Representative English Comedies, v. 1. From the beginnings to Shakespeare

by Unknown

CRITICAL ESSAY

Life.—The first authentic record of John Heywood is one of 6 January, 1515, in Henry VIII.'s Book of Payments, which shows him to have then been one of the King's singing men, in receipt of a daily wage of eightpence. According to Bale, who must have known him, he was "civis Londinensis," the story that he was born at North Mimms, Hertfordshire, having apparently arisen from his possession of land in that neighbourhood. Tradition has sent him to Broadgates Hall, now Pembroke College, Oxford, and there is nothing improbable in this. In February, 1521, Heywood was granted by the King an annuity of ten marks, and in 1526, a quarterly payment of the same sum was made him as a "player of the virginals." He appears to have been specially attached to the retinue of the Princess Mary, a payment being made in January, 1537, to his servant for bringing her "regalles" (or hand-organ) from London to Greenwich, and Heywood himself in March, 1538, receiving forty shillings for "pleying an interlude with his children" before her. At Mary's coronation Heywood made her a Latin speech in St. Paul's Churchyard, and in November, 1558, the Queen granted him some leases in Yorkshire. On the accession of Elizabeth, Heywood, though he had steered through the reign of Edward VI. with safety, fled to Malines, and Professor Ward (in the Dictionary of National Biography) identifies him with the John Heywood who in 1575 wrote from Malines, "where I have been despoiled by Spanish and German soldier," thanking Burghley for ordering the payment to him of some arrears on lands at Romney, and speaking of himself as an old man of seventy-eight, which would give 1497 as his birth-year. He is mentioned in a list of refugees in 1577, but by 1587 is spoken of as "dead and gone." Earlier biographers, it should be noted, following Anthony à Wood, have placed his death in 1565. Besides his plays Heywood wrote a Dialogue Conteyning the Number of the Effectuall Prouerbes in the Englishe Tonge, Six Hundred Epigrams, and a tedious allegory The Spider and the Flie, printed, with a woodcut of the author, in 1556.

Heywood's Place in English Comedy.—The early history of English comedy is a record of successive efforts and experiments apparently leading to no result. The comic scenes in the miracle plays culminate in the really masterly sheep-stealing plot of the Secunda Pastorum in the Towneley Cycle; but the step which seems to us so obvious, the separation of the Pastoral Comedy from its religious surroundings, was never taken, and the Secunda Pastorum stands by itself, a solitary masterpiece. In the earlier moralities there are flashes of humour as in the miracle plays; in the later moralities we find scenes in which the effort to paint the riotous course of Youth, though not very amusing to modern readers, is sufficiently faithful to bring us within sight of a possible comedy of manners. But the morality-writer was far from entertaining any conception of comedy as an end in itself. His aim remained to the last purely didactic. It did not, indeed, occur to him, as it occurred to didactic writers of a later period, to represent dissipation as so unattractive as to make it miraculous that it should attract. He would show it as bitter of digestion, but neither playwright nor audience were concerned to deny that it was pleasant in the mouth, and it is improbable that readiness to acquiesce in the sober moral of a play diminished in the least the applause with which, we may be sure, any approach to gayety in the tavern scenes would be attended. After all, though we may sometimes be inclined to doubt it, audiences both at miracle plays and moralities were human. To the very real strain imposed on their emotions in the miracle plays they needed what seem to us these incongruous interludes of humour by way of dramatic relief, and in the moralities it is difficult not to believe that the humour supplied the gilding without which the didactic pill, at a much earlier date, must have been found nauseating. It remains, however, certain that alike in the miracle plays, the moralities, and the moral interludes such humour as can be found is merely incidental, and this is the justification for assigning to John Heywood the honourable position which he occupies in this collection of English comedies. As far as we know, he was the first English dramatist to understand that a play might be constructed with no other objects than satire and amusement, and if such epithets were not fortunately a little discredited, we might dub him on this score the "Father" of English comedy. Paternity, however, cannot be predicated without some evidence of offspring, and it would be extremely difficult, I think, to show that Heywood exercised sufficient influence on any subsequent dramatist to be reckoned as his literary father. The anonymous author of that amusing children's play, Thersites, was indeed a kindred spirit, but there is at least a possibility that this play should be credited to Heywood himself, and on the subsequent development of comedy his influence was certainly of the smallest. But to have shown that comedy was entitled to a separate existence, apart from didactics, was no small achievement, and to the credit of this demonstration Heywood is entitled.

In guessing how Heywood came to make this discovery it seems not unreasonable to lay some stress on the fact that, according to a tradition which there is no reason to doubt, he was a friend of Sir Thomas More, while we know that four of his plays were printed by William Rastell, the son of More's brother-in-law, John Rastell. More's interest in the drama is attested by the story of his stepping, on more than one occasion, among the players, when they were performing before Cardinal Morton, and taking an improvised share in the dialogue. In the play of Sir Thomas More, written towards the close of the century, this improvisation is transferred to an interlude performed during an entertainment at More's own house, and the introduction of this interlude into the piece, and the ready welcome which the Chancellor is represented as giving the players, certainly argue a tradition of a keen interest in the drama on his part. John Rastell, again, has been credited with the authorship of at least one of the interludes which he printed, and quite recently some interesting documents have been discovered, which show him organizing a performance for which a wooden stage was erected in his own garden at Finsbury, setting Mrs. Rastell to help a tailor to make some very gorgeous dresses, and apparently engaging as players the craftsmen (a certain George Birch, currier, and his friends), who up to this date were still the customary performers, as distinct from a separate class of trained actors. Rastell, at this time, and More, throughout his life, held those views as to church-policy to which we know that Heywood himself consistently clung. The attitude of firm belief, with an absolute readiness to satirize abuses, which we find in Heywood's plays, was exactly characteristic of More, and it does not seem fanciful to believe that it was partly to the author of the Utopia, and to the circle of which he was the centre, that Heywood owed his dramatic development.

Plays assigned to him: Authorship, Dramatic Development, Literary Estimate.—There is the more reason for insisting on Heywood's place as one of a little circle, interested in playwriting and play-acting, in that the evidence for his authorship of two of the best of the six interludes commonly assigned to him is extremely vague. It is, indeed, very unfortunate that the six plays divide themselves into a group of four and a group of two, and that whereas the four plays of the first group are all positively assigned to him in one case in a contemporary manuscript, said to be in his own writing, in the others in contemporary printed editions, the two plays of the second group were both published anonymously, although, like The Play of Love and The Play of the Wether, they were issued by William Rastell, and appeared within a few months of these plays to which Heywood's name is duly attached. In the case of publications of our own day we should certainly be justified in thinking that the assertion of his authorship in two cases and the failure to assert it in two others were intentional and significant. But in the first half of the sixteenth century there was still much carelessness in these matters, while the difference is fairly well accounted for by the fact that in The Play of Love and Play of the Wether Rastell printed the title and dramatis personæ on a separate leaf, whereas in The Pardoner and the Frere and Johan Johan there is only a head title. However this may be, we are bound in the first instance to consider by themselves the four plays of which Heywood's authorship is beyond dispute.

In approaching these four plays we must prepare ourselves to judge them relatively to the other work of the very dull period of English literature at which they were written. To make this claim for them is to admit that they are imperfect, important historically rather than absolutely for their own worth; but the admission is one which no sane critic can avoid, and it is here made with alacrity. What it gains for Heywood is the recognition that two strongly marked features of these plays, one of which is now likely to repel, and the other to weary, most modern readers, in his own day helped to make them amusing. The repellent feature is, of course, that humour of filth which, quite as much as his sexual indecencies, makes some passages both in the Four PP. and The Play of the Wether disgusting even to readers not consciously squeamish. The epithet 'beastly' which Pope applied to Skelton is certainly on this score no less appropriate to Heywood, but it needs no wide acquaintance with the popular literature of his day to learn that this wretched stuff was found amusing for its own sake. To suppress this fact, either by expurgating or by deliberately choosing a less typical play for the sake of its accidental decency, would be to falsify evidence, and any such falsification would be grossly unjust to Heywood's successors. It is only by realizing how low was the conception of humour in the sixteenth century that we can explain the existence in the plays of Shakespeare himself of passages which would otherwise be wholly amazing.

For the other feature in Heywood's plays which now excites more weariness than interest there is no need to apologize; we may even confess that our failure to relish it is due to our own weakness. In Heywood's days one of the chief aims of education was skill in argument. Men disputed their way to academical degrees, and the quickest path to reputation was the successful maintenance against all comers of some hazardous proposition. Instead of introducing this siege-train of argument into their plays, modern dramatists have preferred the lighter weapons of verbal pleasantry and repartee which make what is called "pointed dialogue." A request from one of the dramatis personæ to another "in this cause to shewe cause reasonable.... Hearyng and aunswerynge me pacyently" would assuredly empty any theatre of our own day. But the audience who listened to it in Heywood's Play of Love no doubt settled themselves in their places with an anticipation of enjoyment. And we may fairly grant that our author is not wholly unsuccessful in vivacious argument. For a lady to compare the suit of an unwelcome lover to an invitation "to graunte hym my good wyll to stryke of[f] my hed," pleasingly illustrates the unreasonableness of too great pertinacity on the part of the rejected. The objection "Howe many have ye known hang willingly" shatters at a blow the seemingly sound plea that as the convict suffers more than his hangman, so the rejected lover is more to be pitied than the most tender-hearted lady who finds herself obliged to refuse him. The ups and downs of the argument are often conducted with ingenuity, and an audience to whom argument was amusing for its own sake no doubt applauded every point. Two of Heywood's plays depend almost entirely on their logical attractions,—the interlude, left unprinted till its issue by the Percy Society in 1846, to which has been given as title The Dialogue of Wit and Folly, and The Play of Love twice printed by Rastell (1533 and 1534) and once by Waley. The former is purely argumentative, discussing the question as to whether the fool or the sage has the pleasanter life. The Play of Love, on the other hand, may be said to have two episodes, the first a monologue of some three hundred lines in which the Vice, "Neither Loving nor Loved," narrates his ill-success in an endeavour to conquer the heart of a lady without losing his own, the second his appearance with a bucketful of squibs and a false story of a fire at the house of the happy lover's mistress. The argument in this play is double, "Loving not Loved" and "Loved not Loving" contending as to which is the more miserable, and "Both Loved and Loving" and "Neither Loving nor Loved" as to which is the happier. As each pair appoints the other as joint arbitrators, it is perhaps more surprising that any conclusion was reached, than that it should be the rather tame one that the pains of the first pair and the happiness of the second were in each case exactly equal.

In connection with these two plays we ought perhaps to allude to another, very similar in its form, the dialogue of Gentylnes and Nobylyte,[89] of which the authorship has often been attributed to Heywood. This play is certainly printed in John Rastell's types, but in place of a colophon it has the words "Johannes Rastell fieri fecit," and as Rastell would probably have written "imprimi fecit" if he had been alluding merely to its printing, we can hardly doubt that the word "fieri" refers to performance, if not to composition. With the evidence we now have that John Rastell had plays acted in his own garden, "fieri fecit" seems exactly translatable by "caused to be produced," and as Mrs. Rastell helped the tailor to make the dresses, so probably the lawyer-printer helped to write the play. Its two parts are each diversified by the Plowman beating Knight and Merchant (verberat eos is the stage-direction), but otherwise it is all sheer argument, which in the end a philosopher is introduced to sum up. The tone of the interlude is singularly democratic, the Plowman throughout having the best of it, and, despite a natural similarity between some of the speeches with those of the "Gentylman" and the "Marchaunt" in the Play of the Wether, there seems no reason for connecting with it the name of Heywood, who, for the better part of his life, was in the service of the Court.

In "The playe called the foure PP.: a newe and a very mery enterlude of a palmer, a pardoner, a potycary, a pedler," the advance in dramatic form as compared with The Play of Love is very slight, though the play is much more vivid and amusing. The Palmer begins it with an account of his wanderings, and then the other three characters come on the stage, each catching up the words of the last speaker, and vaunting his own profession. The argument between Palmer, Pardoner, and Pothecary waxes hot, and at last the Pedler suggests that as lying is the one matter in which they are all skilled, their order of merit can best be determined by a contest in this art, and offers himself as the judge. At first the competitors lie vaguely. Then it is resolved that the lie must take the form of a tale, and the Pothecary tells a long story of the effect of one of his medicines; then the Pardoner a much longer one of a visit to Hell and the rescue thence of a shrew of whom Lucifer was very glad to be rid; finally the Palmer in a few words expresses his surprise that there should be such shrews in Hell, as in all his travels he never yet knew one woman out of patience—a remark which straightway wins him the preëminence, though there is more tedious wrangling, before a serious little speech from the Pedler brings the play to a close. The Four PP. is, to our thinking, insufferably spun out; but, except in the epilogue, as we may call it, it is plain that its intention was solely to amuse—

To passe the tyme in thys without offence

Was the cause why the maker dyd make it,

And so we humbly beseche you take it,

says the Pedler:—and in substituting stories and a lighter form of argument for the more formal disputation of the Dyaloge of Wit and Folly and the Play of Love it comes a little nearer to the modern conception of comedy, and may be thought to have deserved the success which it is said to have achieved.

The possession by the Play of the Wether of an obvious moral—the mess which men would make of rain, wind, and sunshine if they had the ruling of them—is undoubtedly a link with the interludes of a didactic character, and so may seem at first sight to place it in a lower grade of dramatic development. There can be little doubt that it was acted by Heywood's company of "children," whom we hear of as performing under his direction before the Princess Mary, and a children's play would perhaps naturally be cast in this form. But the form is here less important than the intention, and it does not need Mery-report's comment ("now shall ye have the wether—even as yt was") to tell us that Heywood's didactics were purely humorous. The point to be noted is that this is really a play—a play, moreover, which if it could be shortened and the unforgivable passages omitted, might be acted by children of the present day with some enjoyment. The part of "the Boy, the least that can play" is charming. There is stage furniture in Jupiter's "trone," and in the coming and going of the characters at least a semblance of action. We must note, however, the set disputation between the two millers, as still linking it with Heywood's other argumentative plays, though with all its faults it is the brightest and most pleasing of its class.

We come now to the two plays, The Pardoner and the Frere and Johan Johan, which modern writers have uniformly assigned to Heywood, although William Rastell printed them[90] without any author's name, and no one has yet adduced contemporary evidence for assigning them to Heywood. In neither of these plays is there any trace of the disputation which in those we have been looking at is so conspicuous. They are both true comedies, comedies in miniature if you like, but true comedies, with a definite scene and dramatic action. The Pardoner and the Frere is little more than an expansion of hints given by Chaucer, from whom the author does not hesitate to borrow two whole passages, but the development of the little plot is well managed and the climax when the Parson and Neighbour Prat are badly worsted and the two rogues go off in triumph is thoroughly artistic. It has been said that this play must have been written during the life of Leo X., who died in 1521, because the Pardoner's speech contains the passage (omitting the Friar's interruptions):—

Worshypfull maysters ye shall understand

That Pope Leo the X hath graunted with his hand,

And by his bulls confyrmed under lede,

To all maner people, bothe quycke and dede,

Ten thousand yeres & as many lentes of pardon, etc.

But as Heywood was probably born in 1497, it is extremely unlikely that his undoubted plays were written before 1520, and if the evidence of this passage is to be pressed, I should regard it as absolutely fatal to his authorship, it being inconceivable that any one who had written the Pardoner and the Frere could subsequently write the Dyaloge of Wyt and Folly or the Play of Love. But there would be an obvious convenience in making a dead pope rather than a living one answerable for the Pardoner's ribaldries, and the weight of this argument is not lessened when we remember that the Pardoner proceeds to quote also the authority of the King.[91] Although no alteration of date would bring the play out of the reign of Henry VIII., we may well believe that that peremptory monarch might forgive such reflections on his management of church affairs at an earlier date much more readily than satire of a system he was then supporting.

We shall have to speak again of the Pardoner and the Frere and its probable date, but we must pass on now to Heywood's masterpiece, if we may call it his, the mery play betwene Johan Johan, the husbande, Tyb his wyfe and Syr Jhan, the preest. In approaching this play, as in approaching Chaucer's tales of the Miller and Reeve and some of their fellows, we must, of course, leave our morality behind and accept the playwright's and tale-teller's convention that cuckoldry and cuckoldmaking are natural subjects for humour. This granted, it will be difficult to find a flaw in the play. Like the Pardoner and the Frere it is short, only about one half the length of the plays of Love, the Wether, and the Four PP., and it gains greatly from being less weighted with superfluities. Johan Johan himself, with his boasting and cowardice, his eagerness to be deceived, and futile attempts to put a good face on the matter, his burning desire to partake of the pie, his one moment of self-assertion, to which disappointed hunger spurs him, and then his fresh collapse to ludicrous uneasiness,—who can deny that he is a triumph of dramatic art, just human enough and natural enough to seem very human and natural on the stage, but with the ludicrous side of him so sedulously presented to the spectator that there is never any risk of compassion for him becoming uncomfortably acute? The handling of Tyb and Syr Jhan is equally clever. Each in turn is prepared to act on the defensive, to be evasive and explanatory, but before Johan Johan's acquiesciveness such devices seem superfluous, and little by little the pair reach a height of effrontery not easily surpassed. One of the incidents of the play, the melting of the wax by the fire, occurs also in a contemporary French Farce nouuelle tresbonne et fort ioyeuse de Pernet qui va au vin, and it is certainly in the French farces that we find the nearest approach in tone and treatment, as well as in form, to this anonymous Johan Johan.

Dates. The Authorship of "Thersites."—It may have been noticed that in passing these six plays in review the order followed has been purely that of their dramatic development. We know that four of them were printed in 1533, when Heywood was thirty-six or thereabouts, but with the exception of the reference to Leo X. in the Pardoner and the Frere, the significance of which I have given reasons for considering doubtful, no one has yet detected any time-reference which enables us to fix their approximate dates.[92] In his little treatise John Heywood als Dramatiker (1888) Dr. Swoboda maintains that the Pardoner must be placed earlier than the Four PP., and that the Four PP. can be shown to be earlier than the anonymous play of Thersites, which we know from its epilogue was acted at Court between October 12 and 24, 1537, the dates respectively of the birth of Edward VI. and the death of his mother, Jane Seymour.[93] In support of his first point he cites the fact that some of the relics ("the grete toe of the Trinite" and "of all Hallows the blessed jawbone") vaunted by the Pardoner in his sermon in the church appear again in the longer list of relics in the Four PP. In support of the second he quotes from Thersites the lines[94] in which that hero proposes to visit Purgatory and Hell, and traces in them an allusion to the Pardoner's story in the Four PP. I cannot accept either of these arguments as decisive chronologically, it being quite as reasonable for a dramatist to abridge a list of relics as to expand it, while the boast of Thersites might be represented as the hint out of which the rescue of Mistress Margery Coorson was developed no less plausibly than as a reference to that notorious lie. The Pardoner and the Frere seems to me dramatically more advanced than the Four PP., and I am therefore slow to accept any argument which would place it earlier; but even when we allow for the fact that Chaucer had fixed for all time the humorous treatment of Pardoners, the fact that the Pardoners in these two plays are so closely alike is an argument of some weight for their common authorship.[95] But if this be so, the reference to sweeping Hell clean in Thersites may set us wondering whether it was not the author of the Four PP. who was most likely to have written it; and we may note also the repetition in Thersites of the absurd boasting with which Johan Johan preludes his disclosure of his cowardice, while the incident of Telemachus belongs to that "humour of filth" which I have already noted as characteristic of Heywood. For the probability of the latter's authorship of Thersites we may claim also a little external support. We have already noticed that in March, 1538, Heywood received forty shillings for the performance by his "children" of an interlude before the Princess Mary. Now Thersites is obviously intended for performance by children; it was acted a few months previously to the payment of March, 1538,[96] in honour of Jane Seymour, to whom Mary, in return for her abundant kindness, was greatly attached; and again Mary's fondness for the classics would explain the selection of a classical burlesque if, as is probable, she was present when it was acted. Given the facts that Heywood had already in the Play of the Wether brought Jupiter on the stage, that Thersites bears at least some slight resemblances to other plays attributed to him, that he was in the service of the Princess Mary, and was manager, whether permanently or temporarily, about this time, of a company of children, and I think we have a fairly strong case for attributing Thersites to his pen. If this theory be accepted, the probability of his authorship of both the Pardoner and the Frere and Johan Johan is considerably increased; for if Thersites is by Heywood, it is good enough to form an important link between these plays and his argumentative interludes, while if Thersites be not by Heywood, there was then some other playwright of the day for whom a strong claim might be put forward to the authorship of these other anonymous plays.

Sources.—The fact that an opportunity for writing about Heywood is not likely to recur very often must be offered as an excuse for interpolating questions of detail into this preface. For the broader view of the subject which we ought here to take it is obvious that the authorship of this or that play is not very important. What concerns us here is that we can see even in the less developed group of plays English comedy emancipating itself from the miracle-play and morality, and in the Pardoner and the Frere and Johan Johan becoming identical in form with the French fifteenth-century farce. Whether we ought to go beyond this and assert absolute borrowing from French originals is rather a difficult question. The Farce nouuelle d'un Pardonneur, d'un triacleur et d'une tauerniere may certainly have supplied the idea both of the preaching-match between Pardoner and Friar and also of the comparison of the wares of Pardoner and Pothecary. The Farce nouuelle tresbonne et fort ioyeuse de Pernet qui va au vin contains two passages[97] which must have some direct connection with Johan Johan. The only extant edition of Pernet qui va au vin was "nouvellement imprimé" in 1548, and the date of its prototype is unknown. The Farce d'un Pardonneur, in the edition which has come down to us, is certainly later than 1540, but this also was probably a reprint. Thus despite the fact that the handling of the incidents in the English plays is far more skilful than in the French, it would seem too daring to suggest that the French farces can be borrowed from the English, and in any case we may imagine that the English dramatist did not make his new departure unaided, but was consciously working on the lines which had long been popular in France. By doing so he did not lay the foundation of English comedy, for it was not on these lines that our comedy subsequently developed. But it was at least a hopeful omen for the future that an English playwright so easily attained a real mastery in the only school of comedy with which he could have been acquainted. It was something also that the right of comedy to exist as a source of amusement apart from instruction had been successfully vindicated. These were two real achievements, and they must always be connected with the name of John Heywood.

"Play of the Wether": Early Editions and the Present Text.—At the time I write, the Play of the Wether has not been reprinted since the sixteenth century. Its bibliography has been rather confused by the existence of two texts of it, one at St. John's College, Oxford, the other at the University Library, Cambridge, each wanting the last leaf, containing in the one case twenty, and in the other sixteen, lines of the text and the colophon with the printer's name. The only perfect copy hitherto generally known is that preserved at the Bodleian Library, which belongs to an edition "Imprinted at London in Paules Churchyearde, at the Sygne of the Sunne, by Anthonie Kytson" whose career as a publisher seems to have been comprised within the years 1549 and 1579. Of this as the only complete edition I then knew I made my first transcript, though subsequent collation showed that the imperfect edition at St. John's College contained many better readings and an earlier spelling, while the copy at the University Library, Cambridge (sometimes, though I think erroneously, attributed to the press of Robert Wyer), belonged to an intermediate edition. The registration by the Bibliographical Society in its Hand-lists of English Printers, 1501-1556, of the copy of an edition of 1533, printed by William Rastell, in the Pepys Collection at Magdalene College, Cambridge, sent me to Cambridge for a new transcript. On examination, the Magdalene edition proved to be identical with that at St. John's College, Oxford, which had previously been conjecturally assigned to Rastell, perhaps by some one who had seen it before the last leaf disappeared. In reproducing Rastell's text I have not thought it necessary to print my collation of the later editions, as it is clear that the unidentified edition at the University Library, Cambridge (U. L. C.), was printed from Rastell's, and Kitson's from this. The printer of the U. L. C. edition introduced some errors into his text, most of which Kitson copied: e.g. hote for hore in l. 38, omission of second so in l. 68, and of second as in l. 72, name for maner in l. 115, or for of in l. 357, we for I in l. 427, plumyng for plumpyng in l. 657, thynges for thynge in l. 660, showryng for skowryng in l. 661, ye for yt in l. 699, and for all in l. 705, belyke for be leak[e]y in l. 800; though he corrected a few: e.g. pale for dale in l. 277. On the other hand, Kitson introduced some sixty or seventy errors of his own, such as creatour for creature in l. 5, well for we in l. 21, myngled for mynglynge in l. 144, mery for mary in l. 366, beseched for besecheth in l. 347, pycked for prycked in l. 467, bodily for boldely in l. 470, solyter for solycyter in l. 496, etc. As these variations are obviously misprints and nothing more, it would have been pedantic to record them in full, and these samples will doubtless suffice. The following title-page is a representation, not a reproduction, of the original. There is no running head-line in Rastell's text.

Alfred W. Pollard.