Both took part together in the first
representation of Ben Jonson's _Every Man in His Humour_, in 1598. His
name was again linked with Shakespeare's in the will of their
fellow-actor, Augustine Phillips, who left each of them a legacy as a
token of friendship at his death in 1605. Christopher Beeston left
Shakespeare's company of actors for another theatre early in his
career, and his closest friend among the actor-authors of his day in
later life was not Shakespeare himself but Thomas Heywood, the popular
dramatist and pamphleteer, who lived on to 1650. This was a friendship
which kept Beeston's respect for Shakespeare at a fitting pitch.
Heywood, who wrote the affectionate lines:
Mellifluous Shakespeare, whose inchanting Quill
Commanded Mirth or Passion, was but _Will_,
enjoys the distinction of having published in Shakespeare's lifetime
the only expression of resentment that is known to have come from the
dramatist's proverbially "gentle lips." Shakespeare (Heywood wrote)
"was much offended" with an unprincipled publisher who "presumed to
make so bold with his name" as to put it to a book of which he was not
the author. And Beeston had direct concern with the volume called _An
Apology for Actors_, to which Heywood appended his report of these
words of Shakespeare.
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