The Malone Society Publications

Dr Peter Happé comments on the John John the Husband , Tyb his Wife and Sir John the Priest, the Malone Society's Featured Volume for this month .

Substantially this play is a translation of the anonymous Farce du Pasté printed in France in about 1500. The identification of this source by T.W.Craik has left us with two matters of outstanding interest: the changes Heywood made to his original and the possible reasons for his selection of this source and the subsequent printing of the play in February 1533 by his brother-in-law, Wiliam Rastell, a fellow Catholic. Heywood follows his source and the promptings within it very closely. He derived therefore a lively plot which exposes the weakness of the husband who is faced with the adultery of his wife with the parish priest. Though the mode of the play is farce, which means that human feeling such as sympathy might be at a minimum, the rich verbal comedy embodying the mounting frustration of John John as the adulterous couple enjoy their 'pie' is a very effective structural feature leading to an outburst in which Heywood carefully modifies the husband's feelings. Taking hints from the original Heywood develops the double entendres over the candle and the split in the bucket to the extent that the readers or the audience must come to wonder whether innuendo can ever be at an end. He does this using specifically English phrases with much ingenuity.
But the wider context is the political and religious events of the early 1530s including Henry VIII's marriage to Anne Boleyn and the humanist reaction to his consequent split from Rome. The play was printed at the point when Anne was pregnant and the secret marriage had taken place and Heywood cleverly links this with an Erasmian critique of saints, some of which he adds to his source, or changes from French to specifically English ones. One of these is Saint Modwin whose image at Burton-on-Trent was worshipped by devout pregnant women. The satire also extends to Sir John the lecherous priest in a convention which goes back to medieval literature, and to the occurrence of miracles, a feature which Heywood cleverly associates with miraculously short pregnancies. Heywood's exploitation of this material may also be related to the predicament of Sir Thomas More, his uncle by marriage, who had resigned the Chancellorship in May 1532 and was now engaged in vigorous anti-Protestant controversy. Heywood's political and religious stance, cleverly masked by his wordplay, was never as extreme as More's and he sought in this play to establish a way of restraining the excess of commitment in public affairs. His characteristic mode of comment is always humorously oblique and to that extent optimistically persuasive. But poor John John, at the end, is not sure that he has put a stop to his wife's adultery.

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