John Heywood was an important literary and theatrical pioneer in
his own right, but he is also a revealing lens through which to
view the wider tumultuous history of the sixteenth century. He was,
through the period from the mid-1520s to the 1560s, as near to a
celebrity as Tudor England possessed, famed for his 'merry' persona
and good humour. But his public image concealed a deeper engagement
with religious and political history. Enduringly resistant to
extremism, he variously entertained, counselled, and cautioned his
readers and audiences through four reigns, finding himself, as
regimes changed and religious policies shifted, successively
celebrated, marginalised, anathematised, condemned to death,
recuperated, and celebrated once more before finally retreating
into exile on the Continent in 1564. He produced plays at the
courts of Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary and Elizabeth, performed and
taught keyboard music, wrote lyric poetry and songs, and from the
mid-sixteenth century turned to collecting and publishing highly
successful volumes of proverbs and epigrams for which he was
remembered well into the seventeenth century. Each of these works
provides a subtle, often courageously critical engagement with the
politics of its moment. To study Heywood's career takes us beyond
the cliches of popular history, beyond Shakespeare and the
Elizabethan playhouses, beyond the canonical Henrician court poets
and the writers of the Elizabethan 'Golden Age', beyond even the
experiences of the century's chief ministers, intellectuals, and
martyrs, to a theatrical and literary world less visible in the
conventional sources. It opens a window on a culture in which the
actions of monarchs, their councillors, and their victims were
witnessed and reflected upon at one remove from the centres of
power. And it allows us to re-examine the significance of an
individual who deserves our attention, not only for his
considerable artistic achievements, but also for the determination
with which, often against the odds, he used his talents in pursuit
of wider humanist cultural principles for over half a century.
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