Numbers
in parentheses refer to lines of the
text.
Though it is
never produced (apart from a few times in academic settings), Thomas Heywood’s
comic interlude The Four PP (ca. 1530) retains some comic appeal yet
today. Its lively tetrameter couplets move
briskly along and a bit of earthy humor revives the reader (or viewer) whose
interest might be flagging. In spite of
this apparent popular appeal, Heywood was a courtier and the piece was most
likely performed for Henry VIII. All of
its characters, the four Ps of the title (normally pronounced "four pees"– a palmer, a pardoner, a peddler, and a “pothecary” (medical
practitioner) – are satirized as professionals who all excel in lying.
Each of these
groups has, of course, long been subject to suspicion and wit. Heywood’s reservations about the physicians
of his day recalls Montaigne’s remark that “I see no kinde of men so soone
sicke, nor so late cured, as those who are under the jurisdiction of Physicke” (Bk.
II, 37, “Of the resemblance betweene children and fathers”). This attitude is surely understandable given
the state of science during the Renaissance and indeed persists in many people’s distrust of conventional medical
treatments even today. Before the development
of experimental science and the professionalization of the practice of
medicine, a great many medical practitioners were out-and-out charlatans, and,
for good reason, even the university men enjoyed little confidence from their
patients.
Doubting the spiritual
benefits of pardons, relics, and pilgrimages, all practices sanctioned and
encouraged by the church, might seem to make Heywood seem a partisan of the
Reformation, did we not know that he clung to the Roman church when it became
disadvantageous, even dangerous, to do so.
His interlude was written very close to the times that religious
controversies led to the Schism of 1531 and Henry VIII’s foundation of the
Church of England a few years later, so the issues were certainly part of
public discourse, but his criticism of Catholic practices surely follows in the tradition of fundamentally orthodox reformers such as Chaucer, Dante,
and Rabelais rather than of schismatics.
The peddler,
asked to judge among the other three, notes that he himself is a skilled liar
(one might think of the popular image of a used car salesman) and thereby
something of an expert on deceit, so he asks the others to compete to see who
might be judged the greatest liar. Contemporaries
accustomed to today’s onslaught of advertising claims will need no convincing
that those in the retail trade are often accomplished at misrepresentation.
Yet another
unrelated theme runs alongside the ridicule of religion and science. The palmer, the pardoner, the peddler, and the
apothecary are all mendacious, but they are also all misogynists.
This commonality is unsurprising as denigrating women and limiting their
power is surely the most widespread and enduring form of prejudice. Since the Bronze Age, at any rate, women have
been subordinated socially and, like other targets of discrimination, assigned
characteristics that justify their oppression.
From Semonides in archaic Greece through Tertullian to Jean de Meun to
Donne’s inability to imagine a woman both “true, and fair” and consistently in
the centuries since, women have been subject to sexist slanders.
The first
sustained reference to women in The Four PP occurs in the peddler’s
introduction of himself as he lists his wares just as he would have done when
approaching prospective customers. His
inventory is heavily slanted toward “women’ triflings” (219) such as “gloves,
pins,combs . . . “
Pomanders, hooks, and laces knotted,
Brooches, rings, and all manner beads,
Lace, round and flat, for women’s heads,
Needles, thread, thimbles, shears, and all such knacks
(236-239)
The pardoner then refers to
another female trait that remains today the theme of jocular criticism, the
time spent in toilette and dressing. This leads the apothecary to dilate on women’s
“trimming and pinning up their gear” (266).
He notes that they have particular difficulty “fiddling with the tail-pin”
(267), an anticipation of the apothecary’s ribald story, soon to come. The peddler, anxious to make his pitch, says,
“let women’s matters pass” (279), but the theme soon returns.
As the men set to arguing about who should
have mastery, the peddler suggests that since “all three can lie as well/ As
can the falsest devil in hell” (442-443), their leader should be the one who
can tell the single biggest lie. The
peddler is competent to judge such a competition as he boasts “some skill” (446)
in fraud.
Each contestant then offers a sample of
his self-praise, including a certain amount of scatological humor, first about
the musty relics; one is a “buttock-bone of Pentecost” (521) while another “relic
hath beshitten the roast” (523). This
vein intensifies and focuses on the female body in the apothecary’s tall tale
about inserting an anal plug which the female patient expels with such force
that it razes a castle ten miles away (710-767).
Not to be outdone, the pardoner responds
with a story of his fetching a woman out of hell (776-976) to the great relief
of the devils to whom she had been a constant trial. They ask the pardoner to divert other such
impossible creatures from their realm and “roar” with joy at her departure
(964). Women are such monsters, it
seems, that even devils cannot bear their company.
After these flights of fancy, the palmer
delivers the interlude’s punch line. In
the vast number of women whom he has encountered he has never, he maintains,
met a single one “out of patience” (1004). The four instantly agree that this is surely the greatest lie possible. All find then that they are in complete
agreement, and the losers are released from “their bond” (1134) in an act of
masculine solidarity.
Having reinforced received opinion in this
way, the play turns to a pious conclusion (not sufficiently pious, however, to
prevent some play with the word “virtue” [1182-1190]), ending in their embrace
of “the Church Universal.” (1236) Male
chauvinism seems the vehicle for their unanimity even more than Jesus
Christ. Like locker-room vulgarity,
attacks on women provide reassurance of male power as well as timeless humor,
enjoyed by Henry VIII as well as by commoners. The “war of the sexes” is in some ways
perennial, but, because of the male domination of education and literature, only one side of the propaganda is preserved.
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