SOURCE: “The Use of Folk Tales in the Works of John Heywood,” in International Folklore Review, Vol. 4, 1986, pp. 55-61.

In the following essay, Ting demonstrates that several of Heywood's plays and some of the proverbs in his Dialogue of Proverbs were based on folktales and other medieval oral traditions.

To most folklorists, John Heywood, a popular mid-16th-century English writer, is known primarily as a collector of proverbs. His Dialogue of Proverbs, as Rudolph Habenicht has pointed out, gave strong impetus to the fashion for proverbs during his own day.¹ Heywood presumably knew not only earlier and classical adages through reading, but was also well acquainted with proverbs in the oral tradition, many of which were recorded first or only in the Dialogue.² A self-made man of ‘humble origin … in the genealogy of the jesters and the minstrels’,³ he was apparently acquainted also with another verbal art—the...