Chapter X: SHAKESPEARE AS A COMIC DRAMATIST. Edward Dowden (5)

To the romance of wonder, saints' plays, legends, and biblical stories had purveyed from early times. From 1570 on the narrative of chivalry and adventure, of which shadowy lineaments had already appeared in one or two miracle plays and in the interludes of Wit and Science, began to gather to itself kindred elements of romantic interest, and to occupy the stage with such plays as _Common Conditions_, written perhaps between 1572 and 1576, and _Sir Clyomon and Sir Clamydes_, written perhaps as early,--dramas of love, fable, and adventure, absolutely free from didactic purpose. At the same time still another variety of romantic comedy, unhampered by the trammels of instructive intent, but dealing essentially in domestic intrigue, kept alive the method of _The Supposes_. This variety was represented by _The Bugbears_, between 1561 and 1584, and _The Two Italian Gentlemen_ (S. R. 1584), which, based upon Italian models, availed themselves on the one hand of a burlesque parody of the magical, and on the other of genuine English mirth. The latter indeed added something of the 'humours' element soon to be exploited by Porter, Chapman, and Jonson. Beside these dramas, there sprang into notice a certain half-moral, half-romantic kind of play which, availing itself of the mould of the interlude, fused therein the materials of the chivalrous, the magical, and the passionate, and produced certain anomalous comedies of great popularity between the year 1580 and the end of the century. The best of these "pleasant and stately morals" are: _The Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune_, _The Three Ladies of London_, _The Three Lordes and Three Ladies of London_.

While Collier thinks that, in point of positive dramatic interest, the _Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune_ requires but brief notice, Dr. Ward holds that the beginnings of romantic comedy were foreshadowed by the play.[87] It is, in fact, both dramatically and historically, one of the most important productions of its date. It was printed in 1589, but played, perhaps, as early as 1582. Mr. Fleay has assigned it to Kyd, but I do not see sufficient reason for the attribution; if we must find an author for it, Robert Wilson's claims might be urged. The _Rare Triumphs_ affords an excellent instance of the fusion of moral and romance. In the Induction, Love and Fortune dispute concerning their respective influence in the affairs of mankind. By mutual agreement the _debat_ seeks its solution in a practical demonstration of the issues involved. And so we find our intellectual as well as emotional interest enlisted in the chances of an Italian story of love, adventure, and magic. Within a moral interlude of classical and mythological origin we discover a romantic comedy. The influence of the supernatural not merely envelops, but permeates the whole; the Acts present the destinies of the mortals of the inner play, the inter-acts the continued intervention of the immortals of the outer. The spectacular effect is, moreover, heightened by the introduction of dumb shows, after the fashion of the masque. In dramatic interest proper few romantic fables of 1582 can compare with the inner story: the love of Hermione for Fidelia, the duel between Hermione and Fidelia's brother, the exile of the lover and his retirement to the cave of his unknown father, the hermit Bomelio; Bomelio's attempt to right matters by magic, the destruction of his necromantic books, his madness, his recovery, and the resolution of difficulties through the instrumentality of the heroine. Such a fable is anything but silly and meagre, as Collier would have it, especially when we consider its conjunction with the humorous and vivid. In the outer play the clown is Vulcan, at whose call Jupiter mediates, "like an honest man in the parish," between the disputatious goddesses. In the inner play Penulo the parasite and Lentulo the clown, though neither of them a Vice, supply the comic delectations of the rôle. The disguise of Bomelio as physician, his dialect, his misfortune and raving, are excellently contrived and conducted. In at least half a dozen particulars one may detect æsthetic possibilities later to be matured in more than one Shakespearian play: foreshadowings of plot and principal actors, as in _The Tempest_; foreshadowings of minor characters like Dr. Caius, or like the Francis of _1 Henry IV_. The play is, in brief, refreshing; the humour, substantial and English; the language, conversational, dramatic, sometimes in prose and then excellent. The versification, however, is of that stiffer quality which warrants Mr. Fleay's conjecture of 1582, or thereabout, as the date of composition.

The attempt to enliven the "old moral" by an infusion of passion and intrigue, and to parade it in the trappings of romance, across the background of contemporary English life and manners, is what distinguishes Robert Wilson's "right excellent and famous Comœdy called the _Three Ladies of London_," printed 1584, and its sequel, _The Pleasant and Stately Morall of the Three Lordes and Three Ladies of London_, registered in 1588. Of these plays, the latter trades in pomp and chivalry; the earlier in something like the motives of romantic interest. "The acuteness and political subtlety evinced in several of the scenes of the _Three Ladies_" have been justly commended by Collier, who points with careful attention also to "the severity of the author's satirical touch, his amusing illustrations of manners, his exposure of the tricks of foreign merchants, and the humour and drollery which he has thrown into his principal comic personage." This is Simplicity, the fool or clown, droll, indifferent, honest, and by no means so simple as he appears: a descendant of the historical Will Summer, a forerunner of the Dogberrys and Malaprops, and the elder brother of an Honesty of another play, _A Knack to Know a Knave_, in which the same author probably had a hand. Standing over against three belated specimens of the Vice, Simplicity unites the shrewdness, manners, and humour of that personage--but in superior quality--with the prudence, the penetration, and the conception of honour peculiar to the professional jester. He also plays a vital part in the main action, and is worthy to be regarded as one of the best clowns, if not the best, in the history of the moral interlude. His forthright utterances in the _Three Ladies_ and his easy and witty prose in the sequel mark him for a model likely to have influenced the younger dramatists of the day. The minor plot-interest of the honest Jew, Gerontus, the rascally Christian, Mercatore, and the Judge, is significant, not only as the reverse of the conception dramatized in the _Jew of Malta_ and the _Merchant of Venice_, but as, with one exception, the earliest elaboration of the motif that was to become prominent in the drama of the next few years. Qualities romantic and real invest the career of the three Ladies; and the characterization of the numerous minor personages is both subtle and suitable to their different classes and interests.

Although the _Three Lordes and Ladies_, one of the earliest sequels in the history of English drama, is "more of a moral" than its predecessor and makes no improvement in plot-structure, it is of importance fully equal. For what it lacks in passion and romance is more than counterbalanced by technical qualities--the blank verse, the fluent prose, the wit of Simplicity and the pages, the scenic display, the variety of incidents, and the portrayal of manners. If we consider the definite transition from abstractions to social and individual traits of character in this play and the preceding,--the multi-fold impersonation of worldly wisdom, fraud, and shoddy, one might say the resolution of the rôle of Vice into its component specialties; the corresponding offset of all these by ensamples of virtuous living, but still human; and the attendant _troupe_ of more obvious 'humours,' Simplicity and the pages, Painful Penury, Diligence, and the rest,--it will be evident that these plays of Robert Wilson are the merging of moral interlude in romantic and social comedy. On this account I cannot agree with Dr. Ward,[88] who says that in construction and conception they mark no advance whatever upon the older moralities. I think they mark a significant advance. In them the moral has arrived at a consciousness of the demands of art; and, attempting to fulfil its possibilities, it acquires body, spirit, and _bouquet_, even though, in the moment of fermentation, it bursts the bottle. Still we must remember that we have now reached a date, 1588-90, by which much of the best work of Lyly, Marlowe, Peele, and Greene had already been produced, and we must, therefore, not attribute to Wilson an importance greater than that of an industrious and inventive contemporary, hospitable to ideas, but essentially conservative in practice. He is at once "father of interludes," as interludes then were regarded, and an intermediary between the interlude of moral abstractions and the comedy of humours. He appears, also, to have played so lively a part in the dramatic history of his day that Mr. Fleay is justified in calling this period by his name; and, therefore, a few further words concerning him and other plays which he seems to have written might well be said here, but we must reserve them for another occasion.

=14. Conclusion=

With but one or two exceptions the plays which we have so far passed in review fail in some respect or other of the plot that makes a comedy. A plot that is argumentative, that is a ratiocination or _exemplum_ conducted by abstractions, is not sufficient to constitute comedy, though it may contribute to its development a unity of interest, a spiritual sequence; nor are sporadic situations and incidents sufficient, though humorously conceived and executed; nor glimpses of types, characters or manners, nor hints of passion, nor satiric speeches and dialogues, though artistically dramatized, true, appropriate, and witty. None of these constitutes comedy. Comedy demands action vitalized by a plot that is capable of revealing the social significance of the individual: an action of sufficient scope and reality to display the spirit of society in individual types and manners, or in character and sentiment; a plot sufficiently urgent to interest us, not only in the phenomena, in the concomitants, of every deed, but in its motive and inherent passion. The comedy of external life may present, by means of typical individuals and conventional manners, a reflex of that which is actual, or a criticism of it; and such a play will be realistic or satirical. The comedy of the inner life, on the other hand, since it reveals the characteristics of humanity in the heat and moment of passion, may present a vision of the ideal made concrete; it is therefore at once interpretative, constructive, and romantic. These two kinds of comedy are alike in that they display the triumph of freedom when regulated by common sense, the adjustment of the individual to society. But as they vary in function and result, so these kinds of comedy differ in the quality of action which each may present. The play of convention and manners can use only the externals of action, actions that neither strike deep nor spring from the depths, for such a play aims to reproduce appearances or merely to re-create them--to criticise and correct rather than construct. The play of character and passion, not the so-called realistic, but idealistic, selects for presentation actions whose springs are in the inner life; and that is because it would present men and women as they should be,--individuals widening the social, pressing toward the ideal, not by overstepping that which is conventional, but by informing it with new meaning and pushing back its limits. Comedy, therefore, is in the plot, and the plot must proceed from the wisdom essential to a comic view of life: acceptance of the social environment as it appears to be, because one believes in society as it should be. The dramatist, his plot and his characters, are the exponents of common sense and freedom, of the light of life as it is with the sweetness of life as it may be. Common sense, however, may become prosaic, or liberty licentious; and it is in preventing such extremes that wit and humour perform their function. Neither of these can alone make a comedy, but one of them may sometimes save it. Both should certainly characterize it. But for the former, the drama of appearances might be caricature, abuse, horse-play, or homily; but for the latter, romantic comedy would be bathos. No amount of wit, however, could save a play that did not possess a significant sequence of material and event. Though the booths of Bartholomew Fair agitate the diaphragm, they do not constitute comedy. Without plot the lunges of wit lack point; and as for the plotless play of passion, it ends in Bedlam, whence all the humour in the world cannot redeem it.

It was a step forward when allegory made way for concrete characters and manners, and the motives born of social intercourse; a further step when the dramatist ceased instructing and sought to amuse. But the final step implied the still rarer ability to create something integral and critical in one, something that should act what life means, and so unconsciously demonstrate that it is purposive, and more hopeful and amusing than we thought. Naturally enough, our earlier comic plots, when they were escaping from the symbolic, lacked sometimes in significance, and sometimes in sequence. The fables of _Roister Doister_ and _Gammer Gurton_ mark an advance in technical construction; but they do not escape the farcical, for their subjects are trivial. There were likewise many experiments to be made in the materials of intrigue and passion before _Damon and Pithias_ and _The Supposes_ could fulfil, even in part, the requirements of significant romance. And when, at last, the play with a plot had come to its own, it was long before it attained wisdom to suffuse the appearances of life with their illuminating characteristic, and imagination to colour the course of characteristic events.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] In _The Academy_, January 11, 1890.

[2] Manly, _Specimens of the Pre-Shakespearean Drama_, vol. I., p. xxvii; for examples of dramatic tropes from the _Regularis Concordia Monachorum_ and the Winchester troper, see pp. xix-xxvi.

[3] _Non novo quidem instituto, sed de consuetudine_, etc., says _Bulæus, Hist. Univ., Par._ II., 226 (edit. 1665); Collier, _English Dramatic Poetry, and Annals of the Stage_, I. 14.

[4] In his _Lives of the Abbots of St. Albans_.

[5] In the _Household Book_, Henry VII.; Collier, _Hist._, vol. I, p. 53 n.

[6] _Gesch. des neueren Dramas_, I. 141.

[7] See Wright's _Early Mysteries_, etc., Klein's _Geschichte des Dramas_, III. 638 _et seq._, Creizenach, _Gesch. d. n. Dramas_, I. 37 _et seq._ Quadrio speaks in his _Storia_, III. ii. 52, of a Pietro Babyone, an Englishman, who, according to Bale, wrote a Latin comedy in verse, _c._ 1366.

[8] Ward, I. 52.

[9] Creizenach, I. 101.

[10] Historians of the Church of York, Rolls Series, No. 71, i. 328. Quoted by A. F. Leach in _Some English Plays and Players_, Furnivall Miscellany, p. 206.

[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.

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

To passe the tyme in thys without offence
Was the cause why the maker dyd make it,
And so we humbly beseche you take it,

says the Pedler:--and in substituting stories and a lighter form of argument for the more formal disputation of the _Dyaloge of Wit and Folly_ and the _Play of Love_ it comes a little nearer to the modern conception of comedy, and may be thought to have deserved the success which it is said to have achieved.

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

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

Worshypfull maysters ye shall understand
That Pope Leo the X hath graunted with his hand,
And by his bulls confyrmed under lede,
To all maner people, bothe quycke and dede,
Ten thousand yeres & as many lentes of pardon, etc.

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

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

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

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