But recent investigations
indicate
that Heywood's novel type
of play was influenced by foreign models; that his stimulus came,
not mainly from the realistic elements in the moralities, but from
the soties or farces which had long been popular in France!
of play was influenced by foreign models; that his stimulus came,
not mainly from the realistic elements in the moralities, but from
the soties or farces which had long been popular in France!
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v05
In the address "To the gentlemen readers'
(given in the edition of 1591, but omitted in that of 1611 reprinted
by Nichols), the dramatist frankly makes this patriotic interest
his first claim for attention :
You that with friendly grace of smoothed brow
Have entertained the Scythian Tamburlaine,
And given applause unto an Infidel:
Vouchsafe to welcome (with like curtesie)
A warlike Christian and your Countreyman.
1 See Churchill, G. B. and Keller, W. , "Die lateinischen Universitäts-Dramen
Englands in der Zeit der Königin Elizabeth,' Jahrbuch der Deutschen Shakespeare
Gesellschaft, vol. XXXIV (1898).
2 Richard the Third up to Shakespeare,' Palaestra, vol. 2 (1900).
6
## p. 83 (#107) #############################################
The True Chronicle History of King Leir 83
But the real hero of the play, as of that which Shakespeare
founded on it, is the bastard Fawconbridge, who is given due
prominence in the title, and whose character is developed with a
good deal of spirit and skill? . On the whole, however, the artistic
merits of the play have been exaggerated by recent critics ; blank
verse, rime and prose are used with the same careless facility,
and the scenes follow one another without any attempt at dramatic
construction. But in it, as in the earlier play, we catch the first
tones of the voice of Elizabethan England to which Shakespeare
gave fuller and nobler expression in the historical dramas founded
on these first rude attempts :
Let England live but true within it selfe,
And all the world can never wrong her State.
*
If Englands Peeres and people joyne in one,
Nor Pope, nor Fraunce, nor Spaine can doo them wrong.
Apart from the use made of it by Shakespeare, The True
Chronicle History of King Leir, and his three daughters,
Gonorill, Ragan, and Cordella (printed 1605 and probably acted
15943) has an interest of its own, though few will be found to
subscribe to the opinion* that 'the whole of this old drama is
incomparably and in every respect superior to Shakespeare's
adaptation. ' But it may be freely admitted that the old play
is well contrived, and written in a light, easy style which is not
unpleasing. In spite of its absurd disguises and coincidences, it
is an organic whole, and not a mere succession of events taken
haphazard from the chronicle, its main sources being, indeed,
Warner, Mirror for Magistrates and The Faerie Queene. The
contrast between the bearing of Cordella and her sisters is made
more natural by the fact that they have an advantage over her
in being informed beforehand that they will lose nothing by com-
pliance with their father's test of affection ; and the characters
!
1 The most striking episode, at the opening of the play, was apparently adapted by
the dramatist, with additions of his own, from a story told by Hall and Stow of the
bastard Dunois of Orleans. See Boswell-Stone, W. G. , Shakespeare's Holinshed,
pp. 48–50.
2 The same comment might be made on the pre-Shakespearean Richard II, printed
in Shakespeare Jahrbuch, 1899 (vol. xxxv), and commended by Boas in Fortnightly
Review, vol. LXXVII (1902), pp. 391-404, for its breadth of canvass, its insight into
popular feeling, and its abundant comic relief. '
* On this point see Perrett, W. , 'The Story of King Lear,' Palaestra, vol. xxxv,
and Law, R. A. , Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, vol. xxI,
pp. 462–477 (1906).
* Leo Tolstoi, in Fortnightly Review, Jan. 1907, vol. LXXXVII, p. 66.
6-2
## p. 84 (#108) #############################################
84
Early English Tragedy
are clearly, though not deeply, conceived. There is a solitary
Senecan aphorism (“For fear of death is worse than death itself');
but the play is free, alike from the tedious commonplaces of
academic tragedy, and from the extravagant rhetoric which
Tamburlaine had brought into vogue. This is partly due to
the dramatist's vein of humour, not always duly restrained, but
seasoned with salt enough to withstand the changes of time.
Occasionally, he seems to criticise the absurdity of his own
dramatic expedients. There is more point than was, perhaps,
apparent to the author in Mumford's comment upon the disguised
king's extraordinary speed in the wooing of Cordella ;
Have Palmers weeds such power to win fayre Ladies?
Fayth, then I hope the next that falles is myne:
Upon condition I no worse might speed,
I would for ever weare a Palmers weed.
I like an honest and playne dealing wench,
That sweares (without exceptions) I will have yon.
These soppets, that know not whether to love a man or no,
except they first go aske their mothers leave, by this hand, I
hate them ten tymes worse then poyson.
KING.
What resteth then our happinesse to procure ?
MUMFORD.
Fayth, go to Church, to make the matter sure.
KING.
It shall be so, because the world shall say,
King Leirs three daughters were wedded in one day:
The celebration of this happy chaunce,
We will deferre, untill we come to Fraunce.
MUMFORD.
I like the wooing, that's not long a doing.
Well, for her sake, I know what I know:
Ile never marry whilest I live,
Except I have one of these Brittish Ladyes,
My humour is alienated from the mayds of Fraunce.
The Lamentable Tragedie of Locrine (Newly set foorth,
overseene and corrected. By W. S. 1595) is a play of unusual
interest, not only because of the questions of authorship it raises,
but because of its combination of the diverse streams of influence
to which the drama was by this time subject. It adopts the dumb-
shows of academic tragedy, with Até as chorus; it has two ghosts
and a duplicated revenge motive; the opening scene is imitated
## p. 85 (#109) #############################################
Locrine and Selimus
85
.
from Gorboduc; and there are numerous transcripts from Seneca'.
But it has also a large and lively comic element and a good
deal of stage fighting, and it borrows freely from Kyd, Marlowe,
Greene, Peele and Lodge, and from Spenser's Complaints (entered
in the Stationers' register 29 December 1590, and containing, in
The Ruines of Time, a reference to the death of Sir Francis
Walsingham, 6 April 1590). The dramatist has been accused
of borrowing from another play, very similar in style, The First
part of the Tragicall raigne of Selimus (printed 1594); but, in this
case, the obligation seems to be the other way. The contributions
to this interesting controversy have been numerous and varied.
Tieck marked a number of parallels between Locrine and
Spenser's Complaints in his copy of the fourth folio of Shake-
speare; but these were first published, with a few additions by
R. Brotanek, in 19002 P. A. Daniel had already drawn attention
to the almost identical passages in Locrine and Selimus. Charles
Crawford, who had undertaken the same investigation at the
instigation of Grosart, charged the author of Locrine with
wholesale 'cribbing' from Selimus, supporting the accusation with
an elaborate array of parallel passages". Emil Koeppel's attention
was called to Crawford's articles by a summary of them published
in the Shakespeare Jahrbuch; and, after an examination of the
text, he arrived at an exactly opposite conclusion, viz. that
Selimus borrowed from Locrine5. The same conclusion had
been reached independently by F. G. Hubbard of the university
of Wisconsin, and has since been supported by him with further
evidence in a paper to which he kindly gave the present writer
access before its publication. It is pointed out that the comic
scene in Locrines, which is paralleled in Selimus, stands alone
in the latter play, while, in Locrine, there is much other low
humour of the same kind in connection with the same characters.
Hubbard adds to this argument in favour of the priority of
Locrine some important considerations with reference to the lines
Cf. the passage in the second scene beginning (11. 68—9)
But what so ere the fates determind have,
It lieth not in us to disannull,
with Oedipus 1001—16 : Fatis agimur : cedite fatis.
? Beiblatt zur Anglia, vol. xi, pp. 202—7.
3 In a letter to The Athenæum of 16 April 1898, p. 512.
* In a series of papers contributed to Notes and Queries in 1901 (Ser. Ix, vol. vir).
- Koeppel's paper was published in Jahrbuch for 1905 (vol. XLI, pp. 193—200). See,
also, Churton Collins, J. , The Plays and Poems of Robert Greene, vol. I, pp. 61–67;
Tucker Brooke, C. F. , The Shakespeare Apocrypha, pp. xvi—xx; Malone Society Col-
lections (1908), part 11, pp. 108–110. As to Locrine, cf. post, chap. x, and as to Selimus,
chap. VI.
8 Act iv, so. 2.
## p. 86 (#110) #############################################
86 Early English Tragedy
in both plays taken from Spenser's Complaints. Locrine has
many such lines not found in Selimus, but (with the possible
exception of a single line) Selimus has nothing from the Com-
plaints not found in Locrine. Moreover, one of these borrowed
lines in Selimus is followed by five other lines not found in
the Complaints, but found in Locrine. A consideration of the
whole passage in Locrine and its relation to the parallel lines
in Selimus and the Complaints bears out the contention that the
borrowings from the Complaints in Selimus were made through
Locrine? . The following parallels in the two plays show that the
The Ruines of Rome, 149—160 :
Then gan that Nation, th' earths new giant brood,
*To dart abroad the thunder bolts of warre,
*And, beating downe these walls with furious mood
Into her mothers bosome, all did marre ;
To th' end that none, all were it Jove his sire,
Should boast himselfe of the Romane Empire.
Like as whilome the children of the earth
*Heapt hils on hils to scale the starrie skie,
And fight against the gods of heavenly berth,
Whiles Jove at them his thunderbolts let fie;
All suddenly with lightning overthrowne,
*The furious squadrons downe to ground did fall.
(The lines copied are marked with an asterisk. )
Locrine, 800–811:
How bravely this yoong Brittain Albanact
+Darteth abroad the thunderbolts of warre,
Beating downe millions with his furious moode;
And in his glorie triumphs over all,
+ Mo[w]ing the massie squadrants of the ground;
+Heape hills on hills, to scale the starrie skie,
+ When Briareus armed with an hundreth hands
+Floong forth an hundreth mountains at great Jove,
tAnd when the monstrous giant Monichus
+Hurld mount Olimpus at great Mars his targe,
+And shot huge cædars at Minervas shield.
(The lines copied in Selimus are marked with a dagger. )
Selimus, 415, 416 :
Ide dart abroad the thunderbolts of warre,
And mow their hartlesse squadrons to the ground.
Selimus, 2423–9:
As those old earth-bred brethren, which once
Heape hill on hill to scale the starrie skie,
When Briareus arm'd with a hundreth hands,
Flung forth a hundreth mountaines at great Jove,
And when the monstrous giant Monichus
Hurld mount Olimpus at great Mars his targe,
And darted cedars at Minervas shield.
## p. 87 (#111) #############################################
Locrine and Selimus
87
author of the later drama outheroded Herod in the current
practice of plagiarism :
Locrine, 1303–6:
Where I may damne, condemne and ban my fill,
The heavens, the hell, the earth, the aire, the fire,
And utter curses to the concave skie,
Which may infect the aiery regions.
Selimus, 1803–5:
Now Bajazet will ban another while,
And utter curses to the concave skie,
Which may infect the regions of the ayre.
Locrine, 793–6:
And but thou better use thy bragging blade,
Then thou doest rule thy overflowing toong,
Superbious Brittaine, thou shalt know too soone
The force of Humber and his Scithians.
Selimus, 245760:
But thou canst better use thy bragging blade,
Then thou canst rule thy, overflowing tongue,
Soone shalt thou know that Selims mightie arme
Is able to overthrow poore Tonombey.
All this does not help us much as to the authorship of the
two plays, except negatively. It seems fairly certain that they
were not written by the same man, for it is unlikely that even
an Elizabethan dramatist would repeat himself to the extent
indicated above, and, as Crawford pointed out, Selimus has
numerous borrowings from The Faerie Queene, while Locrine has
none. The light thrown on the respective dates of the two plays
is more significant. Locrine, in its present shape, cannot have
been completed before 1591, when Spenser's Complaints was
published. Subsidiary proof of this is found by Hubbard in the
line near the end of act v, 'One mischief follows on another's
neck,' apparently copied from Tancred and Gismund (pub. 1591,
with prefatory letter dated 8 August 1591)-'One mischief
brings another on his neck'-a line not given in the earlier MS
version of the play. Selimus was later than Locrine, from which
it copied, and, as Greene died on 3 September 1592, this brings the
issue of his authorship of the play within narrow limits. The dates
also disprove Crawford's theory that Selimus was Marlowe's first
play.
It is remarkable that, at this late date, when new and potent
6
## p. 88 (#112) #############################################
88 Early English Tragedy
influences had begun to work upon English tragedy, a writer for
the popular stage should retain characteristic features of the type
of tragedy which the dramatists of the inns of court had founded
upon
the model of Seneca and his Italian imitators. Some of these
features——the ghost and the revenge motive, sensational horrors
and rhetorical exaggerations, philosophical reflections and highly
polished lyrical or descriptive passages-became permanent char-
acteristics, for good or ill, of Elizabethan tragedy. Other elements
were taken from other sources ; and, no doubt, it is well to keep
in mind that, after the establishment of public theatres, writers
of tragedies and historical plays gave their main attention to
popular taste and national tradition, not to the classical authori-
ties held in esteem in the universities and the inns of court, from
which English tragedy had received its first bent. But, in theory,
at any rate, the playwrights still honoured classical precepts and
example; and their practice, though it departed widely from
classical models, was not so lawless as it would have been without
this restraining force. The valuable part of the Elizabethan
inheritance from the classics in tragedy was, indeed, not that which
lies on the surface-such mechanical devices as the use of the
chorus and the division into five acts, the ghost and other exag-
gerated horrors; it was something more subtle and difficult to
trace—the conception of a real, though not a formal, unity of
interest, dignity of persons and decorum of style.
## p. 89 (#113) #############################################
CHAPTER V
EARLY ENGLISH COMEDY
ONE of the leading notes of medieval literature in all its forms
is its impersonality. Its most characteristic products of romance
or saga or song bear the impress, not of an individual writer's art,
but of the collective genius of a nation or an epoch. This is
equally true of medieval drama, both of those scriptural and
allegorical plays by which the church sought at once to entertain
and edify all classes, and of the farces which, in continental
countries, were a still more spontaneous product of the popular
instinct for the theatre. Thus, it is a sign of the passing of the
old order, when the historian of the English stage is for the first
time confronted, not by the shadowy and elusive forms of the
writers to whom we owe the miracles and earlier morality plays,
but by the authentic figure of a dramatist the record of whose
career is still in part extant in letters, legal documents and state
archives.
John Heywood was born towards the close of the fifteenth
century, in 1497 or 1498. In a letter to Burghley from Malines
(18 April 1575), he speaks of himself as seventy-eight years of age.
E. P. Droeshout, a Jesuit father, in a manuscript Histoire de la
Compagnie de Jésus à Anvers, speaks of him in April 1578 as
a 'vieillard octogénaire. ' J. Pitseus says that he was born in
London; and, as Pitseus was well acquainted with Heywood's
younger son, Jasper, the statement may be accepted as correct.
At an early age? , Heywood entered the royal service, probably as a
chorister. On 6 January 1514—15, he is set down in the Book of
Payments of Henry VIII as receiving 'wages 8d. per day,' and, in
1519, he appears as a 'singer. ' In 1526, he received, as a 'player
1 See Bang, W. , •Acta Anglo-Lovaniensia : John Heywood und sein Kreis,'
Englische Studien, vol. XXXVIII, pp. 234—250. From manuscript and documentary
sources Bang has thrown valuable new light upon Heywood's relationships, and upon
his later years in the Netherlands.
? [See addenda. )
2
## p. 90 (#114) #############################################
90
Early English Comedy
>
3
6
of the virginals,' the quarterly wage of £6. 138. 4d. , and, between
1538 and 1542, he is mentioned frequently in the same capacity at
a much lower salary. But, evidently, he was also engaged in other
ways. In January 1536/7, his servant was paid 20d. for bringing
princess Mary's 'regalles' (hand-organ) from London to Green-
wich; and, in March of the following year, 40s. were paid him for
playing an interlude with his 'children’ before the princess. These
children’ probably belonged to the song-school of St Paul's
cathedral.
Heywood is said to have been introduced to the princess by
Sir Thomas More. He belonged to More's circle by virtue of
his marriage with Eliza Rastell, though the details of the relation-
ship are often incorrectly given. More's sister, Elizabeth, married
John Rastell, lawyer and printer. Their daughter Eliza became
Heywood's wife, and their elder son, William, was the printer of
two or more of his comedies! . In his combination of orthodoxy
with love of letters and with zeal for practical reform, and of exu-
berant gaiety of spirit with the constancy of martyrdom to his faith,
Heywood was a true kinsman, in spirit as well as in fact, of the
author of Utopia. His religious convictions brought him into
serious danger more than once in the later years of Henry VIII and
under Edward VI; but with the accession of Mary his fortunes rose
to their highest point. At her coronation, he sat in a pageant
under a vine against the school in St Paul's churchyard. In 1553,
he presented a play of children at court. In 1558, Mary granted
him a lease of the manor of Bolmer and other lands in Yorkshire;
but her death, later in the year, drove him and others of his circle
to the continent, where he settled at Malines. The state papers
of the ensuing period contain a number of references to him in
his exile; his letter to Burghley of April 1575, in which he thanks
him for ordering the arrears from his land at Romney to be paid
him, has already been mentioned. In the following year, as has
recently been shown from manuscript sources? , he was brought by
his eldest son, Elizaeus, to the Jesuit college at Antwerp, where
he remained till May 1578. At Whitsuntide, the college was
attacked by a mob. Its members, including the two Heywoods,
were expelled and, after perilous experiences, found refuge at
Louvain. Here, presumably, he remained till his death; but there
is no further record till 1587, when he is spoken of by Thomas
Newton as dead and gone. '
1 See post, p. 92.
See Englische Studien, vol. XXXVIII, pp. 236, 237.
a
## p. 91 (#115) #############################################
John Heywood's Interludes
91
Thus, in actual span of years, Heywood's diversified career
lasted to the eve of, and may possibly have extended into, the
decade when Shakespeare's chief predecessors were in full dramatic
activity. But his extant plays all belong to the reign of Henry VIII,
and four of these (including two assigned to him on general
internal evidence) were printed in 1533. Thus, they date from a
period when the morality was still a popular dramatic form,
though often with a theological, political, or educational trend.
It is Heywood's distinctive achievement that in his plays he
dispenses with allegorical machinery and didactic aim, and gives
a realistic representation of contemporary citizen types. His
'new and very mery enterludes,' as they are designated on the title-
pages, therefore bring us far on the road towards fully developed
comedy, though action and individual characterisation are still,
for the most part, lacking; and it becomes a problem of firstrate
interest for the historian of the drama whether Heywood's de-
cisive innovation in theatrical methods was or was not due to
foreign influences. The traditional view has been that he was the
lineal successor of the writers of moralities; that, whereas some
of them had introduced low life scenes under a transparent disguise
of allegory, Heywood had taken the further step of dispensing
with disguise entirely. According to this theory, the native
English drama developed by an inner organic impulse from the
Biblical to the allegorical phase, and thence to the human
comedy' of Heywood.
But recent investigations indicate that Heywood's novel type
of play was influenced by foreign models; that his stimulus came,
not mainly from the realistic elements in the moralities, but from
the soties or farces which had long been popular in France!
If similar productions existed to any wide extent in medieval
England, of which there is no proof, they have left only one
survival, the fragmentary Interludium de Clerico et Puella? . In any
case, he could not have had any difficulty in familiarising himself
with part of the repertory of the contemporary French stage.
During the earlier Tudor reigns, there was active intercourse
between the courts on both sides of the Channel. There is
official record of visits of 'Frenche Pleyers' in 1494 and 1495,
and of '6 Mynstrells of France' about fourteen years later. No
documentary evidence of similar visits in Henry VIII's reign has
7
1 See, especially, Young, K. , “Influence of French Farce upon Jobn Heywood,'
Modern Philology, vol. II, pp. 97-124.
2 Cf. ante, chaps. II and III.
## p. 92 (#116) #############################################
92 Early English Comedy
6
yet been found, but they probably took place, and the story of
Maistre Pierre Patelin had found its way into English at least as
early as 1535. And between three plays traditionally assigned to
Heywood and three French works, as is shown more fully below,
the parallelism in design and treatment cannot be accidental.
While the fact of the relationship between Heywood's inter-
ludes and Gallic farce may, therefore, be taken as generally proved,
definite statements on details are hazardous, partly because of the
uncertainty of dates, and partly because the canon of Heywood's
plays cannot be fixed beyond dispute. Two interludes, The Play
of the wether and A play of love, were first printed by William
Rastell in 1533 and 15341 respectively, and have Heywood's name
on the title-page. The Play called the foure P. P. , is assigned to
him in the three editions issued by W. Myddleton, W. Copland
and J. Allde, of which only the last (1569) is dated. A Dialogue
concerning Witty and Witless is preserved in a British Museum
manuscript ending ‘Amen qd John Heywood. ' In addition to
qa
these four unquestionably authentic plays, two others were printed
by William Rastell: A mery Play betwene the pardoner and the
frere, the curate and neybour Pratte, in 1533, and A mery play
betwene Johan the husbande Johan Tyb his wyfe & syr Jhān the
preest in 1533/4. A. W. Pollard was the first to lay stress on
the fact that these pieces, though always attributed to Heywood,
do not bear his name? . They may, however, be assigned to him
with reasonable certainty, as it is highly improbable that there
were two dramatists at work, closely akin in style and technique,
and both issuing plays simultaneously through Rastell's press? .
Of the undisputed plays, three, Witty and Witless, Love and
Wether, form an allied group. They are dialogues or débats
discussing a set theme. Their method is forensic rather than
dramatic, in the strict sense; it is the method which, in the next
century, was to be glorified in the verbal fence between Comus and
the Lady, and in the dialectics of the fallen angels in Milton's Pande-
monium. Witty and Witless is the most primitive of the group.
James and John dispute whether it is better 'to be a fool or a
wise man. ' James, who is far the more fluent in argumentation,
wins a paradoxical victory on behalf of the fool by proving that
1 See bibliography to this chapter.
2 Gayley, R. E. C. , pp. 6 and 10.
3 Pollard points out (loc. cit. p. 6) that the omission of Heywood's name in the two
anonymously printed comedies ‘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 personae
on a separate leaf, whereas in The pardoner and the frere and Johan the husbande, etc. ,
there is only a head title. '
0
## p. 93 (#117) #############################################
The Plays of love and of the wether
93
6
he has not to toil for his living, that he is free from mental pain
and that he is secure of the greatest of all pleasures—salvation.
But, just as John confesses defeat, Jerome enters the lists; he
retrieves the day for 'wytty' by driving James to admit that a
reasonable man is better than a beast, while the 'wyttles' and
the beast are one and the same. Many of the arguments of
James have their counterpart in Erasmus's Encomium Moriae;
but there is a still closer parallel to his debate with John in the
French Dyalogue du fol et du sage. This Dyalogue was pro-
bably represented at the court of Louis XII, and may well have
been Heywood's model, though the Socratic conclusion in which
Jerome demonstrates the superiority of 'wytty' is the English
writer's own addition.
No source has as yet been traced for Love. Like Witty and
Witless, it is a debate on an abstract theme. The Lover not
Loved and the Woman Loved not Loving contend as to who
suffers the greater pain, while a parallel argument on pleasure
takes place between the Lover Loved and Neither Lover nor
Loved. Each pair ask the other to adjudicate upon their claims,
with the banal result that the first couple are declared to have
equal pain and the second to have equal pleasure. The argu-
mentation is spun out to an insufferable length; but Love is not
merely a formal disputation like Witty and Witless. There is
the crucial difference that the four characters, for all their un-
couthly abstract nomenclature, give voice to their own experiences
and emotions. Lover not Loved, in especial, speaks at times with
a genuinely personal accent of pain. Neither Loved nor Loving
tells with humorous gusto the tale of how he was beaten at the
game of moccum moccabitur by an artful'sweeting. ' Later,
he contributes the one dramatic episode in the interlude. He
cometh in running suddenly about the place among the audience
with a high copper tank on his head full of squibs fired, crying
water! water! fire! fire ! fire ! ' and sends the Lover Loved into
a swoon with a false alarm that his mistress has been burnt to
death. It is noticeable that, while the central part of the play
is written in couplets, the earlier sections are in rime royal, and
that Heywood reverts to this in the closing speeches, in which the
religious moralising was suitable to Christmastide, when Love was
evidently performed.
The Play of the wether has similar metrical characteristics.
Jupiter's opening and closing speeches are in rime royal, and the
rest of the play is in couplets, save for occasional quatrains.
## p. 94 (#118) #############################################
94 Early English Comedy
a
The interlude was written for an evening entertainment at court,
or in some nobleman's hall! , and introduces no less than ten
personages-much the largest number that occurs in any of
Heywood's works. He thus has an opportunity of sketching
varied types, from the solemn and sententious Jupiter to his
'cryer,' the Vice, Mery-reporte, a bouncing self-confident rogue
with an ungovernably free tongue. Mery-reporte’s by-play, as
the characters are successively introduced, furnishes an element
of action lacking in the interludes discussed above. But, in spite
of its wider range, Wether belongs to the same type as Witty
and Witless and Love. It has no development of plot, but
presents, in turn, representative exponents of divergent views on
a debateable theme. Here it is the problem of the management
of the weather, which a 'parlyament' of gods and goddesses, with
the characteristic complaisance of a Tudor legislature, has ‘holly
surrendryd’ to the autocrat Jupiter, who, also in accord with
Tudor precedent, consults the opinion of “all maner people
before taking action. The 'gentylman' wants dry and windless
weather suitable for hunting; the merchant begs for variable,
but not violent, winds; the ranger of woods is anxious for 'good
rage of blustryng and blowynge. ' The water-miller wants rain
which will not fall while the wind blows; the wind-miller com-
plains that there is 'such revell of rayne' that it destroys the
wind. These two brethren of the craft are not content, like the
! other petitioners, with making their appeal to the god. They
have an altercation on the merits of wind and water, to which
trade rivalry gives a pungency and realism not often found in a
débat. There are high words, too, between the 'gentylwoman,'
who would banish the sun, lest it should ruin her complexion, and
the 'launder,' who wants it to shine always, in order to dry clothes
for him. Last, there runs in the Boy, the lest that can play,'
with his delightful plea:
All my pleasure is in catchynge of byrdes,
And makynge of snow-ballys and throwyng the same;
For the whyche purpose to have set in frame,
Wyth my godfather god I wolde fayne have spoken,
Desyrynge hym to have sent me by some token
Where I myghte have had great frost for my pytfallys,
And plente of snow to make my snow-ballys.
1 Cf. 11. 1026—8, where the boy says that he has heard that god almighty,' i. e.
Jupiter
Was com from heven, by his owne accorde,
This dyght to suppe here wyth my lorde.
## p. 95 (#119) #############################################
Heywood’s The Foure P. P.
95
This onys had, boyes lyvis be such as no man leddys.
0, to se my snow ballys light on my felowes heddys,
And to here the byrdes how they flycker theyr wynges
In the pytfale! I say yt passeth all thynges.
Jupiter, finally, declares that all the petitioners shall have in turn
the weather that they have asked for. And, in the didactic vein
of a lecturer on economics, he points the moral of the mutual
dependence of all classes :
There is no one craft can preserve man so,
But by other craftes, of necessyte,
He must have myche parte of his commodyte.
The first edition of The Play called the foure P. P. was not
published till more than ten years after Rastell's edition of Wether.
The presumption, therefore, is that, of the two plays, The foure
P. P. is the later though the internal evidence is inconclusive. It
contains a smaller and less diversified range of characters—the
“palmer, pardoner, potycary and pedler,' from whom it takes its
title; the structure is less compact, and the versification, which
consists almost throughout of couplets with four stresses in each
line, has not so much variety. On the other hand, the verve and
pungent humour of the most notable passages are unequalled by
Wether or any other of Heywood's undoubted interludes, and the
climax to the triangular duel which forms the main episode of The
foure P. P. is an effective piece of dramatic technique.
The opening wrangle between the palmer, the pardoner and
the 'potycary on the merits of their respective vocations is in
Heywood's characteristic manner. The entry of the light-hearted
pedler-a true fore-runner of Autolycus—with his well filled pack,
turns the talk into a more broadly humorous vein, ending in a
song. The newcomer is then asked to decide between the claims
of the three rivals, but he modestly declines to judge 'in maters
of weyght. As, however, he has some skill in lying, and, as lying
is their comen usage,' he offers to pronounce upon their rela-
tive merits in this respect. After some preliminary skirmishing,
in which the pardoner vaunts the virtues of his remarkable assort-
ment of relics, and the 'potycary those of his equally wonderful
collection of medicines, the pedler proposes that each shall tell a
tale as a test of his powers of falsification. Though these tales
are not organically related to the preceding dialogue, they give
Heywood an opportunity for the display of his remarkable narra-
tive faculty at its best. The’potycary's tale is coarse; but, regarded
from the point of view of a Munchausen romance, it is a capital
6
## p. 96 (#120) #############################################
96
Early English Comedy
piece of writing. It is far outdone, however, by the pardoner's
story of his visit to hell to rescue the soul of his friend, Margery
Coorson, who had died during his absence. No such masterpiece
of humorous narrative had appeared in England since Chaucer
ceased to write, though the grimly grotesque vein of the recital
is entirely Heywood's own. The description of the anniversary
festival of Lucifer's fall, when all the devils appeared in gala
dress :
Theyr hornes well-gylt, theyr clowes full clene,
Theyr taylles wellkempt, and, as I wene,
With sothery butter theyr bodyes anoynted;
the account of Lucifer's audience to the pardoner, with the inter-
change of courtesies, and the formal compact that Margery may
go free if the pardoner will undertake that 'there come no mo'
women to hell-all these are combined in a chiaroscuro treatment
unequalled of its kind till, in Byron's Vision of Judgment, it was
applied to a similar theme, with added touches of sublimity and
saeva indignatio. The pardoner's tale gives the palmer his chance.
He cannot understand
That women in hell such shrewes can be,
And here so gentyll, as farre as I se.
He has known five hundred thousand women;
Yet in all places where I have ben
Of all the women that I have sene,
I never sawe nor knewe in my consyens
Any one woman out of paciens.
Such an unheard-of statement startles rivals and judge alike into
involuntary exclamations:
'Por. By the masse, there is a great lye.
Pard. I never harde a greater, by our lady.
PED. A greater! nay, knowe ye any so great ?
The palmer, manifestly, is the victor, and the situation should have
been rounded off in a few lines. But the pedler spins it out by
the prolix manner of his adjudication, and by his final homily on
matters of conduct and faith.
Were Heywood's place in dramatic history to be determined
purely by his indisputable works, it would be matter of doubt
whether he had not chosen the wrong channel for his great gifts.
His narrative powers might have made him the last and most
brilliant of Chaucer's successors, while his services to the stage,
great as they were, would be limited by his inability to portray action.
But, if The pardoner and the frere and Johan Johan are placed
to his credit, the range of his achievement is materially widened.
## p. 97 (#121) #############################################
The Pardoner and the Frere
97
It must be allowed that both plays differ largely from Heywood's
acknowledged pieces in one respect. The latter all end, as has
been seen, upon an edifying note; but in the pardoner and
the frere and Johan Johan, scoundrels and sinners go off
triumphant. This, however, may be due to the influence of
French farce; while, in general conception of character, in handling
of metre and in peculiarities of vocabulary and nomenclaturel
there is close affinity between the two plays and Heywood's
dialogues and interludes, especially the foure P. P. The balance
of evidence is in favour of his authorship of the anonymous pieces.
The opening of The pardoner and the frere, the curate and
neybour Pratte, where the two worthies set forth their claims and
credentials, is strikingly parallel to that of the foure P. P. But
here, the pardoner, in opposition to the evangelical pretensions of
the frere, emphasises his papal commission to the utmost. And
the dialogue method reaches its culminating point of humorous
effectiveness in an amusing scene where, after each line of the
frere's charity sermon, his rival interjects an appeal to the congre-
gation to contribute to the restoration of the chapel of 'swete
saynte Leonarde,' and to earn the remission of sins promised by
the papal bull. This indirect process of recrimination is varied by
bouts of direct personal abuse, till the quarrel reaches its height
in a vigorous use of fists, not to speak of nails and teeth. At this
point, the parson of the parish enters with an imprecation on the
wranglers who are polluting his church, and who have only been
restrained from bloodshed by the lack of staves or edged tools.
While he deals with the frere, he calls in the help of the lay
arm, in the shape of 'neybour Prat,' to manage the pardoner, who
is also a layman. Prat promises his man a taste of the stocks,
while the parson seeks to hale the frere off to prison. It looks as
1 Some of these points have not been sufficiently noted. Thus, Heywood is fond
of alluding to unfamiliar saints and shrines. The locus classicus is in the palmer's
opening speech in The foure P. P. Among the shrines mentioned is the obscure one
of our Lady at Crome,' by whom Johan is found swearing in his opening speech.
Afterwards, Johan appeals to swete Saynt Dyryk,' and the priest mentions the shrine
of . Saynt Modwin,' which seems to have been at Burton-on-Trent. Two of the sham
relics exhibited by the pardoner in The foure P. P. , 'the great toe of the Trinite' and
of all Hallows the bless'd jaw bone' reappear (as Swoboda has noted) among the
stock-in-trade of his colleague in The pardoner and the frere. But, possibly, more
indicative of a single hand is the parallelism in the respective lists of the buttocke
bone of Pentecoste' and the 'arm of sweet Saint Sunday,' and of the eye-tooth of the
Great Turk, which prevents blindness, and the brayn pan' of 'Saynt Myghell,' a
preservative against headache. It is worth noting, too, that the rare word nyfuls,'
dzed in Wether, reappears in Johan Johan, and that the phrase “VII yeare,' for an
indefinite period of time, occurs in Wether, Johan Johan, and The pardoner and the frere.
E. L. v. CH, V.
7
## p. 98 (#122) #############################################
98
Early English Comedy
if the two knaves were going to get their deserts, when, by an
unexpected rally, they get the better of their captors, and go off
with all the honours of war, and an ominous hint of a return visit!
Chaucer had supplied some of the materials for the characters
of the pardoner and the frere, and there are also resemblances
between the play and the Farce nouvelle d'un Pardonneur, d'un
triacleur et d'une tavernière. In Johan Johan, the resemblances
to episodes in the Farce de Pernet qui va au vin are so
detailed that borrowing on the one side or the other is self-
evident? Apart from a number of verbal coincidences, the
singular situation of a husband being set to chafe wax while his
wife and her lover are making merry together can hardly have oc-
curred independently to two playwrights. The only extant edition
of Pernet qui va au vin dates from 1548, but it was then nouvelle-
ment imprimé, and it is probable that an earlier issue was
available for Heywood's use. If not, the French play must have
been indebted to the English, which is unlikely at this period.
The duped husband, Johan Johan, the central figure of the
piece, is admirably sketched. During his wife's absence, he boasts
loudly about the beating that he will give her; but, on her return,
he protests that he has been merely talking of beating 'stokfysshe
in Temmes Street' for a Lenten dish. He suspects, with only
too good reason, that Tyb's frequent visits to Sir Jhan, the priest,
have other than spiritual motives, but he unburdens himself only
in 'asides,' and he dare not refuse to carry an invitation to Sir
Jhan to come and share a 'pye. ' As he starts on his ungrateful
errand, he is repeatedly called back by his domineering partner
to do various domestic offices. And, when he returns with the
wily priest, who has accepted the invitation after well feigned
reluctance, Tyb has further orders for him. He has to fetch a
pail of water, but the pail has a 'clyfte, both large and wyde,'
which is not likely to have come by mere accident. So, while the
wife and the guest enjoy themselves, the master of the house has
to sit at the fire and melt wax to mend the hole.
As he rue-
fully mutters :
I chafe the wax-
And I chafe it so hard that my fyngers krakks;
And eke the smoke puttyth out my eyes two:
I burne my face, and ray my clothys also,
And yet I dare not say one word,
And they syt laughyng yender at the bord.
1 See Young, K. , 'Influence of French Farce,' etc. , pp. 102–9, and Pollard, A. W. ,
in Gayley, C. M. , R. E. C. p. 15.
## p. 99 (#123) #############################################
Calisto and Melebea
99
But, when the meal has been ended, and the two feasters, after
the 'recreacion' of some spicy stories by Sir Jhan, turn to making
mock of the wretched Johan, it is too much even for him. In a
sudden outburst of valour, born of despair, he rounds upon his
tormentors, gives them a drubbing and turns them out of doors-
though he hurries after them for fear of further misdoing in Sir
Jhan's chamber.
Assuming that Johan Johan and Witty and Witless are by the
same author, we have thus seen Heywood's advance from the
composition of abstract and prolix dialogue to that of tersely
written and realistic farce. In any case, with Johan Johan
English drama had come close to the confines of true comedy.
A still nearer approach, in more than one aspect, was made
by A new comodye in englysh in maner of an enterlude, generally
known, from its hero and heroine, as Calisto and Melebea. This
work was published by John Rastell, probably about 1530. It
was an adaptation of the earlier part of the Spanish dramatic
novel Celestina, issued, probably, first at Burgos in 1499, of which
Fernando de Rojas was the chief, if not the sole, author. Celestina
originally contained sixteen acts; but these were increased in 1502
to twenty-one.
(given in the edition of 1591, but omitted in that of 1611 reprinted
by Nichols), the dramatist frankly makes this patriotic interest
his first claim for attention :
You that with friendly grace of smoothed brow
Have entertained the Scythian Tamburlaine,
And given applause unto an Infidel:
Vouchsafe to welcome (with like curtesie)
A warlike Christian and your Countreyman.
1 See Churchill, G. B. and Keller, W. , "Die lateinischen Universitäts-Dramen
Englands in der Zeit der Königin Elizabeth,' Jahrbuch der Deutschen Shakespeare
Gesellschaft, vol. XXXIV (1898).
2 Richard the Third up to Shakespeare,' Palaestra, vol. 2 (1900).
6
## p. 83 (#107) #############################################
The True Chronicle History of King Leir 83
But the real hero of the play, as of that which Shakespeare
founded on it, is the bastard Fawconbridge, who is given due
prominence in the title, and whose character is developed with a
good deal of spirit and skill? . On the whole, however, the artistic
merits of the play have been exaggerated by recent critics ; blank
verse, rime and prose are used with the same careless facility,
and the scenes follow one another without any attempt at dramatic
construction. But in it, as in the earlier play, we catch the first
tones of the voice of Elizabethan England to which Shakespeare
gave fuller and nobler expression in the historical dramas founded
on these first rude attempts :
Let England live but true within it selfe,
And all the world can never wrong her State.
*
If Englands Peeres and people joyne in one,
Nor Pope, nor Fraunce, nor Spaine can doo them wrong.
Apart from the use made of it by Shakespeare, The True
Chronicle History of King Leir, and his three daughters,
Gonorill, Ragan, and Cordella (printed 1605 and probably acted
15943) has an interest of its own, though few will be found to
subscribe to the opinion* that 'the whole of this old drama is
incomparably and in every respect superior to Shakespeare's
adaptation. ' But it may be freely admitted that the old play
is well contrived, and written in a light, easy style which is not
unpleasing. In spite of its absurd disguises and coincidences, it
is an organic whole, and not a mere succession of events taken
haphazard from the chronicle, its main sources being, indeed,
Warner, Mirror for Magistrates and The Faerie Queene. The
contrast between the bearing of Cordella and her sisters is made
more natural by the fact that they have an advantage over her
in being informed beforehand that they will lose nothing by com-
pliance with their father's test of affection ; and the characters
!
1 The most striking episode, at the opening of the play, was apparently adapted by
the dramatist, with additions of his own, from a story told by Hall and Stow of the
bastard Dunois of Orleans. See Boswell-Stone, W. G. , Shakespeare's Holinshed,
pp. 48–50.
2 The same comment might be made on the pre-Shakespearean Richard II, printed
in Shakespeare Jahrbuch, 1899 (vol. xxxv), and commended by Boas in Fortnightly
Review, vol. LXXVII (1902), pp. 391-404, for its breadth of canvass, its insight into
popular feeling, and its abundant comic relief. '
* On this point see Perrett, W. , 'The Story of King Lear,' Palaestra, vol. xxxv,
and Law, R. A. , Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, vol. xxI,
pp. 462–477 (1906).
* Leo Tolstoi, in Fortnightly Review, Jan. 1907, vol. LXXXVII, p. 66.
6-2
## p. 84 (#108) #############################################
84
Early English Tragedy
are clearly, though not deeply, conceived. There is a solitary
Senecan aphorism (“For fear of death is worse than death itself');
but the play is free, alike from the tedious commonplaces of
academic tragedy, and from the extravagant rhetoric which
Tamburlaine had brought into vogue. This is partly due to
the dramatist's vein of humour, not always duly restrained, but
seasoned with salt enough to withstand the changes of time.
Occasionally, he seems to criticise the absurdity of his own
dramatic expedients. There is more point than was, perhaps,
apparent to the author in Mumford's comment upon the disguised
king's extraordinary speed in the wooing of Cordella ;
Have Palmers weeds such power to win fayre Ladies?
Fayth, then I hope the next that falles is myne:
Upon condition I no worse might speed,
I would for ever weare a Palmers weed.
I like an honest and playne dealing wench,
That sweares (without exceptions) I will have yon.
These soppets, that know not whether to love a man or no,
except they first go aske their mothers leave, by this hand, I
hate them ten tymes worse then poyson.
KING.
What resteth then our happinesse to procure ?
MUMFORD.
Fayth, go to Church, to make the matter sure.
KING.
It shall be so, because the world shall say,
King Leirs three daughters were wedded in one day:
The celebration of this happy chaunce,
We will deferre, untill we come to Fraunce.
MUMFORD.
I like the wooing, that's not long a doing.
Well, for her sake, I know what I know:
Ile never marry whilest I live,
Except I have one of these Brittish Ladyes,
My humour is alienated from the mayds of Fraunce.
The Lamentable Tragedie of Locrine (Newly set foorth,
overseene and corrected. By W. S. 1595) is a play of unusual
interest, not only because of the questions of authorship it raises,
but because of its combination of the diverse streams of influence
to which the drama was by this time subject. It adopts the dumb-
shows of academic tragedy, with Até as chorus; it has two ghosts
and a duplicated revenge motive; the opening scene is imitated
## p. 85 (#109) #############################################
Locrine and Selimus
85
.
from Gorboduc; and there are numerous transcripts from Seneca'.
But it has also a large and lively comic element and a good
deal of stage fighting, and it borrows freely from Kyd, Marlowe,
Greene, Peele and Lodge, and from Spenser's Complaints (entered
in the Stationers' register 29 December 1590, and containing, in
The Ruines of Time, a reference to the death of Sir Francis
Walsingham, 6 April 1590). The dramatist has been accused
of borrowing from another play, very similar in style, The First
part of the Tragicall raigne of Selimus (printed 1594); but, in this
case, the obligation seems to be the other way. The contributions
to this interesting controversy have been numerous and varied.
Tieck marked a number of parallels between Locrine and
Spenser's Complaints in his copy of the fourth folio of Shake-
speare; but these were first published, with a few additions by
R. Brotanek, in 19002 P. A. Daniel had already drawn attention
to the almost identical passages in Locrine and Selimus. Charles
Crawford, who had undertaken the same investigation at the
instigation of Grosart, charged the author of Locrine with
wholesale 'cribbing' from Selimus, supporting the accusation with
an elaborate array of parallel passages". Emil Koeppel's attention
was called to Crawford's articles by a summary of them published
in the Shakespeare Jahrbuch; and, after an examination of the
text, he arrived at an exactly opposite conclusion, viz. that
Selimus borrowed from Locrine5. The same conclusion had
been reached independently by F. G. Hubbard of the university
of Wisconsin, and has since been supported by him with further
evidence in a paper to which he kindly gave the present writer
access before its publication. It is pointed out that the comic
scene in Locrines, which is paralleled in Selimus, stands alone
in the latter play, while, in Locrine, there is much other low
humour of the same kind in connection with the same characters.
Hubbard adds to this argument in favour of the priority of
Locrine some important considerations with reference to the lines
Cf. the passage in the second scene beginning (11. 68—9)
But what so ere the fates determind have,
It lieth not in us to disannull,
with Oedipus 1001—16 : Fatis agimur : cedite fatis.
? Beiblatt zur Anglia, vol. xi, pp. 202—7.
3 In a letter to The Athenæum of 16 April 1898, p. 512.
* In a series of papers contributed to Notes and Queries in 1901 (Ser. Ix, vol. vir).
- Koeppel's paper was published in Jahrbuch for 1905 (vol. XLI, pp. 193—200). See,
also, Churton Collins, J. , The Plays and Poems of Robert Greene, vol. I, pp. 61–67;
Tucker Brooke, C. F. , The Shakespeare Apocrypha, pp. xvi—xx; Malone Society Col-
lections (1908), part 11, pp. 108–110. As to Locrine, cf. post, chap. x, and as to Selimus,
chap. VI.
8 Act iv, so. 2.
## p. 86 (#110) #############################################
86 Early English Tragedy
in both plays taken from Spenser's Complaints. Locrine has
many such lines not found in Selimus, but (with the possible
exception of a single line) Selimus has nothing from the Com-
plaints not found in Locrine. Moreover, one of these borrowed
lines in Selimus is followed by five other lines not found in
the Complaints, but found in Locrine. A consideration of the
whole passage in Locrine and its relation to the parallel lines
in Selimus and the Complaints bears out the contention that the
borrowings from the Complaints in Selimus were made through
Locrine? . The following parallels in the two plays show that the
The Ruines of Rome, 149—160 :
Then gan that Nation, th' earths new giant brood,
*To dart abroad the thunder bolts of warre,
*And, beating downe these walls with furious mood
Into her mothers bosome, all did marre ;
To th' end that none, all were it Jove his sire,
Should boast himselfe of the Romane Empire.
Like as whilome the children of the earth
*Heapt hils on hils to scale the starrie skie,
And fight against the gods of heavenly berth,
Whiles Jove at them his thunderbolts let fie;
All suddenly with lightning overthrowne,
*The furious squadrons downe to ground did fall.
(The lines copied are marked with an asterisk. )
Locrine, 800–811:
How bravely this yoong Brittain Albanact
+Darteth abroad the thunderbolts of warre,
Beating downe millions with his furious moode;
And in his glorie triumphs over all,
+ Mo[w]ing the massie squadrants of the ground;
+Heape hills on hills, to scale the starrie skie,
+ When Briareus armed with an hundreth hands
+Floong forth an hundreth mountains at great Jove,
tAnd when the monstrous giant Monichus
+Hurld mount Olimpus at great Mars his targe,
+And shot huge cædars at Minervas shield.
(The lines copied in Selimus are marked with a dagger. )
Selimus, 415, 416 :
Ide dart abroad the thunderbolts of warre,
And mow their hartlesse squadrons to the ground.
Selimus, 2423–9:
As those old earth-bred brethren, which once
Heape hill on hill to scale the starrie skie,
When Briareus arm'd with a hundreth hands,
Flung forth a hundreth mountaines at great Jove,
And when the monstrous giant Monichus
Hurld mount Olimpus at great Mars his targe,
And darted cedars at Minervas shield.
## p. 87 (#111) #############################################
Locrine and Selimus
87
author of the later drama outheroded Herod in the current
practice of plagiarism :
Locrine, 1303–6:
Where I may damne, condemne and ban my fill,
The heavens, the hell, the earth, the aire, the fire,
And utter curses to the concave skie,
Which may infect the aiery regions.
Selimus, 1803–5:
Now Bajazet will ban another while,
And utter curses to the concave skie,
Which may infect the regions of the ayre.
Locrine, 793–6:
And but thou better use thy bragging blade,
Then thou doest rule thy overflowing toong,
Superbious Brittaine, thou shalt know too soone
The force of Humber and his Scithians.
Selimus, 245760:
But thou canst better use thy bragging blade,
Then thou canst rule thy, overflowing tongue,
Soone shalt thou know that Selims mightie arme
Is able to overthrow poore Tonombey.
All this does not help us much as to the authorship of the
two plays, except negatively. It seems fairly certain that they
were not written by the same man, for it is unlikely that even
an Elizabethan dramatist would repeat himself to the extent
indicated above, and, as Crawford pointed out, Selimus has
numerous borrowings from The Faerie Queene, while Locrine has
none. The light thrown on the respective dates of the two plays
is more significant. Locrine, in its present shape, cannot have
been completed before 1591, when Spenser's Complaints was
published. Subsidiary proof of this is found by Hubbard in the
line near the end of act v, 'One mischief follows on another's
neck,' apparently copied from Tancred and Gismund (pub. 1591,
with prefatory letter dated 8 August 1591)-'One mischief
brings another on his neck'-a line not given in the earlier MS
version of the play. Selimus was later than Locrine, from which
it copied, and, as Greene died on 3 September 1592, this brings the
issue of his authorship of the play within narrow limits. The dates
also disprove Crawford's theory that Selimus was Marlowe's first
play.
It is remarkable that, at this late date, when new and potent
6
## p. 88 (#112) #############################################
88 Early English Tragedy
influences had begun to work upon English tragedy, a writer for
the popular stage should retain characteristic features of the type
of tragedy which the dramatists of the inns of court had founded
upon
the model of Seneca and his Italian imitators. Some of these
features——the ghost and the revenge motive, sensational horrors
and rhetorical exaggerations, philosophical reflections and highly
polished lyrical or descriptive passages-became permanent char-
acteristics, for good or ill, of Elizabethan tragedy. Other elements
were taken from other sources ; and, no doubt, it is well to keep
in mind that, after the establishment of public theatres, writers
of tragedies and historical plays gave their main attention to
popular taste and national tradition, not to the classical authori-
ties held in esteem in the universities and the inns of court, from
which English tragedy had received its first bent. But, in theory,
at any rate, the playwrights still honoured classical precepts and
example; and their practice, though it departed widely from
classical models, was not so lawless as it would have been without
this restraining force. The valuable part of the Elizabethan
inheritance from the classics in tragedy was, indeed, not that which
lies on the surface-such mechanical devices as the use of the
chorus and the division into five acts, the ghost and other exag-
gerated horrors; it was something more subtle and difficult to
trace—the conception of a real, though not a formal, unity of
interest, dignity of persons and decorum of style.
## p. 89 (#113) #############################################
CHAPTER V
EARLY ENGLISH COMEDY
ONE of the leading notes of medieval literature in all its forms
is its impersonality. Its most characteristic products of romance
or saga or song bear the impress, not of an individual writer's art,
but of the collective genius of a nation or an epoch. This is
equally true of medieval drama, both of those scriptural and
allegorical plays by which the church sought at once to entertain
and edify all classes, and of the farces which, in continental
countries, were a still more spontaneous product of the popular
instinct for the theatre. Thus, it is a sign of the passing of the
old order, when the historian of the English stage is for the first
time confronted, not by the shadowy and elusive forms of the
writers to whom we owe the miracles and earlier morality plays,
but by the authentic figure of a dramatist the record of whose
career is still in part extant in letters, legal documents and state
archives.
John Heywood was born towards the close of the fifteenth
century, in 1497 or 1498. In a letter to Burghley from Malines
(18 April 1575), he speaks of himself as seventy-eight years of age.
E. P. Droeshout, a Jesuit father, in a manuscript Histoire de la
Compagnie de Jésus à Anvers, speaks of him in April 1578 as
a 'vieillard octogénaire. ' J. Pitseus says that he was born in
London; and, as Pitseus was well acquainted with Heywood's
younger son, Jasper, the statement may be accepted as correct.
At an early age? , Heywood entered the royal service, probably as a
chorister. On 6 January 1514—15, he is set down in the Book of
Payments of Henry VIII as receiving 'wages 8d. per day,' and, in
1519, he appears as a 'singer. ' In 1526, he received, as a 'player
1 See Bang, W. , •Acta Anglo-Lovaniensia : John Heywood und sein Kreis,'
Englische Studien, vol. XXXVIII, pp. 234—250. From manuscript and documentary
sources Bang has thrown valuable new light upon Heywood's relationships, and upon
his later years in the Netherlands.
? [See addenda. )
2
## p. 90 (#114) #############################################
90
Early English Comedy
>
3
6
of the virginals,' the quarterly wage of £6. 138. 4d. , and, between
1538 and 1542, he is mentioned frequently in the same capacity at
a much lower salary. But, evidently, he was also engaged in other
ways. In January 1536/7, his servant was paid 20d. for bringing
princess Mary's 'regalles' (hand-organ) from London to Green-
wich; and, in March of the following year, 40s. were paid him for
playing an interlude with his 'children’ before the princess. These
children’ probably belonged to the song-school of St Paul's
cathedral.
Heywood is said to have been introduced to the princess by
Sir Thomas More. He belonged to More's circle by virtue of
his marriage with Eliza Rastell, though the details of the relation-
ship are often incorrectly given. More's sister, Elizabeth, married
John Rastell, lawyer and printer. Their daughter Eliza became
Heywood's wife, and their elder son, William, was the printer of
two or more of his comedies! . In his combination of orthodoxy
with love of letters and with zeal for practical reform, and of exu-
berant gaiety of spirit with the constancy of martyrdom to his faith,
Heywood was a true kinsman, in spirit as well as in fact, of the
author of Utopia. His religious convictions brought him into
serious danger more than once in the later years of Henry VIII and
under Edward VI; but with the accession of Mary his fortunes rose
to their highest point. At her coronation, he sat in a pageant
under a vine against the school in St Paul's churchyard. In 1553,
he presented a play of children at court. In 1558, Mary granted
him a lease of the manor of Bolmer and other lands in Yorkshire;
but her death, later in the year, drove him and others of his circle
to the continent, where he settled at Malines. The state papers
of the ensuing period contain a number of references to him in
his exile; his letter to Burghley of April 1575, in which he thanks
him for ordering the arrears from his land at Romney to be paid
him, has already been mentioned. In the following year, as has
recently been shown from manuscript sources? , he was brought by
his eldest son, Elizaeus, to the Jesuit college at Antwerp, where
he remained till May 1578. At Whitsuntide, the college was
attacked by a mob. Its members, including the two Heywoods,
were expelled and, after perilous experiences, found refuge at
Louvain. Here, presumably, he remained till his death; but there
is no further record till 1587, when he is spoken of by Thomas
Newton as dead and gone. '
1 See post, p. 92.
See Englische Studien, vol. XXXVIII, pp. 236, 237.
a
## p. 91 (#115) #############################################
John Heywood's Interludes
91
Thus, in actual span of years, Heywood's diversified career
lasted to the eve of, and may possibly have extended into, the
decade when Shakespeare's chief predecessors were in full dramatic
activity. But his extant plays all belong to the reign of Henry VIII,
and four of these (including two assigned to him on general
internal evidence) were printed in 1533. Thus, they date from a
period when the morality was still a popular dramatic form,
though often with a theological, political, or educational trend.
It is Heywood's distinctive achievement that in his plays he
dispenses with allegorical machinery and didactic aim, and gives
a realistic representation of contemporary citizen types. His
'new and very mery enterludes,' as they are designated on the title-
pages, therefore bring us far on the road towards fully developed
comedy, though action and individual characterisation are still,
for the most part, lacking; and it becomes a problem of firstrate
interest for the historian of the drama whether Heywood's de-
cisive innovation in theatrical methods was or was not due to
foreign influences. The traditional view has been that he was the
lineal successor of the writers of moralities; that, whereas some
of them had introduced low life scenes under a transparent disguise
of allegory, Heywood had taken the further step of dispensing
with disguise entirely. According to this theory, the native
English drama developed by an inner organic impulse from the
Biblical to the allegorical phase, and thence to the human
comedy' of Heywood.
But recent investigations indicate that Heywood's novel type
of play was influenced by foreign models; that his stimulus came,
not mainly from the realistic elements in the moralities, but from
the soties or farces which had long been popular in France!
If similar productions existed to any wide extent in medieval
England, of which there is no proof, they have left only one
survival, the fragmentary Interludium de Clerico et Puella? . In any
case, he could not have had any difficulty in familiarising himself
with part of the repertory of the contemporary French stage.
During the earlier Tudor reigns, there was active intercourse
between the courts on both sides of the Channel. There is
official record of visits of 'Frenche Pleyers' in 1494 and 1495,
and of '6 Mynstrells of France' about fourteen years later. No
documentary evidence of similar visits in Henry VIII's reign has
7
1 See, especially, Young, K. , “Influence of French Farce upon Jobn Heywood,'
Modern Philology, vol. II, pp. 97-124.
2 Cf. ante, chaps. II and III.
## p. 92 (#116) #############################################
92 Early English Comedy
6
yet been found, but they probably took place, and the story of
Maistre Pierre Patelin had found its way into English at least as
early as 1535. And between three plays traditionally assigned to
Heywood and three French works, as is shown more fully below,
the parallelism in design and treatment cannot be accidental.
While the fact of the relationship between Heywood's inter-
ludes and Gallic farce may, therefore, be taken as generally proved,
definite statements on details are hazardous, partly because of the
uncertainty of dates, and partly because the canon of Heywood's
plays cannot be fixed beyond dispute. Two interludes, The Play
of the wether and A play of love, were first printed by William
Rastell in 1533 and 15341 respectively, and have Heywood's name
on the title-page. The Play called the foure P. P. , is assigned to
him in the three editions issued by W. Myddleton, W. Copland
and J. Allde, of which only the last (1569) is dated. A Dialogue
concerning Witty and Witless is preserved in a British Museum
manuscript ending ‘Amen qd John Heywood. ' In addition to
qa
these four unquestionably authentic plays, two others were printed
by William Rastell: A mery Play betwene the pardoner and the
frere, the curate and neybour Pratte, in 1533, and A mery play
betwene Johan the husbande Johan Tyb his wyfe & syr Jhān the
preest in 1533/4. A. W. Pollard was the first to lay stress on
the fact that these pieces, though always attributed to Heywood,
do not bear his name? . They may, however, be assigned to him
with reasonable certainty, as it is highly improbable that there
were two dramatists at work, closely akin in style and technique,
and both issuing plays simultaneously through Rastell's press? .
Of the undisputed plays, three, Witty and Witless, Love and
Wether, form an allied group. They are dialogues or débats
discussing a set theme. Their method is forensic rather than
dramatic, in the strict sense; it is the method which, in the next
century, was to be glorified in the verbal fence between Comus and
the Lady, and in the dialectics of the fallen angels in Milton's Pande-
monium. Witty and Witless is the most primitive of the group.
James and John dispute whether it is better 'to be a fool or a
wise man. ' James, who is far the more fluent in argumentation,
wins a paradoxical victory on behalf of the fool by proving that
1 See bibliography to this chapter.
2 Gayley, R. E. C. , pp. 6 and 10.
3 Pollard points out (loc. cit. p. 6) that the omission of Heywood's name in the two
anonymously printed comedies ‘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 personae
on a separate leaf, whereas in The pardoner and the frere and Johan the husbande, etc. ,
there is only a head title. '
0
## p. 93 (#117) #############################################
The Plays of love and of the wether
93
6
he has not to toil for his living, that he is free from mental pain
and that he is secure of the greatest of all pleasures—salvation.
But, just as John confesses defeat, Jerome enters the lists; he
retrieves the day for 'wytty' by driving James to admit that a
reasonable man is better than a beast, while the 'wyttles' and
the beast are one and the same. Many of the arguments of
James have their counterpart in Erasmus's Encomium Moriae;
but there is a still closer parallel to his debate with John in the
French Dyalogue du fol et du sage. This Dyalogue was pro-
bably represented at the court of Louis XII, and may well have
been Heywood's model, though the Socratic conclusion in which
Jerome demonstrates the superiority of 'wytty' is the English
writer's own addition.
No source has as yet been traced for Love. Like Witty and
Witless, it is a debate on an abstract theme. The Lover not
Loved and the Woman Loved not Loving contend as to who
suffers the greater pain, while a parallel argument on pleasure
takes place between the Lover Loved and Neither Lover nor
Loved. Each pair ask the other to adjudicate upon their claims,
with the banal result that the first couple are declared to have
equal pain and the second to have equal pleasure. The argu-
mentation is spun out to an insufferable length; but Love is not
merely a formal disputation like Witty and Witless. There is
the crucial difference that the four characters, for all their un-
couthly abstract nomenclature, give voice to their own experiences
and emotions. Lover not Loved, in especial, speaks at times with
a genuinely personal accent of pain. Neither Loved nor Loving
tells with humorous gusto the tale of how he was beaten at the
game of moccum moccabitur by an artful'sweeting. ' Later,
he contributes the one dramatic episode in the interlude. He
cometh in running suddenly about the place among the audience
with a high copper tank on his head full of squibs fired, crying
water! water! fire! fire ! fire ! ' and sends the Lover Loved into
a swoon with a false alarm that his mistress has been burnt to
death. It is noticeable that, while the central part of the play
is written in couplets, the earlier sections are in rime royal, and
that Heywood reverts to this in the closing speeches, in which the
religious moralising was suitable to Christmastide, when Love was
evidently performed.
The Play of the wether has similar metrical characteristics.
Jupiter's opening and closing speeches are in rime royal, and the
rest of the play is in couplets, save for occasional quatrains.
## p. 94 (#118) #############################################
94 Early English Comedy
a
The interlude was written for an evening entertainment at court,
or in some nobleman's hall! , and introduces no less than ten
personages-much the largest number that occurs in any of
Heywood's works. He thus has an opportunity of sketching
varied types, from the solemn and sententious Jupiter to his
'cryer,' the Vice, Mery-reporte, a bouncing self-confident rogue
with an ungovernably free tongue. Mery-reporte’s by-play, as
the characters are successively introduced, furnishes an element
of action lacking in the interludes discussed above. But, in spite
of its wider range, Wether belongs to the same type as Witty
and Witless and Love. It has no development of plot, but
presents, in turn, representative exponents of divergent views on
a debateable theme. Here it is the problem of the management
of the weather, which a 'parlyament' of gods and goddesses, with
the characteristic complaisance of a Tudor legislature, has ‘holly
surrendryd’ to the autocrat Jupiter, who, also in accord with
Tudor precedent, consults the opinion of “all maner people
before taking action. The 'gentylman' wants dry and windless
weather suitable for hunting; the merchant begs for variable,
but not violent, winds; the ranger of woods is anxious for 'good
rage of blustryng and blowynge. ' The water-miller wants rain
which will not fall while the wind blows; the wind-miller com-
plains that there is 'such revell of rayne' that it destroys the
wind. These two brethren of the craft are not content, like the
! other petitioners, with making their appeal to the god. They
have an altercation on the merits of wind and water, to which
trade rivalry gives a pungency and realism not often found in a
débat. There are high words, too, between the 'gentylwoman,'
who would banish the sun, lest it should ruin her complexion, and
the 'launder,' who wants it to shine always, in order to dry clothes
for him. Last, there runs in the Boy, the lest that can play,'
with his delightful plea:
All my pleasure is in catchynge of byrdes,
And makynge of snow-ballys and throwyng the same;
For the whyche purpose to have set in frame,
Wyth my godfather god I wolde fayne have spoken,
Desyrynge hym to have sent me by some token
Where I myghte have had great frost for my pytfallys,
And plente of snow to make my snow-ballys.
1 Cf. 11. 1026—8, where the boy says that he has heard that god almighty,' i. e.
Jupiter
Was com from heven, by his owne accorde,
This dyght to suppe here wyth my lorde.
## p. 95 (#119) #############################################
Heywood’s The Foure P. P.
95
This onys had, boyes lyvis be such as no man leddys.
0, to se my snow ballys light on my felowes heddys,
And to here the byrdes how they flycker theyr wynges
In the pytfale! I say yt passeth all thynges.
Jupiter, finally, declares that all the petitioners shall have in turn
the weather that they have asked for. And, in the didactic vein
of a lecturer on economics, he points the moral of the mutual
dependence of all classes :
There is no one craft can preserve man so,
But by other craftes, of necessyte,
He must have myche parte of his commodyte.
The first edition of The Play called the foure P. P. was not
published till more than ten years after Rastell's edition of Wether.
The presumption, therefore, is that, of the two plays, The foure
P. P. is the later though the internal evidence is inconclusive. It
contains a smaller and less diversified range of characters—the
“palmer, pardoner, potycary and pedler,' from whom it takes its
title; the structure is less compact, and the versification, which
consists almost throughout of couplets with four stresses in each
line, has not so much variety. On the other hand, the verve and
pungent humour of the most notable passages are unequalled by
Wether or any other of Heywood's undoubted interludes, and the
climax to the triangular duel which forms the main episode of The
foure P. P. is an effective piece of dramatic technique.
The opening wrangle between the palmer, the pardoner and
the 'potycary on the merits of their respective vocations is in
Heywood's characteristic manner. The entry of the light-hearted
pedler-a true fore-runner of Autolycus—with his well filled pack,
turns the talk into a more broadly humorous vein, ending in a
song. The newcomer is then asked to decide between the claims
of the three rivals, but he modestly declines to judge 'in maters
of weyght. As, however, he has some skill in lying, and, as lying
is their comen usage,' he offers to pronounce upon their rela-
tive merits in this respect. After some preliminary skirmishing,
in which the pardoner vaunts the virtues of his remarkable assort-
ment of relics, and the 'potycary those of his equally wonderful
collection of medicines, the pedler proposes that each shall tell a
tale as a test of his powers of falsification. Though these tales
are not organically related to the preceding dialogue, they give
Heywood an opportunity for the display of his remarkable narra-
tive faculty at its best. The’potycary's tale is coarse; but, regarded
from the point of view of a Munchausen romance, it is a capital
6
## p. 96 (#120) #############################################
96
Early English Comedy
piece of writing. It is far outdone, however, by the pardoner's
story of his visit to hell to rescue the soul of his friend, Margery
Coorson, who had died during his absence. No such masterpiece
of humorous narrative had appeared in England since Chaucer
ceased to write, though the grimly grotesque vein of the recital
is entirely Heywood's own. The description of the anniversary
festival of Lucifer's fall, when all the devils appeared in gala
dress :
Theyr hornes well-gylt, theyr clowes full clene,
Theyr taylles wellkempt, and, as I wene,
With sothery butter theyr bodyes anoynted;
the account of Lucifer's audience to the pardoner, with the inter-
change of courtesies, and the formal compact that Margery may
go free if the pardoner will undertake that 'there come no mo'
women to hell-all these are combined in a chiaroscuro treatment
unequalled of its kind till, in Byron's Vision of Judgment, it was
applied to a similar theme, with added touches of sublimity and
saeva indignatio. The pardoner's tale gives the palmer his chance.
He cannot understand
That women in hell such shrewes can be,
And here so gentyll, as farre as I se.
He has known five hundred thousand women;
Yet in all places where I have ben
Of all the women that I have sene,
I never sawe nor knewe in my consyens
Any one woman out of paciens.
Such an unheard-of statement startles rivals and judge alike into
involuntary exclamations:
'Por. By the masse, there is a great lye.
Pard. I never harde a greater, by our lady.
PED. A greater! nay, knowe ye any so great ?
The palmer, manifestly, is the victor, and the situation should have
been rounded off in a few lines. But the pedler spins it out by
the prolix manner of his adjudication, and by his final homily on
matters of conduct and faith.
Were Heywood's place in dramatic history to be determined
purely by his indisputable works, it would be matter of doubt
whether he had not chosen the wrong channel for his great gifts.
His narrative powers might have made him the last and most
brilliant of Chaucer's successors, while his services to the stage,
great as they were, would be limited by his inability to portray action.
But, if The pardoner and the frere and Johan Johan are placed
to his credit, the range of his achievement is materially widened.
## p. 97 (#121) #############################################
The Pardoner and the Frere
97
It must be allowed that both plays differ largely from Heywood's
acknowledged pieces in one respect. The latter all end, as has
been seen, upon an edifying note; but in the pardoner and
the frere and Johan Johan, scoundrels and sinners go off
triumphant. This, however, may be due to the influence of
French farce; while, in general conception of character, in handling
of metre and in peculiarities of vocabulary and nomenclaturel
there is close affinity between the two plays and Heywood's
dialogues and interludes, especially the foure P. P. The balance
of evidence is in favour of his authorship of the anonymous pieces.
The opening of The pardoner and the frere, the curate and
neybour Pratte, where the two worthies set forth their claims and
credentials, is strikingly parallel to that of the foure P. P. But
here, the pardoner, in opposition to the evangelical pretensions of
the frere, emphasises his papal commission to the utmost. And
the dialogue method reaches its culminating point of humorous
effectiveness in an amusing scene where, after each line of the
frere's charity sermon, his rival interjects an appeal to the congre-
gation to contribute to the restoration of the chapel of 'swete
saynte Leonarde,' and to earn the remission of sins promised by
the papal bull. This indirect process of recrimination is varied by
bouts of direct personal abuse, till the quarrel reaches its height
in a vigorous use of fists, not to speak of nails and teeth. At this
point, the parson of the parish enters with an imprecation on the
wranglers who are polluting his church, and who have only been
restrained from bloodshed by the lack of staves or edged tools.
While he deals with the frere, he calls in the help of the lay
arm, in the shape of 'neybour Prat,' to manage the pardoner, who
is also a layman. Prat promises his man a taste of the stocks,
while the parson seeks to hale the frere off to prison. It looks as
1 Some of these points have not been sufficiently noted. Thus, Heywood is fond
of alluding to unfamiliar saints and shrines. The locus classicus is in the palmer's
opening speech in The foure P. P. Among the shrines mentioned is the obscure one
of our Lady at Crome,' by whom Johan is found swearing in his opening speech.
Afterwards, Johan appeals to swete Saynt Dyryk,' and the priest mentions the shrine
of . Saynt Modwin,' which seems to have been at Burton-on-Trent. Two of the sham
relics exhibited by the pardoner in The foure P. P. , 'the great toe of the Trinite' and
of all Hallows the bless'd jaw bone' reappear (as Swoboda has noted) among the
stock-in-trade of his colleague in The pardoner and the frere. But, possibly, more
indicative of a single hand is the parallelism in the respective lists of the buttocke
bone of Pentecoste' and the 'arm of sweet Saint Sunday,' and of the eye-tooth of the
Great Turk, which prevents blindness, and the brayn pan' of 'Saynt Myghell,' a
preservative against headache. It is worth noting, too, that the rare word nyfuls,'
dzed in Wether, reappears in Johan Johan, and that the phrase “VII yeare,' for an
indefinite period of time, occurs in Wether, Johan Johan, and The pardoner and the frere.
E. L. v. CH, V.
7
## p. 98 (#122) #############################################
98
Early English Comedy
if the two knaves were going to get their deserts, when, by an
unexpected rally, they get the better of their captors, and go off
with all the honours of war, and an ominous hint of a return visit!
Chaucer had supplied some of the materials for the characters
of the pardoner and the frere, and there are also resemblances
between the play and the Farce nouvelle d'un Pardonneur, d'un
triacleur et d'une tavernière. In Johan Johan, the resemblances
to episodes in the Farce de Pernet qui va au vin are so
detailed that borrowing on the one side or the other is self-
evident? Apart from a number of verbal coincidences, the
singular situation of a husband being set to chafe wax while his
wife and her lover are making merry together can hardly have oc-
curred independently to two playwrights. The only extant edition
of Pernet qui va au vin dates from 1548, but it was then nouvelle-
ment imprimé, and it is probable that an earlier issue was
available for Heywood's use. If not, the French play must have
been indebted to the English, which is unlikely at this period.
The duped husband, Johan Johan, the central figure of the
piece, is admirably sketched. During his wife's absence, he boasts
loudly about the beating that he will give her; but, on her return,
he protests that he has been merely talking of beating 'stokfysshe
in Temmes Street' for a Lenten dish. He suspects, with only
too good reason, that Tyb's frequent visits to Sir Jhan, the priest,
have other than spiritual motives, but he unburdens himself only
in 'asides,' and he dare not refuse to carry an invitation to Sir
Jhan to come and share a 'pye. ' As he starts on his ungrateful
errand, he is repeatedly called back by his domineering partner
to do various domestic offices. And, when he returns with the
wily priest, who has accepted the invitation after well feigned
reluctance, Tyb has further orders for him. He has to fetch a
pail of water, but the pail has a 'clyfte, both large and wyde,'
which is not likely to have come by mere accident. So, while the
wife and the guest enjoy themselves, the master of the house has
to sit at the fire and melt wax to mend the hole.
As he rue-
fully mutters :
I chafe the wax-
And I chafe it so hard that my fyngers krakks;
And eke the smoke puttyth out my eyes two:
I burne my face, and ray my clothys also,
And yet I dare not say one word,
And they syt laughyng yender at the bord.
1 See Young, K. , 'Influence of French Farce,' etc. , pp. 102–9, and Pollard, A. W. ,
in Gayley, C. M. , R. E. C. p. 15.
## p. 99 (#123) #############################################
Calisto and Melebea
99
But, when the meal has been ended, and the two feasters, after
the 'recreacion' of some spicy stories by Sir Jhan, turn to making
mock of the wretched Johan, it is too much even for him. In a
sudden outburst of valour, born of despair, he rounds upon his
tormentors, gives them a drubbing and turns them out of doors-
though he hurries after them for fear of further misdoing in Sir
Jhan's chamber.
Assuming that Johan Johan and Witty and Witless are by the
same author, we have thus seen Heywood's advance from the
composition of abstract and prolix dialogue to that of tersely
written and realistic farce. In any case, with Johan Johan
English drama had come close to the confines of true comedy.
A still nearer approach, in more than one aspect, was made
by A new comodye in englysh in maner of an enterlude, generally
known, from its hero and heroine, as Calisto and Melebea. This
work was published by John Rastell, probably about 1530. It
was an adaptation of the earlier part of the Spanish dramatic
novel Celestina, issued, probably, first at Burgos in 1499, of which
Fernando de Rojas was the chief, if not the sole, author. Celestina
originally contained sixteen acts; but these were increased in 1502
to twenty-one.
