Book review: John Heywood: Comedy and Survival in Tudor England by Greg Walker

Abstract

In this first, in-depth biography of John Heywood, Tudor poet, playwright and royal servant under Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary, and Elizabeth I, Greg Walker approaches his subject from a well-established expertise in Tudor politics and Tudor literature, more especially drama. This twofold interest continues to evidence Walker’s critical sensitivities which reach back to his Plays of Persuasion, published in 1991, with intermediary landmarks such asWriting under Tyranny (2005) and The Oxford Anthology of Tudor Drama (2014). Walker’s dual approach is admirably suited to this biography, demonstrating how under the Tudors, court plays were political plays, not merely because they dealt with politics, but because they were themselves political acts. This was a period when drama mattered. These demonstrations are well worth underlining, as court or élite drama tends to be understood as light, or frivolous entertainment. Things are in fact different; the predominance of pedagogy and the use of rhetoric, inherited from medieval and humanist culture, provide keys to understand Walker’s subtitle, ‘Comedy and survival in Tudor England’. What Walker suggests by the use of that subtitle is the central part played by politics in Tudor times, a point too often ignored in literary studies. He underlines the contradiction between the medieval tradition and what he calls the ‘Erasmian spirit’ current in the ‘More-Rastell circle’, to which Heywood belonged, as a kinsman of Sir Thomas More without being an overt militant of the Catholic cause. Walker subtly and convincingly shows how the Erasmian balance was, with the passing of time and the inexorable progress of Reformation ideas and institutions, less and less tenable with the passing of years, as life became less and less bearable for a man of his ‘extreme age’ (Heywood died in 1580, aged 83). The volume’s 18 chapters follow Heywood’s life and works from his early years to his exile and death. The social, cultural, political, and religious context is carefully traced. For instance, chapter 6, ‘Complaining about the weather’, discusses Heywood’s writings against the role of Sir Thomas More and the opening of the Reformation Parliament. Chapter 10, ‘Discord, dissent and division’, covers the 1534–43 decade, leading up to Heywood’s condemnation for treason, discussed Book reviews