=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.
="Play of the Wether": Early Editions and the Present Text.=--At the
time I write, the _Play of the Wether_ has not been reprinted since
the sixteenth century. Its bibliography has been rather confused by
the existence of two texts of it, one at St. John's College, Oxford,
the other at the University Library, Cambridge, each wanting the last
leaf, containing in the one case twenty, and in the other sixteen,
lines of the text and the colophon with the printer's name. The
only perfect copy hitherto generally known is that preserved at the
Bodleian Library, which belongs to an edition "Imprinted at London in
Paules Churchyearde, at the Sygne of the Sunne, by Anthonie Kytson"
whose career as a publisher seems to have been comprised within the
years 1549 and 1579. Of this as the only complete edition I then knew
I made my first transcript, though subsequent collation showed that
the imperfect edition at St. John's College contained many better
readings and an earlier spelling, while the copy at the University
Library, Cambridge (sometimes, though I think erroneously, attributed
to the press of Robert Wyer), belonged to an intermediate edition.
The registration by the Bibliographical Society in its _Hand-lists
of English Printers_, 1501-1556, of the copy of an edition of 1533,
printed by William Rastell, in the Pepys Collection at Magdalene
College, Cambridge, sent me to Cambridge for a new transcript. On
examination, the Magdalene edition proved to be identical with that
at St. John's College, Oxford, which had previously been conjecturally
assigned to Rastell, perhaps by some one who had seen it before the
last leaf disappeared. In reproducing Rastell's text I have not
thought it necessary to print my collation of the later editions, as
it is clear that the unidentified edition at the University Library,
Cambridge (U. L. C.), was printed from Rastell's, and Kitson's from
this. The printer of the U. L. C. edition introduced some errors into
his text, most of which Kitson copied: e.g. _hote_ for _hore_ in l.
38, omission of second _so_ in l. 68, and of second _as_ in l. 72,
_name_ for _maner_ in l. 115, _or_ for _of_ in l. 357, _we_ for _I_
in l. 427, _plumyng_ for _plumpyng_ in l. 657, _thynges_ for _thynge_
in l. 660, _showryng_ for _skowryng_ in l. 661, _ye_ for _yt_ in l.
699, _and_ for _all_ in l. 705, _belyke_ for _be leak[e]y_ in l. 800;
though he corrected a few: e.g. _pale_ for _dale_ in l. 277. On the
other hand, Kitson introduced some sixty or seventy errors of his
own, such as _creatour_ for _creature_ in l. 5, _well_ for _we_ in l.
21, _myngled_ for _mynglynge_ in l. 144, _mery_ for _mary_ in l. 366,
_beseched_ for _besecheth_ in l. 347, _pycked_ for _prycked_ in l. 467,
_bodily_ for _boldely_ in l. 470, _solyter_ for _solycyter_ in l. 496,
etc. As these variations are obviously misprints and nothing more, it
would have been pedantic to record them in full, and these samples
will doubtless suffice. The following title-page is a representation,
not a reproduction, of the original. There is no running head-line in
Rastell's text.