Heywood, John | Kent Cartwright (essay date 1993)
Kent Cartwright (essay date 1993)
SOURCE: “The Humanism of Acting: John Heywood's The Foure PP,” in Studies in the Literary Imagination, Vol. 26, No. 1, Spring 1993, pp. 21-46.
[In the following essay, Cartwright argues that The Four PP is the first English play in which ambiguous characterization leads to unpredictability and complexity, and thus serves as a bridge from medieval drama to works by Renaissance writers like Marlowe and Shakespeare.]
John Heywood's The Foure PP (c. 1520s)1 exposes a possibility in acting and spectatorial effect that will ultimately help distinguish renaissance drama from medieval drama. Reproducing a system of allegorical correspondences, medieval plays depend upon “transparent” acting: Good Deeds must enact her name. But sixteenth-century drama's shift toward secular subject matter mines a complexity hitherto unavailable. In The Foure PP, remarkably, a...
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