Part 11

[11] In Supp. Dods. _Old Plays_, Introd. to _Chester Plays_, ix.; _Latin Stories_, p. 100.

[12] _An Answer to a Certain Libel, &c._, in Collier, II. 73.

[13] As early as 1304 in Hamburg: Meyer, _Gesch. d. hamburg. Schul- und Unterrichtswesens im Mittelalter_, S. 197: cited in Creizenach, I. 391.

[14] The Shearmen and Taylors' Pageant, from the _Annunciation_ to the _Flight into Egypt_ (Ms., 1533), and the Weavers' Pageant of the _Presentation in the Temple_.

[15] V. XXVI., XXVIII., XXIX., XXX., XXXI., XXXIII.; probably XXXII. Perhaps this playwright (if we may use the singular) rewrote XXXIV. I think he remodelled XXXV. and XXXVI., in the old metres.

[16] XXVI., _The Conspiracy_, and IX., _Noah_,--abababab⁴cdcccd³.

[17] XXXVI., _The Mortificacio_,--ababbcbc³d¹eee²d³. VII., _The Cayme_,--ababbc⁴d¹bcc⁴d².

[18] Y. XI., W. VIII.; Y. XXII., W. XVIII.; Y. XXXVII., W. XXV.; Y. XXXVIII., W. XXVI.; Y. XLVIII., W. XXX. For particulars see Miss Lucy Toulmin Smith, Pollard, Hohlfeld's _Die Altenglischen Kollektivmisterien_, Anglia XI.

[19] Such as stanza 57 in Wakefield XXIX. _Ascension_, and 97-100 in Wakefield XX. _Conspiracy_.

[20] Cf. stanzas 1 to 4 with those that follow in Wakefield XXII., _Fflagellacio_; and stanza 6 of Wakefield XXIV. with those that precede it; and stanza 58 of Wakefield XXIX. with stanza 57.

[21] XXX. _Judicium_, stanzas 16 to 48, 68 to 76.

[22] XVI. _Herod_.

[23] XX. _a, Conspiracy_.

[24] Stanza 57 might just as well be arranged like stanza 58.

[25] III., XII., XIII., XXI.

[26] Minor passages in the nine-line stanza are II., 35, 36; XXIV., 1-5, 56-59; XXVII., 4 Passages in a closely similar stanza are XXII., 1-4; XXIII., 2; XXVII., 30.

[27] _The Towneley Plays_, Introd., p. xxii.

[28] _Die englischen Mysterien, Jahrb. rom. u. eng. Lit._, I. 153.

[29] Ten Brink, _Eng. Lit._ II: i. 306.

[30] I do not forget that belated _Tobias_ at Lincoln, 1564-66, nor the _Godly Queen Hester_ of 1561; but they have nothing to do with the case.

[31] Rel. _Antiq._ II. 43.

[32] _St. Katharine_ (Dunstable _c._ 1100, Coventry, 1490); _St. George_ (1415 and later); _St. Laurence_ (Lincoln, 1441); _St. Susanna_ (Lincoln, 1447); _St. Clara_ (Lincoln, 1455); _St. Edward_ (Coventry, 1456 and later); _St. Christian_ (Coventry, 1504); _St. Christina_ (Bethersden in Kent, 1522); _Sts. Crispin and Crispinian_ (Dublin, 1528); _St. Olave_ (London, 1557). Some of these were church plays, like the _St. Olave_; some, like the _St. Katharine_, were school plays; some, craft plays, like the _St. Crispin_. It is hard sometimes to distinguish between the play and the mumming or the mute pageant; to the dumb show may be assigned some of the _St. Georges_ and the pageants of Fabyan, Sebastian, and Botulf, displayed, in 1564, by the religious gild of Holy Trinity (St. Botolph without Aldersgate). For some conception of the frequency and vitality of such shows one need only turn to Hone, Stow's _Survey_, the _Records of Aberdeen_, Toulmin Smith's _English Gilds_, the _History of Dublin_, Davidson's _English Mystery Plays_, and other books of this kind.

[33] German ballads on the subject in 1337 and 1478. A case similar to the material of this drama is assigned to 1478 in Train's _Gesch. d. Juden in Regensburg_, pp. 116-117.

[34] Child, _English and Scotch Popular Ballads_, vol. III., pp. 44, 90, 127, 114.

[35] In his introduction, _Contributions to Early English Popular Literature_, London, 1849, privately printed.

[36] Warton, _H. E. P._, vol. II., p. 72.

[37] Repr. in Manly's _Specimens_; the former from _Notes and Queries_, Fifth Series, II. 503-505; the latter from Kelly's _Notices of Leicester_.

[38] Halliwell's _Contribution to E. Engl. Lit._

[39] British Museum, Add. Mss. 33,418.

[40] Repr. Manly, _Specimens_ from _Folk Lore Journal_, VII. 338-353.

[41] Stow speaks of mummers, "with black visors, not amiable, as if legates from some foreign prince."

[42] Cf. "Two balls (i.e. _bulls_) from _yonder mountain_ have _laid me_ quite _low_," with _Golden Legend_, vol. IV., p. 103, Temple Classics ed. There is no such close similarity in the language of the Early South English Legendary, Laud Ms., Seint Ieme, and Seint George (Horstmann, Ed. E.E.T.S., 1887).

[43] _Schauspiele d. engl. Komödianten_, Einl. XCIV.

[44] L. W. Cushman, _The Devil and the Vice_, Halle a. S., 1900.

[45] I remember only Herod and Antichrist outside of the Digby plays and of the Cornwall cycle (where the devils act as chorus and carry off everything in sight), and the souls of those already damned who are claimed by the devils of the Towneley.

[46] Whether the Rewfyn and Leyon of the Co. were Devils, I have my doubts.

[47] Furnivall, _Digby Plays_, p. 43; ten Brink, _Gesch. engl. Lit._, II. 320, and Sharp's _Dissertation on the Co. Mysteries_, 1825.

[48] In the _Nigromansir_, and the _Shipwrights' Play_ of Newcastle.

[49] Cushman, p. 66.

[50] Furnivall's ed., Pt. II. 510, 517, 531, 536, 541.

[51] _Wisdom_, _Disobedient Child_.

[52] _Perseverance_, _Mankynd_, _Mary Magdalene_, _Nigromansir_, _Juventus_, _Like_, _Conflict of Conscience_, _Money_.

[53] _Mankynd_, _Mary Magdalene_, _Juventus_, and _Like_.

[54] _The Witt and Wisdome_, _King Cambyses_, _Like_, and _Horestes_.

[55] _Gesch. d. engl. Dramas_, II., p. 4.

[56] _English Writers_, VII., p. 182.

[57] _Cambyses_; cf. Roister Doister's array.

[58] _Play of Love_; cf. the braggart Crackstone in _Two Ital. Gent._, much later.

[59] In _Wisdom_ he may be regarded as Vice and Devil (Lucifer) rolled into one; in _Everyman_ he is probably represented by the friends who desert the hero in time of need; in the _Disobedient Child_ he is concrete as the prodigal son.

[60] Furnivall, _Digby Plays_, Forewords, xiii.

[61] Never 'Morality' to our ancestors; that is a futile borrowing from the French.

[62] _Wisdom_ has only Lucifer; _Nature_ has only Sensuality and minor Vices; _Pride of Life_ had Devils in all probability, but no Vice, for Mirth is not one; _Everyman_ has neither.

[63] I see no reason for assuming with Professor Brandl (_Quellen u. Forschungen_, XXVIII.) that the loss of the navy bound for Ireland, II. 336-363, has reference to the destruction of the _Regent_ by the French, 1512.

[64] For some of these see Quadrio, _Della Storia e della Ragione d'ogni Poesia_, Vol. III., Lib. II., 53 _et seq._

[65] For the substance of this paragraph see the histories of Klein, Herford, and Creizenach.

[66] _E. Dr. Po._, I. 107, from Gibson's Accounts.

[67] Warton, _H. Eng. Po._ (1871), IV. 323.

[68] Herford, _Lit. Rel._, pp. 107-108.

[69] _History of the Stage_, p. 64.

[70] Brandl, _Quellen_, LXII.; cf. Herford, _Lit. Rel._, p. 156. To trace the suggestion of the model of Barnabas to the _Studentes_ of Stymmelius, 1549, is, I think, absurd. It is strange that Creizenach, _Gesch. d. neu. Dr._, I. 470, should assert, in face of the _Nice Wanton_ and _The Glasse of Government_, that no English 'moral' avails itself of _two_ representatives of the human race--a good and an evil.

[71] Brandl, _Quellen_, LXXIII.; and Herford, _Lit. Rel._

[72] _Lit. Rel._, p. 135.

[73] _The English Chronicle Play._

[74] Hawkins, _Engl. Drama_, I. 145, quotes a passage from one of Latimer's sermons in the presence of Edward VI., which uses the story of "drave me aboute the toune with a puddynge," referred to in _Lusty Juventus_.

[75] _The Marriage of Wit and Wisdome._

[76] See below, p. 96.

[77] See below, p. 198. 'Trueman' in the _Historia Histrionica_ (pr. 1699) thinks it was "writ in the reign of K. Edw. VI."

[78] Bodl. Libr., _Malone_ 172, "second impression," London, 1661; reprinted by F. E. Schelling, Publ. Mod. Lang. Asso., 1900.

[79] _Quellen u. Forschungen._

[80] Not J. Rychardes, as Mr. Fleay has it, _Hist. Stage_, p. 58.

[81] Herford, _Lit. Rel._, p. 156.

[82] Unique original, pub. by Pickerynge and Hacket, 1561, in Duke of Devonshire's Libr., Chatsworth; repr. by Grosart, _Fuller Worthies Libr._, vol. IV., _Miscellanies_, 1873.

[83] As _Hester and Abasuerus_, 1594. I see no reason for attributing the authorship, with Mr. Fleay, to R. Edwardes.

[84] The relation of _The Taming of the Shrew_ to this play is well known.

[85] _Hist. St._, p. 66.

[86] Brit. Mus. c. 34, g; Collier's _Illustr. O. Engl. Lit._, II. 2; Brandl's _Quellen_.

[87] Collier, _E. Dram Po._, II. 432; and Ward, _Hist. E. Dr. Lit._, I. 264.

[88] _Hist. E. Dr. Lit._, I. 141.

_John Heywood_

THE PLAY OF THE WETHER

_and_

A MERY PLAY BETWENE JOHAN JOHAN, THE HUSBANDE TYB, HIS WIFE, &c.

_Edited with Critical Essay and Notes by Alfred W. Pollard, M.A., St. John's College, Oxford_

CRITICAL ESSAY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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