SOURCE: “The Humanism of Acting: John Heywood's The Foure PP,” in Studies in the Literary Imagination, Vol. 26, No. 1, Spring 1993, pp. 21-46.

In the following essay, Cartwright argues that The Four PP is the first English play in which ambiguous characterization leads to unpredictability and complexity, and thus serves as a bridge from medieval drama to works by Renaissance writers like Marlowe and Shakespeare.

John Heywood's The Foure PP (c. 1520s)¹ exposes a possibility in acting and spectatorial effect that will ultimately help distinguish renaissance drama from medieval drama. Reproducing a system of allegorical correspondences, medieval plays depend upon “transparent” acting: Good Deeds must enact her name. But sixteenth-century drama's shift toward secular subject matter mines a complexity hitherto unavailable. In The Foure PP, remarkably, a character's meaning might turn ambiguous, uncertain. That difference identifies a new dramaturgical nexus. Enigmatical acting by both the Pardoner and Palmer disturbs the...