This poem on marriage may make an excellent vehicle for the introduction of these old English sayings, but as a poem it is in itself most cheerless and disagreeable, the view taken being a most unfavourable one. One gets no notion of anything like conjugal felicity being possible, the rhymes being a snarl and a wrangle all through.
John Heywood was a friend of Sir Thomas More. His book at once sprang into popularity, and was ten times reprinted during the sixteenth century. He also wrote the "Mery playe betwene the Pardoner and the Frere, the Curate and Neybour Pratte." The whole tone of this is as hostile to the clergy as the other to Hymen. Another of his productions was the "Play of the Wether," where a "gentylman, wynde-miller, marchaunt, launder," and others all fall foul of the weather, and at last appeal to Jupiter. The gentleman, for instance, "wants no wynde to blow for hurt in hys huntynge," while "she that lyveth by laundry must have wether hot and clere her clothys to dry." He wrote several other plays and other things.
The following extracts from Heywood give an illustration of his rhyming treatment:—
"The cat would eat fish and would not wet her feete.
They must hunger in frost that will not worke in heate.
And he that will thrive must aske leave of his wife,
But your wife will give none, by you and her life."
"Haste must provoke
When the pigge is proffered to hold up the poke.
When the sun shineth make hay: which is to say
Take time when time com'th, lest time steale away.
And one good lesson to this purpose I pike
From the smith's forge, when th' iron is hot, strike."
The reasons may be sound enough, but the rhymes are deplorable. Thus "pike" is no doubt an example of "poetic license," as pick, the word he really wants, would not rhyme with strike!
"From suspicion to knowledge of yll, for sothe,
Coulde make ye dooe but as the flounder dothe—
Leape out of the frying-pan into the fyre,
And chaunge from yl peyn to wurs is smal hyre."
For badness of rhyme it would be hard to surpass this—
"But pryde she sheweth none, her looke reason alloweth,
She lookth as butter would not melt in her mouth."
That "newe broom swepth cleene" is the text for another atrociously bad rhyme. It limps as follows:—
