SOURCE: “Formation of the Christian Self in The Four P.P.,” in Early Drama to 1600, edited by Albert H. Tricomi, State University of New York at Binghamton, 1987, pp. 143-52.

[In the following essay, Finkelstein argues that The Four PP owes much to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, although Heywood's play subtly modifies many of Chaucer's anti-feminist themes.]

In the The Four P.P. John Heywood amplifies the schematic débat plots of Witty and Witless and The Pardoner and the Friar to present a four-way competition for authority and power. Whereas The Play of the Weather mixes the débat with a morality-play structure, the well-matched opponents of our play owe more to non-dramatic sources, generally to the fabliau, but particularly to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, from which Heywood quotes.¹The Four P.P. also exploits medieval anti-feminist portraits, as Chaucer did in creating the Wife of Bath. Nevertheless, Heywood shapes his dramatic structure by using “woman” for two symbolic purposes that are initially contrasting but ultimately unified in function. Inspired by Chaucer's use of St. Jerome, Heywood shapes an inquiry into the formation of a Christian self in fiction.

The play contains several anti-feminist narratives and digressions—a Pedlar's description of female vanity and that sex's thirst for his merchandise; a 'Pothecary's story, which tells of curing a woman's “fallen-synkes” by inserting a rectal tampion, later ejected with a fart so explosive that a distant castle collapsed; and the longest story, the Pardoner's tale of visiting hell to find one Margery Coursen, whom the devil happily frees because she causes excessive trouble. These narratives and the dramatic activity betray Heywood's interest in the fabliau and farce.² However, The Four P.P. responds to its anti-feminist antecedents differently from John, Tib and Sir John. In the latter play Heywood dramatizes the fabliau's physical humor; the comedy closes with a fight and the husband voicing justified suspicions. Close to a débat in form, The Four P.P. describes but does not enact physical violence; it concludes in Christian social harmony and a democratic note typical of Heywood's other débats. By containing his farcial material within the débat's structure, Heywood reshapes his anti-feminist matter into dramatic devices that communicate his Christian concerns.

I am arguing, then, that a play which initially seems wholly misogynistic criticizes both women and men.³ That Heywood so modifies a received tradition does not, however, necessarily make him a spokesman for a new order. Yet his intimate association with Sir Thomas More's circle would almost certainly have influenced him to hold views of women quite different from those expressed by the men in his play. Thomas More so energetically promoted making women's education equal to men's that Erasmus claimed More's programs persuaded him to change his own ideas.⁴ Vives, it may be added, argues for female education in three tracts, as does Sir Thomas Elyot in The Defence of Good Women. Both More and Elyot support their arguments by claiming women's reason at least equal to men's. Furthermore, Vives asserts that both unlearned men and women lower themselves to the level of beasts.⁵ The attitudes expressed in the corpus of Heywood's plays are not inconsistent with those of his friends. Both the Play of the Weather and The Play of Love present portraits of women who merit no more censure than their associates. In the latter, Neither Lover Nor Loved degrades women but is discovered to be the play's Vice. In the former, the Gentlewoman gains no extra reproof; the play's ultimate insistence on interdependence implicitly embraces the strengths of both sexes.

The comic examples I have cited from The Four P.P. do show the play turning on anti-feminism and devoting the bulk of its humor to that theme. However, the play makes both linguistic and topical connections between the men and the women it depicts, thereby forcing us to compare their traits. Initially, the Palmer, Pardoner, and 'Pothecary argue about the relative merits of their professions in moving people towards grace. Although we might expect to favor a Palmer over a Pardoner, this is a comic débat in utramque partem, instead of a Chaucerian exposé; actually we see that both men have defects. As David Bevington shows, neither party in a débat speaks the full truth, which lies somewhere in between their positions.⁶ The Palmer declares that he's been to “many mo [places] / then yf I tolde, all ye do know” (ll. 23-24).⁷ But after commending the virtues of prayer and sacrifice, he flashes some pride—“And namely suche as payne do take / On fote to punyshe their frayle body— / Shall thereby meryte more hyely” (ll. 60-62).

Like ourselves, the Pardoner voices skepticism about the Palmer's success. He feels that one could save exercise—find grace more efficiently—by staying home and buying pardons. The men thus battle over the power of their professions. They also argue about their respective authority. The Palmer complains that “Ryght selde is it sene or never / That treuth and pardoners dwell together” (ll. 109-10). The Pardoner insists the Palmer “may lye by aucthoryte” (l. 134) because no one present can substantiate or challenge a traveller's claims.

Having displayed some of their defects, the men go on to describe women's flaws, indirectly defining their own. The Pedlar boasts of his buying and selling, clearly a comment on both the 'Pothecary and Pardoner, but also on the Palmer, who has perhaps over-promoted his profession. These traits, at their worst, are defined as features of feminine sexuality. The Pedlar asserts that his wares appeal not only to women's interest in clothes, but to the wide variety of their tastes—“they be masked in many nettes: / As, frontlettes, fyllettes, partlettes and bracelettes; / And then theyr bonettes, and theyr poynettes” (ll. 258-60). Women's tastes thus run counter to Christian-Stoic doctrine, which warns against variety and changeable appetites. The sex is said to have other uncontrollable thirsts. The 'Pothecary's wife, it seems, becomes angry when pins fall out of her too large pin-case. This wife looks for new pins when she loses one, much to the 'Pothecary's concern. Lest we miss the punning, the play adds that women love to fiddle with their tail pin, which then “doubles in the cloth,” and that no matter how much you prick and pin these women, they “loke for pynnyng styll” and “wyll nat forsake it” (ll. 271-78).

If we take this supposedly uncontrollable attraction to the phallus as a worship of the power for which it is a metaphor, then the men are not only telling stories about women, but also speaking of their individual desires for power.⁸ The play introduces no female characters for the audience to use as evidence against the whole sex. That Heywood does not scruple to do so in John Tyb, and Sir John suggests a desire in The Four P.P. to focus more on what women symbolize to these men than on what constitutes their true natures. Because these unseen women, as symbols, possess the traits the men themselves exhibit, we will ultimately note that we are watching examples of projection.⁹ Heywood compares the women's libidinous thirsts and the men's own thirsts for power, money, and sex. What the Pardoner calls the Palmer's “wyde wandrynge” (l. 99) becomes Mrs. 'Pothecary's “pyncase so wyde” (l. 247). Because of this supposed anatomical feature, she is always looking for new pins, as the Palmer looks for new places to visit. So too, the Palmer criticizes the Pardoner for using lies to “enlarge” his pardons past their real worth, a parallel to the doubling tail pin (especially when we consider the associations between genitalia and the Pardoner's relics made in Chaucer). Immediately following the jests about the promiscuity of the 'Pothecary's wife, the men joke about an appetite of their own:

Poth: Then tell me thys: be ye perfyt in drynkynge?
Ped: Perfyt in drynkynge as may be wysht by
          thynkyng!
Poth: Then after your drynkynge how fall ye to
          wynkyng?
Ped: Syr, after drynkynge whyle the shot is tynkynge,
Some hedes be swynkyng, but myne wyl be synkynge.

(ll. 301-05)

There is no small sexual suggestiveness in these lines. Even without it, they would obviously comment on the same sexual thirst that comically underlies the pin jokes. A visual metaphor extends the parallel between male and female hungers when the Palmer and 'Pothecary fall to kissing the Pardoner's relics. The 'Pothecary exclaims about the bones' stink; the Palmer suggests that the smell is probably the pharmacist's own breath (ll. 504-05). Their thirsts, their view of women, and the means they manufacture for travelling to grace all reflect their mortal nature, their own physical “stink.”

These traits—sexual voraciousness, resistance to government (epitomized by Margery's frustrating the devil), and competition (among the men) for authority, indeed theological authority—resemble those in such medieval anti-feminist portraits as Noah's wife and the Wife of Bath. As his borrowing from “The Pardoner's Prologue and Tale” shows, Heywood knew The Canterbury Tales well; his interest in The Wife of Bath is indicated by his use of her tale for Gentleness and Nobility. He would also have most likely known Jerome's Epistola Adversus Jovinianum, so important to the Wife.¹⁰ Nevertheless, Heywood adapts these materials to fashion the sinful, destructive natures his male characters attribute to women.

The Wife of Bath defies abusive husbands who “liknest eek womenes love to helle,” as well as “to wilde fyr; / The moore it brenneth, the moore it hath desir / To consume every thyng” (ll. 371-75).¹¹ These verses gloss section l.28 (Migne, 281-82) of Jerome's Epistola, which begins “vitia mulierum. Diabolus et filiae eius insatiabiles.” Jerome is in turn commenting on Proverbs 30: 15-16, which also link women to thirst, fire, and insatiability.¹² Later in section l.28 Jerome explicates lines about two daughters in Proverbs 9: one is a foolish figure calling on passing men to eat her bread in secret and drink her stolen water. Satisfied only by death and destruction, Jerome says, she sends men to hell. He adds that all daughters of Adam correspond to this hell-directing type.

Insatiability for drink in the Proverbs—and for sexual love in Chaucer—thus appears in both Chaucer and Jerome with images of women sending men to hell or as hell themselves.¹³ This is not an appropriate context in which to evaluate the complex question of Chaucer's own motives in introducing these features concurrently. I am, however, arguing that we should no more take Heywood's play as an assault on women than we do Chaucer's poem. For both writers “woman” serves many other functions.¹⁴ Heywood's well-documented borrowings from Chaucer's characters and his similar preference for a comic, metaphoric hell bespeak at least some Chaucerian influence on his dramatic use of “woman” as a symbol. However, if the men are projecting their negative traits onto the women about whom they tell stories, then the images from the patristic context show that as they bicker about the women, they reveal a hell within themselves.

A modern audience would perhaps also be especially sensitive to the spectacle of men with little authority gaining a sense of power by fashioning fictions about the opposite sex. In this case, these fictions reveal not just the insecurities of the men, but their sinful mortal selves as well. However, while we can see this, the men do not. Their competitiveness and resistance to forming a community continue to reveal their pride. By denying their own sinfulness and telling prejudicial stories about women, they place themselves at the greatest distance from knowledge of their own natures. The play's digressions about women thus reveal a coherent function.

What remains to be accounted for is the rapidity with which the men settle their differences following the lying contest. Proposing the competition, the Pedlar says,

And now have I founde one mastry
That ye can do in-dyfferently,
And is nother sellynge nor byenge,
But evyn only very lyenge
And all ye thre can lye as well
As can the falsest devyll in hell.

(ll. 438-43)

From the Pedlar's point of view, the men can all be masters of lying. He is comically undercutting them, but also reminding us that although their professions deny them mastery, lying gives each of them a compensatory control.¹⁵

That the Pardoner and 'Pothecary respond to the Pedlar's invitation with stories shows how the play equates fiction-making with lying, a connection more common later in the century. Applying the Pedlar's terms, we see that fiction-making provides one with a field of mastery isolated from normal human commerce (such as buying or selling). Given this conception, it is likely that when Heywood shows how the men can all lie indifferently, he has in mind the Latin indifferens, used by Cicero and Seneca, for example, to mean neither morally good nor bad in an ethical sense.

The play then provides two explanations of why, after partaking in the lying contest, the men can renounce their struggles for authority and join in communal worship. It argues that creating fictions allows the Christian to explore—in an ethically neutral setting—the basest elements within the individual, as these men do when they tell stories about their female analogues. In the Pedlar's terms, being an author is an experience of mastery. The authority that authors have over their fictions paradoxically allows them, once others receive their fictional projections, to renounce control both over their text and themselves. Within the set of metaphors inherited from the play's anti-feminist and Chaucerian contexts, these men master hell—as the Pardoner comically does in his story—or conquer their own hellishness through the distancing experience inherent in the fictionalizing process.

But renunciation of individual authority does not come easily. The men squabble even after the Palmer's victory. Finally, the Pedlar says that by looking for God in separate ways, they wander further from Him: “Who walketh thys way for God wolde fynde him, / The farther they seke hym, the father behynde hym” (ll. 1185-86). The metaphors summarize the men's former activities. In the play's final lines Heywood transforms the secular metaphors of journey into religious ones, as each man states he will follow God's Church and counsel. The group thus represents the church or it teachings, rather than God Himself, as the focus of this new quest. Only twice is the Lord mentioned; each instance refers to hopes that He will stimulate faith in the Church. The Palmer says,

Then to our reason God gyve us his grace,
That we may folowe with fayth so fermely
His commaundmentes, that we may purchace
Hys love, and so consequently
To belyve hys Churche faste and faythfully.

(ll. 1223-27)

With this Catholic emphasis, an overall structural motif emerges, one that explains the men's final embrace of new selves. Since the Church typologically represents Christ's bride, the men have moved from their lying and their fascinations with—and, in the 'Pothecary's case, marriage to—women with hellish traits to an embrace of a new “marriage.” In this journey the symbol of woman itself changes. What begins as a symbol of humanity's sensual nature comes to signify an idealized spiritual self. Although we cannot specify influence, ample dramatic and theological precedents exist for reversing a signifier's reference to provide a text's structure. The earthly lamb of The Second Shepherds' Play becomes the metaphoric lamb of Christian typology as the characters find grace. The Whore of Babylon, whose traits very much resemble those of Heywood's people, gives way to Christ's bride in Revelation.

Neither a modern audience nor, the evidence suggests, More's circle, could take seriously the play's implicit argument that all earthly women are irredeemably corrupt. However, The Four P.P. ultimately asks that both those who accept this view and others who read matters ironically submit themselves to the same authority. We should note that the Palmer's meek statement that he has never seen a dishonest woman is simultaneously a large lie and the play's only idealization, even if sarcastic, of real women. One of the Pedlar's last speeches addresses the choices one makes when interpreting something uncertain:

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

(ll. 1209-1212)

These remarks remind us that people are measured by the degree to which they judge matters positively. To idealize is to reveal a potential within. Again, considering the mechanism of projection shows us a second irony in the Palmer's deserving victory, one of which he himself may not be aware. Those in the audience incapable of idealization show “no good at the beste,” like the four P's before grace touched them. Because such dangers confront everyone, the play concludes with a request that all subordinate individual judgment to the Church's authority. If adopted as a mode of literary judgment, this faith makes narrative a veil to truth.

Hence, The Four P.P. never condemns the lying within it. It avoids such judgment for another reason: unlike Chaucer's Pardoner and, perhaps, the Wife of Bath, the four P's find redemption because they maintain a distance between themselves and their fictions. Their use of the female “other” to stand for parts of their sensual nature permits these men to separate themselves from their vices. They thus find their Christian selves through their experience of fictions. Although Heywood's wanderers never actually travel anywhere, their use of women as symbols marks their voyage from sin to redemption and an acceptance of their purified selves. The comedy ends in a harmony mediated by obedience to the Church and evinced by participation in a community. The insatiable pride of the men disappears. As it does, their discussion of libidinous women, symbolizing the sinful parts of their nature, vanishes.

Notes

1. Robert Bolwell, The Life and Works of John Heywood (New York: AMS, 1966), p. 104, points out that Heywood takes 65 lines from Chaucer's “Pardoner's Prologue and Tale” and the description of the Pardoner's relics from “The General Prologue.” See also Wilhelm Swoboda, John Heywood als Dramatiker, (Wein: Braumüller, 1888), p. 63 ff.; Karl Young, “Influence of French Farce on the Plays of John Heywood,” MP, 2 (1904), 97-124.

2. Young, “French Farce,” identifies as a source the Farce nouvelle d'un Pardonneur, d'un Triacleur, et d'une Travernire.

3. Of course, the authorial decision to represent “woman” as embodying undesirable traits may itself be an anti-feminist gesture.

4. P. S. Allen, ed., Opus epistolarum Des. Erasmi Roterdami, 12 vols. (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1906-58), IV, 578.

5. For a review of More's, Elyot's, and Vives' attitudes towards female reason and education, see Pearl Hogrefe, The Sir Thomas More Circle (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1959), pp. 201-50. For More, see his letter to William Gonell; for Vives, see De institutione Christianae foeminae (1523), De ratione studii puerilis (1523), and Satellitium animi sive symbola (1524). Vives' comment on unlearned people appears in De officio mariti (1529), discussed in Hogrefe, p. 235.

6. David Bevington, “Is John Heywood's Play of the Weather Really about the Weather?” Rennissance Drama, 7 (1964), 11-19.

7. All quotations from Heywood are from Specimens of the Pre-Shakespearean Drama, ed. John M. Manly (Boston: Ginn, 1897), I, 483-522.

8. An obvious point from a psychoanalytic perspective. For discussion of relations between love and desire for the phallus, see Jacques Lacan, Écrits, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), pp. 281-91.

9. For a definition of this term, see Anna Freud, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense, trans. Cecil Baines (New York: International Universities Press, 1946).

10. For the sources of Gentleness and Nobility, see Bolwell, Works of Heywood, p. 94; C. F. T. Brooke, “Gentleness and Nobility: the Authorship and Source,” MLR, 6 (1911), 458. Heywood would probably have known Jerome's letters, published by Erasmus, through his close association with the More circle.

11. Quotations from Chaucer are from The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F. N. Robinson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957). Verse numbers are cited in the text.

12. I rely on the Revised Standard Version of The Bible (New York and Scarborough: World Pub., 1962). Chapter and verse numbers are cited in the text.

13. For further discussions of such attitudes in Tertullian and others, see George Tavard, Women in Christian Traditions (Notre Dame: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1973), and Rosemary R. Reuther, ed., Religion and Sexism (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974).

14. Judith Ferster, Chaucer on Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985) thoroughly reviews these issues.

15. The Wife of Bath's concern with government perhaps helps to shape Heywood's depiction of the four P's in their competition for mastery.