tresbonne et fort ioyeuse de Pernet qui va au vin_, and it is certainly in the French farces that we find the nearest approach in tone and treatment, as well as in form, to this anonymous Johan Johan. =Dates. The Authorship of "Thersites."=--It may have been noticed that in passing these six plays in review the order followed has been purely that of their dramatic development. We know that four of them were printed in 1533, when Heywood was thirty-six or thereabouts, but with the exception of the reference to Leo X. in the _Pardoner and the Frere_, the significance of which I have given reasons for considering doubtful, no one has yet detected any time-reference which enables us to fix their approximate dates.[92] In his little treatise _John Heywood als Dramatiker_ (1888) Dr. Swoboda maintains that the _Pardoner_ must be placed earlier than the _Four PP._, and that the _Four PP._ can be shown to be earlier than the anonymous play of _Thersites_, which we know from its epilogue was acted at Court between October 12 and 24, 1537, the dates respectively of the birth of Edward VI. and the death of his mother, Jane Seymour.[93] In support of his first point he cites the fact that some of the relics ("the grete toe of the Trinite" and "of all Hallows the blessed jawbone") vaunted by the Pardoner in his sermon in the church appear again in the longer list of relics in the _Four PP._ In support of the second he quotes from _Thersites_ the lines[94] in which that hero proposes to visit Purgatory and Hell, and traces in them an allusion to the Pardoner's story in the _Four PP._ I cannot accept either of these arguments as decisive chronologically, it being quite as reasonable for a dramatist to abridge a list of relics as to expand it, while the boast of Thersites might be represented as the hint out of which the rescue of Mistress Margery Coorson was developed no less plausibly than as a reference to that notorious lie. The _Pardoner and the Frere_ seems to me dramatically more advanced than the _Four PP._, and I am therefore slow to accept any argument which would place it earlier; but even when we allow for the fact that Chaucer had fixed for all time the humorous treatment of Pardoners, the fact that the Pardoners in these two plays are so closely alike is an argument of some weight for their common authorship.[95] But if this be so, the reference to sweeping Hell clean in _Thersites_ may set us wondering whether it was not the author of the _Four PP._ who was most likely to have written it; and we may note also the repetition in _Thersites_ of the absurd boasting with which Johan Johan preludes his disclosure of his cowardice, while the incident of Telemachus belongs to that "humour of filth" which I have already noted as characteristic of Heywood. For the probability of the latter's authorship of _Thersites_ we may claim also a little external support. We have already noticed that in March, 1538, Heywood received