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The first comprehensive scholarly biography of the Tudor playwright, poet, musician, singer, proverb-collector, and satirist, John Heywood.

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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Preface
1: Origins: Early Years: Johan Johan and Witty and Witless
2: Faith, Hope, and Mendacity: The Four PP
3: Interlude: The Annus Mirabilis of 1529
4: Cynicism and Hope: Gentleness and Nobility
5: Conscience and Satire in A Play of Love
6: Complaining about the Weather: Heywood, Thomas More, and the Opening of the Reformation Parliament
7: Discordant Voices: The Pardoner and The Friar
8: The Significance of Heywood''s Interludes
9: New Forms, New Challenges: Heywood''s Songs: Merriness, Malice, and the Death of More
10: Discord, Dissent, and Division: England, 1534-1543
11: In Kent and Christendom?: The Nature of Heywood''s Treason
12: Rehabilitation and Reformation: The Epigrams and Proverbs
13: The Accession of Mary Tudor: ''The eagle''s bird has spread his wings''
14: Speaking in Parables: The Spider and the Fly
15: Bellicose Verse: ''Scarborough Warning''
16: ''When all that is to was is brought'': A Time of Endings and Thoughts of Flight
17: ''At this my extreme age'': ''Old Heywood'' in Exile
18: ''His own life and nature'': Reputation and Legacy