SOURCE: “John Heywood and The Four PP,” in Trivium, Vol. 14, May 1979, pp. 47-69.

[In the following essay, Blamires calls The Four PP Heywood's best drama, arguing that the play should not be dismissed by critics as a frivolous work full of humor and short on literary achievement.]

John Heywood's ‘mad plays’, as he called them, have seemed to many readers to be a particularly eccentric outgrowth from the crop of hybrid drama which characterizes the mid-sixteenth century in England. In surveys of pre-Shakespearian drama, his works are often briskly disposed of as “debates” (insinuating that they are in a subsidiary category of drama) influenced by French farce (which did not influence anybody else and therefore fails to excite the critic looking for “trends”). Heywood is given momentary credit for his “wit”, his “vigour”, and his “Chaucerian spirit”, but the critic of pre-Shakespearian theatre cannot easily accommodate him alongside dramatists of the period like Skelton, Rastell, Bale, or Lindsay, whose plays are more fruitful in the sense that the morality tradition is still conspicuously wagging its tail or Renaissance innovations are creeping in.¹ Yet here was a playwright-cum-impresario who proved to be so indispensable a court entertainer that he was able to survive the turmoil of religious and political factionalism through three successive changes of the monarchy amidst the buffetings of the Reformation until, a staunch Catholic, he finally found his situation untenable soon after Elizabeth's accession and went into exile.² Condemned to death at one point for his alleged participation in a Catholic conspiracy, he escaped execution because of his ‘mirth’—partly as a court wit but also, presumably, as a dramatist. It seems reasonable to suggest that, unless his audiences were peculiarly impoverished, there may be more to his “farce-debates” than is commonly supposed. In that belief I hope to show, through an analysis of arguably his best extant play, The Four PP, the high quality of Heywood's dramatic art and in particular his notable skill in calculated improvisation which gives this play the appearance of haphazard development while simultaneously fulfilling a controlled structure.³ But before discussing the play it will be useful if we can first establish what Heywood wanted to express in his productions, and what means of expression he favoured.

The distinctive feature of Heywood's plays is that they present mankind as incorrigibly competitive. His characters are out to prove themselves ‘better’, ‘happier’, ‘more useful’ than others—or failing that, ‘worse off’ as in the case of two dejected victims of love, Lover-not-loved and Loved-not-loving in The Play of Love. In one scene in the same play a third character Lover-loved, busily justifying his pleasure in the apparent capitulation of his antagonist (No-lover-nor-loved), declares that “it grieveth a man to be overtrodden” (1297).⁴ That puts in a nutshell the prevailing attitude of Heywood's dramatis personae. Egoism, self-assurance, prejudice, obstinacy, abuse of others—these are the raw materials of his plays, which are populated with men and women ever muscling in to assert their superiority either in some absolute sense, or in social status, or in intellect, or in special usefulness to the commonweal. This theme of egocentricity has been acknowledged in the case of The Play of the Weather, where it stares us in the face. Here Jupiter is considering a re-allocation of the world's weather, but first conducts a kind of market survey to assess the needs of individual sections of society: inevitably everyone selfishly clamours for such weather as suits his own interest.⁵ But it needs to be emphasised that egoism is the chief common denominator in Heywood's work, dramatic and non-dramatic alike.

He hunts this theme in two ways. Firstly, he holds up for our scrutiny the egoist's eagerness to tread others down by assaulting them with scoff, taunt, or claw. One notable scoffer is No-lover-nor-loved, who jeers cheerfully away at Lover-loved by insulting him as “Master Woodcock” (305, 1341); Lover-loved retaliates by assuming a lofty disdain (393f.) and by gloating sarcastically at his rival's apparent discomfiture (1284f.). In Witty and Witless James reduces John to ignominious defeat almost as much by withering him with scorn as by intellectual superiority: “Like as a goose can say nothing but hys, / So hath he now nothing to say but yes!” (Farmer ed. p. 205). In The Play of the Weather a washerwoman and a Lady Haughty (“Launder” and “Gentilwoman”) leap onto the offensive the instant they set eyes upon each other. Such flytyng is paradoxically the staple diet of Heywood's comedy, even while it is judged foolish on several counts. It offends the humanist in him because it is an abrogation of reason. It undermines social harmony by igniting actual physical violence. Thus in The Pardoner and the Friar, insults finally escalate into a churchyard brawl. Similarly, in his mock-epic ‘parable’ The Spider and the Fly, when a legal dispute as to which of the protagonists has the right-of-way across window panes has understandably exhausted the patience of some of the witnesses, “one tart taunting spider” and “one sharp saucy fly” hurl jibes at each other until their enmity bursts into “furious fumes” (Chs. 43-4), heralding the eruption later on of all-out civil war. Then again, in the Dialogue of Proverbs the narrator tries vainly to temper the abrasive tongue of his neighbour, an old woman who is hell-bent on accusing her young husband of adultery at the slightest suspicion: “Tong breaketh bone, it selfe hauyng none,” he admonishes her (1781); “For were ye as playne as Dunstable hye waie, / Yet shulde ye that waie rather breake a loue daie, / Than make one thus” (1805-7); “[…] ye shall preeue, / Taunts appease not thyngs, they rather agreeue” (1817-8).

Heywood's most strenuous objection to flytyng, however, is that those who taunt are ‘missing the beam in their own eyes’. Perhaps he was influenced by a contemporary jestbook vogue for quick retorts in which the mocker is mocked.⁶ His works certainly harp on the folly of firing off against others ammunition to which one's own flank is exposed. A warning along these lines prefaces The Spider and the Fly, for instance, urging readers to refer the poem's satire to themselves, and not to succumb to a complacency like that of three women preparing their toilette at one dressing table who were so busy eyeing each other's defects of appearance that they were oblivious to the shambles they were making of their own.

Heywood's second method of satirizing egoism is to expose people's partiality to their own opinions, and their imperviousness to those of others. He caricatures this mentality in The Play of the Weather in a parodic disputation between a Water-miller and a Wind-miller, each comically insulated by self-conviction from his rival's arguments. Equally in The Play of Love No-lover-nor-loved will not be budged from his belief that his contentment is greater than Lover-loved's:

Say what thou will, and I therein protest
To believe no word thou sayest.

(385-6)

His engaging obstinacy persists to the bitter end, for when the other two judge that on the score of contentment it is a dead heat between him and Lover-loved, he tries to reserve the right to disagree—“May I not think my pleasure more than his?” (1553). Turning again to The Spider and the Fly we discover that the obsession with partiality continues. Heywood makes a heavily ironic episode out of it when the Spider changes places temporarily with his captive opponent in the web, and the Fly, rapidly becoming over-partial to the exalted status of Spider, so fanatically adopts spidery prejudices that he seals his fate by declaring that “Spiders own all windows” (Ch.84).

A further example of Heywood's wry conviction that mankind is blessed with “harvest ears, thick of hearing” (Proverbs, 2415) deaf to all opinions except his own, comes at the beginning of the Dialogue of Proverbs. A young man, consulting the schoolmasterish narrator about his choice of a marriage partner, provokes the following rebuke when he contradicts his mentor instead of listening to his advice:

Ye seme more to seke reasons howe to contende,
Than to the counsell of myne to condiscende.
And to be playne, as I must with my freende,
I perfitly feele euen at my fyngers eende,
So hard is your hand set on your halpeny
That my reasonyng your reason setteth nought by.

(305-10)

Finally, returning to the plays, we meet characters tenaciously clutching their ha'penny-worth of ‘reasons’ once again in Gentleness and Nobility, which I think Heywood wrote, though his authorship of it has been questioned.⁷ Here a Knight and a Merchant, initially engaged in a sharp contretemps, eventually close ranks against their common enemy, an upstart Ploughman who soon has them wriggling on the hook of his trenchant logic. The upshot is that neither side will yield an inch of ground. The Merchant suggests that the Ploughman should be left to stew in his own arrogance:

I see he standeth in his own conceit so well,
That opinion we shall never expel
From him by no argument or reason.

But when they have gone, the Ploughman, disdainfully flicking the whip he carries, declares roundly that it is they who typify the wilfulness of a man so fortified in his own opinion that

If God himself then would with him reason,
In effect it shall no more avail
Than with a whip to drive a snail.(8)

Why is it that Heywood is so obsessed with this satiric vision of a world full of Malvolios, ‘turkey cocks’ perversely parading their self-conviction? One answer is that he could have derived it from Sir Thomas More, with whom he was on close terms. We know that the topic deeply vexed More, because it figures prominently in Utopia. There the sage and much-travelled Raphael Hythloday is asked why he does not enter the service of some king or prince, to whom his experience and counsel would be so beneficial. Hythloday responds that rulers are more interested in the arts of war than in the arts of peace which are his speciality, and secondly that

they that be counsellors to kings, every one of them either is of himself so wise indeed that he needeth not, or else he thinketh himself so wise that he will not, allow another man's counsel […]. And verily it is naturally given to all men to esteem their own inventions best. So both the raven and the ape think their own young ones fairest. Then if a man in such a company, where some disdain and have despite at other men's inventions and some count their own best, if among such men (I say) a man should bring forth anything that he hath read done in times past or that he hath seen done in other places, there the hearers fare as though the whole existimation of their wisdom were in jeopardy to be overthrown, and that ever after they should be counted for very dizzards, unless they could in other men's inventions pick out matter to reprehend and find fault at […]. Many times have I chanced upon such proud, lewd, overthwart, and wayward judgments.

Here are precisely those characteristics uppermost in Heywood's writings. It is unlikely to be a coincidence that he echoes More's concern about the hopelessness of trying to “beat” any enlightenment into “their heads whose minds be already prevented with clean contrary persuasions”.⁹

We begin to be in a position to appreciate the central tension in Heywood: a tension between determination to argue, and resistance to argument. The inevitable result is deadlock, and that of course explains why arbitrators or referees appear so frequently in his works. Mery-reporte in The Play of the Weather is a skittish parody of the type: he boasts to Jupiter of his impartiality, claiming that he is “indifferent” to “all weathers”, “without affection, standinge so upright” (154-5)—quite literally a ‘man for all seasons’! But let us pause to consider Heywood's use of the debate method, which necessitates such arbitration in the first place.

The Tudor humanists abhorred scholastic debate on account of what they felt to be its labyrinthine procedures and its obfuscating terminology. Thus there is a certain irony in the fact that Heywood, a member of the Thomas More humanist coterie, should have gone down in literary history as a composer of debates. The ‘debate’ label is regrettable, I believe, because it preconditions readers against looking out for dramatic elements in his work. There are, after all, debates and debates. Debate can be a cerebral, formal exercise governed by strict rules, progressing with the pace and discipline of a chess-game. But if you start to infuse it with racy backchat, subjectivity, and informality, if you throw out the rules, it slides towards something else which can only lamely be called ‘argument’. Eventually a point is reached where the ‘argument’ is dynamic rather than geometric, dramatic rather than forensic. A powerful example of this is an episode in Piers Plowman where, in the midst of the cataclysm of the crucifixion and Christ's descent to hell, Langland daringly recasts the dispute between God's ‘four daughters’ over mankind's right to salvation, into a homely and boisterous quarrel pursued by four excitable young “wenches” as if one some street corner. Heywood, of course, had no need to look so far afield for a model since, as one commentator has pointed out, in the case of More himself “the dialogue in prose becomes a kind of interlude, with irony, pun, dialect, and characterisation”.¹⁰

There is an interesting report by Anthony à Wood that Heywood curtailed his studies at Oxford because “the crabbedness of logic” did not agree with his “airy genie”. He hardly sounds like a man wedded to the rigours of academic debate, and indeed throughout his work an “airy genie” seems to be playfully at odds with “the crabbedness of logic”. He evidently enjoys stretching debate to the brink of absurdity by obliging it to tackle momentous issues like ‘are watermills more important than wind-mills?’ or ‘do spiders, or flies, have tenure of windows?’ Although vestiges of formal dialectic are visible here and there in his dramatic works (notably in Witty and Witless and The Play of Love), those of his characters who pursue earnest discussion have to contend with daunting showers of mockery, inconsequential retort, or downright cynicism. It seems to me that while Heywood is constantly drawn to debate as a natural means of expressing his keen sense of man's competitive instinct, he is restlessly experimenting with it, wrenching it this way and that, until it heaves at the seams or indeed bursts its boundaries altogether.

Because we cannot plot the chronology of Heywood's plays with any certainty, it is difficult to tell what stages he went through in seeking ways of vitalising—or rather dramatising—the debate form.¹¹ Sometimes he contents himself with merely developing the boastfulness, the cunning resourcefulness, or the wit of his disputants. Sometimes he exploits the dramatic potential inherent in punctuating rounds of argument with a sort of ‘recitative’—intervals of improvised by-play or comic routine, “divers toys and jests added thereto to make merry pastime and disport”.¹² In his best work I believe he was aiming at a fusion of both techniques, trying to blend argument and recitative into one: he came nearest to achieving this in The Four PP.

Discussion of that play must be delayed for a moment, however, while we consider how the proliferation of shrill propaganda during the Reformation must have fuelled Heywood's attacks on egoism. He was at court from 1519 onwards, and remained there through the trauma of King Henry's break with Rome, which inaugurated an era of polemic and pamphleteering. Other contemporary dramatists began to channel their talents into propaganda, Protestant or Papist according to their beliefs and the prevailing wind of the moment. Catholic propaganda is later recalled by Spenser in the serpentine figure of Errour who spewed out filthy vomit “ful of bookes and papers” (Faerie Queene I.i.20). The “vomit” spilled on to the stage. Heywood was probably among those who applauded a play at court in 1527 which ridiculed Luther. He was still writing during the period when John Bale was cudgelling Catholics in plays like Kynge Johan, abetted by others such as Wever, author of Lusty Juventus. The Catholic reaction after Queen Mary's accession engendered Respublica, a sharp attack on the Reformation which must have delighted Heywood who was currently writing the conclusion of The Spider and the Fly where Mary (under the guise of a chambermaid) squashes the spider (probably Cranmer) under her heel. This is one of Heywood's few propagandist works, but even here the poem's topical allegory is mostly so cryptic as almost to deserve William Harrison's ironic commendation that it “dealeth so profoundlie, and beyond all measure of skill, that neither he himself that made it, neither anie one that readeth it, can reach into the meaning thereof”.¹³

In what is extant of his writing for the stage, Heywood sensibly kept up a front of neutrality, and avoided adulterating his talent with futile gestures of belligerence, by attacking not the other camp but the root of the controversy, intolerance itself. As we have seen, egotistical intolerance is a general target in his plays, and we may therefore legitimately see them as various refractions, so to speak, of sectarian dispute. Not that I wish to claim specific allegorical import for all of them. In The Play of the Weather, for instance, Heywood is clearly mocking social and political rivalries primarily—yet even in this case it may be that when Jupiter utters his motto for egoist mankind at the end, “There is no one craft can preserve man so” (1194), we hear a veiled condemnation of religious partisanship.

It was probably another consequence of the More circle's ideology that Heywood, so far as we know, did not enter the fray with Bale and the rest. In Utopia we are told that King Utopus decreed

that it should be lawful for every man to favour and follow what religion he would, and that he might do the best he could to bring other to his opinion, so that he did it peaceably, gently, quietly, and soberly, without hasty and contentious rebuking and inveighing against others.

(p. 119)

King Utopus would surely have appreciated a Utopian translation of two of Heywood's plays in particular, in which “contentious” religious fanaticism is exposed with characteristically disarming wit and humour. The two plays are The Pardoner and the Friar and The Four PP. Both involve the same cross-currents: satirizing the superstitious abuse of Catholic practices by ecclesiastical hypocrites; and undermining their noisy boasts that each exclusively commands the most direct route to salvation. If the shouting-match between Pardoner and Friar is not a raucous parody of the war of creeds, what else is it? Here is the Pardoner's attempt to oust his rival from the stage:

… where thou saidst that thou art more meet
Among the people here for to preach,
Because thou dost them the very way teach,
How to come to heaven above:
Therein thou liest, and that shall I prove,
And by good reason I shall make thee bow,
And know that I am meeter than art thou.

(Farmer ed., p. 12)

He betrays precisely the sort of bigotry that rampages in the plays of John Bale and for which he would have been banished outright from Utopia for being “a seditious person and a raiser up of dissension among the people” (p. 119). But The Pardoner and the Friar is a lightweight composition: it is to The Four PP that we must turn for a thoroughgoing dramatic exploitation of such themes.

Lying is the explicit subject of the climax of The Four PP but it is also, as one critic has remarked, a “constant undercurrent of the play”.¹⁴ We see the chance meeting of four rogues, the mountebanks of their time, who attempt to practise their fraudulent salesmanship upon each other and upon the audience. We in the audience are the initial victims, when a Palmer wanders in alone and harangues us with a conceited recital of his travels. Scarcely half a minute would pass before Heywood's original audience would be thinking: ‘lies!’ The tall stories of palmers were proverbial as far back as Langland's day:

Pilgrims and Palmeres plighten hem togidere […]
Wenten forth in hire wey with many wise tales,
And hadden leue to lyen al hire lif after.

(Piers Plowman B. Prol. 46-9)

At about the time when Heywood was beginning to gain recognition at court, we find More's friend Erasmus repeating this accusation. In one of his Colloquies, a certain Cornelius arrives back thoroughly disillusioned from an arduous pilgrimage to Jerusalem, where he saw nothing but counterfeit monuments and relics, fabricated to swindle credulous pilgrims. Laconically, he observes that there is one compensation; his voyage has furnished him with a new supply of lies to infiltrate into flagging conversations at the dinner-table.¹⁵ The fact is that the whole business of pilgrimage, shrines, and image-worship was a conspicuous focus for some of the Reformation's most vitriolic attacks, which were to receive the seal of royal approval in two sets of injunctions issued by Henry VIII. Item VI of the second set (1538) for example, decrees that the clergy must, at least four times a year, preach in such a way as to warn parishioners “not to repose their trust or affiance in […] wandering to pilgrimages, offering of money, candles, or tapers to images or relics, or kissing or licking the same”.¹⁶ Consequently Heywood must have been calculating on a derisory response from the majority of his audience when he opened The Four PP with a Palmer's travelogue—and the point holds true whether the play was first performed in the mid-1540's (probable date of Wyllyam Myddylton's printing of it) or in the 1520's which may have been his most prolific period as a playwright.¹⁷

Three things are simultaneously achieved while the Palmer advertises his pilgrim perambulations. Firstly, his lies begin to betray themselves in the enormity and rigmarole of his name-dropping:

At Saynt Toncomber; and Saynt Tronion;
At Saynt Bothulph; and Saynt Anne of Buckston;
On the Hylles of Armony, where I see Noes arke;
With holy Iob; and Saynt George in Suthwarke […]

(31-4)¹⁸

Though this is but a snippet, in the alliterative patter of the first couplet and in the facile jingling rhyme of the second it invites our scepticism and laughter in much the same way as Mery-reporte's deliberately incredible torrent of ‘places visited’ at one point in The Play of the Weather (198f.). Secondly, although the text does not make it explicit, the Palmer provokes titters in the audience by proudly drawing attention to various trinket-souvenirs which festoon his hat and clothes as mementos of his visits to the shrines whose names he is repeating: hence his introductory remark, “I am a palmer, as ye se” (9). They were a sort of medieval equivalent to the badges and other regalia attached to the back window of a modern caravan touring Europe, and would include a scallop-shell from Compostella (“Saynt Iames in Gales”, 37), and a ring from Walsingham (35)—which in Witty and Witless, p. 194, typifies something trite and laughable. Thirdly, the monologue characterizes him as vain, long-winded, and sanctimonious on the subject of his marathon barefoot labours which, he is resolved to convince us, will guarantee him salvation more certainly than the next man. Unfortunately, the more he labours his narrow trust in pilgrimage, the more his self-righteousness alienates any shreds of sympathy remaining in us:

To Iosophat and Olyuete
          On fote, God wote, I wente ryght bare,—
Many a salt tere dyde I swete
          Before thys carkes coulde come there.

(17-20)

For be ye sure I thynke surely
Who seketh sayntes for Crystes sake—
And namely suche as payne do take
On fote to punyshe their frayle body—
Shall thereby meryte more hyely
Than by any-thynge done by man.

(58-63)

Perhaps Heywood takes a risk in introducing this tendentious bore (a Tudor Catholic Chadband) to us at the start. But I suspect that in performance it would be found that he has nicely gauged the point at which a restive audience will welcome and applaud the Pardoner who now intervenes. In what follows, Heywood carefully manipulates our responses, tossing us back and forth between the characters as he will throughout the play. If we are initially delighted with the Pardoner for deflating his rival's wearisome piety by scoffing at the folly of getting blisters tramping the world for a salvation available next door in the shape of himself (“Nowe, syns ye myght haue spedde at home, / What haue ye wone by ronnyng at Rome?”) our enthusiasm soon evaporates when we perceive that the Pardoner stakes his own claim to spiritual superiority on a mercantile basis of cost-efficiency:

[…] yf there were a thousande soules on a hepe,
I wolde brynge them all to heuen as good chepe
As ye haue brought your-selfe on pylgrymage
In the leste quarter of your vyage. […]
Geue me but a peny or two pens,
And as sone as the soule departeth hens,
In halfe an hour, or thre quarters at moste,
The soule is in heuen with the Holy Ghost.

(139-150)

Conversely, if we warm to the Palmer when he declares that truth and Pardoners are totally incompatible, there is the Pardoner's retort that “ye be as vntrue as I”, that Palmers have a carte blanche to lie because nobody can corroborate their stories.

Our only refuge from the crossfire is to reject both as “false knaues”, which is what the Pothecary calls them as he bounces into their argument. The irony of his own boast that he pre-empts them where sending souls to heaven is concerned, because it is a Pothecary's vocation to assist men to die, capitalizes upon a long-standing tradition of satire on physicians. A Pothecary (i.e. peddling druggist) would be suspected along with the regular physicians of killing more often than he cured. (It is a common joke in the jestbooks and appears elsewhere in the drama, for instance in The Play of the Sacrament). Heywood's Pothecary ingeniously converts the joke into a proof of his own supremacy and, despite his eccentric logic, aims to bowl everybody over by sheer nerve while at the same time trying to attract us with ebullient witticisms about drink (153) and the gallows (174-6); topics which, however, may stir in us uneasy memories of a dangerously jovial personality we have met in the Morality drama, the Vice.

The Pardoner thrusts in quickly against the new secular competitor;

If ye kylde a thousande in an houre space,
When come they to heuen, dyenge from state of grace?

(187-8)

—an argument which incidentally illustrates the play's unobtrusive structuring, since it anticipates the Pardoner's Lie, grounded on his anxiety about the spiritual state of someone who dies suddenly. Here he is backed up by the Palmer in characteristically tendentious style: the erstwhile rivals unite against an outsider's preposterous pretensions. So the Pothecary is stopped in his tracks and a position of checkmate is temporarily reached from which he tries to extricate himself with an exclamation, “By the masse, I holde vs nought all thre!” (202).

It is worth noting Heywood's skill in cueing-in here. A Pedlar has approached and hovers uncertainly near the others, hoping to do business. But interpreting the Pothecary's “nought” in monetary terms, he blurts out his disappointment—“By Our Lady, then haue I gone wronge!” (203). This is a fair sample of the playwright's artful naturalism in getting freshcomers into conversations, something that is also complemented by his gift for contriving a natural to-and-fro of talk.

In terms of the salvation-argument, the Pedlar is an interloper. This is deliberate. There can only be deadlock between the three egoists unless they find an arbitrator. One can think of another “P” who might logically have been introduced—a Priest. But besides being an ‘interested party’ he would be difficult to fit into the overriding scheme of salesmanship which Heywood is pursuing. The Pedlar, in fact, is ideal because he combines the desired independence with showmanship and with that reputation for dishonesty which enables Shakespeare's sharpster Autolycus to slip so easily into the role in The Winter's Tale. Thus his addition to the trio seems to complete a quartet of rogues. “Where the deuyll were we foure hatched?” exclaims the Pothecary (212). Perhaps, as we survey the four of them, we are reminded of analogous squads (of Vice-and-comrades) in the Moralities. The Pardoner and Palmer at least would surely have summoned up in Heywood's audience the image of an “Avarice” or a “Deceit” adopting a clerical disguise to bluff his victims.

Anyway the Pedlar now tries to foist his knick-knacks on the others and no doubt on the audience, just as the Palmer ‘sold’ his earful of shrines earlier. Maybe, he insinuates, the Palmer has “a wanton in a corner” somewhere for whom a glove, pomander, lace or pincase would make a timely present. The Pothecary, who is rapidly proving to be the play's leading ‘turkey cock’, perceives a golden opportunity to display his salacious wit, and cracks at the Pedlar for making his wife's pincase so wide that “the pynnes fall out” and “Great pynnes must she haue, one or other” in consequence (247-9). The play, it might seem, now takes a desultory path, losing its way in the fit of antifeminist joking which the Pothecary here embarks upon. A gratuitous competition in sexual quibbling between him and the Pedlar appears to be pushing Heywood off course—even if it is a realistic reflection of male repartee. Borrowing a criticism levelled at Shakespeare by Dr. Johnson, we might be inclined to say that “a quibble is to Heywood what luminous vapours are to the traveller; he follows it at all adventures: it is sure to lead him out of his way, and sure to engulf him in the mire.”²⁰ There would be some truth in all this. The pun, in Tudor times, was enjoying a cocky adolescence. Heywood feasts us with trencher-sized courses of quibbles which defeat the appetite of most modern readers; and frequently so “naughty” that in 1937 they “could hardly be printed and certainly not repeated publicly.”²¹ I imagine that this extravagance arises from a sort of unwritten contract between Heywood and his original audience. Because he was renowned in his day for his conversational virtuosity in rattling off volleys of puns and conceits; because word-harrying was the very hallmark of his personality, his audience would expect to be saturated with word-play.²² A new Heywood interlude without it would have been baffling—rather like a new Pinter play without silences.

In any case the verbal jugglery is still amusing (though requiring a comedian's quickfire performance to gain maximum effect). The Pedlar's explanation why women take so long to dress is a dextrous comic crescendo:

Forsoth, women haue many lettes,
And they be masked in many nettes:
As frontlettes, fyllettes, partlettes and barcelettes;
And then theyr bonettes and theyr poynettes.
By these lettes and nettes the lette is suche
The spede is small when haste is muche.

(257-62)

But how does it all advance the play? The answer is that the jokes establish the antifeminist mood which is to be the nub of the final scenes; that the Pothecary's lusty tongue again intimates his Vice-like identity and prepares us for the content of his Lie; and that the Pedlar emerges as a man “well sene in womens causes” (253) hence one whose verdict on such things will be authoritative. So the ‘recitative’ sustains naturalism and theme alike—up to a point, since Heywood does strain his dialogue a little as he manoeuvres it towards the topic of singing. Songs were de rigeur in Tudor drama, and had to be got in, by hook or by crook.

Eventually the Pardoner cuts off further pleasantry by reverting to the bone of contention about salvation (which the Pothecary has been encouraging everyone to lose sight of). For the Pedlar's benefit there has to be a summary of previous arguments in a speech which is “the most crass form of exposition” according to R. C. Johnson (p. 90). Actually it should go down quite well in production if the actor can underline how the Pardoner slides speedily from objectivity to partiality. He is soon sounding the abrasive note again, caustically taunting the Palmer whose “payne” is “more than hys wit / To walke to heuen, syns he may syt!” (356-7) and openly insulting the Pothecary as an arrogant “daw”. The Pothecary takes up the challenge (and confirms his arrogance) as he proceeds to try to hustle the Pedlar into giving a quick verdict in his favour. But the Pedlar is not going to meddle in judgment of such “maters of weyght”. Instead, in the archetypal fashion of arbitrators, he slips off the hook by proposing a compromise. He suggests, in all innocence, that if the three of them can “obey one wyll” and work together as a team, their combined professions will give any man who applies to them a cast-iron guarantee of salvation. The Pothecary responds to this novel scheme of a sort of holy trinity partnership with enthusiasm—as long as he is to be the leading partner! (His conviction that “Twayne of vs must wayte on the thyrde” (415) may be another echo from the Morality plays, where the Vice is frequently anxious to assert authority over his fellows). Here it merely takes us back to square one since none of these egoists can bear the thought of yielding the leadership to another.

Some way out of the impasse is desperately needed, and the Pedlar has the solution: “to deuyse some maner thynge / Wherein ye all be lyke connynge” (432-3) and which he is qualified to judge, namely a lying-competition. It is apparently a spur-of-the-moment inspiration: but Heywood's ‘improvisation’, as earlier suggested, is subject to a calculated design. Lying was implicit in the opening speech and we have scarcely lost touch with it since. If his characters appear to be ‘in search of a play’, devising their own script as they go along, that is simply a mark of Heywood's skill in presenting his plot with a convincing façade of informality.

There is sly irony in the Pedlar's promise to be an incorruptible judge, awarding the “mastrye” as his “consciens” directs—in a lying-contest! Only the Palmer has to be chivvied into co-operation. Although he can lie, he would like it put on record that he is “loth” to lower himself to that sort of level (452-3). This is part of a clever developing strategy on Heywood's part, because the Palmer's conspicuous silence during the bawdy repartee earlier, and his reluctance to play the game now, are building up an erroneous impression in the audience that he is bound to be outmatched by his volatile, less starchy rivals. However the Pedlar insists that the Palmer can safely drop his pious guard in present company, and that everybody has enough facility in lying to “hope” to win (461). This precipitates a false start to the contest, because our Pothecary flightily ‘mistakes’ the issue and “hops” crazily about the stage for a quick victory, as though he were in a young folks' dance competition. It is an opportunity for the actor to indulge in an Andrew Aguecheek-like fit of lugubrious cavorting. It also serves, firstly, as another signal to us that the Pothecary is in some sense the Vice of the play, because mistaking-the-word was a common Vice trademark;²³ and secondly to provoke more platitudes from the straitlaced Palmer who protests that “quietnesse” (like his) is a greater “rychesse” in a man than such tomfoolery. That in turn gives the Pardoner a cue to brag of the “rychesse” of his pardons and relics, further substantiating the mercantile streak noticed in him before. There is an awkwardness in this transition in reading that would not, perhaps, be evident in performance. At all events Heywood is shunting into a situation where the Pardoner and Pothecary can promote their wares as the others have already promoted theirs.

It is wrong of R. C. Johnson to describe the ensuing comic routine as a “digression”. We are still firmly anchored to the lying theme. The Pardoner's relics are an increasingly outlandish farrago of patent frauds: All-hallows' jaw-bone, the Great Toe of the Trinity, a Buttock-bone of Pentecost, one of the Seven Sleepers' slippers, and a box of bumble-bees that stung Eve when she bit the apple! To our immense delight the Pothecary systematically, and hilariously, explodes each relic as it is flourished from its case. Putting his lips to All-hallows' smelly jaw-bone, for instance, he recoils melodramatically, like Absolon from Alisoun's buttocks in The Miller's Tale; and he quips of the Trinity's extraordinary toe

Other the Trinite had the goute,
Or elles, bycause it is iii toes in one,
God made it muche as thre toes alone.

(515-7)

But it is the odour rather than the size of the relics that most provokes his deadly sarcasm, which he defends against the Pedlar's reproaches with an exclamation that surely draws a round of applause from the audience: “Shall I prayse relykes when they stynke?” (537)²⁴

Our huge enjoyment of this scene is enhanced by the credulous reverence expressed by Pedlar and Palmer. Moreover the Pedlar's gullibility continues to add spice to the subsequent scene in which it is the Pothecary's turn to advertise his goods, so much more efficacious he insists than the Pardoner's clutter. To vary the comedy, Heywood here allows the quack to catalogue his polysyllabic prescriptions almost uninterrupted. Scoffing is left to the audience, which is invited to savour innuendoes and asides acknowledging his medicines' death-dealing properties, which pass unnoticed by the others on-stage.

The lying-contest proper at last seems about to get off the ground. But Round One is another false start. Our clever-clever Pothecary tries to out-wit the others in one sentence by addressing the Palmer as “an honest man” (655): the Palmer, naturally, agrees; the Pardoner declares it to be a lie. It is a crisp and witty joke. The Pothecary crows over them. He deliberately lied: they, caught on the hop, both fell into the trap and spoke what they considered to be the truth. Ergo, he alone is capable of lying. A cunning victory—but hollow of course because they weren't trying yet. Heywood is spiralling around the rogues' roguery, teasing and entertaining us by ravelling up truth and lies in a tangle of irony. But this sham-contest also serves a structural function, for it artfully balances the imminent climax. The Pothecary is an arrant overreacher; next time, he will be on the receiving end, hoist with his own petard. Once again we can see, therefore, that Heywood has built a structural underprop into a superficially inconsequential episode. And it is entirely characteristic of him that the point of it will be ‘the biter bit’ or ‘the mocker mocked’ (see note 6).

If you give the Pothecary an inch, he takes ten yards. The Pedlar-umpire senses that things will get out of hand unless the contest is redefined more stringently, so he requests a “tale” from each contestant, the verdict to depend on the degree of “meruell” and implausibility attained (698-703). (It is not the only instance where Heywood integrates storytelling into a play. In The Play of Love 40lf. No-lover-nor-loved holds the stage with a juicy anecdote as long and as accomplished as either of the tales in The Four PP. Probably these tales-within-plays are another indication of that cabaret-like function of Tudor drama which we are belatedly beginning to appreciate).

Predictably the Pothecary leaps into the breach first. He gives full rein now to the bawdiness for which he has already shown such a penchant. His tale is in classic jestbook style, but with a brilliantly ludicrous edge. He conflates two favourite joke motifs—one about miraculous cures for constipation²⁵ and another about ways of curing lecherous women subject to “fallen-syknes” (nymphomania). They converge in the “tampyon” which the quack places in his patient's anus as a “glyster” (enema) for the first complaint and as a sort of chastity-belt for the second. As he half expects, an internal combustion takes place. The “tampyon” cannons off like an artillery shell with such force that it totally demolishes a castle ten miles off: with the consequence that his patient is delivered of one of her inconveniences (the constipation) at least!

The Pothecary's antifeminist lie is in character; brash, garish, altogether overwrought, for all its bawdy ingenuity. The Pardoner's ensuing effort makes a fine contrast in its more sophisticated development and urbane humour. It is some 200 lines long, and must tax the actor's resourcefulness in gesture and mime. The Pardoner, like his rival, fuses antifeminism with the idea of a cure, but in this instance a “gostely” (spiritual) cure greater he declares than any physical cure ever achieved by the quack.

There is food for thought in that expression “gostely” cure (773). I believe it should alert us to the means by which the Pothecary's and Pardoner's lies are bound into the play's fabric. The point is that Heywood is exploiting a traditional Christian metaphor whereby the clergy are ‘physicians’ who cure mankind of the sickness of sin. The priesthood derives its ‘curative’ powers from God, whom More, in A Dialogue of Comfort (written in 1534) calls “that high, great, and excellent physician without whom we could never be healed of our very deadly disease of damnation”. Interestingly enough, in the same passage More contrasts God, the genuine physician, with agnostic “paynim philosophers” who are ultimately as worthless in providing spiritual aid as “bold blind poticaries which […] give sick folk medicines of their own devising, and therewith kill up in corners many such simple folk as they find so foolish to put their lives in such lewd and unlearned blind Bayards' hands”.²⁶ Now in The Four PP, what Palmer, Pardoner and Pothecary each claims is that his occupation is the best prescription for the health of the soul (see 11.88, 155, 389). But the tales told by the latter two are to say the least grossly distorted exempla of how spiritual medicine should be administered. The Pothecary ‘cures’ a patient in a spoof of a real physician's methods; at one remove, I suggest, he also parodies a priestly function in his attempt to ‘deliver’ (or purge) her of her “inconueniens” (i.e. sin; 765-6). Similarly in the tale we are about to consider, the Pardoner's “gostely” cure—he rescues a prostitute from hell—parodies a genuine priest's exertions to save his parishioners from damnation by exercising what in medieval times would have been called his “lechecrafte”.

These are implications which Tudor spectators could not have missed. They would quickly have grasped that within the ‘Lying Proficiency test’ Heywood is cleverly sharpening the ironies surrounding the hypocrites' partisan claims about salvation. They would, moreover, have been acutely aware that Purgatory and pardons were currently easy prey for “Protestant zealots like Tyndale” who “crudely denounced the doctrine of Purgatory and indulgences as a worldwide plot by the priesthood aimed at fleecing poor and rich alike.”²⁷

The Pardoner's story is essentially simple. A woman-friend Margery Coorson, by implication a prostitute, dies suddenly and thus without the insurance of one of his pardons. Reproaching himself with negligence, he undertakes a mission to ascertain her spiritual fate, travelling first to Purgatory but finding, as he has guessed in advance, that she is not there. He hurries on and reaches Hell on a propitious day, the festival of Lucifer's fall (perhaps implying that the Pardoner unwittingly re-enacts that fall?). He obtains a safe-conduct with the help of an old friend who mans Hell's gate:

Thys deuyll and I were of olde acqueyntaunce,
For oft in the play of Corpus Cristi
He had played the deuyll at Couentry.

(830-2)

Lucifer instantly grants his request for Margery's release from Hell, because women make a complete nuisance of themselves there; he bids the Pardoner to return the favour by lavishing pardons on women to prevent them from coming under his jurisdiction. Hell rings with joy as Margery is escorted out of the infernal kitchens and deposited safely on Newmarket Heath.

This fluent, imaginative, and circumstantial ‘lie’ is superbly resonant. Heywood subtly blends together the Pardoner's implied lechery and implied damnation, his facile belief in the spiritual efficacy of his pardons, parodies of royal safe-conducts, of court festivities and of a plaintiff making a plea before a monarch, and a pervasive seasoning of antifeminism, within a story which has the broad dimensions of a mock-Harrowing of Hell or a mock-Orpheus and Eurydice. How, we must wonder, can the Palmer, so slow of speech and sour of wit, possibly approach the quality of such a cultivated Lie?

However a third monologue on anything like the scale of the first two would have overtaxed the patience of the audience. Heywood shows an astute sense of theatre in deliberately throwing the contest out of gear. The Palmer, still harping on his immense experience as a globe-trotter—and we may note that the stress laid on that at the beginning is going to be vindicated here—simply fastens on to the Pardoner's suggestion that Lucifer and his officials are exasperated at the shrewishness of their kingdom's female population. He cannot understand it. Of all the thousands of women he has encountered in his wanderings, he declares (and rather spoils his pious image by letting slip that he has “taryed” with a few of them), he has never once known a single woman “out of paciens” (1004). This is too much for the other contestants. Crying out, almost with one voice, that it is a barefaced lie, they really capitulate before they realise what they are saying. The Pedlar's verdict is a foregone conclusion. In his view ten of the Pothecary's tampons and castles, ten of the Pardoner's underworld quests, would be ten times more plausible than the Palmer's lie.

Some critics have tended to think that the play, to all intents and purposes, ends here even if it carries on as if propelled by its own momentum for another 200-odd lines. For example R. C. Johnson is of the opinion that “when the Pedlar awards victory to the Palmer, the play should end; the climax would be artistically perfect, but the humanist overpowers the dramatist, and the play plods along” (p. 93). I cannot agree with this. The ‘climax’ would be superficial: it would leave the play's themes in an uneasy state of suspension.

After the contest, we are pitched back realistically into recriminations. Arbitration is all very well: but can it change people's minds? Certainly not the Pothecary's. Enraged that the verdict will enslave him (a “gentylman”) to the beggarly Palmer, he vents his ungentlemanly spleen on their judge, flinging all those ‘tens’ back in his teeth. It is an outburst of verbal fireworks, of almost intoxicated wit and semi-incoherent wrath demonstrating that he is not a man to give up without a fight. The Pardoner, however, dissociates himself from his irate fellow-loser and tries softer tactics to try to win some concession from their adjudicator—in vain, it transpires, for the Pedlar's “consciens” (1060) directs him to confirm the verdict. The lie about women, he says, is one that may be put to the test “euyn in thys companye” (1068) where two out of every three women in the audience will be shrews; or all of them. In familiar interlude style, the audience is yanked into the play, but not yet in earnest. Even the women singled out by the Pedlar's pointed finger (1070f.) can still feel complacent. Antifeminism, however excellently re-vamped in the play, is after all an old convention, fit only for mirth. A fig for the Pedlar's ‘conscience’.

When the Pardoner degenerates to the Pothecary's level, cursing his judge, and the Pothecary conversely enacts a sarcastic parody of “curtesy” towards his new overlord the Palmer, there is clearly no hope that the trinity of rogues can work in unison as the Pedlar originally suggested. The Palmer discharges his recalcitrant servants. Egoism rules the roost again.

There follows what R. C. Johnson calls (p. 94) a “sermon” in which the Pedlar, “out of character”, drives home the point of the play. Johnson is probably swayed by the family resemblance between the Pedlar's exhortatory manner and that of numerous Expositors/Doctors/Philosophers who figure in the concluding scenes of Mystery and Morality plays, and there is something in that. But this conclusion is not a ‘medieval’ trailer hitched clumsily to the towbar of The Four PP. Rather it is a fitting culmination, which forces us to acknowledge that a serious issue has been underpinning the “airy genie” of all that we have watched. The Pedlar is not altogether ‘out of character’. The final dramatic twist explains puzzling ambiguities about him in earlier scenes, which a production of the play should preserve. Suddenly we realize that his obsession with impartiality and with his conscience was not merely frivolous; that it was not just naivete which caused him to reproach the Pothecary for deriding the Pardoner's relics (“Syr, me thynketh your deuocion is but smal” 534) or to give the Pothecary's medicines the benefit of the doubt (602-3); and that his proposition that the three men work together was sincere, not a smart tactic to evade the onus of judging between them; that, in short, despite his suspect profession, the Pedlar is the odd “P” amongst the four!

So it is from a basis of moral integrity intimated throughout his role in the play, that the Pedlar can now address the others and try to persuade the Palmer and Pardoner that, if they are genuine, they are ‘walking’ on parallel spiritual paths and that an infinite variety of virtuous lifestyles are equally acceptable to God. Their sectarian rivalry is exposed for the fratricidal thing it really is:

One kynde of vertue to dyspyse another
Is lyke as the syster myght hange the brother.

(1187-8)

As for the way of the Pothecary, who congratulates himself that he escapes such criticism by using “no vertue at all” (1190), the Pedlar denounces that as the worst way of all except that (a lovely last flick of the lying theme!) the Pothecary has, for once, spoken the truth about himself.

However the final twist, in a play packed with them, is still to come. The Pedlar rounds on the audience, which has been comfortably enjoying the egoists' discomfiture, even while he finishes demolishing the Pothecary:

[…] I dare well reporte,
Ye are well be-loued of all thys sorte,
By your raylynge here openly
At pardons and relyques so leudly.

(1199-1202)

It suddenly dawns on us that we, too, have been caught out. We, too, have been swept into the irreverence and backbiting of the play. We have mentally applauded each character in turn for the jibes he has flung “leudly” at his rivals. Worst of all, we have shown our kinship with the irreligious braggart Pothecary, become his accomplices so to speak, by loving every minute of his withering attack on the Pardoner's relics. In recoiling from the manifest corruption of the church as embodied in Palmer and Pardoner, we have thrown ourselves into the dubious embrace of a man who may be considered to be the Vice of The Four PP.

Two observations can be added. The first is that Heywood here contrives a subtle Catholic counter-attack on the Protestant Pardoner-baiting into which he has lured a willing audience. It is presumptuous, the Pedlar warns, to take upon oneself the church's prerogative of judging its officers. Secondly, Heywood closes his play with a characteristic plea for tolerance, gently rebuking us for our own susceptibility to that aggressive instinct which he has so comically exploited and exposed. We may have a right to treat flagrant Chadbandery with circumspection, concedes the Pedlar,

But where ye dout the truthe, nat knowynge,
Beleuynge the beste, good may be growynge—
In iudgynge the beste, no harme at the leste,
In iudgynge the worste, no good at the beste.

(1209-12)

Measured by such standards, the play's characters and its audience have been found wanting, through Heywood's skilful theatrical shaping of a theme that is central in many of his works, though most concisely presented in the first three stanzas of his Ballad against Slander and Detraction:

Almighty God
Doth shake his rod
          Of justice; and all those
That unjustly,
Detractively,
          Detract their friends or foes,
He telleth each one,
Thou shalt judge none;
          And if thou judge unbidden,
Thyself, saith He,
Shall judged be.
          This lesson is not hidden:
To this now stirred,
This is concord,
          Which willeth us in each doubt
To deem the best,
That may be jest,
          Till time the truth try out.

(1-18)²⁸

Critics have too easily written Heywood off as a farceur who never aimed at much more than divertissements composed to tickle the fancy of drowsy audiences after heavy dinners. There are, I agree, abundant flaws in his interludes; his command of style is strangely uneven, for instance, and he does sometimes flog puns to death. Nevertheless, without I hope making over-extravagant claims, I have tried to demonstrate the sophistication with which he could build a play. The Four PP is Heywood at his best. Its artfully ‘improvised’ surface, its noisy bouts of wrangling, and even its heady draughts of bawdy wit, gather into a precise and humane design whose significance is cunningly borne in upon us at the end. It is a Morality play in fool's costume. One can sense from its quality why King Henry's horrified courtiers persuaded him (if he needed persuading) to prevent Heywood's execution, though some of them probably valued his ephemeral witticisms or his court masques or his musical skills more than his talents as a dramatist. He was unlucky in that the Elizabethan taste for romantic plot—by which even now we still tend to measure his achievement—was so soon to leave his unromantic comedies outmoded (though he would have found a bedfellow of sorts later on in Ben Jonson). In his time he tried to use laughter as a weapon to fight a very sane rearguard action against blinkered fanaticism, in a way that seems particularly poignant when we consider how the entrenchment of Protestantism eventually drove him into exile following the accession of Queen Elizabeth.

Notes

1. A. P. Rossiter, English Drama from Early Times to the Elizabethans, London 1950, p. 117, even thinks that Heywood has been overvalued. The most recent full-length study, R. C. Johnson's John Heywood, New York 1970, often strikes a patronising note. A more adventurous approach is adopted in T. W. Craik and D. M. Bevington, ‘The Art of John Heywood: Two Views’, Renaissance Drama VII, 1964, pp. 6-19.

2. Biographical information in this paper is derived from Johnson (see above) and from R. W. Bolwell, The Life and Works of John Heywood, reprint New York 1966.

3. Craik, p. 9, notes “something of calculated extemporization, coherent inconsequence, in Heywood's entertainments,” but he does not elaborate the idea very far.

4. Heywood's plays are collected in J. S. Farmer, The Dramatic Writings of John Heywood, London, 1905, but without line numbering. I have used recent editions where available: J. A. B. Somerset, Four Tudor Interludes (London 1974) for The Play of Love, and D. Bevington, Medieval Drama (Boston 1975) for The Play of the Weather. Quotations from the Dialogue of Proverbs are from R. E. Habenicht, John Heywood's ‘A Dialogue of Proverbs’, Berkeley 1963; and references to The Spider and the Fly are to Farmer's text in The Writings of John Heywood, London 1908.

5. See Bevington's article cited in note 1, and Johnson, pp. 81-6.

6. See Tales & Quick Answers (? 1535) No. 11 ‘Of him that kissed the maid with the long nose’: “it is folly so to scoff that yourself thereby should be laughed to scorn again”, and cf. Nos. 40, 60, etc.: in P. M. Zall, A Hundred Merry Tales and other Jestbooks, Lincoln 1963. ‘Moccum moccabitur’ is the moral of No-lover-nor-loved's anecdote in The Play of Love 417f.

7. Bolwell, pp. 93-4, supports the Heywood attribution; P. Hogrefe, The Sir Thomas More circle, Urbana 1959, p. 283 assumes that Rastell was the author; Johnson, pp. 120-2, is undecided between Heywood and Rastell.

8. The Writings of John Heywood, ed. Farmer, pp. 465-6.

9. Utopia and The Dialogue of Comfort, ed. J. Warrington, London 1951, pp. 20-1 and p. 47. However, Hythloday's views are not necessarily always those of More. In the final paragraph of Utopia, the first passage quoted is recalled and subjected to a touch or two of irony.

10. Habenicht, p. 59. See also Hogrefe, pp. 94-7, on Erasmus and Lucianic dialogue.

11. The Pardoner and the Friar, The Play of Love, The Play of the Weather, and Johan Johan were all printed in 1533 by Heywood's brother-in-law William Rastell: but precisely when they were written is a matter of speculation. The Four PP was first printed, probably in the 1540's, by Myddlyton. Witty and Witless is extant only in manuscript. There are tantalizing allusions to other Heywood plays now lost; e.g. one “upon the parts of man”, apparently a dispute between Reason and Will, written 1545-8 (see Johnson, p. 88).

12. Frontispiece to Gentleness and Nobility, Farmer, p. 431.

13. See Johnson, p. 64.

14. Craik, p. 8.

15. The Colloquies of Erasmus, transl. C. R. Thompson, Chicago 1965, “Of Rash Vows”. One Colloquy. ‘The Religious Pilgrimage’, is a broadside attack on the shrine industry.

16. The Reformation in England, ed. A. G. Dickens & D. Carr, London 1967, p. 83.

17. Hogrefe dates the play “probably about 1521 to 1525” (p. 289). An early date does seem probable. By the 1530's a Catholic would have felt that attacks on the abuse of pilgrimage had already gone far enough. In his Confutation of Tyndale's Answer (1532) More rebukes Tyndale for mistranslating “idol” as “ymage” and declares that for his part he “neuer hadde that mynde in my lyfe to haue holy sayntes ymages or theyr holy relykes out of reuerence.” He goes on to complain that Tyndale's vituperations have “so enuenemed the hartes of lewdly disposed persones yt men can not almost now speke of such thynges in so mych as a play, but yt such euyll herers wax a grete dele ye worse” (Yale ed. of The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, Vol VIII, 1973, p. 178). The Four PP is more likely to be among the reformist plays now regretted by More than a later composition in which Heywood risked offering further anti-Catholic ammunition to the Protestants.

18. I have preferred J. M. Manly's text of The Four PP (Specimens of the Pre-Shakespearean Drama, 1897, Vol. I) to the text in Farmer or the modernised version in F. S. Boas, Five Pre-Shakespearean Comedies, London 1934. The Palmer's geographical patter derives from a tradition also represented in e.g. The Play of the Sacrament and Hyckescorner: see Manly, Specimens, I, p. 243 and p. 396.

19. Although the Pardoner can hardly be a Protestant, it is conceivable that Heywood squeezes in here a sideglance at the Protestants' insistence (initially supported by Catholic humanists) that salvation is to be sought in daily life at home rather than in pilgrimages. Cf. the conclusion of Erasmus' Colloquy, ‘The Religious Pilgrimage’.

20. Preface to Shakespeare: The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. VII, ed. A. Sherbo, Yale 1968, p. 74.

21. R. de la Bere, John Heywood, Entertainer, London 1937, p. 76.

22. “There came to be in reputation for the same faculties [in “vulgar makings”] John Heywood the epigrammatist who for the myrth and quickness of his conceits […] came to be well benefitted by the King [i.e. Edward VI]”; Puttenham, Arte of English Poesie, quoted from de la Bere, p. 27. See also R. Withington, ‘Paranomasia in John Heywood's plays’, Smith Coll. Studs. in Mod. Languages XXI, 1939-40, pp. 221-39. I. Maxwell, French Farce and John Heywood, Melbourne 1946, pp. 46-7, 107-8, claims that the habit of word-play is imported from the French theatre.

23. Similarly in The Play of Love 1024f. No-lover-nor-loved (who sufficiently resembles “the vice” to be so designated in a stage direction) facetiously mis-takes Lover-loved's Petrarchan paradoxes about the hot-and-cold of lovers. The Pothecary's pun on “hopping” recalls another in Dialogue of Proverbs 155-7. See also Chaucer's Troilus & Criseyde II.1107 “‘How ferforth be yet put in loves daunce?’ / ‘By God,’ quod he, ‘I hoppe alwey byhynde’.”

24. Heywood's debt to Chaucer's Pardoner has often been noted. Compare also A Satire of the Three Estates where the Pardoner's boy, Wilkin, maintains the supply of ‘relics’ by digging up the bones of dead cattle. The joke about the Trinity's toe is reminiscent of a passage in Erasmus' ‘The Religious Pilgrimage’ where Ogygius is shown a swollen limb purporting to be St. Peter's middle finger. In the same Colloquy an Englishman offends custodians at the Canterbury shrine by squeamishly refusing (like Heywood's Pothecary) to kiss their relics. Although The Four PP may originate partly in a French farce, another of the Colloquies, ‘Of Rash Vows’, embraces most of the play's major ingredients: satire on pilgrimage, the lies of pilgrims, a comparison between lying and calumny, satire on pardons, and significantly a conclusion in which the two pilgrims arrange to meet again for a competition in telling tall stories.

25. E.g. A Hundred Merry Tales, No. 7.

26. Ed. Warrington, p. 150.

27. A. G. Dickens, The English Reformation, London 1964, p. 6.

28. The Proverbs, Epigrams, and Miscellanies of John Heywood, ed. Farmer, London 1906, p. 305. See also Dialogue of Proverbs 1903-4.