John Heywood was born, in 1497, perhaps at North Mims, in Hertfordshire, where afterwards he certainly had a home. He was opposed to Lutheranism; and his friendship for Sir Thomas More having brought him into the king’s favour, he retained it by his wit. His name first appeared in the King’s Book of Payments in 1515, when he had eight-pence a day for wages. In 1519 he was called a singer. In 1521 he had an annuity of ten marks as the king’s servant. In 1526 he was entered as “player of the king’s virginals,” and he held that office to the end of Henry VIII.’s reign. He was much liked by the Princess Mary, and in March, 1538, received forty shillings for playing an interlude with his children before her. It is to be inferred, therefore, that he directed a small company of interlude players. He remained at Court when Edward VI. was king, and under Queen Mary, for whom, when a young princess, he had shown a particular respect. He had composed, when she was eighteen, a poem in her praise. But on the accession of Elizabeth he went abroad, and died at Mechlin in 1575, in which year he wrote of himself to Burleigh as an old man of seventy-eight. Besides his interludes, John Heywood wrote six hundred epigrams.

  Works: “A Mery Play between the Pardoner and the Frere,” 1533 (anon.; only one copy known); “A Mery Play between Johan the Husband, Tyb the Wife, and Sir Jhan the Priest,” 1533 (anon.; only one copy known); “The Play of the Wether,” 1533; “The Play of Love” (1533); “Of Gentylnes and Nobylyte” (anon.; attrib. to Heywood) (1535); “The Four P. P.” (1545?); “A dialogue conteining the number in effect of all the proverbes in the Englishe tongue” (1549); “The Spider and the Flie,” 1556. Posthumous: “A Dialogue on Wit and Folly,” ed. F. W. Fairholt, 1846.

The Spider and the Fly

  Lucian and Apuleius wrote of an Asse, Themison in praise of the herbe Plantaine, Homere in commendation of Wine, Ephren in dispraise of Laughing, Orpheus and Hesiodus of Fumigations or Perfumes, Chrysippus of Colewortes, Phanias of Nettles, Messala made of everie severall letter of the A, B, C, a severall booke, Virgil of a Gnat, Ovid of a Nut, and Erasmus of the praise of follie, and Heywood, yet later, of the Spider and the Flie.

  He dealeth so profoundly, and beyond all measure of skill, that neither he himself that made it, neither anyone that readeth it, can reach unto the meaning thereof.

  It is a very long poem in the octavo stanza, containing 98 chapters. Perhaps there never was so dull, so tedious, and trifling an apologue: without fancy, meaning, or moral. A long tale of fictitious manners will always be tiresome, unless the design be burlesque: and then the ridiculous, arising from the contrast between the solemn and the light, must be ingeniously supported. Our author seems to have intended a fable on the burlesque construction: but we know not when he would be serious and when witty, whether he means to make the reader laugh, or to give him advice.

General

  Iohn Hoywood the Epigrammatist who for the myrth and quicknesse of his conceits more then for any good learning was in him came to be well benefited by the king.

  Heywood for his Proverbs and Epigrams is not yet put downe by any of our countrey, though one doth indeed come neare him, that graces him the more in saying he puts him downe.

  His comedies, most of which appeared before the year 1534, are destitute of plot, humour, or character, and give us no very high opinion of the festivity of this agreeable companion. They consist of low incident, and the language of ribaldry. But perfection must not be expected before its time. He is called our first writer of comedies. But those who say this, speak without determinate ideas, and confound comedies with moralities and interludes. We will allow, that he is among the first of our dramatists who drove the Bible from the stage, and introduced representations of familiar life and popular manners.

  His pieces, which may in some sense be compared to the mimes of Sophron, were but a succession of scenes, for the most part comic, but destitute of every thing like complication of plot, yet boldly sketched, lively, and teeming with popular wit, directed to matters of public or domestic interest, or existing characters, manners, and opinions.

  Warton and his followers have obscured a true genius for exuberant humor, keen irony, and exquisite ridicule, such as Rabelais and Swift would not have disdained, and have not always surpassed.

  It is clear, also, that Warton had never seen one of Heywood’s most humorous pieces; and he does not give him the credit he deserves as the inventor of a new species of theatrical entertainment, which, in the middle of the reign of Henry VIII., superseded both Miracle-plays and Moralities, and directly led the way to the introduction of genuine comedy.

  Though he was a professional jester, gaining his livelihood and taking his position in society as a recognised mirth-maker, he allowed no considerations of personal profit to cloud his conscience. He remained an Englishman to the backbone, loyal to his party and his religious convictions, outspoken in his condemnation of the superstitions which disgraced the Church of his adoption. This manliness of attitude, this freedom from time-service, this fearless exposure of the weak points in a creed to which he sacrificed his worldly interests, give a dignity to Heywood’s character, and prepossess us strongly in favour of his writings. Their tone, like that of the man, is homely, masculine, downright, and English, in the shrewdness of the wit, the soundness of the sense, and the jovial mirth which pervades each scene…. The “Four P’s,” which I propose to examine more closely, is an excellent comic dialogue. More than this it cannot claim to be; for it has no intrigue, and aims at the exhibition of characters by contrast and collocation, not by action. Its motive is a witty situation, and its dénouement is a single humorous saying. Thus this Interlude has not the proportions of a play, although its dialogue exhibits far more life, variety, and spirit than many later and more elaborate creations of the English stage. It is written in pure vernacular, terse and racy if rude, and undefiled by classical pedantry or Italianising affectation. Heywood, here as elsewhere, reminds us of Chaucer without his singing robes. As Charles Lamb called his namesake Thomas Heywood a prose Shakspere, so might we style John Heywood a prose Chaucer. The humour which enchants us in the “Canterbury Tales,” and which we claim as specifically English, emerges in Heywood’s dialogue, less concentrated and blent with neither pathos nor poetic fancy, yet still indubitably of the genuine sort.

  John Heywood still represented for England, as Hans Sachs did for mediæval Germany, the mediæval disputation of abstractions, though, if it is rightly assigned to him, he also produced a more characteristic piece of genuine human conversation in the “Gentylnes and Nobility,” where a Merchant, a Knight and a Plowman dispute “Who is a very gentleman?”

  His works may be said to mark an epoch in the history of the drama. Inclination and a knowledge of his own powers wisely determined him to limit himself, to concentrate his faculties. The era in which he lived had gropingly attempted to produce dramas of various kinds; and Heywood, by taking up such as were best suited to his ability, and by developing them after his own fashion, threw new life into forms of mediæval dramatic poetry that had almost become extinct…. Heywood did not actually create English comedy, but certainly many of its essential elements. He prepared the way for it much in the same way as the commedia dell’arte served as the first stage to Molière’s art. Successful delineation of character (even though not carried to any great depth), an inexhaustible fund of whimsical ideas, dramatic animation, the development of an effective though drastic species of comicality,—these are the qualities we specially value in Heywood’s works…. The earlier blossoms of English Comedy cannot compete with his modest one-act plays in freshness of life and vigour. In their own period, and in their own way, they stand unrivalled.

  “The Four P’s,” is the last typical utterance on the stage of the Pre-Renaissance spirit in this country. It shows absolutely no trace of foreign influence, and is English to the core alike in its excellences and its faults. Its dialogue is pungent and nervous in a high degree; its sketches of character are firm and effective; its mixture of good sense, humour, and piety is singularly pleasing. But it lacks the distinctive mark of the higher drama, for in spite of the neatness of the dénouement, there is nothing that can seriously be called a plot. Many of the features that go to make a first-rate comedy are present, but we miss one that is essential—the constructive faculty. This was a gift almost entirely withheld from the mediaeval playwrights, and in his lack of it Heywood proves himself a late-born son of the era which produced the “Miracle” and the “Morality.”