[In the following essay, Craik demonstrates that Johan Johan is a translation of a French farce and concludes that Heywood was not always the innovative author many claim him to be.]

Professor Gustave Cohen's recent edition¹ of fifty-three hitherto unedited farces is of great importance to the student of French farce. There is, however, an independent interest for English readers in the fact that in the nineteenth of these farces (Farce nouvelle et fort joyeuse du Pasté et est à trois personnaiges. C'est assavoir: l'Homme, la Femme, le Curé) we have what is clearly the true source of John Heywood's Johan Johan.

It has long been known that Heywood's farces were strongly influenced by contemporary French examples, but the extent of his borrowings has remained a matter of much speculation. The first full investigation was made by Dr Karl Young,² who suggested the Farce de Pernet qui va au vin³ as the source of Johan Johan. In this play Parnet is a foolish and jealous husband. He interrupts the assignation of his wife Nicolle and her lover (not a priest), and with great presence of mind they break it off by bidding each other ‘Adieu, cousine’ and ‘Adieu, cousin’. Recognizing the departing ‘cousin’ as their neighbour, Pernet remains suspicious, but Nicolle succeeds in persuading him not only that he is her lover's ‘cousin’ but also that he is nobly born. The lover now reappears, keeps up the deception which he uses as an excuse for kissing Nicolle, and further imposes on Pernet by sending him for wine with which to celebrate the discovery of their relationship and Pernet's noble birth. Pernet tries in vain to send Nicolle, and on various pretexts returns eight times to interrupt the lovers. At last he is told to fetch both wine and a pie which the ‘cousin’ has ordered, and goes on his errand with a soliloquy which shows that his suspicions are not allayed. On his return the ‘cousin’, after sampling the wine, acquaints him with

                                                                                          ung subtil affaire,
Dont vous serez riche à jamais:

Pernet is to soften wax and make an image which ‘sera profitable’. Thoughts of future wealth, however, are not sufficient to distract him from the meal, which is being rapidly dispatched while he labours at the fire. He tries to approach the table under cover of saying grace, but he does not get a morsel, and the play concludes with his lamentations and a triumphant summing-up by the lover.

Young's position is that Heywood was acquainted with this farce in some form and that he ‘borrowed from it at least the plot, type, characters and main incidents of Johan Johan’.⁴ This statement has been generally accepted and little was added to it until the work of Professor Ian Maxwell appeared four years ago.⁵ Professor Maxwell's study of Johan Johan and Pernet throws valuable light on the wax-chafing incident.

In this closing passage [he writes], only the slightest lip service is paid to realism. Pernet is set to soften wax for an image, presumably in order to acquire wealth by magic; but the real point of the scene lies in the second sense of ‘chauffer la cire’. It means ‘to attend long for a promised good turne’ (Cotgrave), as one might await the warming of the wax with which a charter was to be sealed (Ancien Théâtre François, x, 130). Huguet gives the sense ‘attendre’ with an illustration from the middle sixteenth century. A much older one may be found in no. 92 of the Cent nouvelles nouvelles.⁶

It is thus proved that the episode of wax-chafing, with its double meaning, ‘must have been conceived in French’;⁷ and consequently that Johan Johan (which also ends with the devouring of a pie, while the husband chafes wax ‘when any other task would have served as well or better’)⁸ must derive from a French source. The marked resemblances between the final scenes of the two plays led to the natural conclusion that Pernet, then the only known French farce in which wax-chafing occurred, was in fact that source; and this in turn led to Heywood's being credited with the invention of all episodes not in Pernet, and consequently with a complete mastery of the methods of French farce.

The publication of the Farce du Pasté makes it now evident that Heywood has taken very few liberties with his real source, of which Johan Johan is a close (though none the less spirited) translation. An example from the opening monologues of the plays will make this clear:

Battre, mais quoy! se je la tue,
Je pourroye bien estre pendu!
Dea, quant j'auray son corpz batu
Et receu cent coups pour l'amende
Et pensez-vous qu'elle n'amende?
Nenny, je ne la battray point
Et si elle fait rien mal à point
Ou qu'elle laisse son mesnaige
Et pour cela ne la batray-je?
Et pour la chair bieu si feray …(9)
Beten qd a? yea but what and she therof dye
Than I may chaunce to be hanged shortly
And whan I haue beten her tyll she smoke
And gyuen her many a.C. stroke
Thynke ye that she wyll amende yet
Nay by our lady the deuyll spede whyt
Therfore I wyll not bete her at all
          And shall I not bete her / no shall
Whan she offendeth and doth a mys
And kepeth not her house / as her duetie is
Shall I not bete her if she do so
Yes by cokkes blood that shall I do. …(10)

As almost the whole of Heywood's play is as directly translated from his source as are these lines, it merely remains to consider in what respects Heywood has departed from his original and for what purpose.

The only alteration to the plot occurs in its final episode. In both the Farce du Pasté and Johan Johan the action ends with the rebellion of the long-suffering husband and a fight in which he takes on the other two single-handed. The closing lines of the French version are as follows:

L'Homme.                                        Vive Sainct George!
A ly! à ly! a! maistre prestre,
Vuyder vous feray de cest estre,
Vous en aurés, tenez, tenez,
Nostre pasté mangé avez,
Mais il vous sera chier vendu,
A force vous verray vaincu,
Or sus, or sus à ly! à ly!
La Femme. A ly! curé!
L'Homme.                                        Je vous vy
A! vous estes trop contre moy,
A! par le corps bieu, je m'en voys
Et y garde ce qui vouldra.
La Femme. Par où s'en va-il?
Le Curé.                                        Par delà!
Je vous pry, suyvons-le de près.
                                        L'homme revient par derrière atout
                                        ung sac plain de pain.
L'Homme. Après, curé, après, après.
A! vous me gastés le pasté,
Après, curé, après, curé,
A ly! à ly! à ly! à ly!
Or, Messeigneurs, adieu vous dy!
                                                                                          explicit.(11)

The fight in Johan Johan has a different conclusion:

Jhān. By kokkes soule horson preest / thou shalt be slayn
Thou hast eate our pye / and gyue me nought
By kokkes blod it shalbe full derely bought
Tyb. At hym syr Johan / or els god gyue the sorow
Jhān. & haue at your hore & thefe / saynt george to
          borow
                                        Here they fyght by the erys a whyle & than
                                        the preest and the wyfe go out of the place.
Jhān. A syrs I haue payd some of them euen as I lyst
They haue borne / many a blow with my fyst, etc.(12)

It is apparent that Heywood here improves on the French farce, which, in spite of the lively farcical effect produced when a character reappears in the rear of his pursuers and mocks their fruitless efforts to catch him, seems casual and perfunctory. This might be the end of any farce in which the characters come to blows.¹³ The rich comedy of the version in Johan Johan lies in the unforeseen triumph of the valiant husband, followed immediately by his relapse into all the misgivings of his opening soliloquy (with the additional fear that malice may provide a new motive for Tyb and Sir Johan)¹⁴ and his anxious departure from the scene ‘to se yf they do me any vylany’.¹⁵

We now come to the verbal alterations of importance. It is the measure of Heywood's excellence as a translator that it has never been suspected that Johan Johan ever had any other source than Pernet, and it is far from easy to catch him in the act of turning French into English. There is, of course, no doubt that he is the borrower. Apart from the historical probabilities, and the conclusive evidence of Professor Maxwell on the phrase ‘chauffer la cire’, an occasional gallicism remains from the text of the Farce du Pasté to clinch the matter:

J'enrage presque je ne puis
Veoir le tour de nostre bourgeoise.(16)
Yet I almost enrage that I ne can
Se the behauour of our gentylwoman.(17)

At other times Heywood has written lines ambiguous in themselves but clear when compared with the original:

Si le pasté se refroidist,
Par mon serment, il est perdu.(18)
I wyll not gyue a strawe I tell you playne
If that the pye waxe colde agayne.(19)

And at one point a gratuitous touch of colour by Heywood spoils the perfect articulation of the scheme against Johan Johan. It will be remembered that Tyb produces the pie to explain where she has just been, implying that though she was with the priest she was well chaperoned:²⁰

Truely Johan Johan we made a pye
I and my gossyp Margery
And our gossyp the preest syr Johan
And my neybours yongest doughter An. …(21)

But when Johan Johan calls on Sir Johan with the invitation he hears that he is already engaged, having ‘on saterday last’ given the money for the pie and arranged the date of the meal, and presumably having taken no further part in the affair since then. It is hard to see why Heywood introduced a discrepancy by altering ‘ce matin’²² to ‘saterday last’.²³ Certainly the credulity of Johan Johan is emphasized, but at the expense of the ingenuity of the wife and the priest. Possibly Heywood realized that the plot of the farce requires Johan Johan to suspect nothing when the other piemakers are not invited to the feast, and thought that instead of slurring over the husband's necessary lack of acumen he might stress it by making a large and obvious flaw in the wife's plan.

On the other hand, this alteration may have been through mere carelessness if, as is probable enough, Heywood was translating at speed. It would be in accordance with the principle on which he translated his source, this being to make his audience feel at home by colouring his version with proverbs, familiar phrases, and especially with English allusions. ‘The churche of poules’ replaces ‘Saint-Maurice’ and ‘Nostre-Dame’,²⁴ and ‘swete saynt Dyryk’ is invoked instead of ‘Saincte Me(s)aise’.²⁵ When the husband in the Farce du Pasté comments on ‘Jehannette ma commère’

Ha! ventre bieu! c'est la plus fine
Macquerelle qui soit jusques à Romme,

Heywood makes Johan Johan say of ‘gossyp Margery’

By cokkes lylly woundes that same is she
That is the most bawde hens to Couentre;(26)

but he remembers the original expression, and when later required to translate a far weaker comment on the same person,

—C'est la plus forte macquerelle,
Par la chair bieu, que je cognoisse—

he makes a thrifty use of it:

Nowe so god helpe me / and by my holydome
She is the erranst baud betwene this and Rome.(27)

The names of the characters are also changed to fit them for an English setting. Accordingly Sir Johan, the generic name for the English priest,²⁸ replaces the Curé's original name of Maistre Guillaume. The nameless wife (nameless, that is, unless she is the ‘Marion’ of l. 83) becomes Tyb, a name later reappearing in the Tibet Talkapace of Ralph Roister Doister. Jehan-Jehan is anglicized into Johan Johan, with great loss of significance; for on the early French stage ‘the diminutives of Jean are commonly used in the sense of “sot”’,²⁹ and in the Farce du Pasté the wife calls her husband ‘Jehan-Jhenin’,³⁰ Jenin being a synonym for that particular type of ‘sot’, the cuckold.³¹

It is in the passage containing the three ‘miracles’ that Heywood's translation is most free.³² Before the Farce du Pasté was known, Professor Maxwell, comparing these miracles with those attributed in the Farce d'un Pardonneur to Saints Couillebault and Velue, said that ‘Heywood writes with a deliberation rare in farce and is careful to underline his jests’.³³ This is now proved partially true of his treatment of his real source, in which these miracles are attributed to ‘Sainct Arnoul’.³⁴ The first, for which the Curé claims authority in Holy Writ, is a very brief account of a man who invoked the saint on the day of his marriage and subsequently had fourteen children through prayer alone. In Heywood's version, the man went abroad a fortnight after marriage and returned seven years later to find himself the father of seven, and Sir Johan appropriates to himself some of the spiritual credit for this, with obvious double-entendre:

Yet had she not had / so many by thre
Yf she had not had the help of me,

the point being then driven through the thickest skull in four more lines:

Is not this a myracle / yf euer were any,
That this good wyfe / shuld haue chyldren so many
Here in this town / whyle her husband shuld be
Beyond the se / in a farre contre.(35)

The second and third miracles are, however, shortened by Heywood; and though the third follows the French fairly directly, the second is considerably altered by the introduction of Saint Modwin at whose shrine live pigs are offered by childless London wives. The French version of the second miracle, which is naturally on the same theme of children born as the result of divine aid, is obscurely related and lacks at least one line, and possibly Heywood did not trouble to work out its details. Heywood has also partly altered the husband's reception of the stories. The husband in the Farce du Pasté, though no less sceptical than Johan Johan, covers his satire with a veil of feigned piety, and reproaches himself for his lack of the Curé's faith and works:

A! povre pecheur malheureux!
Que n'as-tu telle conscience
Et aussi parfonde science
Que ce tres-notable curé!(36)

Although Johan Johan's pious hope that all wedded women ‘within this place’ may receive similar divine aid parallels one of the husband's remarks in the Farce du Pasté,³⁷ it is more characteristic of him to show by an obscene suggestion that he knows only too well the function of the Curé in bringing such miracles to pass.³⁸ Again, when Tyb mentions that her cat is generously blessed with offspring, Heywood does not care to translate the husband's reply:

                                                                                          Dea! m'amye
Dieu doit de tout estre loué
Mais qui scet s'elle avoit voué
Son fruit au Glorieux Corps saint?(39)

Possibly his orthodoxy, which presents itself so visibly at the end of The Four PP.⁴⁰, suggested to him that the satire here was tinged with blasphemy.

On another occasion Heywood has added a passage to his original. This occurs in Johan Johan's opening monologue,⁴¹ and though part of it is merely an amplification of the theme of beating, the rest is devoted to the personal offensiveness of his wife. Sordid description of persons was, of course, one of the features of Skelton's Elynour Rummyng. It is nevertheless not improbable that Heywood had in mind such French pieces as the Farce du Pect⁴² or that of Tarabin-Tarabas,⁴³ in both of which there are detailed complaints of a like nature by husbands against their wives. Other extended forms of the sordid set-piece occur in later English interludes.⁴⁴

In view of Heywood's close following of his source, it remains to be seen whether he used Pernet at all. Curiously enough, four of the points noted by Professor Maxwell as shared by Pernet and Johan Johan are not to be found in the Farce du Pasté.⁴⁵ First, the approach of the husband is seen by one of the lovers, who warns the other. This is, however, a stock incident of all farce. Again, in each play coals are mentioned; but in a different connexion.⁴⁶ Thirdly, both Pernet and Johan Johan are contemptuously bidden to prolong their absence, Pernet being told to go ‘tout au plus loing’ for the wine, while Tyb bids her husband

Go and hye the as fast as a snayle
And with fayre water fyll me this payle.(47)

It is true that this is in direct contrast to the injunction in the Farce du Pasté:

Tenez, emportez ce cuvier
Et l'emplissez d'eau vistement!(48)

but it is more than likely that Tyb's simile is to be understood as ironic comment rather than as serious suggestion.⁴⁹ The final similarity shared by Pernet and Johan Johan is the phrase in which the husband complains as the last mouthful of pie is devoured; says Pernet,

C'est ung très povre passetemps
De chauffer (la) cire quant on digne,(50)

while Johan Johan grumbles,

By the good lorde this is a pyteous warke;(51)

but since it is not his own wax-chafing but the whole situation which is ‘a pyteous warke’ this is quite probably simply an amplification of Jehan-Jehan's ‘Hélas! Hé Dieu!’⁵²

The probability is thus that Heywood worked merely from the Farce du Pasté and was not familiar with Pernet. I do not intend to consider the question of the relative dates of the two French farces, as there seems to be insufficient evidence to make this profitable. The proverbial sense of ‘chauffer la cire’ is better illustrated, as Professor Maxwell says, in Pernet, where the husband hopes to gain infinite riches, not merely a piece of pie, by this action. On the other hand, the episode of wax-chafing occupies a far more important position in the Farce du Pasté than in Pernet, where it simply becomes an appendage to the main farcical action of Pernet's departures and returns.

The main importance to English drama of Heywood's use of the Farce du Pasté as a source is that here for the first time we have an instance of his copying a model in detail. It would be rash to suggest that in other plays by Heywood similar large debts might be traced if more of the contemporary drama survived; but we must now modify the accepted theory that Heywood's borrowings were always trifling and that his completed work is invariably distinctive and original.

Notes

1. Recueil de farces françaises inédites du XVe siècle, ed. G. Cohen (Medieval Academy of America, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1949).

2. ‘The Influence of French farce upon the plays of John Heywood’, Modern Philology (1904), II.

3. Farce nouvelle très bonne et fort joyeuse de Pernet qui va au vin. (Viollet-le-Duc, Ancien Théâtre François, I, 195-211.)

4. Modern Philology, II, 106.

5. French Farce and John Heywood, 1946. (Comparison of Johan Johan and Pernet, pp. 56-69.)

6. Op. cit. p. 58.

7. Op. cit. p. 67.

8. Ibid.

9. Farce du Pasté, ll. 28-37.

10. Johan Johan, ll. 19-30. (I have used the text of the 1533 edition in the Pepys Library, Cambridge. It is reprinted, with modernized punctuation, in J. Q. Adams, Chief Pre-Shakespearean Dramas. The numbering of the lines is that of Adams.)

11. Farce du Pasté, ll. 749-67. The final speech-heading is missing in the original version, and has been supplied. It is clear that the lines are not a continuation of the Curé's speech.

12. Johan Johan, ll. 660-6.

13. Professor Cohen, Recueil, p. xiv, makes the statement: ‘A la fin mari et femme se reconcilient sur le dos de leur hôte qu'ils battent’, but the text does not bear this out.

14. ‘And peraduenture / there he and she
    Wyll make me cokold / euyn to anger me.’

    (Johan Johan, ll. 673-4)

15. Johan Johan, l. 677.

16. Farce du Pasté, ll. 91-2.

17. Johan Johan, ll. 89-90.

18. Farce du Pasté, ll. 314-15.

19. Johan Johan, ll. 304-5. (He is in fact very much concerned that the pie should be kept warm.)

20. Hence the derogatory remarks of Johan Johan on the character of Margery.

21. Johan Johan, ll. 157-9.

22. Farce du Pasté, l. 396.

23. Johan Johan, l. 382.

24. Farce du Pasté, ll. 153-4. Johan Johan, l. 153.

25. Farce du Pasté, l. 148. Johan Johan l. 146.

26. Farce du Pasté, ll. 165-6. Johan Johan, ll. 163-4.

27. Farce du Pasté, ll. 495-6. Johan Johan, ll. 465-6.

28. Cf. Heywood's Proverbs, pt. II, ch. V (Farmer's edition, p. 66).

29. Maxwell, op. cit. pp. 68-9.

30. Farce du Pasté, l. 181.

31. Maxwell, pp. 68-9.

32. The miracle-stories are better introduced in the Farce du Pasté, where the husband is caught muttering a pithy aside at the expense of the gorging Curé, and passes it off as an attempt to call to mind an illustration from last Sunday's sermon; the priest then needs little prompting to begin his recitation, which he does by a sort of reflex action. In Johan Johan a tale ‘of myrth or sadnes’ is baldly requested by Tyb.

33. Maxwell, pp. 82, 99.

34. Farce du Pasté, ll. 589, 602, 650.

35. Johan Johan, ll. 547-52.

36. Farce du Pasté, ll. 638-41.

37. Farce du Pasté, ll. 611-12; Johan Johan, ll. 584-6.

38. Johan Johan, ll. 553-5.

39. Farce du Pasté, ll. 664-7.

40. The Four PP., ll. 1143-1236.

41. Johan Johan, ll. 65-84.

42. Viollet-le-Duc, A.T.F. I, 94-110.

43. Cohen, Recueil, pp. 95-101.

44. Thersites, in Dodsley's Old English Plays (ed. Hazlitt), I, 427-9. Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis, ed. D. Hamer (Scottish Text Society), ll. 4341-83. It is well known that Lyndsay, in the latter, shows his familiarity with French drama; and the fact that Folie's description of his wife's nastiness has the quality of a semi-official complaint may indicate acquaintance with such ‘causes grasses’ as the Farce du Pect. In Thersites, on the other hand, the hero is describing his mother, an ‘old witch’, and the author has probably no other literary models than Elynour Rummyng (though there is a faint echo of Chaucer's Somnour's Tale, ll. 442-3, in the line ‘Except it had be a mare in a cart …’).

45. Maxwell, pp. 61-5.

46. Pernet is told to put coals on the fire to melt his wax. Johan Johan threatens to throw ‘this shouyll full of colys’ at Tyb. This second fact provides an interesting clue to the original staging of Johan Johan, reinforcing Sir E. K. Chambers's conjecture that the hearth of a banqueting hall was used as a background to the action (Elizabethan Stage, III, 23). There is no mention of the shovelful of coals in the Farce du Pasté, and this suggests that Heywood could rely on a realistic setting not necessarily shared by the author of the French farce.

47. Johan Johan, ll. 419-20.

48. Farce du Pasté, ll. 430-1.

49. Heywood introduces another proverbial phrase in Johan Johan, ll. 312-13. The expression ‘as fast as a snayle’ is in his Proverbs (ed. Farmer, p. 21).

50. Pernet, p. 211 of A.T.F. vol I.

51. Johan Johan, l. 593.

52. Farce du Pasté, ll. 671-2.