SOURCE: “Life and Works,” and “The Plays,” in The Plays of John Heywood, edited by Richard Axton and Peter Happé, D. S. Brewer, 1991, pp. 1-10, 11-31.

[In the following excerpts from the introduction to their edition of Heywood's plays, Axton and Happé discuss details from the author's life and survey the plots, themes, and staging of his interludes.]

LIFE AND WORKS

Art thou Heywood that hath made many plaies?
Ye many plaies, fewe good woorkes in all my daies.

(Epigram 100, Fifth Hundred of Epigrans)

Heywood's long life (c.1497-1578) spans five reigns of doctrinal and social upheaval. As a loyal Catholic, related by marriage to the Rastells and the Mores, and by his daughter's marriage, to the Donnes, he narrowly escaped hanging in middle age. The last fourteen years of his old age were spent in exile, parted from a comfortable fortune. Yet his brilliance as an entertainer (singer, dancer, keyboard player, composer, playwright, poet, proverb-maker), made him welcome and rewarded at the courts of Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary, and Elizabeth. A tall man of striking presence,¹ he seems, literally, to have lived by his wit; his playful intelligence, his sociability and his quickness in coining epigrams made him the Tudor epitome of a ‘witty man’.

Among his contemporaries his reputation as a man-of-letters was very high. Bale praises his linguistic and musical skill, his power to evoke laughter;² Thomas Whythorne, who was Heywood's pupil between 1545 and 1548, emphasises his originality (his work came ‘from his brain’) and his copiousness, unrivalled in England since Chaucer:

… I waz plased [wit]h mr John Haywood, to be both hiz servant and skoller, for hee waz not only very skylled in Muzik, and pleyeng on þe virȝinals but also such an english poet, az þe lyk, for hiz witt and invension, with þe quantite þat hee wrot, waz not az þen in England, nor befor hiz tym sinse Chawsers tym.³

Whythorne goes on to praise Heywood's skill as instrumentalist and composer of songs: ‘In Muzik sweet [he] kan fram sweet nots to agree.’ Gabriel Harvey, writing in the margin of his copy of Quintilian, ranks Heywood with Sidney and Spenser, contrasting these three ‘natural geniuses’ rather surprisingly with the lesser, ‘lively talents’ of Chaucer, More and Bishop Jewel.⁴ Puttenham is more discriminating:

for the myrth and quicknesse of his conceite more than for any good learning was in him [he] came to be well benefitted by the king.⁵

John Florio regarded him as the great maker of English proverbs, Ben Jonson as ‘Heywood the Epigrammatist’.⁶

Puttenham's implication of frivolity is misleading. Like many highly intelligent writers Heywood often understates the serious; much of his wit is oblique. His engagement in religious and political issues by virtue of publication, his involvement in the conspiracy against Cranmer, and the writing of Spider and Flie all show him as a committed Catholic, though never solemn or pompous about his beliefs. Our Explanatory Notes show how much ‘good learning’ there was in the plays, in particular how intimate Heywood was with the English writings of his wife's uncle Thomas More, and how intelligently he tracked the religious and social issues of his times. There is, literally, much more to the plays than meets the casual glance.

The ‘merry conceited fellow’ and the ‘vir pius’ are aspects of an authentic humanism, which has qualities appealing strongly to modern sensibilities: a good-natured balance of mind, religious tolerance and lack of factionalism, a quizzical eye and ear for pretensiousness or special pleading, a Chaucerian self-deprecation, a strong and kindly sense of the family of mankind. His plays, for all their fashionable intelligence, embody much traditional wisdom and down-to-earth humour—qualities found above all in the English proverbs, of which he was so fond.

A good deal of detail about Heywood's life has been gathered, particularly by A. W. Reed, to whom all later scholars are much indebted.⁷ Many of the facts in the account that follows have been rehearsed before, although not with the interpretation and emphasis given here. In the shaping of John Heywood's professional career and fortunes three factors stand out: his native skill and charm as an entertainer; his family alliance with the Rastells, playmakers, lawyers and printers; and through them his affirmation of the Catholic ideas and attitudes of Thomas More.

From his own testimony, Heywood was born in about 1497, probably in Coventry, home of the Rastell family into which he married. It is likely that the William Heywood who temporarily succeeded Thomas Rastell, father of John, as Coroner of Coventry 1505-06, was father of John Heywood and three other sons.⁸ John Rastell, father of Joan whom Heywood married in about 1522, had Coventry business associations with the Mores as early as 1499; by 1504 he was married to Elizabeth, Thomas More's sister. In London Rastell pursued a versatile and exhausting career at law, in royal service, printing, writing plays and polemics, producing pageants and scenic devices. He was to prove a powerful guide to his son-in-law.

Nothing certain is known about the first twenty-one years of John Heywood's life. He would have been twelve when Henry VIII came to the throne in 1509 and it is likely in view of later testimonies to his skill as a musician, that he was a chorister in the Chapel Royal, although this is unproven. Some time around 1513 he apparently studied, briefly and without taking a degree, at Broadgates Hall (now Pembroke College), Oxford.⁹ It is as a ‘synger’ that Heywood's name first appears in the King's Household Books, at a time when, according to the chronicler Edward Hall's contemptuous exaggeration, the courtiers of the King's privy chamber ‘wer al Frenche’.¹⁰ Identification of the ‘Iohn Haywoode’ who received payment made on Twelfth Night 1515 is impossible, but it is clearly the ‘synger’ who in 1519-20 was in receipt of quarterly payments of 100 shillings.¹¹ At Michaelmas 1525 a payment of £6.13.4d refers to him as ‘player of the virginals’.¹² From February 1521 there is evidence of reward in the form of annual rents from lands in Essex, which had reverted to the Crown and which soon made Heywood prosperous and propertied. In 1523, with some assistance from the King he was granted Freedom of the City of London.¹³ At about this time he married Joan Rastell. By 1525 her father, among his heavyweight legal titles, had printed three English interludes.

At Christmas 1528 Heywood received the first of numerous sums of 50 shillings, the quarterly payment of ‘his annuell pencion after the rate of £10 by the yere … during his lyf.’¹⁴ This record has usually been taken to signify his discharge from Court service, though R.C. Johnson suggests, without evidence, that it marks the beginning of his appointment as dapifer camerae or ‘sewer’ of the royal chamber. However, an ‘annuell pencion’ was a retainer, not a golden hand-shake, and Heywood received further payment as ‘player of virginals’ in March 1529.¹⁵ Though he does not seem to have been in receipt of regular wages as a court servant, his involvement in court life is intermittently documented during the next two decades.

A year later (20 January 1530), Heywood transferred from the ‘crafte’ of Stationers to the wealthy Mercers Company, as ‘Comen Mesurer or meter of Lynnen Clothes’ and adjudicator of disputes.¹⁶ This does not necessarily mean that he was fully employed at the cloth business; the wording of the presentation allowed him to substitute a ‘sufficient depute’ if he wished. Moreover, he is referred to as ‘oon of the kynges ser[v]auntes’. During the next few years, which were fraught with political difficulty, Heywood seems to have kept in the King's good books. A record of royal New Year's gifts 1532/33 includes one ‘To Heywood. Item a gilte cuppe with a cover weing xxiii oz’.¹⁷ Whether or not there is any substance to the suggestion that Henry's handsome gift was in return for a manuscript of Heywood's dramatic works, one may be sure that the surviving plays associated with his name were virtually complete by this time. In the course of the next year, four of the six plays were printed by Heywood's brother-in-law William Rastell.

Publication began anonymously six weeks into the New Year with Johan Johan, issued by William Rastell on 12 February 1533 (assuming, as seems probable, that Rastell began the New Year in legal and Roman style at January 1). The Pardoner and the Frere, also anonymous, followed on 5 April 1533. The Play of the Wether (1533) and A Play of Love (1534), both in folio, carried John Heywood's name. Foure PP was probably published around this time, though no Rastell edition survives; it was printed by Myddylton c.1544, at about the time he reprinted Wether. Witty and Witless (an eighteenth-century title) was apparently never printed but was copied and included in Harleian MS 367.¹⁸ The manuscript bears Heywood's name, though the hand is not his, and the spelling is very different from that of the plays which went through Rastell's printing house. Watermarks suggest a date for the MS roughly contemporary with Myddleton's reprints.¹⁹ One other play has frequently been attributed to Heywood; this is Gentleness and Nobility, printed by John Rastell c.1526.²⁰

It is difficult to be certain how much earlier the plays had been composed, and it has generally been assumed that this was during the period 1520-28. Up to the point of his supposed ‘departure’ from Court none of the records associates Heywood's name with dramatic spectacles. During the next decade there is considerable evidence of his playmaking, but this comes too late to illuminate the context in which the extant plays must have been composed.

However, some sense of the context in which Heywood wrote his plays can be inferred from the activities of the Rastells up to William's printing of his brother-in-law's plays in 1533. The Rastell printing business was set up around 1509, after John Rastell moved from Coventry to London. His first book was a translation by his brother-in-law Thomas More, The lyfe of Johan Picus erle of Mirandula (? 1510). Rastell's printing trade flourished: in the course of twenty years he published over 60 titles, 15 of them law books, 14 were the work of family or friends, 33 were written, edited or translated by himself. Not only was Rastell the first English printer to bring out play texts, but plays continued to make up a significant proportion of his output: Medwall's twenty-year-old Fulgens and Lucres (c.1514) was followed by Rastell's own scientific morality Four Elements (c.1519) (which included the first music printed in England with moveable type) by Gentleness and Nobility, Calisto and Melebea (c.1525), and Medwall's Nature (c.1530). Skelton's Magnyfycence was printed by P. Treveris using Rastell's type.

Pageant making at court appears to have been for Rastell a natural extension of his engineering activity under the Clerk of the King's Works (another Coventry connection).²¹ His special expertise in mechanical invention was soon employed in the design and construction of pageant devices for royal occasions: in 1520 at the Field of Cloth of Gold; in 1522 for the visit of Charles V and in 1527 for the entertainment of the French ambassadors at Greenwich, where he made a pageant ‘Father in heaven’ with ‘zodiacke’ machinery.²²

By marrying Joan Rastell, John Heywood gained access to a ‘family theatre’ and it would be surprising if this exposure played no part in fostering his interest in writing for the stage. When John Rastell built his own house at Finsbury Fields in 1524 he made a stage for plays; his wife, Elizabeth More, made costumes which were later hired out.²³ This, perhaps the least aristocratic of London's private playing places, provided a platform for Rastell's own serious ethical and philosophical ideas and, no doubt, also for his family and playwright friends. His brother-in-law Thomas More's enthusiasm for acting is legendary.²⁴ Ben Jonson's Tale of a Tub, set in Tottenham, associates ‘old Iohn Haywood’ with the mechanical craft of scene-making for masques.²⁵

The links between publishing and playmaking are neatly illustrated in the case of Rastell's second or third play title: Of gentylnes and nobylyte a dyaloge betwen the marchaunt, the knyght and the plowman is a vigorous extension of the argument of Medwall's humanistic Fulgens and Lucres, which he had published about ten years earlier (c.1512-16). Most of Gentleness is written in a metre and dramatic language indistinguishable from Heywood's colloquial style, while the systematic philosophical argument in favour of a ‘work ethic’ and for reform are wholly congruent with Rastell's Four Elements and Calisto and Melebea. On both internal stylistic features and circumstantial evidence it must be highly probable that Heywood had a large hand in Gentleness. Heywood's debt to Fulgens is evident later in The Play of the Wether. It thus seems likely that it was John Rastell who first steered Heywood's musical talents towards play making.

Whatever dependence Heywood had on his father-in-law must have been drastically reduced by Rastell's change of faith. During the 1520s John Rastell worked as a Chancery lawyer under Wolsey, but towards the end of the decade, he was drawn increasingly to engage in religious polemic, as writer as well as printer. In the course of his exchange with John Frith over purgatory (1529-31) he adopted the Protestant faith, enthusiastically espousing Cromwell's Reforming activities. The first version of More's Dialogue concerning Heresies (June 1529) issued from Rastell's printing house, but it probably was his staunchly Catholic son William who actually oversaw the printing, as he certainly did the new edition of 1530.²⁶

Heywood's printer, William Rastell, born in 1508, had gone to Oxford in 1525. He had worked with his father and with Holbein on the 1527 Greenwich entertainment of the French ambassadors, preparatory to Princess Mary's betrothal.²⁷ Before entering Lincoln's Inn in 1532 he had learned the law printing from his father. Clearly he was a man of exceptional ability, rising to become judge in 1558. William remained Catholic and his intense loyalty to his uncle More, reinforced by his marriage in 1542 to his cousin Winifred (More's adopted daughter), is most evident in his monumental life task: editing and, finally, in Queen Mary's reign, publishing Thomas More's Works in English (1557).

It was crucial for Heywood and for More that William Rastell remained firmly Catholic. As the King leaned towards ‘heresy’ in his determination to be free of Katherine and of Rome, questions of religious orthodoxy and authority in England became vexed, and printing became more dangerous. William Rastell, having ‘elected himself the chief purveyor of Catholic works,’²⁸ published all the polemical writing by his uncle More that appeared after 1529. When More, who considered himself spokesman of the Queen's party and opposed to the drift of Henry's proposals, was allowed to resign as chancellor on 16 May 1532, Rastell's publication of Part I of the Confutation of Tyndale followed almost immediately. In the following year Rastell printed More's Apology, his Letter against J. Frith and The Debellation of Salem and Bizance. At the same time, he began printing Heywood's plays—in two pairs, the first pair anonymous. Johan Johan was dated 12 February 1533 (Rastell seems to have started the new year in January, legal fashion). Pardoner and Frere was dated 5 April 1533. Neither title page named John Heywood.

When Henry's break with Rome became public, events accelerated: Anne's appearance as Queen (15 April) was swiftly followed by Cranmer's declaration of the marriage with Katherine nul; Anne was crowned (1 June) and three months later gave birth to Princess Elizabeth. Soon after the King's order that Mary was no longer to be styled ‘Princess of England’, Heywood dedicated to her his ballad, ‘Give place ye ladies.’ Far from shunning danger, William Rastell, who was sharing a house with Heywood, increased his output. It may be that Foure PP was first printed at this time, though the first surviving edition is Middleton's of about 1544. At any rate, when Rastell printed the second pair of plays, The Play of the Wether 1533 (probably late in the year) and A Play of Love 1534 (probably soon after), both title pages named John Heywood.

The risk in printing these unpretentious and superficially non-controversial plays was slight, especially as there is evidence that the author enjoyed royal favour at the beginning of 1533. Printing the second part of More's Confutation of Tyndale was another matter. This seems to have been ready for sale around Christmas 1533, and Rastell dated it 1534 in anticipation of its release. Early in the New Year he was summoned before Cromwell to account for his part in an alleged reply by More to St German's pro-supremacy Articles.²⁹ More himself was first under investigation and then arrested. (In this connection it is worth noting that A Play of Love bears the colophon ‘cum privilegio Regali’, as if to claim some protection.) The upshot of Cromwell's pressure on More was that William Rastell stopped printing at this time, and devoted himself to the law at Lincoln's Inn, where he was joined in July 1534 by Heywood's brother Richard. Within a year John Heywood's son Jasper was born and Thomas More was executed. Things also went badly for old John Rastell, imprisoned as a zealot, examined by Cranmer, he died in April 1536, a year before his wife Elizabeth More.

The circumstances of printing Heywood's plays in 1533-34 may therefore be seen as part of an energetic campaign by William Rastell to support Thomas More after his resignation as Chancellor in his private stand for the old beliefs and loyalties, just as Cromwell's reformation seemed to have triumphed for the King.

John Heywood himself apparently weathered these difficult times with success, though men on such opposite tacks as John Rastell and Thomas More sank. The records suggest that he continued to prosper as musician and play-maker. He was associated with Princess Mary's household, possibly as music tutor, and in January 1537 her Book of Expenses shows a payment ‘to Heywood's servant for bringing my lady graces Regalles to Greenwich xxd.’³⁰ In March 1538 he received 40s ‘for pleyeng an enterlude with his Children bifore my ladies grace.’ This may have been at Richmond.³¹ There is no indication whether he devised and acted in the interlude as well as directing it. The ‘children’ are likely to have been choristers from the Chapel Royal or St Paul's, with whose Master, Sebastian Westcott, Heywood certainly collaborated some years later.³²

Surprisingly, at about the same time as Cromwell paid the fiercely Protestant John Bale for a play performance, Heywood was also involved in dramatic production for Cromwell. This is indicated by Heywood's receipt of payment and his ‘costes’ for his part in producing a ‘Masque of King Arthur's Knights’ with hobby horses at Cromwell's house on 11 February 1539 (Shrove Tuesday).³³ On 22 February Cromwell paid ‘the bargemen that carried Heywoods maske to the court and home again.’³⁴ Meanwhile, Heywood was active acquiring property in Essex, where it seems he benefitted from Cromwell's execution in 1540.³⁵ Jointly with his wife he conveyed property in Tottenham to William Rastell at the time of the latter's marriage to Winifred Clements, Thomas More's adopted daughter, in 1542.

Amidst what might look like trimming, Heywood's boldest intervention in religious affairs came in 1542-43, when he was involved with John More and other conservative Catholics in a plot to arraign Cranmer for heresy. With others he was found guilty at Westminster on 15 February 1544 of conspiring against the royal supremacy; John More was pardoned; on 7 March Heywood walked to the scaffold with other of the leading conspirators, but was not hanged. Following a pardon on 26 June, in which he is referred to as ‘late of London, alias of North Mymmes’ (Middlesex), on 6 July he dressed in a penitential gown and read a public recantation at St Paul's Cross. According to Sir John Harington, the King's favourite ‘escaped hanging with his mirth’.³⁶

Soon after this recantation, according to Thomas Whythorne, his ‘servant and skoller’ in music from about 1545 to 1548, Heywood composed a metaphysical interlude for Cranmer. It sounds like a peace-offering:

At þe request of doktor (Thos.) Cranmer, lat archbyshop of Cantorbury hee mad A sertayn enterlude or play which waz devyzed vpon þe parts of Man at þe end wherof he lykneth and applieth þe sirkunstans þerof to þe vniuersall estat of Chrystes church.³⁷

Whythorne transcribed (as prose) a speech in two rhyme royal stanzas from this lost moral play, which shows Heywood's style at its knottiest (see Appendix I). To this same period belong reprints of Foure PP, Love and Wether, and the manuscript copy of Witty and Witless. The reissue of the plays, whether it originated with Heywood or not, may reflect a confidence that these openly attributed plays would not be thought the work of a religious zealot. A Dialogue of Proverbes, also referred to by Thomas Whythorne, was published by Thomas Berthelet, the King's Printer, in 1546, and reprinted in 1549, 1556, 1561. Meanwhile, Heywood's personal wealth was boosted by fees from a disestablished priory.³⁸ In 1550 Berthelet printed his An hundred Epigrammes (reprinted 1556).

Though he can have felt little sympathy with the Protestant Reformation, Heywood's position at court seems to have continued secure. On 4 March 1552, on the death of Sir William Penyson, his pension was substantially increased to £40 a year and he was appointed (or reappointed) dapifer camerae, sewer of the King's chamber.³⁹ ‘Apparell and furnyture’ for ‘another playe of the Children made by Mr Hawood’ were paid for by the Office of the Revels between January and April 1553 and included ‘xij cotes for the boyes’. ‘Heywoodes playe’ was part of Shrovetide Court Revels, under the direction of George Ferrers. Along with a topical ‘playe of the State of Ireland’ made by the lawyer William Baldwin, it was postponed, probably till Easter.⁴⁰ At the young King's death (19 July 1553) Heywood was granted livery for himself and two servants, as ‘sewer of the chamber’, in charge of seating the King's guests at table.

While it cannot be claimed that Heywood suffered under Edward VI, the accession of Mary, his Catholic princess and pupil, must have brought great joy to him at the age of almost sixty. At her coronation on 30 September, Mary

rode forth and in Pauls Churchyard against the school [Colet's] one Master Haywood sate in a pageant under a vine and made to her an oration in Latin & in English.⁴¹

As the children of Paul's and other choirmen at Dean's gate ‘sung dyverse staves in gratifying the quene’, Heywood's pageant at Colet's school probably made use of older boys; at the ‘commynge of the prynce of Spayne’ in 1554, Heywood was similarly engaged.⁴² The earlier annuities were confirmed.⁴³ To judge from Ben Jonson's Conversations with Drummond, Heywood's confidence in Queen Mary's favour showed itself in characteristic clowning.⁴⁴ In spite of the evident theatrical activity, no new plays of Heywood's were published. A further Two hundred Epigrammes were printed and Heywood completed The Spider and the Flie (printed by T. Powell 1556), taking up an allegory of legal intrigue in Westminster more than twenty years earlier and redirecting it to compliment the Queen.⁴⁵

Meanwhile, William Rastell finished his great life work, of collecting and editing his uncle's writings, and Thomas More's Workes … in the Englysh tonge was printed by Tottel, dated 30 April 1557. In October 1558 he became a judge, three weeks before Queen Elizabeth's accession. That Christmas, Jasper Heywood, who had been a fellow of All Souls in Oxford, became Lord of Misrule at Lincoln's Inn.

At first nothing seems to have changed for Heywood. When Queen Elizabeth was at Nonsuch on 7 August 1559, according to Henry Machyn's Diary, she saw, ‘a play of the chyldren of powlls and ther master S[ebastian Westcott], Mr Phelypes & Mr Haywode.’⁴⁶A fourth hundred of Epygrams was printed in 1560. In January or February 1561 Thomas Hackett paid fourpence to enter ‘a play of Wytless’ in the Stationers' Register.⁴⁷ Thomas Powell printed John Heywoodes Woorkes (excluding the plays) in 1562.

The balance of Elizabeth's religious settlement shifted the fortunes of the Catholic families decisively. Faced with the impending 1563 Articles of Religion, William Rastell fled with his wife's Clements family to Louvain. After the establishment of the Commission to enforce the Act of Uniformity, Heywood and his wife left England on 20 July 1564 to settle in Brabant.⁴⁸ William Rastell died, leaving a ring to John Heywood and most of his estate to Heywood's son Ellis. The Heywood property amassed during a life-time of successful royal service was confiscated. John and his wife continued to live at Malines (Mechelen), though Queen Elizabeth granted him permission to return to England.⁴⁹ On 18 April 1575 he wrote from the poverty of exile in Malines to Lord Burghley, asking—with pathos and gallant wit, and also with success—for release of revenues from his estates in England.⁵⁰

As he approached eighty John Heywood joined his son Ellis, a priest at the Jesuit College in Antwerp, making his will on 16 January 1577.⁵¹ Fleeing the violence of the Orange party in 1578 he and Ellis took refuge in Louvain, where John died, shortly after his son's death on 2 October 1578.

The last fifteen years make a sad and strained conclusion to a life that was unusually long, fortunate, and creative. By the time of his death most of the extant plays were half-a-century old. Since publication in 1533 some had been printed at least three or four times. On 15 January 1582 J. Awdeley assigned to J. Charlewood the printing rights to Foure PP (last printed by J. Allde 1569), A Play of Love (last extant edition c.1550) and The Play of the Wether (last extant edition c.1573). Some spellings were modernized, some expressions were made metrically smoother, and some references to Catholic practice were changed (see note on 4P1163). It is unlikely and probably impossible that Heywood overlooked these later editions, which means that they cannot be afforded much authority. The plays belong to the 1520s and early 1530s and there is little in their subtle topical and doctrinal manoeuverings to alarm an Elizabethan reader looking to merry John Heywood for wit and proverbial wisdom.

From the biographical details sketched here it should be apparent that external evidence for composition and performance of the extant plays is meagre. However, discussion of the plays' source materials, as well as of their topicality and interrelations, will attempt to put into historical focus the canon attributed to Heywood and will suggest a tentative order of composition. First, however, the themes and conventions of the plays themselves merit description and analysis.

THE PLAYS

1. COMMON FEATURES

In size and scope all the plays are suited as entertainment in private houses or at Court or Inns of Court, and are playable within about an hour-and-a-half, depending on the extent of additional song and music. The plays, however, come in two sizes—short (Witty and Witless 703 lines, Johan Johan 678, Pardoner and Frere 641) and long (Foure PP 1234 lines, Love 1577, Wether 1254). Size of cast varies considerably: the first two have three actors, the next three have four, while Wether requires ten—probably an indication of increased resources available to Heywood at different points in his career. Wether looks to be the odd one out; it may be the only survivor of his plays written for acting by boys of the Chapel Royal or St Paul's.

All the plays are comic, working satirically through exaggeration and ridicule. In all except the French-derived Johan Johan, which has a ‘proper plot’, the essence of dramatic action is a dispute for preeminence: debate of views (Witty and Witless), argument based on personal experience (Play of Love), trial of professional expertise (Pardoner and Frere, Foure PP), competing claims for social and economic priority (Play of the Wether). Conflict develops dynamically through the process of dialogue and mutual judgment, so that the audience's own judgment is awakened; argument and view point are critically manipulated towards resolution in which the rivalries are finally viewed as parts of a whole, diverse but unified. In Pardoner and Frere this resolution takes a parodic form in the last-minute alliance of the rogues against authority and the established Church. The characters themselves are little altered, but for the audience a pattern is revealed, so that they must confront their own selfish bias. In the two plays with violent farcical action (Johan Johan, Pardoner and Frere) decisive change in estate is likewise avoided and a strong sense conveyed of a repeatable cycle.

Analysis shows all the plays to be carefully constructed according to fairly simple principles of stagecraft: the entry or exit of a character marks a new stage in the process of the action. Except for Witty (which seems to begin in a conversational Erasmian fashion, as if the audience has just entered a room where discussion is already in progress), all the plays open with a long speech; in three cases (Johan Johan, Pardoner and Frere, Play of the Wether) this is also the longest speech in the play. The scenic units are often balanced with a fine sense of the symmetry and are interwoven to produce a pleasing diversity of mood and interest, while at the same time the main dramatic idea is constantly thrust forward.

There is much formality in the conduct of argument itself. Heywood's keen interest in displaying and exercising the mechanics of argument and showing the difficulty of resolving it gives support to Altman's emphasis on the widespread Tudor interest in dialectic.⁵² Likewise, his structuring of argument by adept manipulation of rhetorical tropes to accentuate contrasts between speakers and between attitudes, has been noted.⁵³ In visual terms, Heywood's liking for symmetries and oppositions, paradoxes, contradictions, is highlighted by recurrent dance-like antics which regroup the figures on stage, making new alliances and thematic patterns. This is specially true of the plays which make use of four actors.

Language and versification are significantly varied, so as to shift tone and pace, and to switch levels of social decorum. The ‘highest’ verse form, rhyme royal is used at the end of Witty and Witless and Foure PP, where the king or the court audience is addressed. In A Play of Love rhyme royal is used at beginning and end. Jupiter in The Play of the Wether speaks little else, while the verse forms and speech of the human figures is hierarchically graded. In the scurrilous Johan Johan Heywood was interested in the prosodic variety of his source, the Pasté, and in translating he uses a lively array of verses, including repetitive phrases reminiscent of the rondeau, and the subdivision of individual lines between different speakers. His most frequent verse form, the couplet, is used with great variety, especially in argument where rhymes are made to pick up keywords, or where the pace is varied as the speakers exploit opportunities for making points in debate.

These characteristics are enhanced by Heywood's skilful use of ‘leashes’ where a word may be turned inside out by frequent repetition, so that its meaning is destabilized. Many examples of this ‘French’ technique occur in Witty and Witless and in A Play of Love.⁵⁴

The recurrence of proverbial language is usually integral to the argument where proverbs are often used as the voice of authority to strike an attitude or generalise a point. Nowhere do the plays attain the density of proverbial texture in the later virtuoso Dialogue of Proverbs where proverbs are swapped and matched, crowding upon one another sequentially in exhilarating display of ingenuity. Characteristically, the proverbs in the plays are used for their colloquial pithiness and ironic worldly wisdom; but the colourful ‘scenic’ quality of their figurative language also helps to create a literal and vivid visual world.

Because action centres on the conflict of ideas and social attitudes, the ‘characters’ required are usually types. Only Johan Johan, Tyb, Syr Johan, Jupiter, and Mery Report have ‘proper’ names, the rest being labelled, fixed in their estates: ‘a Gentylwoman’, ‘the Pedler’. ‘Lover unloved’ and so on. Fixity of social position and outlook, economic, intellectual, or moral, is necessary to perpetuation of conflict. The greatest range is in The Play of the Wether, where the eight suitors use different verbal registers and speak from conflicting economic interests. Here and elsewhere Heywood shows a Chaucerian pleasure in the detail of technical language for its own sake, as well as to create character and social function.

The paucity of local habitations and names for his characters is in some respects off-set by Heywood's liking for lists, especially of places and things, giving solidity to the outside world beyond the plays. This geographical world stretches as far as Jerusalem but is mostly located in the vicinity of Greater London, especially in Middlesex and Essex, where the playwright himself had property. Performance of the long monologues stretches the audience's sense of the world as well as testing its credulity and taxes the actor's ability to the full. Heywood's most fascinating experiments in this area of dramaturgy may be his use of the long monologue (following Chaucer in the Canterbury Tales) to make the audience judge story against teller. The Pardoner's descent to hell (Foure PP) and No lover nor loved's account of his own invulnerability to the folly of love (A Play of Love) are masterful in this respect.

In contrast to the strongly typical nature of most of Heywood's characters, some parts require extraordinary versatility and an almost bewildering range of mood and theatrical behaviour: the Pedler, the Potycary, Mery Report, No lover nor loved in particular. These last two are the first named ‘Vices’ (although the others share many Vice characteristics). In Foure PP, where a Vice is not designated, or perhaps even conceived, his functions are shared between the Pedler, who organises the proceedings, and the acrobatic Potycary.⁵⁵ Our sense of the Vice's role has been intensified by the suspicion that Heywood—by contemporary accounts a charming, witty, and versatile performer and an expert singer may have taken this part himself in Wether. If the possibility that John Bale played the Vice in his Three Laws and King Johan is also kept in mind, the case for playwright-actor is strengthened.

These Vice characters have an organising function—not to say a manipulative one—and a propensity to deflate others by irreverence. They are play-makers and go-betweens, not fixed in any social ‘estate’, but able to mimic any. They relate as easily to the audience as to the other players, taking liberties with both. Their capers and apparent improvisations add movement, dance perhaps, and song-like antics often reminiscent of children's games. But the Vice figures are the least innocent of Heywood's roles: knowing, verbally clever, and irrepressibly bawdy.

Recurrent and reductive joking, both scatological and sexual, is a notable common feature. This was part of the traditions of popular and courtly entertainment Heywood inherited, but he developed this line of entertainment from his acquaintance with the theatrical routines of French farce and sottie. Henrician court taste clearly countenanced a liking for double entendre and a good deal of grossness. In a theatrical context these features ensure that the audience's attention is refreshed in following serious argument; they also act as a foil to more dangerous objects of satire. In the terrifying, sometimes ridiculous, struggle of the Tudor Court enmeshed in the inseparable problems of Divorce and Reformation, wit was indispensible, and the making of jokes essential for survival. There can be no doubt about the seriousness of Heywood's orthodox beliefs, nor of his courage and consistency in restating them. Beyond the cogent sanity of their argument, the theatrical qualities of the plays, which were produced at—or close to—the centre of power, suggest a much more daring course, danced nimbly between diplomacy and subversion.

2. WITTY AND WITLESS

The play's dramatic mode is disputation—itself a form of humanist entertainment and intellectual exercise—on the great Erasmian theme of Folly. Direct argument between the first two protagonists, who are then joined by a third, is used to explore contradiction and paradox. Provisional acceptance of the folly of men's lives is then subjected to more searching scrutiny leading to an affirmation of deeper spiritual wisdom.

The dramatic construction is simple: two large dialogue scenes flank a central short scene of three characters. The symmetry and progression reinforce the movement of the argument. Dialogue is entirely in ‘heavy’, long-line couplets (10-13 syllables, usually five-stress) with some repeated rhymes forming quatrains a dozen times at random intervals.⁵⁶ A brief epilogue to be used in the royal presence, is in rhyme royal.

Witty and Witless is unique among the plays in that Heywood plunges in medias res. It is possible that the beginning of the text has been lost from the manuscript, yet the Erasmian stylistic trick is neatly turned: ‘I seay as I began’ (Wy4) and the ‘first’ topic of review is introduced at Wy8, so that nothing appears lost from the argument. The question in debate is, Has the witty or the witless man more pleasure and less pain in life? The first section ends when John concedes to James, ‘better to be a foole then a wyse man, sewre’ (Wy408). Jerome's entry brings all three speakers on stage (Wy408-42), though dramatic convention allows the newcomer to have heard the preceding arguments. He distinguishes wit and wisdom, showing the necessity of wit to human beings. At this, the impertinent and scornful ‘elfe’ (Wy120) James exits in anger, thinking he has lost. In the third ‘scene’ (Wy443-703), at John's request, Jerome points out his errors in having conceded the arguments of James, and persuades him of the uses of reason. By introducing considerations of the soul he guides argument towards reinforcing a traditional Catholic position: man should use his wits to good purpose, ‘Plant ymps of good woorcks’ (Wy556) in hope of reward in heaven, because ‘There are in heven dyvers degrees of glory’ (Wy563). Lines 676-703 form an epilogue, four of the stanzas being addressed to the King.

Thus the apparently superficial issue of the first part becomes a consideration of the relation of good works to grace, and of salvation to degrees of glory (Wy559-73, 603-34). Jerome is forcefully persuasive, and contrasts with James's impertinent defence of folly; like Mery Report in Wether, James is an ‘elfe’ (Wy120), although the play's strict pursuit of argument allows him little scope for irrelevant antics.

Of all the plays this offers least information about action and plot—there is only one stage direction. Forceful conduct of the argument would no doubt be accomplished by gesture and positional play in the performance area. Noteworthy are the set pieces within the speeches, such as the description of the lot of the mill horse (Wy466-76), which may be one of the earliest examples of an Erasmian ‘emblem’ enacted. Miming the mockery of the ‘sott’ is reinforced by lengthy repetition of ‘Some beate hym …’ (Wy31-41). In general the play is richest of all Heywood's in ‘leashes’ which strain a repeated word almost beyond sense. Significantly, these often initiate or end phases in the argument.⁵⁷ Rhyme is neatly used to clinch points in argument, as at Wy195-6. Taken together, these virtuoso passages of speech, reveal one of Heywood's interests in performance: the speaker's skill is in negotiating passages which are difficult to say because they depend upon tongue-twisting or feats of memory. In one case the word play follows the proverb ‘Better one byrde in hand then ten in the wood,’ and runs through nine succeeding lines (Wy594-602). Such dazzling dexterity can assist the argument, and it contrasts amusingly with occasional monosyllabic and sometimes extra-metrical lines. At one point the monosyllabic ‘yes’ draws a contemptuous comment (Wy365).

The central concept of folly in the play is epitomized by the references to Will Somer, the King's Fool and, perhaps, in some senses Heywood's theatrical rival (Wy43, 701, and notes). These jibes and the one direction about the possibility of the King's presence (Wy675) attest a royal or Court performance.

3. JOHAN JOHAN

The dramatic qualities of Johan Johan partly derive from its French source, so that discussion of it as a translation is postponed to the section on sources. Partly as a consequence of its origins, the play is closer to ordinary domestic circumstance than any of the other plays; it depends far more on physical objects and actions and is unique in its sustained representation of narrative. Its plot springs from the conspiracy of Tyb and the priest Syr Johan against her husband. The characters are traditional types (dithering cuckold, lustful shrew, sanctimonious adulterer) and functional, subservient to dramatic conflict.

Dramatic construction follows the French in its rapid linear clarity. Like most of Heywood's plays it has strong symmetry, having a ‘prologue’ scene of monologue, three ‘scenes’, and an ‘epilogue’. In his long opening speech, addressed to the audience (J1-110) Johan Johan confides his suspicions and threatens to beat his straying wife. Though strictly speaking this is a monologue, Johan Johan's quotation of his neighbour's advice on how to treat his wife, together with his own cowardly vacillations, make it seem like dialogue.

Tyb's aggressive entry starts the first movement of the plot (J111-313), withering Johan Johan's resolve. He is made the unwilling agent of her plot to entertain the priest. Here, the simple conflict of marital strife gives an impression of being orchestrated for four voices, because both speakers use asides, often overheard and responded to by the other partner. The secret to Tyb's theatrical power is that she brazens out her asides; in contrast, Johan Johan's meek denial of his shows him impotent. Similarly, she ignores his commands, while he unwillingly carries out hers, setting the trestle table, washing the cups and so on. This comic inversion of ‘normal’ authority is very much funnier (and less offensive to modern audiences) if, as was probably the case historically, Tyb is played by a man.) Throughout the preparations, the husband's anxious and hungry solicitide establishes the pie as the goal of the characters' appetites in the play. Dramatic tension has been heightened by six false exits before Johan Johan is finally allowed to leave the house.

For the second ‘scene’ (J314-415) there is a second locus, the priest's house, to which Johan Johan is sent. Here a richness of vocal response is generated by mingling the oily double entendre of Syr Johan's professed virtue with the husband's gullible asides, through which his angry suspicions evaporate. Johan Johan's resumption of the threatening mode concludes the scene, as the two move back to his house for supper.

All the characters are now gathered at the original locus of hearth and pie for the longest scene (J416-664). At first the lovers are careful of Johan Johan's hovering presence, but as their confidence grows, their impositions on Johan Johan grow more flagrant as the dramatic tension mounts towards the climax. While the priest gorges himself on Tyb's pie, the husband is ritually humiliated. It is not sufficient that he stand by the fire chafing the wax in a vain attempt to stop the ‘cleft’ of his wife's pail; he must be made to narrate his humiliation in a refrain which is repeated, with variations, sixteen times before his patience bursts into physical violence.

After the flight of the adulterous pair, in a brief monologue (J665-78) Johan Johan's glow of self-satisfaction at having beaten his wife soon cools to habitual nagging jealousy. He exits, fearing a never-ending tale of sexual deception.

An impression of speed is intensified by the use of couplets for the entire dialogue, save for one triplet (J328) and nine quatrains of alternating rhyme.⁵⁸ Individual lines are divided between speakers at the height of dramatic tension (J629-36) just before the breaking point. Further division of a line between the three of them—‘And thou lyest!’ ‘And thou lyest!’ ‘And thou lyest agayn!’ (J659)—indicates a care for symmetry of the triangle even in the midst of the brawl. Pauses are equally important. Johan Johan's opening speech breaks into short ‘paragraphs’ (indicated in the folio by the use of a pilcrow) as he starts off in ludicrously self-contradictory directions.

The quality of colloquial speech is caught throughout: in the thorough Anglicization of the scene through reference to local saints and churches; in the false note of Tyb's simpering, ‘By my soule, I love the too too’ (J183); and in the characters' apt use of proverbs to relate their particular experience to the way of the world. Proverbs are sometimes realised literally, as in Johan Johan's complaint:

The parysshe preest forgetteth that ever he was clarke.

(J595)

They always carry a thematic burden, and there is rueful irony in Johan Johan's line:

He must nedes go that the dyvell dryveth. [Exit]

(J313)

Heywood's liking for punning allusions is evident in his choice of popular saints (see note on J146) and in his tracing of patterns of imagery. The outrageous sexuality of the plot is conveyed by elaboration of the idea of Tyb as a cat on heat who goes ‘catter wawlyng’ (J110 and note) and by pursuing such double entendre as ‘tacle’ (J554). Above all, the domestic stage properties are used to represent the elemental action; chafed wax candle, split bucket, and hot pie greedily devoured convey frustrated impotence and the satisfying of appetite in a directly physical—but also ridiculously oblique and mechanical—way.

This explicitness of sexual ideas in word and action derives from the Farce source. It was a technique Heywood was able to extend in other, more decorous play actions, particularly in The Play of the Wether, and A Play of Love, where Heywood mocks the follies of love. The dramatic effectiveness of building conflict into physical combat he used again in The Pardoner and the Frere, where the opponents also ‘fyght by the erys’.

4. THE PARDONER AND THE FRERE

Though it is written for four actors, this is a virtuoso piece for two. The Pardoner, is taken directly from Chaucer's vehement and unscrupulous salesman, while the mendicant Frere, with his hackneyed diction of the friar song-books (his ‘Lorde, clyped swete Jesus’ PF35), develops the lisping preacher from the Canterbury Tales too. They have been simplified to the needs of crude confrontation with polemical undertones: separately and together they threaten the Church. The two vicious and avaricious rogues compete for the audience's attention and money until they come to blows; when finally challenged by authority in the form of the Curate and Prat, the constable, they join forces and escape to try their tricks another day. Condemnation is implicit.

The action is simply linear. The Frere enters first (PF1-78), is joined, unawares, by the Pardoner (PF79-188). Rivalry begins with their simultaneous address of the audience, indicated by the stage direction,

Now shall the Frere begyn his sermon, and evyn at the same tyme the Pardoner begynneth also to shew and speke of his bullys, and auctorytes com from Rome:

and increases without slackening through a continuous ‘dialogue’ (PF189-544). There are five bursts of simultaneous speech, divided by brief exchanges which become increasingly threatening. In the first (PF189-209) the two charlatans pretend to be unaware of each other, pausing only long enough for each to make a two-line comment on the other's interruption, before resuming (PF214-51), so that the Frere completes his exemplum of Dives and Lazarus while the Pardoner simultaneously alleges Papal authority for pardons in the cause of collecting for St Leonard's chapel. In turn (PF252-315), the Frere curses his opponent for hindering the Word and the Pardoner threatens the Frere with excommunication, accusing him of heresy. The third ‘bout’ (PF316-43) is an open competition for the audience's attention, with the Frere's begging formula ‘We freres’ ringing against the Pardoner's ‘This is the pardon’. In the brief pause (PF344-63), the Frere attempts formally to curse using words alleged to be from scripture. They fall to simultaneous sales patter (PF246-407) in praise, respectively, of poverty and pardons. In a further respite from the cacophany of simultaneous speech (PF408-35) the Pardoner openly accuses the Frere of the very ‘covetyse’ that he preaches against (an accusation Heywood has neatly turned round from Chaucer). The two resolve to a further and louder trial of voices (PF436-507) in which each decries the other's deeds; the Frere praises his services as intercessor with God, while the Pardoner, playing on the audience's fear of death, describes ceremonial wakes and chantry prayers. The contest now grows furious (PF508-44) and physical, as each incites the audience to help ‘pull down’ the other, so that after many a threat and dare, they fight—literally—‘by the ears’.

The entry of the Curate provokes speeches of self-justification and further vilification of each rival (PF545-77). Neybour Prat is called in to help arrest the knaves for punishment. With the full cast now on stage (PF578-641) Heywood springs one last surprise. The two rascals unite against authority and, having made ‘reade blood’ run, exit together. It is a final savage irony that, having spoken 252 lines simultaneously, their last utterance is spoken in unison:

Than adew, to the devyll, tyll we come agayn!

(PF640)

The traditional theatrical ‘Vice’ exit line here carries an ominous suggestion that the place they go to can only be hell.

There is little doubt from the stage direction at PF188 that the Pardoner and Frere are meant to speak simultaneously. Experiment has shown that the audience can follow both speeches at the same time quite successfully, though one must leave open the possibility that some variation would need to be introduced over the five bursts in performance. Clues in the dialogue show how the attention of the audience may be sustained and also switched from one speaker to the other. The formulaic quality of the speeches, repetition in the syntax, and metrical exactness all help the listener to engage with the sense of the individual speeches and yet be simultaneously aware. If the performers, building upon these clues as structural aids, then add variation, say in pitch of voice and in pace, not to mention physical posturing, we have an extraordinary coup de théâtre which encourages virtuoso performance. It seems the Pardoner may keep up a continuous noise while the Friar is speaking (PF347-9 and note). That the conflict grows more physical is hinted in the dialogue (PF515, 521) and detailed during the fight itself (PF539, 540, 543).

Heywood's skill in relating words and actions is very original here. The perception of the follies of avarice and heresy—neither character arouses sympathy from the audience—is sharpened by the carefully controlled tempo and by the inventiveness of the conflict. The audience, subjected to a double onslaught of trickery, is manipulated into making a judgment. It is a startling moment when the Parson reveals near the end of the play that all this chicanery has been perpetrated inside his church—a cleverly delayed and clinching condemnation. As in Johan Johan, simultaneous stage presence is exploited to convey interaction and reaction. The Pardoner's accusation that the Friar is avaricious is proved true, and its converse implied. Neither admits his heresy. There is an implicit warning in the escape which the tricksters make from the just condemnation of the Parson and the Constable.

The play may be seen as a variation of Heywood's continuous interest in presenting conflicting views. There are orthodox defences implied in the words of each speaker. What they say may be expected of them given their initial positions, but it is an additional irony that they condemn themselves out of their own mouths. The insistence with which the play turns its audience from game to earnest, towards the squalid violence and sacrilege of contemporary factionalism, reveals the underlying seriousness of Heywood's dramatic imagination.

5. THE FOURE PP

The play resembles The Pardoner and the Frere in the idea of a comic ‘contest between shady wayfarers’, but is different in tone and method and offers a positive and harmonious resolution instead of sinister violence. Heywood's preference for four actors (as in Pardoner and Frere but with the parts more evenly distributed) makes for variety of conflict and contrast, requiring a more complex resolution than do the plays scripted for three.

Although Foure PP is virtually plotless, its action is skilfully constructed by means of symmetries and contrasts. The interweaving of formal boasts or narratives with antic ‘improvisations’ creates four larger movements of roughly equal length. Lines 1-321 introduce the characters, establishing their animosities, and ending with their song. From 4P322-643 further argument, including formal boasts by the Pardoner and Potycary, about the merits of their professional skills in helping men to salvation, unearths a bone of contention: Which of the four should take social precedence? The third movement (4P644-1010) contains the formal lying contest, with the long narratives of the Potycary and the Pardoner, respectively scatological and escatological, ending with the clever, brief intervention of the Palmer. Finally (4P1011-1234) judgment is given by the Pedler, first on the trivial competition, then more seriously on the morality of the three contestants' chosen ways of life.

The characters (as in most of the plays) are clearly types, but they are strongly distinguished by temperament and moral outlook: one pair (Palmer, Pedler) is sunny, optimistic, orthodox; the other (Pardoner, Potycary) is cynical, aggressive, blasphemous, heretical. It accords with natural justice that the good-natured Palmer, whom the audience meets first, when he recommends pilgrimage to them, should carry the day (which he does by his apparently naive defence of women). As a good Christian, he accepts fortune, cheerfully turning the other cheek to insults from the defeated pair. He immediately gives up his ‘maistry’ over them. The Palmer's authority is underlined by the fact that he alone speaks in higher verse forms; he begins the play with quatrains and closes it with two stanzas of rhyme royal.

The Pardoner, who challenges him, is a shady figure, pursuing a licensed trade from despicable motives. His actual relics are ludicrous beyond the point of blasphemy—for instance the big toe of the Trinity; his jaw-bone of All Hallows associates him with the Protestant heresy preached at All Hallows, Honey Lane (see below p. 42). It is notable that in boasting of his own powers he claims ‘more then heven [man] can nat get’ (4P354), thus denying the degrees of beatitude of the saints. (In Witty and Witless Heywood puts the orthodox view that there are degrees in heaven in the mouth of the aptly named Jerome.) The Pardoner is sly and snobbish, showing some deference towards the Palmer only when he wins (4P1053-5) but taking the judgment in bad part (4P1102-5). He commands the audience's attention by his zany, egotistical imagination; his masterly story-telling bounds with energy—

And I from thens to hell that nyght

(4P819)

—and abounds with delightful details: the incidental dispatch to heaven of the soul in purgatory who blesses the sneezer, the coincidence of his acquaintance with the devil-porter from the Corpus Christi play in Coventry, his observation of the devils' birthday-best livery and grooming, Margery's employment in the diabolical kitchen. The Pardoner's smug account of the deferential welcome he receives in Purgatory provides splendid scope for vocal mimicry and gesture; it contrasts nicely with his fawning admission to hell, where he needs the devil's authority in the form of a safe conduct. Clearly the Pardoner overreaches the limits of his own authority.

The Potycary, coarse, lively, and unpredictable, is equally interesting dramatically. He is originally conceived, though he may owe something to the medieval tradition of the mercator or quack doctor. Entering third, he immediately tries to prove the Palmer and Pardoner fools, and proceeds to trivialize the argument by claiming that his poisonous drugs send men to heaven. Later, he admits that he thus damns himself to hell (4P407). His most devout prayer is for perpetual wine from the Pardoner's antedeluvian glass. Totally unscrupulous, he tries to bribe the judge and then claims victory by a cheat. He has two strongly marked ‘Vice’ qualities: a vein of obscene double entendre, both sexual and scatological, and boundless physical energy: he hops manically in anticipation of victory and constantly invents acrobatic routines to disrupt the proceedings (4P1034, 1106). The Pedler's judgment concedes that the Potycary is ‘well beloved’ by the audience for his railing at pardons and relics, and his admission of ‘no vertue at all’ is the beginning of self-knowledge. As a sinner he is, perhaps, redeemable.

The fourth P sees himself not as contestant so much as umpire. He is without pretentiousness and offers his Pedler's trifles as ‘tokens’ of love, cheerfully accepting the lack of customers. It is he who proposes the ‘pastyme’ of singing. Side-stepping more weighty and contentious issues in a way that is perhaps characteristic of Heywood's own tact, he agrees to be judge in the contest for ‘maistry’, and suggests the suitably trivial contest of lies. His sense of fun is manifest in his proposal, with appropriate acrobatic arrangement, that the three others should form a sort of Trinity, as the best formula for salvation. He handles the lying contest firmly and with courtesy, judging in favour of the Palmer's lie with reasoned analysis. Finally, he proceeds to make judgments on the serious issues he at first eschewed, commending the Palmer and Pardoner to their practices, which he sees as symbolic of all human effort done with good will: alms giving, good works, the maintenance of chantry priests, loving one another. He even claims to see a gleam of hope for the incorrigible Potycary, but warns him against ‘raylynge’ on relics unless he knows for sure that they are ‘counterfete’; otherwise, all personal judgments should be submitted to those of the Church. Here the voice is unmistakably that of the author.

Thus Heywood's defence of orthodox Catholic positions is worked through the interplay of the four well-matched wayfarers. The Palmer's final apology to the audience for any ‘neglygence’ may be taken to refer to the statement of doctrinal matters as much as to performance of the play itself.

In spite of its deliberately inconsequential plot, the play is inventive in its language and action. The business of setting up the group as a kind of watch is accompanied by alliteration and expressed in couplets with an occasional triplet (4P211-3). Leashes are frequent: the one ending in -ynge is split between two speakers (4P301-7); and the Pedler forcefully expresses his conviction that two women in three are shrews by means of a ‘leash’ on ‘Thre’ (4P1070-80). Stage business is enhanced by Heywood's enthusiasm for the recital of lists, which are cleverly handled and much developed. The Palmer lists the contents of his pack (4P232-42), and later elaborates in a leash of trinkets for women ending -ettes (4P257-62). In the description of the Pardoner's relics there are plenty of interruptions in which comic disbelief magnifies the outrageousness of what is on offer. The Pardoner drops his sanctimonious tone to describe one specially efficacious one as a ‘whipper’ (4P524). In reply to the Pardoner, the Poticary recites the qualities of his medicines (4P592-643). So the lists are more than just occasions for stage business: they become central to the play in provoking the audience to consider the bounds of credibility, and they lead naturally to the competition in lies.

Further linguistic set pieces take the form of extended bawdy jokes—on pyncase (4P243-53), tail pin (4P267-78), and spit (4P954-60). Proverbs are used frequently (see notes on 4P66, 109-10, 293, 351, 467s.d., 569, 1185-6, 1190-2, 1206-10), often with a cynical tone. They add verbal dexterity and a sense that what is shown here has been merely a sample of the world's trickery.

The inter-relationship between speech and action is much developed in the manipulation of pronouns. These indicate stage movement by pointing the attention of one character to another, or by shifting the attention of the audience (e.g. at 4P378-9). An extended play on I, you, us and he is tied together by a repetitive ‘leash’ on lied/lie/lier/laide (4P680-93). Such devices enclose the play-world tightly, yet skilfully manipulate the audience's viewpoint. Similar devices and gestural business is provided for the Potycary—further evidence, perhaps, for his being partly a Vice. There is his hopping game (4P467 s.d.), turning words into action, and the curtsy joke which surrounds the triumphant Palmer with mock respect, culminating a leash with double rhymes (see notes to 4P1106-10, 1115-8). In another number game he arranges and rearranges the others in formation as ‘knaves’ (4P1034-7).

These features, which draw the audience into a ‘play’ of active judgment (4P5-6, 158, 992, 1198), constitute a very accomplished stage technique. Heywood is confident enough to insert the very long narrative of the Pardoner's visit to Hell (4P771-976), which itself contains linguistic devices and games. It is a tale full of wit and invention, and includes many passages of direct speech inviting mimicry. If, as we suppose, there are satirical hits at the court of Henry VIII, in the tennis playing and the celebration of the Devil-king's birthday, the attention of the original audience would have been stimulated by the danger of the allusions.

Such a daring sequence gives an important clue to Heywood's conception of theatre, and it needs to be related to the underlying theological issues noted above. The disguising of serious doctrine in comic entertainment is a remarkable development of techniques found in Fulgens and Lucres and Magnyfycence. He probably owed something to these plays in their comic subplots, and in the way in which folly—in different disguises—is made to comment on the action. Heywood was not a superficial joker, and his ability to exploit comic routines seems to have improved with practice.

6. THE PLAY OF LOVE

Like Foure PP, Heywood's intellectual comedy of the pleasures and pains in love is scored for four actors. The complementary natures of the characters, variously loved and loving, forms the base for an intricate debate structure; in the end each pair judging the other can only find a draw. On the page the characters may be difficult to distinguish, yet the dramatic mode separates them clearly, and once they are identified visually, their contributions to the argument and their manner of speaking seem more distinct. The clues are that Loved not lovyng is the only woman, Lover not loved is melancholic, Lover loved is foolishly cheerful, and No lover nor loved is specifically a ‘vyce’ figure, who combines a quick, cynical wit and ‘impromptu’ capering about. The first (oddly valent) two are paired to judge the dispute between the last (evenly valent) two, and vice-versa. Patterns of opposition, contrast, symmetry are explored with logical—sometimes geometric—delight.

The process of the action falls conveniently into ten movements, of which the sixth occupies the centre and almost half the play's length. These sections are marked off by entrances or exits and may be further distinguished by shifts in verse form.

1. (L1-63) The Lover not loved is met first, and his complex, meandering sentences beautifully controlled in rhyme royal stanzas, establish a world of Petrarchan love and courtly lyric complaint.

2. (L64-245) The lady, Loved not lovyng joins him, belittling his sufferings with her irritiation. After some argument as to who suffers most, they agree to find arbitration; eyeing the audience, they can find ‘here no judge mete,’ and go out to find one.

3. (L246-301) A song introduces the demonstrative Lover beloved, solo, who explains enthusiastically that love is the highest pleasure. He too keeps to rhyme royal stanzas.

4. (L302-98) The mocking voice of No lover nor loved brings him down to earth in couplets interspersed with rondeau-like quatrains (abba). Until the end of the play couplets now remain the principal medium—an indication of the control excercised over the tone and conduct of affairs by this Vice character. In dubbing love a folly and the Lover a ‘woodcock’, the cynic includes the audience, ‘this flock’ (L322). His cynicism requires him to demonstrate his imperviousness to women and this he does in a double-edged leash of superlatives (L351-62). This pair agree, like the first, to find an ‘indifferent herer’ to judge their case.

5. (L399-690) The Lover loved's exit leaves the Vice holding the stage and he proposes to ‘pass the time’ with a ‘mummyng’ (408). After a reverie describing the ideal woman from top to toe, rapidly delivered in Skeltonic dimeter couplets, he proceeds to tell a story. In this virtuoso narrative he tells how his younger self engaged in an affair with a practised woman. ‘Mock or be mockt’ is the rule of the game they play, but the tale, guided by the proverb ‘mockum mockabitur’ backfires on him. His cynical superiority is finally seen to be self-deceiving as he confesses his hurt to the audience. The audience is thus prepared for the return of the others to form a complete set in the acting place for the big sixth scene.

6. (L691-1268) As Lover loved brings in the first pair, the decorousness of his rhyme royal and his courtly manner in leading the woman by the hand are abruptly deflated by the Vice's comment that one of the men at least might mount this ‘nag’. For the first time, all the characters are together. This, the longest movement, conducted almost entirely in couplets, turns out to have a double structure, with the two cases proceeding seriatim. First, the Lover unloved and the woman, Loved not lovyng, dispute; meanwhile No lover nor loved enlivens the proceedings from above, apparently perched on a throne, where he takes off Chancellor Wolsey's style of judgment: having no legal training he relies on the purity of his conscience (see L800 and note). After a deadlock of the judges (a ‘demurrer in lawe’), further skilful pleading by the woman clarifies the moot point on which they agree to request judgment. In the second half of the scene roles are reversed and the first pair become judges. The contented Lover loved begins by distinguishing pleasure (positive and selfish) from ‘contentacyon’ which has regard to circumstance and to other people: he thus lays the foundation for a deeper, religious note at the play's ending. Lover loved's claim that love is good is countered by the Vice's ‘proof’ that it is evil. But the Vice is cornered by the charge that he is no better than an insensible ‘post’, and he improvises an excuse to exit, bringing the scene to a close.

7. (L1269-97) Heywood now skilfully precipitates a climax and instant reversal. In the presence of the unhappy pair, the Lover loved rashly rejoices in the height of his happiness, proposing to hasten to judgment.

8. (L1298-1335) The Vyce's spectacular entry, shooting fireworks from his hat, calling, ‘Fire, fire’, collapses the Lover, who exits in desperate hope of finding his mistress saved from her burning house.

9. (L1336-53) The ninth scene matches the seventh; the Vyve, rejoicing that his ‘woodcock’ is basted by fire, proposes summary judgment.

10. (L1354-1577) The Lover loved returns chastened in his own perfect happiness. He now attacks the Vice's ability to feel, using a traditional comparison (as in Witty) of tree and horse, and reducing him to perplexity. The second case is now brought to a single moot question (L1451-2). Judgment proceeds. The first pair's claims are found to be equal in ‘just counterpaise’. Switching roles, the first pair become judges and reach a similar balanced judgment. From L1495 to the end, with only two brief exceptions, a more serious tone is underscored by the use of rhyme royal. After the second judgment, all the characters commend impartiality as in accordance with Christ's second commandment (L1547). The ‘love’ in dispute here is said not to be conducive to ‘contentacyon’; men are urged to accept bad fortune uncomplainingly and to rejoice in each other's good fortune. It is the Lover not loved who recommends the audience,

… seke the love of that lovyng Lorde
Who to suffer passion for love was content.

(L1566-7)

Of all the plays, the idiom of Love is the most formal, often tortuous in its syntax and strangely removed from common speech, capable of ambiguous interpretation. These features suggest deliberate imitation and parody of lawyers' language (see Sources 6). The polite, conversational idiom is polished into verbal neatness, and occasionally sprinkled with a commoner idiom—

But I thus deckt at all poyntes poynt devyce
At dore were this trull was I was at a tryce.

(L513-4)

or, with sexual innuendo—

Ye take to much upon ye'

(L641)

to great effect. In the almost incessant wordplay is that on hope and hop, (L573), used also at 4P468 as a key to antic hopping. Among the set pieces of the play, the fourteen lines which analyse love as a conflict of Good and Bad Angels (L543-56) remarkably anticipate Shakespeare's Sonnet 144.

Of all the plays Love has most proverbs …, used for critical and summative comment, to distill a moot point of argument. They may derive from the legal provenance of the play. Dazzling twists of argument, recalling Witty and Witless, are embellished by many leashes; for example, the play on content/contentacyon at a very late stage in the argument (L1104-46) emphasizes the key note of the ending; similarly, the punning which interweaves ‘love’ with ‘lie’ (L1362-71) reinforces perceptions the audience must make about the characters and their arguments. Within the Vice's narrative ‘pastime’ the verbal fireworks continue in the play on ‘I love you’, and conjugation of the verb ‘to love’ (L581-5). In general, the witty, surface play of words encourages swiftly changing and critical viewpoints on the speakers.

Within the formality a wide range of emotions is subtly discriminated. Altman (pp. 112-14) suggests that Heywood was interested in giving fictional depth to his argument, and these psychologically accurate details support his view. In performance there is a further psychological complexity in that each of the ‘oddly valent’ couple (Lover not loved and Loved not loving), complaining of the cruelty of another person not represented on stage, makes the other stand for that person; this raises a flickering suspicion in the minds of the audience that the two are indeed each other's bane. The Vice's prodigious narrative (L399-690), like those in Foure PP, has many mimetic elements. Here, again, a present and a reported fictional persona can be compared; the mocker of love is mocked and his proverbial motto mockum moccabitur is made to reflect on his own folly.

In spite of the apparent abstraction of the argument, and the fact that only two out of eight stage directions do more than indicate entrances and exits, the play is rich in visual incident. The Vyce's ‘copintank’ of squibs is an obvious coup de théâtre. His cries of alarm at first sight look improvised and hypermetric; they are in fact highly patterned and antithetical. An indefatigable entertainer, he does most to shape the visual appearance of the group and to keep up the audience's spirits and critical attentiveness. He has ready recourse to sexual innuendo and it seems likely that wordplay such as that on joyne/part (L775-92) would be accompanied by appropriate gestural play. The other characters are mocked in a routine of curtsying (L705-12), which has them whirling about, and a variation of the routine reoccurs at L1076-7. There is visual comedy in the heat and cold of Lover not loved's prolonged Petrarchan sufferings, which are reduced to absurdity by the Vice's clowning between head and arse (L1018-31). Further bawdy merriment is involved in the revival of Lover loved (L1316-35). In all these routines No lover nor loved controls the action. As judge he dominates the action (L1468-81), just as earlier he mimics Chancellor Wolsey (L801-12), no doubt much to the satisfaction of a lawyerly audience.

The Vice is less dominant in the argument, however. His withdrawal into a cynical rejection of love is quite contrary to the conclusion of the play, in which the two lovers appeal for toleration (L1543-77). The doctrinal precept which requires ‘One man to joy the pleasure of another’ (L1549) is linked to the passion of Christ in a passage woven round the word ‘love’ (L1565-8). Thus love fulfils the law (Rom 13:10). Such a message in such a form is appropriate for Christmas, a season of ‘honest myrth’, and specially valuable in a time of political uncertainty and religious faction.

7. THE PLAY OF THE WETHER

The cast of ten in Wether gives Heywood the opportunity to work with his greatest variety of character types, and to satirize the self-interest of the estates of England as they clamour for the ear of their ruler. Nor does Henry VIII himself escape Heywood's irony (though this has not previously been sufficiently noted); scepticism is expressed principally through the impudent way in which Jupiter's messenger Mery Report dances round important matters of state—the proposed divorce and the assumption of ever greater autocratic powers. Discussion of the play's likely date and auspices depending on a detailed account of its topicality will be found in the following chapter, so that the present account may concentrate on a straightforward account of its structure and themes.

The action presents conflicting claims for more stable weather, a subject for argument which is English enough, and one correspondingly settled by a compromise when the king of gods decrees no change amid general rejoicing. This basic plot is so simple and its outcome so anticlimactic that in less skilful hands the dramatic treatment might have become a mere hierarchical pageant of suitors. As it is, Heywood varies not only the themes, pace, and tone, but also the length and complexity of his scenes. This pleasing variety and interplay is articulated by a variety of voice patterns and with careful attention to a hierarchical use of metre. As a result, a simply episodic string of complaints is given a formal structure which is the most intricate and satisfying of all, and the theatrical interest is made to climax where the most dangerous topics are glanced at.

The ‘process’ of the play falls conveniently into twelve scenic units (appropriate, perhaps, to the theme of the weather), marked by changing the number of speakers on stage. First, Jupiter introduces himself, speaking in dignified and aureate rhyme royal, and proposes to hear suits concerning the weather, for which he will need a servant (We1-97). The preposterous entry of Mery Report at once lightens the tone and creates other expectations of ‘pastime’ (We98-185). His idiom of couplets (mostly four-stressed) now dominates the play as he attracts each new character into it. After Mery Report's exit to change his livery, Jupiter reasserts his ruffled dignity in rhyme royal, speaking in whole stanzas. The first and second suppliants, the hunting Gentylman (We186-328) and venturing Merchaunt (We329-95), are allowed to make their complaints in the royal presence. Both speak in long-line quatrains (rhyming abab); both are answered in rhyme royal by the god; both converse with Mery Report in couplets. The Gentylman's ideas of social precedence and ‘heads’ are turned arsey-versy by Mery Report's clowning. In the fifth scene (We396-441), the formula is varied; Mery Report prevents the Ranger, a plain-spoken woodsman from reaching the throne, receiving his homely request and despatching him briefly, so that the audience is made impatient for the double scene which follows (We442-761). The Water Miller addresses his request for steady rains directly to god's servant, using the higher quatrain form; but instead of seeing him off, Mery Report allows in the Wind Miller and leaves the two professional rivals together to argue the social and economic benefits of their alternative technologies. On Mery Report's reentry this technical mill talk is animated by double entendre, by which mills turn into insatiable wives and all men are inadequate millers, their pecking tools worn into disuse and impotence. Though this exchange happens ‘under the stairs’, as it were, and not in Jupiter's presence, it must have the effect of provoking the audience's sexual awareness in preparation for the entry of the Gentylwoman.

At the play's centre, the seventh scene (We762-981) turns out to have a similar double structure to the sixth, forming a symmetry with it. Before she has had a chance to state her case, the Gentylwoman is accosted in sexual banter by Mery Report, who offers her to Jupiter as a possible ‘wife’ and raises the audience's prurient curiosity about what the god-king is doing out of sight ‘making new moons’. When she is finally allowed to, the Gentylwoman speaks her piece in quatrains, but she is at once returned to couplets by Mery Report's pressing her to sing and then to a kiss. The abrupt entry of the Launder—one confessedly past her prime—on this cue turns the kiss into osculandum fundamentum. With coarse vigour and self-righteous moralism of one who bleaches the world's underwear in the sun, she attacks the veiled Gentylwoman for her vanity. While the spirited exchange which ensues has some aspects of medieval debates of Occupation and Idleness, and of Age and Youth, Mery Report's banter from the sidelines keeps up the bawdy possibilities of one man contemplating a choice of sexual partners. With the Gentylwoman's exit, the tone becomes even more obscene.

A very short eighth scene, symmetrical with the third, follows (Wy982-1001): Mery Report solus complains of his own thankless estate of servant to Jupiter. His notion that he would do better serving the devil is suggestive in relation to the courtly devil-king in Foure PP. The charming next scene with ‘Little Dick’ (significantly named to keep up the sub-theme of impotence) shows Mery Report in his most kindly vein, his mockery in abeyance, except for the comic matter of their relative stature. The Boy's innocent pleasure in snowballs is conveyed in his fresh speech in eight-syllable couplets (We1002-49). Left alone for a very short space (We1050-68), Mery Report addresses all estates in the audience, enlivening his idiom with trimeter rime coueé. He now gives Jupiter a summary report of all the suits and is commended gravely in rhyme royal (We1069-1131).

The finale is in itself a miracle of dramatic composition which gathers up the themes into a formally patterned harmony. Jupiter solus speaks one stanza before Mery Report drives into his presence all eight suitors chanting an eight-line snatch. (This has yet another new form with five- and four-syllable lines, and double rhymes, and may be a song.) The god's judgment is delivered in measured rhyme royal, eight stanzas corresponding (though not addressed individually) to the eight suitors. It is preceded and followed by short speeches of praise by the Gentylman as head of the estates. The others, in order of their hierarchical appearance in the acting place, follow suit. The play concludes, as it began, with Jupiter speaking rhyme royal stanzas of self-praise before ascending to his heavenly throne, no doubt to the accompaniment of music.

Much would depend in performance on the emphasis of the playing, and the extent to which individual performances were caricatures. The vanity of this Jupiter, his concern with his own supreme power, his self-glorification, his references to Parliament, the national disagreement, and the solution of all by divine intervention invite identification with the King. A mask worn by Jupiter might add to this.

The Vice's part is notably large. Instead of occasional manipulations like those of the Potycary and Pedler, and of No Lover nor loved, Mery Report is deputed royal power and he conducts the entire business of the court. He controls access to the royal presence, and thus the theatrical space takes on the highly charged and politically sensitive atmosphere of the ‘haut-pace at the King's chamber-doore’ (We487 and note). He decides which suitors shall be privileged, and he behaves in an overbearing manner in his new (but unspecified) clothes, insisting on respect (We432-3, 483). From the moment he picks on a torch bearer on his first entrance (We98, see also 167, 249, 733, 1239), he keeps in close contact with the audience. Thus Heywood has conflated the role of playwright with that of stage manipulator. It is hard not to imagine that, as servant of the King and, possibly, groom of the chamber, he wrote the part for himself to act, knowing that he would draw on the resources of the Chapel Royal or St Paul's choir school and that the task of directing the large cast of boy actors would be made easier by his own presence on stage.

The Vice has a particularly strong line in bawdy. Heywood's predilection for sexual jokes has been remarked. Here they occur in what appear to be deliberate sequences. For example, in the argument between the two Millers, the Vice's mention of his wife at We722 leads into a scatalogical passage of such intensity that the audience must be providing sexual meanings for nearly every line. We cannot be quite certain, in such a lively context, what the underlying implications are: the importance lies in the increase of awareness, because the climax of this sexual comedy is the appearance of the Gentylwoman. Whoever she is—she may well have been veiled—Mery Report thinks the god (being Jupiter, or perhaps Henry) ought to be interested in her. The explicit imagery in the following lines may well allude to the King's great matter (see We782-5, and note), but the important theatrical aspect is the way the susceptibilities of the presumably well-informed audience are aroused. Mery sustains his own sexual overture to the Gentylwoman through a song, the mutual ‘pleasure’ of which is stressed (We849, 855-7), so that the repeated ‘yt’ of We860-1—in another leash—has sexual implications. There is thus a sequential element in the Vice's antics and sexual jokes, by which an actual plot is promoted.

Apart from the arrival and departure of the suitors, there is plenty of stage action. Some of this may well be gestural, associated with the sexual jokes (We235, 737, 973-4). The pronounced switches at We735-6, and 754 invite gesture. There is by-play between the Gentleman and Mery Report, possibly involving a joke about physical size, and a threatened blow (We298-300). The heads-and-tails routine seems to give Mery Report pain in his neck (We310-5, 325). Looked at another way, this may be a gallows joke for an audience aware of the sensitive nature of the satire in a hierarchically conscious court.

In Wether, as in all the plays, Heywood's handling of his themes is determined by a constant awareness that the audience has to be entertained, its inhibitions removed, its attention stimulated and directed, and the pace of events managed so that interest does not flag. This delicate manipulation of theatrical interest demands nimbleness and resourcefulness from the actors, because it constitutes the very technique by which the playwright defends his satire.

8. STAGING

The actors in Heywood's plays would most likely be drawn from the Court and its immediate environs. The plays do not seem to have been conceived with doubling (and hence professional players) in mind. Some of the actors would be boys available, through Heywood's connections as a musician, from St Paul's and the Chapel Royal. Adult actors may have been associated musicians and schoolmasters. This possibility is increased by the evidence from 1553 onwards of his working with ‘children’ and with Master Wescott later at Court. Wether clearly requires at least one boy. More's participation in plays at home, and Rastell's building a theatre in his house suggest that Heywood may have been able to draw upon the family for help.

The settings demand little in the way of scenery that would not be readily available in a Tudor banqueting hall. There are sometimes several locations. Johan Johan requires a table for the meal, and a fireplace at Johan Johan's house, and, some distance away, the house of Syr Johan, though nothing is required there except perhaps a door which could be provided simply, or mimed. In a hall, as Southern suggests (p. 249) the fireplace commonly located on one wall would be suitable. Wether has most clues about an extravagant or impressive setting, though it must be admitted that these do not amount to much in comparison with other known Court entertainments before and after Heywood. Mery Report's comment to someone holding a torch on the side lines (We98) suggests a household auspice and evening performance, the occasion of a supper (We1027). Jupiter's throne could be placed at the screens end of the hall. A curtain seems necessary so that Jupiter may retire as if into a little chamber in order to make his new moon; and Mery Report, some way off, makes other characters aware of his master's presence without actually saying that he can be seen (We534). Most of the action takes place at some distance from the throne. The throne and its curtain has a back entrance (We770), possibly used for the re-entry of the suitors near the end of the play (We1138). The throne itself was probably raised on a few steps, so that Jupiter could ascend in state (We1254). An area screened from the audience is suggested in Love by the Vice's need to go offstage to prepare his spectacular costume and fireworks for an effect which would be spoiled if it was anticipated. He could withdraw from the hall altogether, of course.

Cues for music are found in Wether (four), Love (one), and Foure PP (one). In performance this could imply instrumentalists (keyboard, string or wind) in the musician's gallery of a banqueting hall. In Wether the stage direction ‘the god hath a song played in his trone’ (We178 s.d.) suggests that the musicians were behind the throne curtain. The play ends with Jupiter again calling for music and inviting ‘ye that on yerth sojourne … to synge moste joyfully’ (We1250-53), apparently an ensemble of the actors. On the three occasions when the actors are specifically required to sing, one is a quartet (4P321 s.d.), one a duet between Mery Report and the Gentylwoman, with a request for an accompaniment from the musicians (We854 and stage direction), and one a solo by Lover loved (L245 s.d.). Mery Report's jingle to round up the procession of suitors to await Jupiter's judgment (We1139-46) is possibly the only song lyric in the texts, though there is no instruction for him to sing here. Performance of the quartet is delayed by discussion of whether the Pedler is ‘a ryght syngynge man’—a distinction which may support the suggestion that Heywood himself took this part of ‘playmaker’ and judge. The Potycary leads, inviting the others to follow, perhaps in harmony, though this may have been a round or a ‘catch’. The occasion of this song is the Pedler's satisfaction with the company (4P290) and his conventional requirement for ‘pastyme’ (4P295). It follows jokes about drinking which may indicate subject matter.⁵⁹

The duet in Wether comes in a sexual context (We845, 849) where the Gentylwoman seems both to want to evade Mery Report's proposition and to accept it (We856). Her part would be sung by a boy, possibly a chorister, one of Little Dick's hundred fellows (We1023).⁶⁰ On this occasion, ‘Come kiss me Joan,’ mentioned in Nature (Pt. 2, l.150) might have the right mood.⁶¹ Similarly, Lover Loved sings of his satisfaction in love. A suitable mood is found in ‘In youth is pleasure’ (Lusty Juventus, lines 37-49).

Heywood usually writes with a strong sense of the audience. Even Witty and Witless shows concern to tailor the play to the presence of the King by introducing three special stanzas of rhyme royal (Wy675 s.d.). In Johan Johan the husband's indecisive confidences are addressed directly to the audience, and the comedy of his deception and humiliation depends heavily on asides by all three characters. There is some speech directed to the audience in La farce du Pasté, and Heywood follows his source in the by-play about leaving the coat with a spectator, but he enlarges the joke by having Johan Johan suggest to the man, ‘Whyle ye do nothyng—skrape of the dyrt’ (J257). In Pardoner and Frere the audience is put to some strain in listening to the protagonists speak simultaneously, yet the characters address the audience as though they form a congregation in a church requiring instruction and salvation. This Babel of heretics must be meticulously synchronized if the actors are not to lose their way. The Palmer addresses a single spectator (4P61), and the Pedler picks out women separately seated in the audience for sexist ridicule (4P1082). The Vice in Love proposes to entertain the audience as a ‘pastime’, telling a tale about himself (L399-690). In Wether the Vice emerges from the audience, volunteering to be Jupiter's servant. His later bawdy jokes are addressed to them (We176-8); on his reentry he pushes through the crowd, impertinently demanding respect (We249). Further encounters of actor and audience at We249, 607, and 1239, sustain the view that in his play Heywood was particularly keen to arouse close attention and sympathy. Given the nature of Wether's satirical objectives, this would be very necessary, and Heywood cultivates audience contact with more persistence than he does in any other play. The separate seating of the women is made the occasion of provocation here as in Foure PP: Mery Report introduces the Gentylman as a hunter who ‘wolde hunte a sow or twayne out of this sorte. Here he poynteth to the women’ (We249). The Pedler addresses ‘the women in thys border,’ numbering them off in threes and characterizing them all as shrews (4P1068-80).

The texts offer little direct information about costume. Except for Mery Report in his finery as God's servant, and No lover nor loved's alarming ‘copyn tank’ of squibs, there are no examples of the changes for dramatic purposes common in morality plays and interludes. However, since most of Heywood's characters are generalized types it seems likely that the visual impact of each would have helped to identify social function and rank. The cast of Witty and Witless however are not differentiated socially, though the impertinent ‘elfe’ James should look different from the more sober Jerome, who requires an ecclesiastical robe or doctor's gown. Appropriate clothing for the casts of Johan Johan and Pardoner and Frere should distinguish their professional roles; in the latter play the fact that the Pardoner and Frere are charlatans and heretics may be pointed by exaggeration.

Love and Wether give more distinct possibilities. Lover loved might be dressed in cheerful colours to distinguish him from Lover not loved whose aimlessness hints at an unkempt appearance. The Vice's bizarre behaviour and acrobatics suggest that appropriate clothing should be flashy but not physically constricting. Colour coding the four characters would reflect the balletic mode of the argument.

In Wether there are stronger reasons for costume by ‘estate’. Mery Report responds very quickly when each new suitor appears, and at a time of sumptuary laws regulating the richness of cloth appropriate to various social degrees, it seems certain that they should be typically dressed. The Gentylman wears hunting clothes, with a horn prominent. The Ranger too is an outdoor man; he may wear livery, since he is a crown officer, and he needs a cap (We433). The Millers should be linked, though the Wind Miller's dress might reflect his alleged poverty (We522-3); and they may bear tools of their craft (e.g. a ‘pecker’ We744). Mery Report's wilful mistaking of the Marchaunt for a Parson suggests that he should wear a long gown.

The Gentylwoman is the sexual centrepiece of the play. Whether her costume would reflect the personality of someone at Court is speculative. Her concern to protect her complexion suggests a veil, perhaps a ‘bongrace’ (see 4P146 and note). Jupiter as a god would require a gilded mask. Both these ‘disguises’ might have been used to suggest a specific person at Court. The emphasis upon Jupiter's glory requires extravagance (even ‘magnificence’). Mery Report is rebuked for his light array (We110), and appears in much more impressive, even pompous, clothing as ‘goddes servaunt’ (We483); a Mercury costume, with winged helmet and heels, might be suitably incongruous.

Properties are in general sparingly used, but hand properties are important in Foure PP, where each of the four has tokens of his trade: pilgrim badges, relics, patent medicines, knick-knacks. Practical experience shows that the production of visual items enlivens Heywood's lists and enthralls the audience. The Pardoner in Pardoner and Frere needs relics and bulls. Both these protagonists stand on stools to preach. The properties in Johan Johan are dictated by the source (trestle table, cups, stool, pot of ale, bread and, especially the pie), as is the method of exploiting them. The lovers' eating of the pie and the husband's handling of the wax candles and the pail require full exploitation of the bawdy possibilities. In Love the Vice has an unspecified book, perhaps a Fool's bible, while his trick played on Lover Loved requires a spectacular hat stuffed with fireworks. His take-off of Wolsey again suggests use of a stool to gain stage dominance (L801-12). In Wether the suitors may carry props consonant with social type—the Launder a basket, the Boy a pitfall trap and so on—but the only property specified is the horn blown by the Gentylman and carried by his companions, if any.

Stage directions in the text are sparse—only one in the manuscript copy of Witty and Witless. The earliest printed texts Johan Johan and Pardoner and Frere have respectively two and five; Middleton's Foure PP has only two. The longest texts have most: Love, eight and Wether, twenty. The status of these directions is suspect, since we can not be sure they are authorial. However some concern essential actions, as when Johan Johan brings the empty pail (J442), or when he is left on stage after the fight at the end (J664—a modification of the source). In Pardoner and Frere the Frere ‘kneleth downe’ at his prayers while the newly entered Pardoner declares the vertue of his relics; the protagonists are directed to speak ‘evyn at the same tyme’ (PF188), and to fight (PF538, 627). Stage directions calling for songs occur at 4P321, L245, and We178 and 853.

The more plentiful use in Love and Wether is to mark the many exits and entrances (in the case of Wether occasioned by the large cast). Six of the stage directions are added in the margin in italic type (We185, 249, 328, 396, 551, 954). The remaining ones are fully integrated into the black letter text. Elsewhere, a few special incidents or movements are noted, as with the Potycary's hopping (4P467), the Vice's entry at L1297, one of Mery Report's sexist jokes (We249), and his leading in the suitors (We1138).

Taken together, however, the stage directions give only the slightest hint of the bustle and intricacy of stage movement in most of the plays. Previous discussion has shown that there are many actions implied in the dialogue. These may involve dance-like play with groupings, and a variety of gestures, some of them scatological, some perhaps indicating mannerisms of those in the audience or known to it, some purely entertaining, like the hopping. The curtsying routines and the use of nods and becks, and the extended description of the court of hell in in Foure PP, may all be making fun of Court ceremonial. Even in Witty and Witless, where it is difficult to pick up hints of performance from the manuscript text, Tudor acting conventions would have provided a good deal of rhetorical gesture. The leashes and insistent verbal patterns seem the most likely places for improvised action, not least because such passages are often markers at critical stages in the argument. The labours of the mill horse, for example, invite mimetic representation (Wy470-6). All of the actors' vocal resources and physical skills are needed to sustain the monologue narratives. In Foure PP the boasts of the Potycary and Pardoner offer opportunities for ‘stage journeys’ and visual antics, as well as for vocal mimicry of speakers within the stories. The same is true of Love, in the Vice's subtle and self-revealing tale of mocker mocked. The probable lampooning in that play of Wolsey's manner may serve as a reminder of the dangerous possibilities open to Heywood and his co-players as they sought to show the very age and body of the Henrician time by direct or oblique impersonation.

Notes

1. To judge from the portrait on the frontispiece to Spider and Flie (T. Powell, 1556) STC 13308.

2. John Bale, Illustrium Majoris Britanniae Scriptorum Summarium, Wesel, 1548, fol. 235; Scriptorium Illustrium Maioris Brytannie Catalogus, Basel, 1557-59, II 110. The pro-Catholic Pitts, praises his piety and the easy charm of his conversation (Iohannes Pitseus, Relationem Historicarum de Rebus Anglicis, Paris, 1619 p. 234; cited by Robinson p. 31).

3. The Autobiography of Thomas Whythorne ed. James M. Osborn, Oxford, 1961, p. 13. The word ‘quantite’ here refers to poetic output rather than to Heywood's Chaucerian couplet versification. In the corresponding verses Whythorne says that no English poet ‘somuch þis day can show.’

4. Virginia Stern, Gabriel Harvey: His Life, Marginalia and Library, Oxford, 1979, pp. 149-50 & note).

5. The Arte of Poesie, ed. G. D. Willcock and A. Walker, Cambridge, 1936, p. 60. Puttenham's comment may derive from Bale's ‘sine doctrina ingeniosus’ (Catalogus II p. 110).

6. Second Frutes, 1591, ‘To the Reader’ sig. A6v; Conversations With Drummond in Works (ed. C. H. Herford and Percy Simpson, Oxford, 1925-) I 148.

7. A. W. Reed, Early Tudor Drama, 1926. See also Robert W. Bolwell, The Life and Works of John Heywood, New York, 1966.

8. Reed p. 9.

9. Anthony à Wood gives an account of Heywood in his Athenae Oxoniensis, 1691-92 (ed. Philip Bliss, 1813), I col. 348.

10. Alistair Fox, Politics and Literature in the Reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII, Oxford, 1989, p. 237.

11. Reed p. 40. The earliest record we have confirmed is for Easter 1521, in ‘The Kyngis boke of paymentis’, PRO E36/216 p. 254.

12. BL Egerton MS 2604 fol. 3. Reed p. 41. On Heywood's musical activities, see Stevens, Music and Poetry, pp. 282, 319-28.

13. ‘… at the contemplacion of the Kynges letter, John Heywoode be admitted into the liberties of this citie, paying the olde hanse [fee]’. Town Clerk's Records, Guildhall 22 May 1523, quoted by G. C. Moore Smith, ‘John Heywood the Dramatist a Freeman of London’, N&Q X (1914) 128.

14. PRO E101/420 fol. 11. L&P V 306; Reed p. 43.

15. Johnson p. 22. L&P V 309.

16. Reed p. 46 cites Guildhall, Town Clerk's Records, Letter Book O.

17. L&P VI 14. Reed p. 44.

18. A Catalogue of the Harleian Manuscripts in the British Museum, 3 vols., 1808-1812, I 213.

19. Personal communication from Dr John Pitcher. See Two Moral Interludes.

20. On authorship of Gentleness and Nobility see Rastell Plays pp. 20-6.

21. Rastell Plays pp. 4-8.

22. Reed pp. 165-6; Anglo pp. 197, 218-19.

23. Rastell Plays p. 8. ‘Pleadings in a Theatrical Lawsuit, John Rastell v. Henry Walton’ in Fifteenth-Century Prose and Verse, ed. A. W. Pollard, 1903, pp. 307-21.

24. See Lancashire, Nos. 258, 262, 267. E. K. Chambers, Medieval Stage II 193 n. 1.

25.                     ‘Ha' you nere a Cooper
    At London call'd Vitruvius? send for him;
    Or old Iohn Haywood, call him to you, to helpe.’

    (V ii 72-4)

26. STC 18084, 18085.

27. ‘The Reknyng of Johan Rastall’ in Treasurer's Accounts of Sir Henry Guldeford, 19 Henry VIII, PRO E36/227 (unpaginated).

28. G. R. Elton, Reform and Reformation 1509-1558, London, 1977, p. 156. William Rastell's importance as a leading Catholic at Lincoln's Inn is indicated by a record that on 3 May 1554, as ‘one of the benchers’ he paid for a ‘great image or pycture in a Table of the takyng downe of Chryste fro the Crosse for chapel Altar’ at the Inn (The Black Books of Lincoln's Inn: I 1422-1586 (London, 1897) pp. 308-9). His wife ‘Wenefred’ was dead by then.

29. J. Guy, ‘Thomas More and Christopher St German: The Battle of the Books’ in Reassessing the Henrician Age: Humanism, Politics and Reform, ed. A. Fox and J. Guy, Oxford, 1986, pp. 95-120.

30. Princess Mary's Privy Purse Accompt, BL Royal MS 17.B.xxviii fol. 7v. Reed p. 58. The accounts for February 1524 show payment of expenses to a ‘Johannes haiwarde de henley super Tamisia et sociis suis’ but this seems to have been a provisioner (PRO E36/222 p. 11).

31. Privy Purse expenses of Princess Mary, cited by Reed p. 58. Lancashire No. 1334.

32. A payment of 30s from Household Expenses of Princess Elizabeth, 13 February 1552, shows Heywood in collaboration with ‘Sebastian’, who was reimbursed for ‘the charge of the children with the carriage of the plaiers garments’ (Reed p. 59, Lancashire No. 754). An inscription in Thomas Mulliner's Book (Add MS 30513), containing some of Redford's music and his play Wit and Science, claims that Mulliner was a pupil of Heywood's, some of whose poems are written into the MS (fols. 56-62v).

33. L&P V.xiv.ii.340. Reed p. 44. Bale, Plays I, 4-5.

34. L&P V.xiv. 782. Reed pp. 61-2. Lancashire No. 1029.

35. Reed pp. 35-51.

36. Reed p. 63 cites Harington's Metamorphosis of Ajax. See also Foxe, A&M V 528; L&P XIX.i 444; Brigden pp. 353-54.

37. Whythorne, Autobiography pp. 13-14; a few lines from the play are quoted on p. 74. Lancashire No. 136 dates this 1545-9.

38. L&P V.xxi.243.

39. Reed p. 51. Puttenham's story that ‘merry John Heywood was allowed to sit at the tables end’ at the Reformist Duke of Northumberland's board may also relate to this period (Arte of Poesie, pp. 275-6).

40. Anglo p. 315; Feuillerat pp. 134, 141-5; Lancashire No. 1081.

41. Stowe's Annals (1631 ed.) p. 617; Reed p. 59.

42. Lancashire No. 1083; Reed p. 60; Anglo p. 326.

43. Reed p. 51 cites Patent Rolls 1&2 Philip & Mary, P.8.m.40, P.4.m.16.

44. ‘Heywood the Epigrammatist being apparelled in Velvet by Queen Mary with his cap on in the presence, in spight of all the Gentlemen, till the Queen herself asked him what he meaned, and then he asked her if he was Heywood, for she had made him so brave that he had almost misknowen himself.’ (Works I 148).

45. Spider STC 13308. Possibly this began as the story of how John Rastell was caught in Cromwell's web and altered to how Heywood himself was caught in Cranmer's web. But the Spider has been interpreted as Northumberland. See further John N. King, English Reformation Literature, Los Angeles, 1986, p. 252; de la Bère pp. 101-11.

46. Reed p. 60.

47. A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London; 1554-1640, ed. Edward Arber, 4 vols., London, 1875-77, I, 154. Revels History of Drama II 60.

48. Reed p. 68.

49. CSP Dom.Eliz. 1566-79, p. 581.

50. Printed by Reed pp. 237-8.

51. W. Bang, ‘Acta Anglo-Lovaniensia: John Heywood und sein Kreis’, Englische Studien 38 (1907), 234-49, at 236. On Heywood's last years see also ed. H. De Vocht (ed.), Jasper Heywood and his Translations of Seneca, Louvain, 1913, p. vii.

52. Altman, pp. 107-24.

53. Robinson, pp. 163-80.

54. E.g. Wy76-9, 128-32, 661-5, where the words ‘witty’ and ‘witless’ are consistently juxtaposed; and L941-4, 1102-45, 1362-71, which play upon ‘will’, ‘contentacyon’ and ‘lie/love’.

55. Compare the Potycary's joke with that of Not lover nor loved, 4P499-503 and L1022-7.

56. Wy19, 105, 175, 181, 207, 245, 365, 395, 399, 437, 489, 615, 649.

57. E.g. at Wy307-12. Other leashes are noted at Wy76-9, 131-2, 207-10, 307-11, 329-35, 355-64, 595-602, 637-42, 661-5.

58. Quatrains (abab) are at J341, 391, 487, 497, 525, 543, 581, 593, 641, so that metrically the play is very similar to Witty and Witless.

59. Drinking songs (without settings) are found in Gammer Gurton's Needle (ll. 237-9, a group offstage), Tom Tiler (ll. 254-77, three voices), and Like Will to Like (C1, solo; C2, solo; D1v, three voices).

60. Love songs are common in interludes, as in Magnyfycence (ll. 2064-77, solo), Wyt and Scyence (ll. 989-1020, two groups of four singers), Nice Wanton (A4v, duet), and Patient Grissell (ll. 968-78, solo).

61. The tune is in C. B. Simpson, The British Broadside Ballad and Its Music, New Brunswick, 1966, fig. 256, pp. 396-8.

Abbreviations

Altman: Joel B. Altman, The Tudor Play of Mind: A Rhetorical Inquiry into the Development of Elizabethan Drama (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1978)

Anglo: Sydney Anglo, Spectacle Pageantry and Tudor Policy (Oxford, 1969)

BL: British Library

Brigden: Susan Brigden, London and the Reformation (Oxford, 1989)

CSP Sp: Calendar of State Papers, Spanish, ed. G.A. Bergenroth, et al., 13 vols. (London, 1862-1964)

Feuillerat: Documents Relating to the Revels at Court in the Time of King Edward VI and Queen Mary, ed. A. Feuillerat, in Bang vol. 44 (Louvain, 1914)

Fox: Alistair Fox, Politics and Literature in the Reign of Henry VII and Henry VIII (Oxford, 1989)

Foxe, AM: J. Foxe, Acts and Monuments, ed. S.R. Cattley and G. Townsend, 8 vols. (London, 1837-41)

L&P: Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, ed. J. S. Brewer, et al., 21 vols. (London, 1862-1932)

La Rosa A Critical Edition of John Heywood's ‘A Play of Love’, ed. F.E. La Rosa (New York, 1979)

Lancashire: Ian Lancashire, Dramatic Texts and Records of Britain: A Chronological Topography (Cambridge, 1984)

PRO: Public Record Office

Rastell Plays: Three Rastell Plays, ed. R. Axton (Cambridge, 1979)

Reed: A.W. Reed, Early Tudor Drama: Medwall, the Rastells, and the More Circle (London, 1926)

Robinson: Vicki Knudsen Robinson, A Critical Edition of ‘The Play of the Wether’ by John Heywood (New York and London, 1987)

STC: A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland and Ireland, and of English Books Printed Abroad, 2nd ed., ed. W.A. Jackson, F. J. Ferguson, and K.F. Panzer, 2 vols. (London, 1976, and 1986)

Whythorne: The Autobiography of Thomas Whythorne, ed. James M. Osborn, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1961)