Identical in metre1 with "Witty and Witless" is another dialogue of greater dramatic merit, to which Heywood has so far only a conjectural claim. "Gentleness and Nobility," "Adyaloge betwentheMarchaunt, the Knyght, and the plowman, dysputyng who is a verey Gentylman," seems to me in a number of details to bear the marks of Heywood's peculiar method, and it undoubtedly shows an advance upon that author's "Witty and Witless." Whereas the three disputants of the latter piece are entirely unindividualized, the three speakers in "Gentleness and Nobility" are carefully endowed with the contrasted class characteristics upon which Heywood relies for his main effect in nearly all his more developed dramas, and which he employs with especial cleverness in the "Play of the Weather." "Witty and Witless" is a rather dull composition, displaying no knowledge of the rules of stage action and indicating a positive incapacity to deal with more than two of the dramatis persona at a time. Thus, one of the three figures is always completely neglected, while Heywood is presenting the dispute of the other two. The author of "Gentleness and Nobility," on the contrary, has a mastery of dramatic technique, which everywhere suggests Heywood's more ambitious plays. The speakers are brought on and off the stage with perfect naturalness; the interplay of speech and action is that of the adept in arranging stage situation; and the break in the middle of the piece, necessitated by the short patience of the audience, is so managed as to avoid every indication of artificiality or incoherence. One has but to compare the deliberate skill

manifested in the division of "Gentleness and Nobility" with the sheer awkward amputation of Medwall's "Nature" in order to realize the presence of that new artistry in plot manipulation which is generally regarded as Heywood's great contribution to English dramatic progress.

Heywood's authorship of "Gentleness and Nobility" is rendered the more probable by a relationship which seems not hitherto to have been noted. Like "The Pardoner and the Friar" and "The Four P's," and unlike any other known drama of this epoch, "Gentleness and Nobility" is marked by a very close imitation of the work of Chaucer. The entire moral of the piece is taken from the Wife of Bath's Tale, and the specific verbal plagiarism in several passages is hardly less striking than that manifested in the two accepted works just mentioned.1

In the "Play of Love," Heywood harks back to the old subtleties and refinements of the courts of love. The four characters are thus named: The Lover not Beloved, The Woman Beloved not Loving, The Lover Beloved, Neither Lover nor Loved. The last figure, who is elsewhere termed the "vyse," gives the play all the little liveliness it possesses. The contents can well be imagined. They may in Heywood's time have amused an audience of fine ladies and court gallants, as they would certainly have been more likely to do two centuries earlier, but there is little reason why a student of the drama should linger over so patent an anachronism.

The most carefully worked out of Heywood's plays, and the most original, is the "new and very merry in1 See, further, my article in Modern Language Review, 1911.

terlude of all manner weathers," devised, probably, in flattery of Henry VIII.1 Instead of the three or four characters in his other works, Heywood here introduces ten, all of whom are on the stage simultaneously in the concluding scene. The dramatis persona embrace Jupiter, the all-wise and affable sovereign; Merry Report, the vice, whose genially comic figure has lost all savor of the fire and brimstone originally attaching to it; and a collection from the different types of humanity; a gentleman, a merchant, a forestranger, a water-miller, a wind-miller, a gentlewoman, a laundress, and a boy "the least that can play." This motley assemblage is brought together by a proclamation of Jupiter, desirous once for all to settle mundane meteorology, that all persons interested in the weather should declare their preferences. The clash of conflicting interests is amusingly depicted. The gentleman thinks of his hunting, the merchant of his sailing vessels, the forester of his windfall perquisites, the watermiller and the wind-miller have high words over the need of rain and wind respectively. The gentlewoman, anxious for her complexion, finds herself at odds with the laundress, who clamors for hot sunshine; and the small boy comes in as emissary from his fellows to demand unlimited snow-balling. Jupiter reconciles the contending suitors and makes clear to the audience the supreme wisdom of his own arrangements.

In theplays of "Love" and "Weather" it is possible to discern the vague influence of the morality in the "vice," who still remains, though greatly altered and humanized. In the other interludes of Heywood even this resemblance disappears, and the reader finds himself conveyed back by subject-matter and spirit of treatment to Chaucer and fourteenth-century realism; while in dramatic method he is being carried forward — thanks to the poet's individual genius and to his imitation of the French — to a plane of technical skill and conscious art considerably higher than that attained by any of Heywood's contemporaries. In "The Pardoner and the Friar," the "Mery Play between JohanJohan the husbande, Tyb hiswyfe, and syr Jhan the preest," and the famous "Four P's," there is nothing which suggests either the ancient morality play or the religious and social conditions of Heywood's time. Doubtless Heywood, in whom the controversialist seems to have been submerged in the entertainer, and whose sympathies lay certainly with the less aggressive papal party in the Reformation conflict, found it safer and pleasanter to avoid the burning questions of theological dispute, so fully treated by Bale, and to restrict himself to trite and harmless themes such as the impostures of pardoners, friars, and palmers, or the amorous lapses of the parish clergy. Page after page in these dramas is plagiarized from the "Canterbury Tales." There is nowhere aturn of thought or plot unfamiliar to readers of Boccaccio and Chaucer; but Heywood makes up for the uninventive archaism of his subject by progressiveness in presentation. In his interludes English realistic comedy attains full growth.1 The mustard seed of buffoonery, found almost by accident in the mystery and the early morality, has completely choked the more serious matter. Comedy required at this period, not stimulation, but refinement, — deepening and idealization. These elements were added in time, but they were not to be found in native drama, and their gradual introduction manifests itself in a number of hybrid productions, which begin as mere expressions of the playwright's craving for greater variety of subject, and end by bridging the chasm between the incoherent native interlude and the largely exotic and thoroughly self-conscious, but still essentially national comedy of Elizabeth's reign.

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