SOURCE: “John Heywood and The Four PP,” in Trivium, Vol. 14, May 1979, pp. 47-69.

In the following essay, Blamires calls The Four PP Heywood's best drama, arguing that the play should not be dismissed by critics as a frivolous work full of humor and short on literary achievement.

John Heywood's ‘mad plays’, as he called them, have seemed to many readers to be a particularly eccentric outgrowth from the crop of hybrid drama which characterizes the mid-sixteenth century in England. In surveys of pre-Shakespearian drama, his works are often briskly disposed of as “debates” (insinuating that they are in a subsidiary category of drama) influenced by French farce (which did not influence anybody else and therefore fails to excite the critic looking for “trends”). Heywood is given momentary credit for his “wit”, his “vigour”, and his “Chaucerian spirit”, but the critic of pre-Shakespearian theatre cannot easily accommodate him alongside...