On a tyme there was a Joly Citesyn walkyng in the countrey for sport which met with a folysh prest, & in dirysyon in communycacion called hym syr John. This prest vnderstonding his mockyng calde him master rafe. Why, quod the cytesyn, doste thou call me master rafe. Mary, quod the prest, why callyst me syr John. Then quod the cytesen, I call the syr John becawse euery folysh preste most comonly is calde sir John. Mary, quod the prest, & I call the master rafe because euery proud Cocold most comenly is callyd master Rafe. At the which answer all that were by laught apace because dyuers there supposyd the same cytesen to be a cokcold in dede.¹

This jest narrative is taken from A C mery talys published in 1526 by John Rastell, brother-in-law to Thomas More and father-in-law to John Heywood. Unlike his son and fellow printer, William, John Rastell would convert to the Reformist faith in the following decade, but this volume with its consuming interests in the farcical possibilities of moral weakness, spiritual failure and sexual misdemeanour clearly engages with actions, attitudes and values which enjoyed wide currency with its diverse readership in the closing years of pre- Reformation England.² The broad comedy of Johan Johan published a few years later, like that of A C mery talys, may also be seen to respond to key anxieties circulating within Henrician cultural debate and the discussion which follows concentrates precisely upon the textual implications of these anxieties — anxieties which relate to the consequences of Folly, the integrity of the Social Order, and the obligations of Marriage.

Marital 'Pleye' and Tudor Cultural Debate
The composition of Johan Johan³ might well date from the 1520s, but it was published in 1533 by William Rastell, who also brought out Heywood's The Pardoner and Frere and The Play of the Wether in the same year.⁴ Nonetheless, it was not until 1661 that Johan Johan would be attributed formally to John Heywood in a bookseller's listing—an attribution which has gained increasing critical consensus.⁵ Ridicule of the passionless cuckold, the unruly dame and the lascivious cleric, in which Johan Johan invests so spectacularly, has a long ancestry reaching back across the length and breadth of the medieval centuries, surfacing in complaint literature, polemical writings, judicial records, jests, popular airs, and narrative poetry such as Chaucer's Shipman's Tale and the fifteenth-century Scots poem, The Friars of Berwick.⁶ Moreover, these consuming interests in ecclesiastical critique continued to be probed with enthusiasm by writers across urope. Marguerite de Navarre, for example, briefly mooted at the beginning of the sixteenth century as a possible bride for the future Henry VIII, remained deeply exercised in her compendious Heptaméron (published posthumously in 1558, but thought to be composed during the final decade of Henry 'VIII's reign) with the erotic and/or criminal misadventures of an ever renewing number of 'cordeliers' or mendicant friars who remained 'plus attentif[s] à la vie active qu' à la contemplative' [more attentive to the active than the contemplative life]: 'Le Beau pere après luy avoir tenu plusieurs propos de la grande amitié qu'il luy portoit, luy voulut mettre la main au tetin, qui fut par elle bien repoulsé comme elle devoit' [After having related several accounts of the great affection that he bore her, the Holy Father wanted to put his hand on her breast, but she pushed him away as she ought].⁷ Yet it was becoming particularly apparent in Tudor England that these turmoil-ridden years of the Henrician Reformation were yielding ample opportunity for his subjects to ponder the government of polity and parish, indeed the nature of all commitments to life in society. The celebrated humanist scholar Juan Luis Vives himself remained in no doubt of the political continuities which existed between the unity of marriage and the unity of the state, tellingly underlining in 1529 that God

would not, that man vntemperately shoulde medle with manye women, nor that the woman shoulde submitte her selfe to many men. Therfore he bownde them together in lawfull mariage, and deliuered her vnto the man, not only for generations sake, but also for the societie and fellowshippe of life [...] And what a commoditie is the wife vnto ye husband, in ordering of hys house, & in gouerning of hys familie & housholde? by this cities are edified & buylded.⁸

In 1518, Erasmus had published his own Encomium Matrimonii and an English version of it appeared in 1532 'cum priuilegio regali', the year prior to the publication of Johan Johan. It was dedicated to Thomas Cromwell by the translator, Richard Tavernour, who advised that Erasmus had been prompted to write the tract because 'he considered the blynd superstition of men and women which cease nat day by day to professe & vowe perpetuall chastyte before they suffyciently knowe themselues & thinfirmite of theyr nature'. Indeed, Tavernour proffered further strong food for thought for his readers of the 1530s, saying that the frailty of such unions '[in my opinion] hathe bene and is yet vnto this day the rote and very cause original of innumerable myscheues'.⁹

Such eminent voices from the community of humanists continued to contribute to the rich corpus of literature on marital conduct and household discipline throughout the early Tudor period. Indeed, they were among the most vigorous in stipulating that coupledom was a condition for the laity which had received divine blessing: Vives, for example, highlighted that 'Paule [...] geueth this counsell, yt better it were to marye, then to burne, leste any man should disturbe thorough iniury any other mans peace or quietnes, or defyle him selfe with filthy thoughtes or dedes'.¹⁰ Nonetheless, this condition was one which required strict regulation: the ideologically sound silent, chaste, obedient and pious early Tudor helpmeet (as described with effortless frequency by conduct books of the period) should remember, Vives advised, that

The goyng, sitting, restyng, the countenaunce and eyes, the motion of the whole bodye and the sownde of mans voyce are but light & feble significations of a mans mynd? The more certayne tokens are mans maners and customes, among the which his speache and communication is the principall.¹¹

Indeed, a generation earlier, the fifteenth-century political theorist Sir John Fortescue had asserted in the Lancastrian tract 'De Natura Legia Naturae' (1461–63) that 'a man devotes his attention to affairs outside, the woman hers to the internal business of the family. Whence it is the duty of a woman [...] to keep quiet at home, and to look after the concerns of the household.'¹² Yet in Johan Johan, we depart from these scholars' eirenic visions of unceasing household service to the patriarch to one where Tyb is as ready to complain about her husband's 'bawlyng' (117) as he is about her 'catter wawlyng' (110). As a consequence, the priest-lover is able to dupe Johan all too easily into thinking that he has censured this shrew's loose tongue and received his reward: 'And therfore I knowe she hatyth my presens' (365). Erasmus insisted that 'No man (if ye gyue any credence to me) had euer a shrewe to his wyfe, but thrughe hys owne defaute', and the perils of relaxing the checks of domestic restraint appear all too evident at the opening of the farce where the shamed husband is driven to petition an audience of strangers: 'God spede you, maysters, everychone! 'Wote ye not whyther my wyfe is gone?' (1–2).¹³ Was it with such theatrical capers in mind that the Brigittine monk Richard Whitford submitted in the very year preceding the publication of Johan Johan that plays did 'more harme than good [...] for without fayle they ben spectacles of mere vanites, whiche the worlde callethe pastymes, and I call them waste tymes'?¹⁴

Whether in terms of the home or the larger world of the parish, of mental or physical exertions, Johan remains a figure of failed authority. He may secure a position of sustained attention (if not intimacy) with the audience in his numerous asides as the dramatic narrative unfolds, but his collapsed cultural status is never in question, for he is continually defined by the roaming rebelliousness, the marked unreformability, of his wife — for Tyb 'wyll go a gaddynge very myche | Lyke an Anthony pyg with an olde wyche | Whiche ledeth her about hyther and thyther' (5–7). Indeed, the gendering of these questions of discipline and command had continued to preoccupy a long line of early English playwrights, from those composing the Abraham and Isaac, Noah, and Mary and Joseph cycle pageants, for example, to dramatic texts appearing in early Tudor print culture: moral plays, like Mankind, and interludes, such as Medwall's Nature and Skelton's Magnyfycence.¹⁵ In Johan Johan we are never allowed to deflect our attention from the ritualistic humiliations of the cuckold who may 'eate nothyng, nother meate nor brede' (612) in his own house, and is set to the hopeless task of 'Mendyng the payle, whiche is so rotten and olde' (639).

In his History of English Poetry (1774–81), Thomas Warton asserted influentially that Heywood was 'among the first of our dramatists who drove the Bible from the stage, and introduced representations of familiar life and manners in its stead'.¹⁶ Charles D. Deshler rehearsed the same dictum for nineteenth-century readers, as did Ronald de la Bère in the years preceding the Second World War, adding that Johan Johan must be considered above all 'a shrew play'.¹⁷ Nonetheless, while it is certainly true that a play such as Johan Johan indicates a willingness to turn away from native traditions of dramatic literature devoted to allegory and spiritual didacticism, the stunted or subordinate masculinity as expressed by the cuckold in this 'shrew play' is vigorously counterpointed by the extravagant appetite for pleye articulated by his alter ego, the erring clericus. Syr Johan remains a key player in this vacated, and then violated family home. While Tyb continues to go a-roaming, the husband struggles repeatedly and desperately to unsettle or mask the knowledge of his own sexual displacement by the priest and the prospect of his imminent public humiliation:'The folkes wyll mocke me'(48). Equally significantly, the meagre resources of his imaginative life are clearly also deeply stimulated by the possible details of Tyb's adventuring — that the priest enjoys the final favours of his wife all too easily and indeed, 'gyve[s] her absolution upon a bed'(141).

In 1518 John Colet, celebrated scholar and dean of St Paul's Cathedral, had recognized that 'res uxorial est saepenumero res negotiosa & turbulent' [the married state is oftentimes one full of business and disturbance], and most particularly with reference to his proposed reform of the Cathedral's statutes that 'convenit enim, ut qui tam proprie accedunt ad Altare Dei, tam magnisq[ue] ministeriis intersunt, omnino casti & intemerati sint' [for it is fitting that those who approach so near to the altar of God, and are present at such great mysteries, should be wholly chaste and undefiled].¹⁸ And in the same year, Cardinal Wolsey's provincial constitutions re-affirmed earlier decrees that the concubines of priests risked excommunication and burial in non-sanctified ground.¹⁹ Nevertheless, under the influence of Lutheran teachings, priests began to be married in Wittenberg from 1521, and Luther himself married Katharina von Bora in 1525.²⁰ An overwrought Erasmus wrote from Louvain in that same year to Nicholas Bérault,

Everyone knew that the church was burdened with tyranny and ceremonies and laws invented by men for their own profit [...] but often remedies unskilfully applied make matters worse [...] Oh, if that man had either left things alone, or made his attempt more cautiously and in moderation!²¹

However, things had not been left alone and the implications of Lutheran teachings were placing into question all conventions of inherited cultures of worship. Some ten years later, in his answere vnto Sir Thomas Mores dialoge (1531), William Tyndale addressed more specifically the Reformists' response to the question of clerical celibacy, urging that 'it was Pauls meaninge to preferre ye maried before ye vnmaried for the inconueniences that might chaunce by the reason of vnchastite', and that 'M. More might se what occasions vnchastite be geuen vnto ye curates euery where by the reason of their office and dayly conuersacion with the maried'.²² Indeed, during a lively tale full of 'gauloiseries' concerning the sexual harassment of a resourceful wife by two friars, Marguerite de Navarre has some of her outraged citizens in the Heptaméron complain, 'Ces beaux-peres nous prechent chasteté, et puis la veulent oster à noz femmes' [The Holy Fathers preach chastity to us, and then wish to defile our wives].²³
Whatever the varying conditions of the secular clergy in pre-Reformation English society, it remains clear that its members continued to enjoy privileges of social status and access on account of their vows of spiritual and pastoral service which were widely recognized by the laity.²⁴ And these principles of difference expressed themselves in a host of different ways in late medieval England. In her wide-ranging study of York's Church courts during this period, Sandra Brown reports that one Nicholas Hakenay was forced to acknowledge his sin of fornication and was fined forty pennies on 23 April 1338. A week later he re-appeared in court and met with the same accusation, but was only fined eighteen pennies on that occasion. (In these accounts of money changing hands from adulterers to their accusers, we may be reminded that in Johan Johan the cuckold envisages a rather different exchange, or wager, with his conscience: 'But where the dyvell, trowe ye, she is gon? | I holde a noble she is with Syr Johan' — 85–86.) Brown also stresses that in 1340, two years after the fines administered to Hakeney, when the authorities in the Diocese of York met with a similarly sinning William Busk, vicar of Fridaythorpe, they advised him 'to try to exchange his benefice'. Nonetheless, Brown justly underlines that

not all clerical offenders received a light punishment. John of York, vicar of Wadworth, was accused of fornication during the capitular visitation of 1472–3. The visitors, Dean Robert Booth and William Poteman ordered the sequestration of his vicarage and warned him not to administer the sacraments within their jurisdiction under penalty of suspension. It was not until 26 June 1484 that John of York appeared before the auditor and was granted leave to exercise cure of souls under penalty of deprivation of his vicarage if he frequented suspected places.²⁵

The scrutiny of ecclesiastical privileges (privileges which might test the priest's sexual continence) certainly appears to have preoccupied the attentions of Church authorities across Europe in the late medieval period. Helen Parish highlights that the twenty-third canon of the Council of Paris in 1429 affirmed that 'on account of the crime of concubinage, with which the multitudes of the clergy and monks are inflicted, the Church of God and the whole clergy are held in derision, abomination and dishonour among all nations'.²⁶ A century later, in a more general review of the Church's failings in 1516, Erasmus struck a characteristically eirenic note, observing in a letter to the Papal scribe Lambertus Grunnius:

Human felicity consists above all in this, that a man should devote himself to what he is fitted for by nature. There are men whom one would compel to adopt celibacy or the monastic life with no more success than one would enter an ass for a race at Olympia or take an ox, as they say, to the wrestling school.²⁷

Attending rather more specifically to the British context, the historian Glanmor Williams records that 'At the Caernarvon sessions in 1503 it was disclosed that so many priests and clerks in holy orders were guilty of "ravishing" the daughters of tenants on the crown's manors of north Wales that a financial crisis had ensued', on account of the public demand for 'marriage' payments from sinning priests.²⁸ Elsewhere, in her illuminating study of the Court records of Kent in the early Tudor period, Karen Jones draws attention to the plight of one Margaret Scott in the same year, 1503, who 'beyng a mayde very seke like to dye', sent for her local priest Sir Roger Johnson, vicar of Petham in Kent, to hear her confession. Once the assembled company had been ushered out, it was reported in later depositions that Sir Roger 'offerd to the said Margaret his prevy members', enquiring, 'wull this do you any ease or pleasure?' In the later court proceedings, Scott refused to revise her testimony, and arrangements were put in place for another cleric to replace Johnson in the parish.²⁹

Criticism of the secular clergy was not only regularly in evidence in the proceedings of the Church courts. In early Tudor print culture, there was ample testimony to the growing unrest occasioned by the sexual incontinence of the parish priest. Caxton's rendering of Gui de Roye's doctrinal of sapyence (1489) insisted that the lecherous cleric 'is culpable of the body of our lord ihesu cryst that is to saye as yf he had slayn hym'.³⁰ Similarly, the compendiouse treetise dyalogue of Diues and Pauper (1493) thundered that the 'prestys and dekens of the newe lawe be worthy moche woo: if they presume to touch goddes body or to mynestre at goddes auter [w]hanne they haue comonedde wythe other mennes wyues or wythe ther concubynes'.31 And it becomes increasingly apparent that in Johan Johan the cuckold himself is clearly conversant with the broad lines of such well-established critique ('The parysshe preest forgetteth that ever he ware clarke' — 595), and queries plaintively:

But Syr Johan, doth not remembre you How I was your clerke, and holpe you masse to syng, And hylde the basyn alway at the offryng? (596–98)³²

Un bon Jannin de village, de qui la famme faisoit l'amour avecque son curé, se laissa aiséement tromper [How Johnny the Village Cuckold suffered himself to be easily deceived by his wife who capered with the Parish Priest].³³

It is in this manner that the sixteenth-century editors introduced the ribald and, to all appearances, intensely familiar narrative structure of the 29th tale from the 3rd Day of Marguerite de Navarre's Heptaméron: the similarities between the English play published by Rastell in 1533 and de Navarre's account of the wife and the parish priest who 'faisoient bonne chere ensemble' [who were amusing themselves merrily together]³⁴ in the absence of the cuckold are immediately evident, and indeed both texts contribute to the rich and varied late medieval and early modern corpus of European writings devoted to the ridicule of erring clerics. More generally, the affinities between the intrigue of Johan Johan and those of the French fabliaux and farces have long been recognized in what scholarship has been devoted to the English play over the last hundred years. Initially, critics such as Adophus W. Ward and Jules Jusserand pointed to parallels with the fifteenth-century Farce Nouvelle Très Bonne et Fort Joyeuse de Pernet Qui Va Au Vin in which the 'sot mary' [stupid husband] Pernet is offered the promise of a share in a chicken pie by the 'Amoureux' [Lover].³⁵ By the close of the intrigue, the lovers resolve to distract the husband's unwelcome attentions ('Nous luy ferons chauffer la cire' [We will make him chafe the wax]), while the Amoureux asserts his own rights as 'le sire' [the sire/master].³⁶ With the 1949 publication of Gustave Cohen's Recueil de Farces françaises inédites du XVe siècle,³⁷ T. W. Craik and William Elton independently recognized that Johan Johan was not simply related generically and thematically to the substantial body of French fabliaux and farces,³⁸ but that it was in fact a close translation of the Farce nouvelle très bonne et fort joyeuse du Pasté — yet expertly transposed to a convincing English idiom.³⁹

In Johan Johan there is clearly a sustained desire to present the early Tudor audience with a reassuringly familiar dramatic world, populated by native saints ('by our lady of Crome' — 10) and figures such as Tyb's intimate, Margery — 'she | That is the most bawde hens to Coventre' (163–64). However, if Johan Johan certainly has greater detail of domestic specificity, characterization and intrigue than is common in other plays by Heywood which rely more typically upon competitive disputation for dramatic momentum, this fact may indeed be attributed to its close adherence to the Farce du Pasté, where we are greeted with the itinerant dame ('Dea je ne sçay où elle va' [God knows, I know not where she goes] — 15), the hen-pecked Jehan-Jehan who keeps the home fires burning ('Or vous venez chauffer ma mye!' [Come warm yourself by the fire, my dear] — 126) and the insatiable curé ('menteur et bourdelier' [liar and brothel-haunter] — 245).⁴⁰

The conventions of medieval French farce clearly responded to the mainsprings of humour witnessed repeatedly in the rich traditions of the verse fabliaux.⁴¹ Moreover, as Holly A. Crocker has underlined, 'The fabliau is a literary form without discrete borders [...] Figuring the body as a site of multiple and contested processes, fabliaux suggest that corporeal limits are never guaranteed'.⁴² Ranging in estimated numbers from some 150 to 200 texts, excess is also thematic to this genre. Driven by the urgent desire to stimulate explosive comic effects, the fabliaux move at an accelerated pace, and invest deeply in rhetorical parody and punning riposte, scatological reference, and ludicrous schemes for duping. If the possibilities of farce had certainly existed in earlier traditions of English drama, the heavily stylized French fabliaux dispensed with other all considerations in order to foreground with great economy carefully executed comic peripeteia. Jacques Ribard has concluded that 'la thématique essentielle et constante des fabliaux repose sur un véritable trépied — l'argent, le sexe et la ruse' [the key and recurring thematic interests of the fabliaux rest upon a triple focus: money, sex, and deception], but Raymond Eichmann seeks to further refine such judgements by highlighting that 'The overwhelming majority (75 per cent) of the fabliaux are frankly erotic, and sixty-three of them deal with the theme of the adulterous triangle'.⁴³ Under such generic terms, characterization is rigorously controlled into stock figures, reader identification minimized, and intrigue privileged through a thoroughgoing emphasis upon plot-driven narrative gravitating remorselessly towards a frenzied débâcle. In addition, the role of the spiritually failing priest has a regular presence in the comic depictions of fractious marriages, as may be witnessed in the celebrated, but not unrepresentative example from the thirteenth century of Du Prestre ki abevete [The Priest who Peeked]:

Et li vilains abeuvetoit
A l'huis et vit tout en apert
Le cul sa femme descouvert
Et le prestres [si] par desseure.
Et quist chou: 'Se Dix vous sequeure,
Fait li vilains, 'est che à gas?'
Et li prestres en eslepas
Repont: 'Que vous en est avis?
Ne veés vous? Je sui assis
Pour mengier chi à cette table.'

[And there the other man was, peeking
At the little hole, through which he spied
His lovely wife's exposed backside
And the priest, riding on top of her.
'May God Almighty help you, Sir,'
The peasant called, 'Is this a joke?'
The parson turned his head and spoke:
'No, I'm not joking. What's the matter?
Don't you see: I have your platter.
I'm eating supper at your table?']⁴⁴

In Prestre ki abevete even the peasant husband ('gabés | Et decheüs et encantés' [tricked | And deceived and befuddled]) is forced to retort, 'Par le cuer Dieu, ce samble fable' [By the heart of God, this is like a fabliau].⁴⁵ From here it is but a short journey into the riotous dramatic world of Johan Johan with its obsessive interests in devouring, cozening, gorging and seizing, in promoting cultural privilege in terms of excessive consumption: 'The preest payde for the stuffe and the makyng, | And Margery, she payde for the bakyng' (161–62).⁴⁶ If he is successively dazed by Tyb's quick-witted verbal assaults and the heady concoction of Syr Johan's 'tryfyls [...] toys [...] mokkes [...] fables, and [...] nyfyls' (431–32), Johan the starveling remains richly sensitive to the spectacle of the lovers 'Eatynge and drynkynge at [their] owne desyre' (603) — even if like the fabliau husband above, he remains unwilling or unable to decipher definitively the rather compelling evidence of his own social and sexual marginality.

In his highly influential twelfth-century treatise De arte honeste amandi, Andreas Capellanus had advised that only rarely were

farmers [found] serving in Love's court, but naturally, like a horse or a mule, they give themselves up to the work of Venus [...] And if you should, by some chance, fall in love with some of their women, be careful to puff them up with lots of praise and then, when you find a convenient place, do not hesitate to take what you seek and to embrace them by force.⁴⁷

In the event, it appears that no such regime of force is required in the dramatic worlds of late medieval farces such as Johan Johan. As we enter the disorienting scenes of frantic verbal and physical exchanges between the impoverished, the impotent, oath-breakers, and sexual sinners, Tyb expresses no inclination to defend anything more than her right to access the enticing world of adult experience beyond the marital home — and, as so often in jest narratives from the period, those who fail to participate in this world of mery gestys are served up as suitable fodder for universal derision.⁴⁸

The environment of the hearth which Tyb regularly abandons for her 'pylde preest' (289) is afforded a palpable, if unappealing reality: indeed, Johan may not even place his coat on the ground ('by cokkes soule here hath a dogge pyst' — 247) and so the audience ('Whyle ye do nothyng') is invited to take care of it and to 'skrape of the dyrt' (257). In this way, at several reprises throughout the dramatic narrative, we are urged to attend to the very specificity of the domestic scene: indeed, the wrathful Johan curses not only the antics of the erring lovers, but the very public correlative of his failed union, the untended home: 'a vengaunce [. ..] | On the pot, the ale, and on the table, | The candyll, the pye, and all the rable, | On the trystels and on the stole' (288–92).

In De officio mariti (1529) Vives argued forcefully that the wife should attend most particularly to 'those thinges yt belong vnto ye kitchen, & to ye most part of ye houshold stuffe', and it becomes increasingly evident that Johan himself cannot be divorced from an emasculinity denoted by the neglected objects in his home environment.⁴⁹ Vives remained adamant in De officio mariti that the husband must remain 'maister ouer al the house'.⁵⁰ However, in the comic inversions of Heywood's dramatic world, Tyb assumes the authority to surpass Johan verbally and physically, promoting her very own ideals of service: 'go to brynge the trestels hyther' (241); 'lay the table I say' (265); 'Gyve us water to wasshe nowe' (442). Nonetheless, publicly denied the roles of provider and protector, Johan determines from the safety of his temporarily abandoned home that the 'catter wawlyng' spouse must be schooled vigorously on her duties and prevented from entering the wider economy of the parish where she is given to using her body as a token of exchange.

'Shall he cum hyther?' — Crossing Thresholds
Despite the vigorous cut-and thrust of accusations between husband and wife at the beginning of this intrigue of ruses and humiliations, it is in fact the ousted Johan who initially seeks out the hospitality of another: 'How mayster curate, may I come in | At your chamber dore without any syn?' (314–15). In the event, there is little reason for him to feel disoriented: whether at home or abroad, Johan is harassed by individuals peddling lies of one kind or another: 'I | Sayd that I wolde gyve them a pye' (388). In De officio mariti Vives had warned in a timely fashion that 'The straungers and gestes, the which that thou doste receaue into thy house, do oftentymes become thy enemies, & throughe a certayne beneuolence do cause muche wickednes'.⁵¹ However, in Johan Johan upon entering the peasant household the 'pylde preest' is able with little trouble to blur the distinctions between guest, predator and itinerant felon. Furthermore, in this world of comic frenzy (where the exigencies of the labour economy appear permanently deferred), all the characters have an embarrassment of leisure with which to ponder the devices and desires of temptation: 'yet could I never espy | That ever any dyd wors with her than I' (351–52).

In case there were any doubt, Vives had emphasized that 'true matrimonie can not be betwene thre or foure, but betwene two onelye'.⁵² However, rather than demonizing Tyb as luxuria or unveiling the priest as a wanton reprobate with a stunning coup de théâtre ('In fayth, all the towne knoweth better than he | Is a hore monger, a haunter of stewes' — 233–34), the drive of this comic narrative is remorselessly intent upon probing the farthermost limits of the gull's simplicity. Instead of exhibiting an anti-laical contempt which John Van Engen has identified as a conventional response of the late medieval clergy, the fleshly Syr Johan finds himself mostly among like-minded people and has no qualms in tapping the resources of his parish for his own needs.⁵³

In the N-Town cycle pageant The Trial of Joseph and Mary the company of Detractors pour scorn upon the truth of the Virgin Birth, with the First Detractor jeering that the pregnant Mary must have conceived by swallowing a snowflake: 'a flake therof into hyr mowthe crepte, | And therof the chylde in hyr wombe doth growe' (308–09).⁵⁴ Interestingly, this speculation constitutes an integral part of the jest in the French fabliau entitled L'Enfant qui fu remis au Soleil where the wife tries to convince her merchant spouse of the perfect naturalness of bearing a son during his two-year absence.⁵⁵ In the source text for Johan Johan, La Farce du Pasté, among 'les mensonges et les junchées' [the lies and the fabrications] (446) that the Curé recounts are those of immaculate conceptions enjoyed by various maids of the parish blessed by Saint Arnoul.⁵⁶ This French Curé concedes that these are 'Des miracles que j'ay congneuz | De [Saint Arnoul], mais n'en ay nulz veuz' [some miracles which I have heard of by Saint Arnoul, but I never witnessed any of them] (590–91).⁵⁷ Yet, in direct contrast to La Farce du Pasté, the 'pylde preest' in Johan Johan indicates all too plausibly that he had a hand in the 'miracles' he relates.

Yet had she not had so many by thre
Yf she had not had the help of me.
Is not this a myracle, yf ever were any,
That this good wyfe shuld have chuldren so many
Here in this town, whyle her husband shuld be
Beyond the se, in a farre contre? (547–52)

Whatever the nature of the liberties that Tyb and her intimates enjoy in the parish, it remains evident that they may slip the leash of their inept guardians, but few if any of them escape a role in the wayward erotic career of Syr Johan. Like so many wives of the fabliaux, they are repeatedly defined by evading marital control and by their robust participation in illicit unions. As the priest rehearses his ribald accounts of miraculous births, the childless Tyb remains once again markedly receptive to the charms of this guest. In an expert finale to his performance, Syr Johan wishes 'eche wyfe' who 'is wedded here within this place' such good fortune (584–85) but, in response, is it a guileless or a goading childless wife who recalls in the presence of her husband, 'I have sene the day that pus, my cat, | Hath had in a yere kytlyns eyghtene' (588–89)? Whatever the case, as another riotous world of apparently ceaseless fecundity is summoned up for attention both on- and off-stage, Johan is greeted with yet another opportunity to appreciate his own place relegated to the social and sexual margins of the parish. Furthermore, by the close of the proceedings, he has been shamed into adopting a whole sequence of conventional feminized identities: scold, domestic servant, submissive helpmeet, and dispenser of curses:

Now in good soth, this is a wonderous myracle —
But for your labour, I wolde that your tacle
Were in skaldyng water well sod! (553–55)

In the 1950s Stanley Sultan lamented that 'Johan Johan offers singularly slight opportunity for scholarship'.⁵⁸ Even earlier, in the opening years of the century, Alfred W. Pollard argued authoritatively that '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'.⁵⁹ The purpose of this discussion has been to challenge some of these remarkably persistent critical attitudes and to integrate Johan Johan more vigorously into the rich cultural debates of Reformation England.

Heywood's play The Pardoner and Frere, also published in 1533, concludes with an energetic 'fyght' (Frere 'Ye horeson, wylt thou scrat and byte?' — 543) between the main protagonists, and the Curate and 'Neybour Pratte' are finally called upon to separate the combatants of this 'nyse fraye' (578). In the final scene of Johan Johan, after the husband has been left for a sustained period to 'chafe the wax | And [...] chafe it so hard that [his] fyngers krakkes' (507–08), it should come as no surprise that the dramatic business ends in a scrummidge between the 'pylde preest', his 'drab' and the 'horson kokold' (658, 651, 657). Johan's revenge is spectacular, if brief and inconclusive: Syr Johan becomes the victim of his own jest ('take thou there thy payle now' — 645) and Tyb is threatened with a 'shovyll full of colys in thy face' (654). Not to be bested by her spouse, Tyb proclaims 'I shall make the blood ronne about his erys' (650), but is fended off with the retort: 'Nay, get the out of my house, thou prestes hore!' (656).

In the event, Johan Johan is characterized like so many of the fabliaux and medieval farces by the deferral of any disciplinary regime. In the same manner that the characters survive without the economic pressures of the workaday world, they exist in a dramatic world radically unlike that of Henry VIII's realm: the environment of this farce is markedly devoid of any means of correction or punishment. Johan is more than content to rail against his lecherous priest as a 'a hore monger, a haunter of stewes' (234) but, as the historian Karen Jones underlines, earlier in the century in 1515 one Kentishman William Baldok of Newington (named 'a common defamer of the order of priests') might easily have risked a heresy charge for calling priests 'whoremongers and other words in public'.⁶⁰

In direct contrast to the close of La Farce du Pastéh, the audience of Johan Johan is finally left to contemplate the husband's weakness of body and irresolution of mind as he ends the play still unconvinced whether the 'hore and thefe [...] wyll make [him] cokold' (664, 674). In De officio mariti, Vives had railed that 'Unchast women are intollerable, what wyse man can suffer any suche, excepte he be wytles?'⁶¹ Ultimately, the beleaguered Johan is not only wytles but debilitated, as David Bevington has highlighted, by 'the ache of sexual anxiety' — an anxiety which could have been richly rewarded at the end of the farce when Tyb reaches for her 'clyppyng sherys' (649).⁶² In reality, the priest's concubine might not escape censure in late medieval society where, as Karen Jones points out, '“priest's whore” was a common insult to women', and cites the 1467 case of one Katherine Cheyne of Romney who was heard to claim that 'the gay bedys and gyrdils that Johane Markby hath cam never of her husbondes geft but by the geft of prystes'.⁶³ Indeed, Henry A. Jefferies recounts that when an Armagh woman in the Henrician period was publicly accused of being 'a priest's whore', she offered a counter-suit that the plaintiff had previously defamed her as a 'common whore, a priest's whore, a monk's whore, and a whore to all other men besides'.⁶⁴

In reviewing the characteristics of the earlier fabliau tradition, Philippe Ménard has drawn attention in a timely manner to the 'caract&erave;re troublé de certains rires' which frequently serve as audience responses to narratives from this genre: 'dans les fabliaux le rire est inégalement réparti. On ne rit pas continûment dans les textes dit comiques [...] Le rire ressemble à un sel volail et fugace' [the vexed nature of certain kinds of laughter [...] in the fabliaux laughter is not uniformly present. We do not laugh throughout these so-called comic texts [...] The laughter resembles a kind of seasoning, both light and fleeting].⁶⁵ Investing deeply, as has been shown, in the generic conventions of the fabliaux, after the spectacular finale of fisticuffs, the provocations to laughter subside in Johan Johan: rather than having to do business with formidable powers of justice, the ceaseless energy of these villagers means that the processes of social exchange continue unimpeded. The characters return to their capers without risking external intervention or rupture in their leisure activities; and in the final moments of the dramatic narrative, the cuckold finds that he has yet more surveillance work to do and so he bids farewell to the 'noble company' (678).

Sir Thomas More's Dialogue Concerning Heresies (1529), published in the same turmoil-ridden years for the nation as Johan Johan, acknowledges the pervasive criticism of lecherous clerics: 'The pore man quod he had found the preste ouer famylyer wyth hys wyffe and because he spake hym abrode and coulde not proue it the prest sued hym before the bysshoppys offycyall for dyfamacyom'. If the text's 'Master chauncelour' confirms that 'A mery tale [...] cummyth neuer a mys to me', the reader is reminded forcefully that if we believe one lewd priest 'were ye clergye [as a whole] [...] than forgete we to loke what good men be therin and what good counsayle they gyue vs & what good example they showe vs'.⁶⁶ Adopting a rather different angle of vision some ten years later in Yet another Course at the Romish Foxes (1543), the former Carmelite Prior and subsequent Protestant apologist and prelate, John Bale, proclaimed that

If I schuld recyte all the wholsom frutes of your chast vowe, which I haue redde in cronycles and hystoryes, and knowne by your examples besydes forth, manye menne wolde maruele that ye synke not to hell with yowr prodygiouse chastyte. For innumerable knaueries hath your holye abbottes, priors, doctors, prestes, persons, curates, and relygiouse (as ye cal them) done.⁶⁷

In post-Reformation Europe, religious disputants would, of course, continue to rage and abuse each other from within their own faith communities for generations to come. However, in the final, changeful years of Henry VIII's reign when the fate of the nation was inextricably yoked to the unravelling of the 'King's great matter', it is apparent that the many and various details of sinning priests, witless cuckolds and tempted wives continued to be put to very regular service in a society condemned to irrevocable upheaval in its cultures of worship.




1 The jest narrative ends with the concluding remark: 'By thys tale ye may se that he that delyte[t]h to deryde & laughe other to skorne is somtyme hymselfe more derydyd'. See A C mery talys (London: J. Rastell, 1526), fol. 1r.
2 For further discussion here, see Marion Wynne-Davies, Women Writers and Familial Discourse in the English Renaissance (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 28ff
3 The play is celebrated by Howard B. Norland as 'the first play printed in England to represent farce as a dramatic form'. See Drama in Early Tudor Britain, 1485-1558 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), p. 255.
4 A first folio of Heywood's The Foure PP may also have been issued by William Rastell in this year.
5 See Tom Tyler and his wife an excellent old play, as it was printed and acted about a hundred years ago: together, with an exact catalogue of all the plays that were ever yet printed (1661), p. 12 (2nd pagination set). The critical debate surrounding authorial attribution has in the past met with a range of responses. In the years preceding the Second World War, R. de la Bere [Ronald B. Delabere Barker] argued that 'the play must be attributed to Heywood, though I can only base my opinion on rather small evidences'. See R. de la Bere, John Heywood, Entertainer (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1937), p. 87. In 1970, Robert Carl Johnson cautioned that 'Johan Johan should perhaps be assigned to Heywood only tentatively. Externally, evidence is lacking; but internally, the style is familiar'; see Robert Carl Johnson, John Heywood (New York: Twayne, 1970), p. 102. Indeed, in the early years of the twentieth century, Charles William Wallace had wished to promote the cause of William Cornish, Henry VIII's Master of the Boys of the Chapel Royal and the influence of More in the debate surrounding the authorship of this farce. See Charles William Wallace, The Evolution of the English Drama up to Shakespeare (Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1912): 'The Pardoner and the Frere and Johan Johan, were probably written by Cornish, as already shown, and certainly not by Heywood' (p. 80). In 1991, taking into account the critical history and textual transmission of the text, Richard Axton and Peter Happé included the farce in The Plays of John Heywood (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1991).
6 For a lively account of The Friars of Berwick in this context, see John Hines, The Fabliau in English (Harlow: Longman, 1993), p. 209ff.
7 See respectively: 23rd tale from the 3rd Day; 22nd tale from the 3rd Day. See Marguerite de Navarre, L'Heptaméron, ed. by Nicole Cazauran (Paris: Folio, 2004), pp. 289, 276. In this context of mendicant friars in sexual and/or murderous misadventures, see also, for example: 23rd tale on 3rd Day; 31st tale on 4th Day; 46th tale on 5th Day; 48th tale on 5th Day; 61st tale on 7th Day. Unless otherwise indicated, translations from French are my own.
8 Quoted here from the English translation: Juan Luis Vives, The office and duetie of an husband, made by the excelle[n]t philosopher Lodouicus Viues, and translated into English by Thomas Paynell (1555, 1st pub. 1550), sig. A5r, A7v. However, my discussion does not seek to extend these analogies to view Johan Johan as a pièce à clé, but as an engagement with cultural concerns which were widely shared in the early Tudor period. For a development of a thesis that sees Johan as a representation of Catherine of Aragon, for example, see Sylwia Borowska- Szerszun, 'The Unruly Household in John Heywood's Johan Johan', Studia Anglia Posnaniensia, 43 (2007), 265–73.
9 Quoted here from a later edition. See Erasmus, A ryght frutefull epystle, deuysed by the moste excellent clerke Erasmus, in laude and prayse of matrymony, translated in to Englyshe, by Rychard Tauernour, which translation he hathe dedicate to the ryght honorable Mayster Thomas Cromwel most worthy counseloure to our souerayne lorde kyng Henry the eyght. Cum priuilegio regali (1536), sig. A2r.
10 Vives, The office and duetie of an husband, sig. C6v.
11 Vives, The office and duetie of an husband, sig. F5r.
12 Sir John Fortescue, 'De Natura Legis Naturae', trans. by Chichester Fortescue, in The Works of Sir John Fortescue, ed. by Thomas Fortescue, 2 vols (London: printed for private distribution, 1869), i, 257.
13 See Erasmus, A ryght frutefull epystle [...] in laude and prayse of matrymony, sig. D2v. All line references from Heywood's plays are taken from the following edition: John Heywood, The Plays of John Heywood, ed. by Axton and Happé. For a wider discussion of domestic misgovernment and violence in late medieval England, see Barbara A. Hanawalt, 'Violence in the Domestic Milieu of late medieval England', in Violence in Medieval Society, ed. by Richard W. Kaeuper (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2000), pp. 197–214.
14 Richard Whitford, Here begynneth the boke called the Pype, or tonne, of the lyfe of perfection (1532), fol. 209v.
15 For a particularly stimulating discussion of Nature as the dramatization of failing masculinity, see Fiona S. Dunlop, 'The Rule of Youth and the Rule of the Familia in Henry Medwall's Nature, in The Medieval Household in Christian Europe, c.850-c.1550, ed. by Cordelia Beattie, Anna Maslakovic & Sarah Rees Jones (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), pp. 155-66.
16 Thomas Warton, The History of English Poetry from the Close of the Eleventh Century to the Commencement of the Eighteenth Century, 4 vols (London, 1781), iii, 87-88.
17 See respectively: Charles D. Deshler, Afternoons with the Poets (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1879), p. 44; de la Bere, John Heywood, Entertainer, p. 86.
18 See J. H. Lupton, A Life of John Colet, 2nd edn (London: G. Bell 1909), p. 135.
19 For further discussion here, see: Felicity Heal, Reformation in Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 77ff; Parish, Clerical Celibacy in the West, c.1100-1700 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), p. 128ff.
20 In this context, see the extensive discussion in Helen Parish, Clerical Celibacy in the West, esp. p. 152ff.
21 To Nicholas Berault, Louvain, 16 February 1521. See Erasmus, The Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. VIII: The Correspondence of Erasmus. Letters 1122 to 1251 (1520-1521), trans. R. A. B. Mynors, annotated by Peter G. Bietenholz (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), p. 155.
22 William Tyndale, An answere vnto Sir Thomas Mores dialoge (1531), fols. 94r-v.
23 5th tale from the 1st Day. Marguerite de Navarre, L'Heptaméron, p. 99.
24 For further discussion here, see Andrew Hiscock, 'Johan Johan (1533): The Politics of Marriage and Folly in Henrician England', Theta X: Théâtre Tudor (April 2013), 97-116.
25 See Sandra Brown, The Medieval Courts of the York Minster Peculiar (York: St Anthony's Press/Borthwick Papers, 1984), pp. 26-27. In this context, see also Margaret Bowker, The Secular Clergy in the Diocese of Lincoln, 1485-1520 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968): 'It was very rare for the bishop or his deputy to deprive a clerk for immorality'. However, she acknowledges that there were the inevitable exceptions (p. 119).
26 Parish, p. 127.
27 Erasmus, The Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. IV: The Correspondence of Erasmus. Letters 446 to 593 (1516-1517), trans. by R. A. B. Mynors and D. F. S. Thomson, annotated by James K. McConica (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), p. 9.
28 Glanmor Williams, The Welsh Church from Conquest to Reformation (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1976), p. 341.
29 This episode is related in Karen Jones, Gender and Petty Crime in Late Medieval England: The Local Courts in Kent, 1460-1560 (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell, 2006), pp. 149-50.
30 Gui de Roye, Thus endeth the doctrinal of sapyence the whyche is ryght vtile and prouffytable to alle crysten men, whyche is translated out of Frenshe in to englysshe by wyllyam Caxton at westmestter (1489), sig. H8v.
31 Here endith a compendiouse treetise dyalogue. of Diues [and] paup[er]. that is to say. the riche [and] the pore fructuously tretyng vpon the x. co[m]manmentes (1493), sig. R7v.
32 However, orthodox doctrine of the Catholic Church insisted that the purity of the sacraments was in no manner marred (or improved) by the human agent who administered them. In this context, see, for example 'Saint Austyn saith that the synnes of an euyl prest empessheth not the sacrament. but he dampneth him right parfondly', in Gui de Roye, the doctrinal of sapyence, sig. H8v; and the assertion that 'the secrament is not the worsse for the malyce of the preeste', in the compendiouse treetise dyalogue of Diues and Pauper (1493), sig. R8v.
33 See 29th tale from 3rd Day in Marguerite de Navarre, L'Heptaméron, p. 335.
34 See 29th tale from 3rd Day in Marguerite de Navarre, L'Heptaméron, p. 335.
35 See: Adolphus W. Ward, History of English Dramatic Literature, 2 vols (London: MacMillan, 1875), i, 244; Jules Jusserand, Le Théâtre en Angleterre depuis la conquête jusqu'aux pré-décesseurs immédiats de Shakespeare (Paris: Leroux, 1881), note 3, pp. 160–61.
36 See Ancien théâtre françois où Collection des ouvrages dramatiques les plus remarquables depuis les Mystères jusqu'à Corneille, ed. by Viollet le Duc, 10 vols (Liechtenstein: Kraus, 1972 [1st pub. 1854]), i, 208, 211. Howard B. Norland argues that 'Tib retains in the English version most of the characteristics of the stereotypical promiscuous and cunning shrew encountered in both the French fabliaux and the French farces, but she is bolder and more cynical than her French counterpart'. See Howard B. Norland, 'Formalizing English Farce: Johan Johan and its French Connection', in Drama in the Middle Ages: Comparative and Critical Essays, ed. by Clifford Davidson and John J. Stroupe (New York: AMS Press, 1991), pp. 356–67 (p. 359).
37 Recueil de Farces françaises inédites du XVe siècle, ed. by Gustave Cohen (Cambridge, MA: Mediaeval Academy of America, 1949).
38 This had been argued persuasively and at length in Ian Maxwell's French Farce and John Heywood (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1946).
39 See: T. W. Craik, 'The True Source of John Heywood's Johan Johan', Modern Language Review, 45.3 (July 1950), 289–95; William Elton, The Times Literary Supplement, 24 February 1950, p. 128. Unaware of this discovery, Stanley Sultan continued to affirm a more general parentage between the play and French farce, in 'Johan Johan and its Debt to French Farce', Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 55 (1954), 23–37. This led Elton to re-affirm la Farce du Pasté as the source text in 'Johan Johan and its Debt to French Farce', Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 55 (1954), 271–72.
40 Recueil, ed. by Cohen, pp. 145, 146, 148.
41 Raymond Eichmann emphasizes that 'With the exception of one fabliau in the Montaiglon- Raynaud corpus, all fabliaux are written in octosyllabic couplets. They vary in length, from eighteen to thirteen hundred lines, but most average around two hundred and fifty lines.' See Cuckolds, Clerics, & Countrymen: Medieval French Fabliaux, ed. by Raymond Eichmann, trans. by John Du Val (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1982), p. 2.
42 See 'Introduction', in Comic Provocations: Exposing the Corpus of Old French Fabliaux, ed. by Holly A. Crocker (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 1.
43 See, respectively: Jacques Ribard, 'Et si les Fabliaux n'étaient pas des contes à rire', in Le Rire au Moyen Age dans la Littérature et dans les Arts, ed. by Thérèse Bouché and Hélène Charpentier (Bordeaux: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 1990), pp. 257–67 (p. 257); Eichmann, Cuckolds, Clerics, & Countrymen, p. 6.
44 Du Prestre ki abevete, ll. 62–71. For text and translation, see Eichmann (ed.), Cuckolds, Clerics, & Countrymen, p. 46. Here, the priest peeks inside the peasants' house and says he suspects the couple are love-making. The couple declare that they are dining and the husband welcomes the priest inside. In a swift manoeuvre, the wife and her priest-lover now lock the husband outside the house and it is the husband who is left to peek as the priest feasts on his wife.
45 For text and translation for this fabliau, see Larry D. Benson & Theodore M. Andersson, The Literary Context of Chaucer's Fabliaux: Texts and Translations (Indianapolis, IN, and New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971), pp. 272–73.
46 For further discussion here, see: Jean Verdon, Rire au Moyen Age (Paris: Perrin, 2001), p. 177ff; Sarah Gordon, 'Laughing and Eating in the Fabliaux', in Laughter in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times: Epistemology of a Fundamental Human Behaviour, its Meaning, and Consequences, ed. by Albrecht Classen (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010), pp. 481–97; Sarah Gordon, Culinary Comedy in Medieval French Literature (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2007).
47 Chapter 9: 'The Love of Peasants'. See Capellanus, The Art of Courtly Love, trans. by Parry, p. 149.
48 For further discussion here, see Andrew Hiscock, '"Hear my Tale, or Kiss my Tail": The Old Wife's Tale, Gammer Gurton's Needle and the Popular Cultures of Tudor Comedy', in The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature, 1485-1603, ed. by Mike Pincombe and Cathy Shrank (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 733-48.
49 Quoted from the English translation: Juan Luis Vives, The office and duetie of an husband, made by the excellent philosopher Lodouicus Viues, and translated into English by Thomas Paynell 1555), sig. T8v, U1r. For further discussion of 'emasculinity' in the context of medieval society, see Robert N. Swanson, 'Angels Incarnate: Clergy and Masculinity from Gregorian Reform to Reformation', in Masculinity in Medieval Europe, ed. by D. M. Hadley (Harlow: Longman, 1999), pp. 160–77.
50 Vives, The office and duetie of an husband, sig. T8v.
51 Vives, The office and duetie of an husband, sig. U6r–v.
52 Vives, The office and duetie of an husband, sig. B7r.
53 John Van Engen, 'Late Medieval Anticlericalism: The Case of the New Devout', in Anticlericalism in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. by Peter A. Dykema and Heiko A. Oberman (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1993), pp. 19–63 (p. 19).
54 See 'The Trial of Mary and Joseph', in The N-Town Plays, ed. by Douglas Sugano (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2007), p. 130.
55 For a stimulating discussion of the medieval literary and philosophical contexts for these speculations, see Roy J. Pearcy, Logic and Humour in the Fabliaux: An Essay in Applied Narratology (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2007), p. 7ff.
56 For French text, see Recueil, ed. by Cohen, p. 152.
57 For French text, see Recueil, ed. by Cohen, p. 155.
58 Sultan, 'Johan Johan and its Debt to French Farce', p. 23.
59 Alfred W. Pollard, 'John Heywood: Critical Essay', in Representative English Comedies [. ..] From the Beginnings to Shakespeare, ed. by Charles Mills Gayley (New York: Macmillan, 1903), pp. 1–17 (pp. 11–12).
60 For full discussion of this case, see Jones, Gender and Petty Crime, p. 106.
61 Vives, The office and duetie of an husband, sig. G4v.
62 Apart this ache, Bevington also stresses that the audience is asked to bear witness in Johan Johan to the equally energetic 'desire for orgiastic gratification'. See Medieval Drama, ed. by David Bevington (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), p. 970.
63 Jones, Gender and Petty Crime, pp. 149, 106.
64 Henry A. Jefferies, Priests and Prelates of Armagh in the Age of Reformations, 1518-1558 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1997), p. 110.
65 See 'Le Rire et le Sourire au Moyen Age dans la Littérature et dans les Arts: Essai de Problématique', in Bouché & Charpentier (eds), Le Rire au Moyen Age, pp. 7–30 (p. 9).
66 Sir Thomas More, A dyaloge [...] Wherin be treated dyuers maters, as of the veneration [and] worshyp of ymages [and] relyques, prayng to sayntys, [and] goyng o[n] pylgrymage. Wyth many othere thyngys touching the pestylent sect of Luther and Tyndale, by the tone bygone in Sarony, and by tother laboryed to be brought in to Englond (1529), fol. 13v.
67 John Bale, Yet another course at the Romyshe foxes (1543), sig. 69v.