1612), Gunaikeion (1624), The Hierarchie of the Blessed Angels (1635), and Pleasant Dialogues and Dramma's (1637)--strong evidence indeed that the translation is his. ⁴

But what became of the "two [books of] De Remedio Amoris," the translation of the contradictory poem that traditionally follows Ovid's three-book Ars, one that counsels its readers how to fall out of love? Its disappearance seems strange, as does Heywood's apparent lack of concern as to its fate. He makes no effort at reclamation by including it in his later prose work on classical authors, angels, noble women of antiquity, and the theater, nor does it surface in the play texts he continually produced until his demise. Its wealth of mythological material would have provided excellent exempla for his scholarly arguments, dramatic exchanges, and tableaux. The case becomes even stranger when one considers that Heywood's pride of ownership extended to an obsession with details such as the accurate printing and spelling of his works. He refused to associate further with the printer William Jaggard after he had produced a sloppy edition of Troia Britannica and had pirated between two and nine of his Ovidian-style poems and attributed them to Shakespeare in A Passionate Pilgrim (1612). He preferred the work of Nicholas Okes, whose ethics and craftsmanship he praises in An Apology for Actors, which...