Cynicism and Hope

This chapter offers a new reading of this powerful humanist interlude. It argues for Heywood’s authorship in collaboration with his father-in-law John Rastell, who also printed the play. It reads the play in the context of humanist debates about the injustices of contemporary society, and demonstrates that the epilogue effectively reverses the pessimism about the prospects of enacting thoroughgoing reform that characterizes the latter parts of the play. Setting the play in the context of the fall of Wolsey, the summoning of the Reformation Parliament, and the elevation of More to the chancellorship, it argues that the play was written and revised over the autumn of 1529, reflecting the newfound optimism about social reform generated in those months.

Origins and Early Years

This chapter sketches what is known of Heywood’s early life and career, taking him from Coventry in the early 1500s to the royal household in the 1520s, setting out both what is known about these early years and what is not. It offers close readings of two short interludes which it is suggested were produced for performance within the humanist circle around John Rastell and Thomas More, possibly on Rastell’s newly built domestic stage at his house in Finsbury Fields. It identifies elements of these early plays that would become characteristic of Heywood’s later dramaturgy, with its subtle, innovative approach to audience engagement.

Early English Protestantism and Renaissance Poetics: The Charge is Committing Fiction in the Matter of Rastell v. Frith

The debate between John Rastell and John Frith constitutes a previously unrecognized ancestor to Stephen Gosson's attack on poetry and Sir Philip Sidney's (problematic) defense of it. Although the nominal aim of Rastell's A Newe Boke of Purgatorye and Frith's A Disputation of Purgatory is theological disputation, in fact these texts constitute an implicit defense of and attack on fictions. Consequently, they form an important background for the Elizabethan and Jacobean "war against poetry."