Worshypfull maysters ye shall understand That Pope Leo the X hath graunted with his hand, And by his bulls confyrmed under lede, To all maner people, bothe quycke and dede, Ten thousand yeres & as many lentes of pardon, etc. But as Heywood was probably born in 1497, it is extremely unlikely that his undoubted plays were written before 1520, and if the evidence of this passage is to be pressed, I should regard it as absolutely fatal to his authorship, it being inconceivable that any one who had written the _Pardoner and the Frere_ could subsequently write the _Dyaloge of Wyt and Folly_ or the _Play of Love_. But there would be an obvious convenience in making a dead pope rather than a living one answerable for the Pardoner's ribaldries, and the weight of this argument is not lessened when we remember that the Pardoner proceeds to quote also the authority of the King.[91] Although no alteration of date would bring the play out of the reign of Henry VIII., we may well believe that that peremptory monarch might forgive such reflections on his management of church affairs at an earlier date much more readily than satire of a system he was then supporting. We shall have to speak again of the _Pardoner and the Frere_ and its probable date, but we must pass on now to Heywood's masterpiece, if we may call it his, the _mery play betwene Johan Johan, the husbande, Tyb his wyfe and Syr Jhan, the preest_. In approaching this play, as in approaching Chaucer's tales of the Miller and Reeve and some of their fellows, we must, of course, leave our morality behind and accept the playwright's and tale-teller's convention that cuckoldry and cuckoldmaking are natural subjects for humour. This granted, it will be difficult to find a flaw in the play. Like the _Pardoner and the Frere_ it is short, only about one half the length of the plays of _Love_, the _Wether_, and the _Four PP._, and it gains greatly from being less weighted with superfluities. Johan Johan himself, with his boasting and cowardice, his eagerness to be deceived, and futile attempts to put a good face on the matter, his burning desire to partake of the pie, his one moment of self-assertion, to which disappointed hunger spurs him, and then his fresh collapse to ludicrous uneasiness,--who can deny that he is a triumph of dramatic art, just human enough and natural enough to seem very human and natural on the stage, but with the ludicrous side of him so sedulously presented to the spectator that there is never any risk of compassion for him becoming uncomfortably acute? The handling of Tyb and Syr Jhan is equally clever. Each in turn is prepared to act on the defensive, to be evasive and explanatory, but before Johan Johan's acquiesciveness such devices seem superfluous, and little by little the pair reach a height of effrontery not easily surpassed. One of the incidents of the play, the melting of the wax by the fire, occurs also in a contemporary French _Farce nouuelle