John Heywood was born about 1497 (R. Johnson 1970). By the 1520s he had established himself at the court of Henry VIII as a playwright, poet, actor, and producer. Over the next forty years until the succession of Elizabeth I, Heywood was at the centre of Tudor court culture. Despite this, his place in accounts of the literary history of the sixteenth century has invariably been small and insignificant. This is largely because his work has been traditionally placed on the margins of a teleological narrative of literary change whose broad outlines have remained unchanged since C. S. Lewis condemned the mid-Tudor period as the ‘Drab Age’ of literature. Indeed Lewis singled out Heywood for condemnation because not only did Heywood, in Lewis’s eyes, write drab poetry: he chose to do so (1954: 145-6). This was for Lewis the ultimate crime. It is, however, not only Heywood’s poetry that has been largely neglected by literary historians; Heywood’s status as a dramatist has suffered owing to his place in the rather confused narrative that theatre historians tell of the development of English drama between the medieval period and the 1590s. In this narrative the debate over court drama, and the rather technical discussion of its status, have had the effect of underplaying the complexity of Heywood’s Henrician drama. This chapter discusses the nature of the Henrician court and its drama before focusing in detail on a number of Heywood’s plays, including Johan Johan, The Pardoner and
This chapter could not have been completed without support from the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
The Friar, The Four PP, and The Play of the Weather, to illustrate the sophistication— dramatic, political, and religious—of Heywoodian court drama.
World History
