Heywood, HAY wud, Thomas (1574?-1641), was a popular and productive English playwright of the Elizabethan Age. He claimed he wrote all or part of 220 plays, of which about 20 survive. Heywood's most enduring drama is A Woman Killed with Kindness (1603). This tragedy is almost unique in Elizabethan drama because the characters in the play are not of high rank, and the central situation is wholly domestic and free from political overtones. The play thus anticipates the direction that serious drama took almost 300 years later in the works of Henrik Ibsen.