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.