SOURCE: “Experiment and Variety in John Heywood's Plays,” in Renaissance Drama, Vol. VII, 1964, pp. 6-11.

[In the following essay, Craik discusses The Play of the Weather, The Four PP, and The Pardoner and the Friar as examples of the Heywood's innovative dramatic technique.]

John Heywood may be considered as standing in a line of English comedy connecting Chaucer and Shakespeare. Like them, he writes for sophisticated hearers who also appreciate robust humor and occasional coarseness; and, like theirs, his best work has the appearance of evolving naturally—even unexpectedly—and not of being worked out beforehand in every detail. Though his characteristic dramatic method is evidently that of the disputation between opponents, he never seems in any danger of writing the same play twice. This essay is an attempt to show something of Heywood's variety and his experimenting and improvising technique as a dramatist, in The Play of the Weather, The Four PP, and The Pardoner and the Friar.

This is not to discount his other plays; but the effects made in Witty and Witless and in Love have their counterparts in the richer dialogue-plays, while Johan Johan, being a close translation from a French original, throws light on Heywood's methods only where he departs from his source. The essence of farce is the development of an extravagantly absurd situation, and Johan Johan serves to show that Heywood elsewhere virtually dispenses with plot (in the sense of a chain of causally-connected events leading up to a climax), and uses very little stage-action. In this he is like the writers of contemporary moral interludes (Youth and Hickscorner, for example), who conduct their simple plots (of temptation, sin, and repentance) mainly by means of argument.

Heywood chooses subjects which encourage argument. The situation in The Weather—a number of suitors demanding from Jupiter weather appropriate to their trades or pleasures—offers him the chance of multiplying debates, and doubtless this led him to the story. He might have arranged the suitors in a formal order of descending rank, each having his interview with the god's officer and registering his desires, but this would have been both less lively and less significant than the arrangement he did in fact make.

Like Chaucer's pilgrims, Heywood's petitioners take the action into their own hands: Chaucer contrives that the Knight draws the first lot (just as he began the General Prologue with him), and Heywood contrives that the Gentleman is Jupiter's first suitor, but thereafter both secretly contrive that the order seems capricious, and hence natural. In Heywood's play, the role of Merry Report, who is allegedly chosen from the audience to serve as Jupiter's officer, and who consequently has one foot among the actors and the other among the audience throughout the action, likewise suits this deliberate effect of informality, and the subtle mingling of “truth” and “fiction” (like the presence of Chaucer, the narrator, among his own pilgrims). The presentation of petitions, moreover, varies from suitor to suitor: the Gentleman and the Merchant are allowed to speak personally with Jupiter, but the Ranger is not, which makes a change of routine; and there is also variety of pace, the Merchant's and Ranger's visits being both very short, whereas the Gentleman's has occupied a long scene. With the next long scene Heywood introduces the first pair of disputants, the Wind and Water Millers, and during their debate (which grows very abstract and philosophic, and deals with the absolute superiority of wind or water, not merely with their relative merits as mill-power), Merry Report leaves the stage, so that the audience is pleased to see him return and to hear his ingeniously bawdy quibbles on windmills, watermills, and millstones. The Millers once gone, Merry Report interviews a Gentlewoman, who wants temperate weather for the sake of her complexion, and a Laundress, who wants good drying weather of wind and sun, so that a further dispute develops between these, the only two women in the play. After men and women comes the boy, little Dick, whose personal name makes him the most individualized of the suitors, and whose smallness (he is “the least that can play,” the smallest boy in a company of boys) emphasizes the triviality that is overtaking Jupiter's enquiry. The quarrels between suitors of opposed views (another Chaucerian touch, perhaps, recalling his Friar and Summoner) have also implied the futility of the whole enterprise of pleasing everyone, a point which is further made when Merry Report's summary stresses the contrariety of all the requests, and when, with the re-entry of all the petitioners to hear Jupiter's decision, their differences are (so to speak) presented in visible form. Accordingly, when Jupiter resolves to give them the weather even as it was, this formal recognition of the inevitable is richly and comically satisfying, while at the same time it allows Heywood the opportunity to drop a perfectly serious moral lesson about mutual dependence.

The emergence of the moral lesson (like the “Taketh the moralite, goode men” of Chaucer's Nun's Priest's Tale) is itself a kind of dramatic effect, an unexpected turn just as the play seemed to be over. Heywood uses it again at the end of The Four PP when he proclaims that virtue is always worthy of respect, in whatever form it may happen to be practised. The moralizing is diversified with humor: for example, when the Pedlar blames that virtue which despises another virtue, the Pothecary says,

For fear lest such perils to me might fall,
I thank God I use no virtue at all,

(p. 63)¹

which draws a witty rejoinder from the moralist. The Four PP is, of course, essentially as light-hearted as The Weather, and its attraction partly lies in a similar assembling of diverse disputants. However, whereas in The Weather a single theme is pursued with variations throughout the play, in The Four PP the dispute is conducted upon shifting ground. It begins as a controversy about the most expeditious way of getting to heaven, the Palmer and the Pardoner partly forgetting their spiritual rivalry in forming an alliance against the materialistic Pothecary who boasts that his medicines effect the necessary separation of soul from body. Then, with the Pedlar's entry, the action takes a fresh turn, in readiness for which Heywood relaxes his audience with flights of bawdy fancy occasioned by the pins and pincases in the Pedlar's pack, and with a song in which all four characters join. The new topic is that of superiority in lying, and it is broached by the Pedlar, who urges the others to go into partnership since they are all agreed on the desirability of sending men to heaven, and who hits on the lying contest as a means of choosing a leader for the partnership. This is itself a minor dramatic surprise, even though it harmonizes with the earlier dialogue in which the Palmer and Pardoner have already accused each other of lying, and though lying may therefore be said to be the constant undercurrent of the play. But the chief dramatic surprise is the climax of the contest: the audience is led to anticipate a tale from the Palmer to match the two fantastic ones of the Pothecary and the Pardoner, and instead his ingenuous remark about never knowing an impatient woman forces his rivals to make him an involuntary present of the victory. The speech in which the Palmer makes this observation goes on for some twenty lines, to give the spectators time to watch the growing astonishment of the Pardoner and the Pothecary, so that the climax is not past before they know it is coming. And once the victory is gained, Heywood characteristically makes the victor throw it away:

And since ye list not to wait on me,
I clearly of waiting do discharge ye.

(p. 61)

Thus, like The Weather, the play ends with “a conclusion wherein nothing is concluded”:

Now be ye all even as ye begun;
No man hath lost, nor no man hath wun.

(p. 61)

There is something of calculated extemporization, coherent inconsequence, in Heywood's entertainments. This appears not only in their total structure, but also in their episodes and in their expression. When, in The Four PP, the Pedlar has proposed the lying contest, he says to the others,

Ye need not care who shall begin;
For each of you may hope to win.

(p. 42)

and thereupon, in a kind of action-punning, “the Pothecary hoppeth.”

Palmer. Here were a hopper to hop for the ring!
But, sir, this gear goeth not by hopping.
Pothecary. Sir, in this hopping I will hop so well,
That my tongue shall hop better than my heel:
Upon which hopping I hope, and not doubt it,
To hop so, that ye shall hop without it.

(pp. 42-43)

This leads nowhere at all: it is simply a bit of physical action, a passing release of high spirits, and a momentary verbal by-play depending on the audience's quickness of ear. A subtler form of verbal skill involves a momentary playing with incongruous ideas: a character happens to say something which the audience perceives to be wittier than the speaker knows. During his lying tale, the Pardoner is given a safe-conduct beginning,

                                                                                          Lucifer,
By the power of God, chief devil of hell,

(p. 53)

and receives it with a grateful exclamation of “God save the devil.” This is unconsciously witty in the same way as is the priest's retort, in Johan Johan, to the accusation of adultery:

Thou liest, whoreson cuckold, even to thy face.

(p. 88)

or Merry Report's benediction upon the pagan Jupiter:

Now, good my lord god, Our Lady be with ye!

(p. 98)

Heywood is pleased with the nonsensical things that people say by accident. When Merry Report receives little Dick, he feels that his request is beneath the god's notice: “Give boys weather, quoth a!”; and this is capped by the boy's reply that if the god will not give any then perhaps he will consent to sell some, and by his ambiguous promise to repay:

When I make my snow-balls ye shall have some.

(p. 134)

The Pardoner and the Friar is altogether slighter than The Weather and The Four PP. An obvious difference is that, far from filling his play with gratuitous wit, Heywood resigns himself to writing speeches which must mostly pass unheard, as they are being delivered in shouting rivalry at the same time. One would think this would be as great a strain upon the audience as it must have been upon the actors. Heywood seems to have written this play wholly for the sake of its straightforward amusing situation, to which he added a characteristically unexpected end, where the rogues defeat the over-bold Parson and his parishioner Neighbour Prat. Could it have been a commissioned play? And was Heywood (like Shakespeare showing “Sir John in love” in The Merry Wives of Windsor) asked to show Chaucer's Pardoner and Chaucer's Friar both trying to preach in the same church at the same time?² It certainly looks like a piece hastily thrown off. Yet even here one must admire Heywood's readiness to experiment, and the vigor with which he carried his experiment through.

Notes

1. For the reader's convenience, page references have been supplied to John S. Farmer's edition of The Dramatic Writings of John Heywood (London, 1905) in the Early English Dramatists Series (Ed.).

2. There is much quotation from the Pardoner's Prologue. Incidentally, the lines:

   Our Saviour preserve ye all from sin,
   And enable ye to receive this blessed pardon,
   Which is the greatest under the sun

   (p. 5)

   suggest that Heywood understood a much discussed passage in Chaucer:

   And Jhesu Crist, that is oure soules leche,
   So graunte yow his pardoun to receyve;
   For that is best; I wol yow nat deceyve.

   (ll. 916-918)

   quite simply as referring to the Pardoner's pardon. He was probably right.