IV, i, to old Lionel: “here… in time you may keep your shrievalty, and I be one o’ the serjeants.” The idea of the sheriff proving himself a benefactor to the speaker by appointing certain people serjeants or serjeants’ yeomen may, it is true, have been common property to the time; the opinion, however, that “in a good hospitality there can be nothing found that’s ill, he that’s a good housekeeper keeps a good table,” etc., and deserves all confidence, which the clown pronounces in Heywood’s English Traveller (I, 1), makes certainly a more individual impression. It mirrors in a remarkable way Doll’s words: “I, byth mas, will we, Moor: [sc. hear you] th’art a good howskeeper,” etc. Also the remark of Lincoln: “Our countrie is a great eating country,” we find in the Engl. Tr. (I, i), “Our [English] appetites are not content but with the large excess of a full table,” etc. Furthermore, the extremely rare word “to top” = “to lopp off,” which we meet in Sir Thomas More’s “that could have topt the peace”—Spedding altered it into “kept”—is to be found in the Rape of Lucrece, II, iii, “But when, in topping one, three Tarquins more… grow.” The expression “wash your foul minds with tears” has several distant parallels in Shakespeare, but a very close one in the “Woman Killed with Kindness,” V, iii: “but when my tears have washed my black soul white;” so also: “help me with your tears, to wash my spotted sins.” The idea that disobedience to kings is a sin against God is expressed in the lines: “ Treason to kings doth stretch even to the gods, And those high gods that take great Rome in charge Shall punish your rebellion” (Rape of Lucrece, V, ii). The expression “god on earth” applied to kings does occur in Shakespeare, it is true, though not in particularly trustworthy passages, i.e. Rich. II, V, iii, 136, and Pericles, I, i, 103. Heywood uses it repeatedly. Compare The Fair Maid of the West, I, v, 2: “I’d swear great Mullisheg To be a god on earth!” The Golden Age (Works, iii, p. 67) “Thou art a God on earth.” The displaying of dry geographical knowledge (“go you to France or Flanders, To any Jarman province, Spaine or Portigall”) which is so very unShakespearian finds quite a number of parallels in Heywood, compare e.g. Woman Killed with Kindness, V, iii: “I’ll over first to France, And so to Germany and Italy.” Or 1 Edw. IV, I: “he neither comes from Italy nor Spain.” Considering the fact that most of Heywood’s plays from the very years in which Sir Thomas More seems to have originated are lost, this list of similarities is not quite inconsiderable,
