We British: The Poetry of a People. Andrew Marr

He was on the other side of the argument from poor Anne Askew, part of the circle around Sir Thomas More, and at one point he himself narrowly escaped hanging. He was less learned than Medwall – he had risen as a chorister, a musician and an actor – but again, his drama, though highly moralistic, is full of the smell and the street language of the age. These were plays which may have been created on the edges of the court, but then made their way outwards, being performed in private houses, the inns of court, and anywhere else where there was a hall big enough to accommodate the audience.

      One of the most thoroughly enjoyable takes what is perhaps the classic British conversation to new levels. The Play of the Weather imagines that Jupiter, who bears an uncanny likeness in his grandiosity to Henry VIII, is considering reform of the chaotic British weather, which has been caused by disagreements between various other gods. His chief servant or courtier, ‘Mery Report’, is a rude, puckish creature, not a million miles away from Shakespeare’s Ariel in The Tempest. Mery will be a good servant in this judgement, he tells Jupiter, because the weather means nothing to him personally:

      For all weathers I am so indifferent,

      without affection standing up so right –

      Sun light, moon light, star light, twilight, torch light,

      Cold, heat, moist, dry, hail, rain, frost, snow, lightning, thunder,

      Cloudy, misty, windy, fair, foul, above head or under,

      Temperate or distemperate – Whatever it be

      I promise your lordship all is one to me.

      So at least we know that the weather around 1533, when this play was probably written, wasn’t so different from today’s. The play is also about the antagonism and rivalry between different parts of the British economy, again a contemporary theme: among those asking for meteorological favours are a lordly huntsman, a woodsman, a merchant, the owner of a watermill and the owner of a windmill, a gentlewoman who wants to keep herself from being sunburnt, a laundress who needs good drying weather and a schoolboy who enjoys throwing snowballs. So it’s clear that in moving from moral archetypes towards contemporary Britons, we have already come quite far.

      Although Heywood was a serious man and a passionate Catholic, he was also typically Tudor in his enjoyment of bawdy and of raucous argument. And the play is surprisingly hard-edged in its economic assessment of England at the time. Remember the buzzing market of Isabella Whitney’s London, its goods pouring in by merchant ships? Here is Heywood’s merchant pleading with Jupiter for favourable winds, and a lack of mists and storms. He sounds at times like an early free-market economist:

      In the daily danger of our goods and life,

      First to consider the desert of our request,

      What wealth we bring the rest to our great care and strife –

      And then to reward us as ye shall think best.

      What were the surplusage of each commodity

      Which grows and increases in every land,

      Except exchange by such men as we be,

      By way of intercourse that lyeth on our hand?

      We brought from home things whereof there is plenty,

      And homeward we bring such things as they be scant.

      Who should afore us merchants accounted be?

      For were not we, the world should wish and want …

      What does this tell us? Certainly that there was a vigorous discussion going on about whether or not the merchant classes deserved their wealth and position. But the play takes on more sensitive questions as well. After a pompous gentleman demands good weather for his hunting, a forest ranger, in charge of hunting territory, eloquently protests his lot:

      Rangers and keepers of certain places

      As forests, parks, purlews and chases

      Where we be charged with all manner and game

      Small is our profit and great is our blame.

      Alas for our wages, what be we the near?

      What is forty shillings or five mark a year?

      There is a distinct class edge to this. What would Henry VIII, that manically enthusiastic hunter, or indeed a local lord hosting such a play, make of this demand for higher wages? It would certainly have caused a hubbub of debate once the show was over. Similarly, after the libidinous gentlewoman has complained about her complexion being ruined by sun and rain, a working-class laundress gives her a terrific scolding. She too might have been as fair, except that she knew she had to work, partly because of the danger of idleness:

      It is not thy beauty that I disdain,

      But thine idle life that thou hast rehearsed,

      Which any good woman’s heart would have pierced.

      For I perceive in dancing and singing,

      In eating and drinking and thine appareling,

      Is all the joy wherein thy heart is set.

      But naught of all this doth thine own Labour get.

      For how dost thou nothing but of thine own travail,

      Thou mightest go as naked as my nail.

      The passages between the owners of the windmill and the watermill fascinatingly compare the two ways of grinding meal, and their usefulness to ordinary farmers and peasants. But there’s a lot of sly comedy to be had: the owner of the windmill, of course, wants maximum wind and little rain. But the watermiller explains that the blazing sun is a wonderful thing:

      And so for drought, if corn thereby increase

      The sun doth comfort and ripe all, doubtless

      And often the wind so leyth the corn, God wot,

      That never after can it right, but rot.

      England’s heavy rains are in fact essential: water is no mere commodity, but

      … thing of necessity,

      For washing, for scouring, all filth cleansing.

      Where water lacketh, what beastly being!

      In brewing, in baking, in dressing of meat,

      If ye lack water what could ye drink or eat?

      Without water could live neither man nor beast,

      For water preserveth both most and least.

      The argument between the two millers quickly degenerates into a sexual competition about grinding; the pecking of their millstones becomes a fairly grotesque metaphor of the kind that Tudor audiences apparently liked. The puckish messenger, Mery, complains that his watermill is ‘many times choked’, to which the watermiller replies:

      So will she be though you should burst your bones,

      Except you be perfect in setting your stones …

      and advises him on good ‘pecking’. Mery responds:

      So saith my wife and that maketh all our checking.

      She would have the mill pecked, pecked, pecked every day,

      But by God, Millers must peck when they may.

      So oft have we pecked that our stones wax right thin

      and all our other gear not worth a pin …

      And on and on it goes. It’s simple bawdy, not great poetry by any standards. But it tells us more about the life and talk of early modern England than all the lovelorn swains and surprised goddesses put together. There is a material directness about these Tudor ‘interludes’ from which Shakespeare and his contemporaries must certainly have learned. Here, for a final example, is the boy, explaining to Jupiter’s