23 October 2007¶ Heywood's "The Four PP"
The Four PP is a medieval play. The four characters are types from medieval life, the Palmer, the Pothecary, the Pardoner, and the Peddlar. They meet and talk. There is no set, no scene, no place. They are characters who meet and perform, like clowns, and mock their various professions. It’s all surface; there’s little subtext here.
The most significant content is the contest for the biggest lie. The Peddlar acts as judge for reasons which might be clear to someone who read more closely than I did, but it wasn’t significant to the direction of the dialog anyway. The three remaining characters each told the most outlandish lie they could come up with. Each was, in its own way, completely misogynistic, and they grow in their misogyny.
The pothecary goes first and tells the story of a epileptic woman (yes, this story is the apotheosis of political correctness in the 21st century) who is cured by one of the pothecary’s cures. She doesn’t ingest it so much as, um, internalize it: he calls it a “taimpon.” Yes: you’ve got the image now. It does cure her, but it also explodes out of her, shoots for ten miles, and… well, that’s enough, don’t you think?
The pardoner tells the story about how he took a trip down to purgatory to rescue a woman. At first, Satan is perfectly happy with his presence until he discovers who he’ll be taking. Satan isn’t at all happy once he discovers the identity of the woman pardoned, but he has no choice but to obey: pardons are binding, you see. So he takes the woman from the very kitchen of hell, where she works at the spit, roasting meat. The pardoner claims that the others can meet the woman by visiting a particular corner in London.
The palmer replies, in what sounds like a simple response and is much shorter than the others’ stories, that he didn’t believe the pardoner’s story because the woman he described was a she-devil. Every woman he’s ever met, explains the palmer, is nothing but perfectly patient.
The others immediately agree that the palmer’s story about women being patient is the biggest lie they’ve ever heard. The palmer wins.
The play would be much strengthened to end right there. It’s a big gag, and the play has been working up to that joke for most of its length. But then the play keeps on going and going for another couple of pages. The energy and the big bang from the joke get lost in a bunch of wandering chatter that ends up with a proclamation to stay close to the universal church.
For all the amateur elements in the play — the short length, the lack of setting, the four characters with no depth, the entirely conventional mockery of the characterizations, the dramatic predictability and lack of tension — the part that’s most telling of the play’s medievality is this final speech. Sustaining the universal church is a move that’s entirely out of step with the satiric tone of the rest of the play and only serves to provide a close that’s a reaffirmation of the status quo. It positions the play safely outside any lasting intellectual impact (though there was no real risk of that) and comforts the audience with a line that’s sure to satisfy even the most conservative viewers. Kind of a yawn, actually: instead of a big power-punch the play only delivers a meek yessir and allows the audience to get back to their drinking, unimpacted by anything they’ve seen. The power of the stage is squandered, but I don’t think anyone at the time really understood the power of a play. I guess Heywood’ll be forgiven for that, after all.
More information about Four PP
Commenting is closed for this article.