Episode 152: As the Saying Goes

Welcome to the History of English Podcast, a podcast about the history of the English language.

This is episode 152, as the saying goes.

In this episode, we're going to explore two developments that took place in the first half of the 1500s in England.

The first is the collection of popular sayings and words of advice by several notable writers during this period.

Most of those sayings and proverbs had been around for centuries, but around this time they started to be assembled into extensive collections to illustrate the wit and wisdom of the ages.

The other development concerned a new type of dramatic performance.

For centuries English drama had been confined to religious and morality plays, but during the early 1500s a new type of drama emerged that was both secular and humorous.

Both of these developments had one thing in common, and that common element was a poet named John Haywood.

He was both a playwright who contributed to the development of English comedy and a proverb collector who assembled the first great collection of English sayings and proverbs.

So in this episode we'll look at both of those developments, and we'll also look at the final years of the reign of Henry VIII.

But before we begin, let me remind you that the website for the podcast is historyofenglishpodcast.com, and you can sign up to support the podcast and get bonus episodes at patreon.com/slash history of English.

Now, last time, we looked at sickness and disease in Tudor, England, and in that episode, we revisited the concept of the four humors, the four bodily fluids that determine one's health.

It was a concept that extended all the way way from the ancient Greeks to the early modern era.

But in the first half of the 1500s, the word humor started to acquire a new sense.

The word was applied to the general state of mind or mood of a person.

If the humors were in balance and the person was in good health, the person might be said to be in good humor.

And from there, the word humor came to refer to something that caused a person to be happy.

Of course, people in the Tudor Tudor period loved humor and entertainment just like people today,

and one place where they sometimes found humor and entertainment was in collections of popular sayings and proverbs.

People have always been interested in these little sayings, but in the early age of print, some writers started to collect them and assemble them into books that could be published.

In fact, you might remember from an earlier episode that the first book that William Caxton published in England was one of these collections called Dictus, or Sayings of the Philosophers.

It was an English translation of a French book, but the French version was ultimately based on an old Arabic text composed in the 11th century.

Caxton published the English version in 1477.

So the first book ever printed in English on English soil was a collection of ancient sayings and proverbs.

This type of collection contained sage advice that had been passed down over over the centuries.

Many proverbs can be traced back to antiquity, and around the year 1500 another massive collection of proverbs was assembled by the well-known Dutch writer Erasmus, who I have mentioned in prior episodes.

He prepared a Greek edition of the Bible, and he encouraged the translation of the Bible into local vernaculars.

And like other humanists of the period, he studied the writings of the ancient Greeks and Romans, and early in his career he assembled this massive collection of sayings or proverbs from the ancient Greeks and Romans.

Erasmus' anthology was written in Latin, and it was called Collectinea Adagiorum, which literally meant collection or anthology of adages.

He revised and expanded the work several times over his lifetime.

By the time of his death in 1536, the collection had expanded from around 800 proverbs to over 4,000 proverbs.

Those collections are generally known as the Adagia, which is just the original Latin version of the term adages.

The collections were very popular among early consumers of books, and they helped to popularize many of those old sayings.

They contained the Latin version of common English sayings like to kill two birds with one stone, to squeeze water out of a stone, to leave no stone unturned, and the grass is greener on the other side of the fence, as well as many, many others.

Well, around the current point in our overall story of English in 1539, an English writer named Richard Tavener translated a small portion of Erasmus' proverb collection into English.

Tavener's book contained only 187 of the proverbs, so it was just a sampling of the larger collection, but it showed that there was interest in producing a version in English for readers who didn't speak Latin.

But as I noted, Erasmus' collection was mostly derived from the sayings of the ancient Greeks and Romans.

Some were also culled from the Bible or other ancient sources.

Although some of them could be found in English, many were ancient and obscure sayings that were largely unknown in English.

But a collection of decidedly English proverbs was just around the corner.

The man who eventually produced that collection was named John Haywood, but in the late 1530s he was actually well known for something else, his plays.

Haywood was a poet and a playwright who lived at a time when medieval drama was evolving into the art form that became so popular in Elizabethan England and ultimately produced writers like Shakespeare.

That transition occurred over the course of the 1500s, and Haywood was one of the early writers who contributed to that change.

So in order to explain what I mean by that, I think we should consider what drama was like prior to the 1500s.

In Europe, the story really begins with the ancient Greeks.

The Greeks loved drama and theatrical performances, and in fact many of the basic terms we associate with drama today came from the Greeks, including theater, prologue, protagonist, antagonist, scene, episode, thespian, and dialogue.

The Greeks also gave us the words for the primary types of theatrical performances, comedy, tragedy, and drama.

The words comedy and tragedy can be found in late Middle English, but drama is first recorded in English in the 1520s, so it was a relatively new word in English at the current point in our overall story.

Today we tend to associate the word drama with serious or emotional stories, but it originally referred to any kind of theatrical theatrical performance.

So it encompassed both comedy and tragedy, and I'm going to use the word drama in that broader sense in this episode.

Now, as we know, the Romans were heavily influenced by Greek culture, and the Romans embraced Greek drama as well.

Roman playwrights contributed several important plays in the classical Roman period.

But then the early Christian church was established, and it frowned upon such performances.

As a result, the dramatic arts largely disappeared in Western Europe during the early Middle Ages.

During that period, people sometimes put on folk plays on special occasions, like celebrations associated with the changing of the seasons, but those productions mostly consisted of informal or improvised skits, and none of the dialogue from those plays was preserved.

It wasn't until the late Middle Ages that drama finally started to make a comeback in Europe.

The church started to embrace the art form as a way to teach people about the Bible.

Certain stories from the Bible were sometimes acted out for congregations.

At first, those performances were performed on special occasions, like a depiction of the birth of Jesus at Christmastime.

But over time, these types of short vignettes were composed for most of the well-known stories in the Bible, and on certain special holidays, the local craft guilds would perform them.

Those plays became known as mystery plays, and during those special holidays, the guilds would perform each scene on a large open cart or wagon that was pulled through town.

Each cart would stop at certain points along the way and perform the scene, so it was sort of like a combination of a play and a parade.

Both the movable platforms and the plays that were performed on them were called pageants.

The word pageant was borrowed from Latin and French, but the original meaning of the word is disputed.

One theory is that the word is derived from the same Latin root as the word page,

and pageant referred to the pages of dialogue that had to be memorized for the performance.

An alternate theory is that the word pageant is derived from a term that referred to the platform itself, and over time the word was extended from the platform to the performance that was presented on top of it.

At any rate, in modern English the word pageant has come to refer to any spectacular display presented on a stage.

Now, I said that one theory connects the word pageant to the word page because the dialogue was usually written down on pages for the performers to memorize.

Well, some of the scripts from those mystery plays performed in the 1400s have survived the centuries.

I actually talked about one of those plays called The Second Shepherd's Play back in episode 130.

I discussed that play because it featured a character who spoke in a regional English dialect, but it also happens to be one of the oldest surviving plays composed in English.

That particular play is also well known because it featured a comedic scene in which one of the characters steals a sheep and then takes it home, and then his wife tries to hide it by placing it in a crib and pretending it's a baby.

Even though mystery plays were religious in nature, they often featured those types of added scenes.

Of course, those amusing scenes weren't part of the traditional stories in the Bible.

They were just a little something extra that was added in to entertain the audience.

Some people equated those extra bits to the mince meat or stuffing that people ate at dinner.

Mince meat or stuffing was a kind of cheap filler.

The French word for that type of food was farce.

It's a term that can still be found in a word like force meat, which is a type of chopped meat used as a stuffing.

Well, in the early 1500s, that culinary term was extended to the comedy scenes that were added as filler to these Bible stories in those mystery plays.

And that's how the word farce evolved within English from a type of food to a type of broad comedy.

By the early 1500s, the popularity of the mystery play had started to give way to a new type of performance called a morality play.

Those plays weren't based on specific stories in the Bible, but they were designed to teach a moral or ethical lesson.

The characters were allegories who represented specific concepts and ideas.

So for example, the plays featured characters like truth, mercy, charity, and peace, and they exchanged dialogue with each other to present a moral lesson.

Well, the morality plays of the early 1500s were very popular in places like England, and even though they were sanctioned by the church, they represented a step away from from the literal stories of the Bible that had been performed previously.

Then the influence of the Renaissance and the Reformation led to a further evolution of the art form as it moved into a more secular direction.

In the early 1500s, performers at the royal court started to perform short skits and sketches that didn't have anything to do with the church at all.

The performances usually occurred during breaks between other activities and were called interludes.

They weren't intended to teach a lesson or provide a moral message.

They were strictly entertainment and were presented for the delight of the audience.

These types of plays were soon performed for the general public in courtyards and town squares.

And again, this new style of play proved to be very popular with audiences, and it marks the point when English drama began to take shape outside of the confines and limitations of the church.

There were no permanent theaters or formal companies of actors yet, but both of those would start to appear over the next few decades.

I noted that these new types of plays were called interludes.

The term originally referred to those short sketches or skits performed at royal banquets or celebrations, but it soon came to be used for just about any type of play that was produced during this period.

And one of the most popular writers of those plays was the man I mentioned earlier, John Haywood.

He originally joined the court of Henry VIII as an entertainer.

The surviving court records identify him as a singer, but he was also a musician and a composer of music.

After Haywood had been in the king's service for about a decade, he began to write scripts for those new sketches or interludes that were being performed at the royal court.

Some of his plays touched on politics and religion, but they can generally be described as farces.

One of Haywood's most well-known plays of this period was called The Four Ps.

The Four Ps referred to the four characters in the play, a palmer or pilgrim, a pardoner who sold indulgences and religious trinkets, a peddler or merchant, and a pothecary, which was an apothecary or druggist, but the word was sometimes rendered without the A at the front.

In the play, the palmer, pardoner, and pothecary debate which one of them is more important,

and then the peddler arrives and suggests that they resolve the argument by seeing who can tell the most elaborate lie.

The pardoner lies about the holy power of his trinkets, the apothecary lies about the healing power of his cures, and the palmer or pilgrim tops them all by claiming that he had never met an angry woman in all his travels, the implication being that all women tended to be angry about something most of the time.

Misogyny was a common theme in the literature of this period.

Well, Haywood's plays were written in rhyming verse, and he loved to play around with words.

We get a good example of that type of word play in a passage from the Four Ps, where the peddler arrives and tries to sell the other three men some goods.

The men aren't interested in buying anything, but the peddler says he enjoys their company, and he suggests that they devise a game to pass the time, and that he will win because he's the best at most games.

The apothecary responds with a snod question asking if the peddler is the best at drinking and winking or falling asleep.

The peddler assures them that he's quite good at both, because drinking and sleeping are usually linked.

He uses the term winking and pinking to refer to his eyes closing.

By the way, the term pinking has largely disappeared from English, but it can still be found in some local English dialects where it refers to the late afternoon or early evening when the day grows dark, like when someone closes their eyes.

Now, here's a performance of that passage from Haywood's play, performed by the Beyond Shakespeare Company.

And again, note the word play:

Devise what pastime you think best, and make ye sure to find me pressed.

Right, Pedler, be ye so universal that you can do whatsoever ye shall.

Sir Pothecary,

if ye list fort oppose me, what can I do?

Then shall you see?

Then tell me this, Pebba.

Are you perfect in drinking?

Perfect in drinking, as may be wished by thinking.

Well, then, after you're drinking, how fall ye to winking?

Sir, after drinking, while the shot is tinking, some heads be swimming, but mine will be sinking.

And upon drinking, my eyes will be pinking.

For winking to drinking

is always linking.

As you can hear, these interludes were both plays plays and poetry, but they were often playful poetry, and they were intended as light-hearted entertainment.

Again, this was one of several plays composed by John Haywood in the late 1520s and early 1530s.

Shortly after Haywood completed the last of these plays, they were all printed in 1533.

And that was another important development because it meant that his plays could now be read by the general public.

Someone who purchased the plays could experience them without actually attending the performance.

And this marks a point when plays started to emerge as a specific type of literature in and of themselves.

And again, we see how that process laid the groundwork for the great playwrights of the upcoming Elizabethan period.

Now, it was around this same time in the mid-1530s that Henry VIII demanded that people throughout England swear an oath recognizing him as the head of the Church of England.

Well, John Haywood was a devout Catholic, so he apparently made the decision to lay low during this period.

He largely stopped writing plays, and he returned to his earlier role as a singer, musician, and musical composer.

As we saw in an earlier episode, Henry's demand that people swear an oath recognizing him as the head of the English Church led to many notable executions, including the execution of Henry's chancellor, Thomas More.

Well, John Haywood was actually married to Thomas More's niece, so he had a close connection to the Moore family, and that may have also played a factor in Haywood's decision to step away from the limelight.

When Thomas More resigned as Chancellor, he was replaced with Thomas Cromwell, and as we saw last time, Cromwell emerged as Henry's new right-hand man, and he was the one who orchestrated the dissolution of the monasteries.

Cromwell was a committed committed Protestant, and he used his position to push through many Protestant reforms.

But certain events around the current point in our story led to Cromwell's fall from grace.

That fall is usually attributed to Cromwell's role in arranging Henry VIII's fourth marriage, which turned into a bit of a disaster.

It had been a couple of years since Henry's third wife, Jane Seymour, had died shortly after giving birth to their son, Edward.

With Henry now a widower, Cromwell saw an opportunity to promote an alliance with the Protestant states of northern Europe.

By that point, many of the princes in the northern part of the Holy Roman Empire had become Protestants, and that included the Duke of Cleves in the northwestern part of modern-day Germany.

The Duke had a sister named Anne, and Cromwell thought that she would make a good wife for Henry.

He thought that it would help to forge a strong alliance between England and the Protestant states across the Channel, and it would also create a fracture within the larger Holy Roman Empire ruled by the powerful Habsburg Emperor Charles V.

Despite Cromwell's plans, Henry was reluctant to marry a woman that he had never met, but he was finally convinced by a portrait of her painted by Henry's court artist, Hans Holbein.

With the marriage agreed to, Anne of Cleves arrived in England in December of 1539.

Henry decided to ride out to meet her before she reached London, but he decided to play a little prank.

Before meeting Anne, he disguised himself by taking off his royal garments and putting on the clothing of a messenger.

Well, Anne didn't recognize him as the king.

She thought he was a messenger, and she was apparently unimpressed by what she saw.

Well, Henry took offense and apparently never recovered from that first impression.

He later complained that Anne was ugly, though contemporary sources suggested that wasn't the case.

Regardless, Henry wanted nothing to do with her, but he felt compelled to go through with the marriage anyway.

The marriage was doomed from the start, and within six months Henry had negotiated an annulment with her.

He gave Anne several large estates to obtain her consent, and she retired to live in relative luxury for the rest of her life.

By that point, Henry had already fallen for Anne's maid of honor, named Catherine Howard, and just 19 days after his annulment from Anne of Cleves, he married Catherine, who became wife number five.

But Henry had to buy his way out of a disastrous marriage to marry Catherine, and he wasn't willing to forgive Thomas Cromwell for his role in arranging that marriage.

On the same day that Henry married Catherine Howard, Thomas Cromwell was executed for treason.

Cromwell's role in arranging that marriage to Anne of Cleves was certainly a major factor in his execution, but as the saying goes, it was probably just the straw that broke the camel's back.

Cromwell had made a lot of enemies through some of his radical policies, like dissolving the monasteries, and those critics finally convinced Henry that Cromwell needed to go.

Henry also came to realize that the alliance with the Protestant states of Northern Europe wasn't really necessary.

He had feared that Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, was making an an alliance with the French king.

That kind of combined power would have been dangerous for England, so that was part of the reason why Henry had tried to forge an alliance with the northern Protestant states.

It would have divided the Holy Roman Empire along religious lines, and it would have weakened Charles's position in Europe.

But it soon became apparent that Charles was not going to form an alliance with the French king after all, so Henry didn't really need that Protestant alliance.

In fact, Henry would soon look to Charles for a renewed alliance against France.

But in the early 1540s, Charles had a lot on his plate.

Remember that Charles was the Habsburg Emperor, so his realm not only included the Holy Roman Empire in Central Europe, it also included Spain and the Spanish territories in the New World.

Well, the Spanish exploration of the New World was continuing during this period, and it was revealing a massive continent in the north as well as the south.

In 1539, Charles had given his consent for the establishment of the first printing press in the New World.

The press was installed in modern-day Mexico City, and it began publishing government documents, religious manuals, and schoolbooks.

And that development shows the extent to which the Spanish had begun to establish permanent settlements in the New World by this point.

In the same year that the printing press was put into operation in modern-day Mexico, a Spanish explorer named Hernando de Soto landed in Florida looking for gold.

He traveled north and west through modern-day Georgia and Alabama, continuing westward all the way to the banks of the Mississippi.

The following year, another Spanish explorer named Francisco Vázquez de Coronado led an expedition out of Mexico and headed northward.

The expedition traveled into the western part of the modern United States.

His men encountered the Grand Canyon as well as the native Pueblo people who lived in some of those western regions.

The idea that North America was a narrow strip of land that could be easily crossed by Europeans on their way to Asia proved to be wrong.

It was a massive continent, separate and apart from South America.

And speaking of South America, in the year after Coronado's expedition in the north, another Spanish explorer named Francisco de Orellana made an important discovery in South America.

Orellana launched an expedition out of modern-day Ecuador in the western part of South America.

He had discovered a river to the east of the settlement that flowed in an easterly direction, so he decided to follow the course of the river to see where it led.

For over half a year, his men followed the river almost due eastward until they finally reached the mouth of the river at the Atlantic Ocean.

As the expedition neared the mouth of the river, his his men came under attack from a native tribe that lived in the region.

During the attack, the women of the tribe fought alongside the men.

The reports of the women who fought alongside the men harkened back to a warlike tribe of women who appeared in Greek legends.

The Greeks had called the female warriors Amazons, and that term was soon applied to this South American river, which was supposedly defended by female warriors who fought alongside the men.

And that's how the largest largest river in South America got its name.

In the 1990s, Jeff Bezos adopted the name of the river for his online retail company because the name conveyed a sense of largeness and grandeur.

Of course, Amazon is one of the largest retailers in the world today.

And it even plays a role in podcasting.

If you're listening to this podcast on Audible, you're listening on a subsidiary of Amazon.

By the way, here's an interesting note.

In the last episode, I talked about the word Abracadabra.

Well, before Bezos adopted the name Amazon for his company, he originally planned to call it Cadabra based on the sense of magic and wonder that the word conveyed.

But apparently, he was talked out of the name Cadabra because it sounded too much like cadaver.

So it was much better to be named after a large South American river than a dead body.

And speaking of dead bodies, that takes us back to England and Henry VIII.

As we know by now, Henry was responsible for a lot of dead bodies.

By the early 1540s, executions for treason were commonplace in England, and no one was spared, not a close advisor, or even a wife.

And Catherine Howard was about to become the second of Henry's wives to be executed.

In the summer of 1541, rumors emerged that Catherine had been involved in an intimate relationship with a man before her marriage to Henry.

Since the accusations involved a relationship prior to becoming queen, it wasn't necessarily treason, but it did require a formal investigation to determine if the relationship had continued beyond the marriage.

The investigators questioned the old boyfriend named Francis Durham.

He confirmed the prior relationship, but he denied that the relationship was ongoing because he said that Catherine had moved on to another man named Thomas Culpeper.

And that's when the investigation took a turn.

When Catherine was confronted with the evidence, she denied a relationship with Culpepper.

But Culpepper's belongings were searched by the investigators, and the investigators found a letter from Catherine which suggested that there was in fact an ongoing sexual relationship between the two of them.

Either way, it was unacceptable for the Queen to be involved in such a questionable relationship with another man, and it was even more unacceptable for for her to have secret late-night meetings with a male member of the court.

In late 1541, both of the men, Durham and Culpeper, were charged with treason and executed.

And then Catherine was charged with adultery and executed a couple of months later in February of 1542.

Catherine became the second wife of Henry VIII to be executed on charges of adultery.

You might think that Henry would have given up on marriage by this point, but he didn't.

He seems to have had a love-hate relationship with the women in his life.

That also applies to his relationship with his daughters, Mary and Elizabeth, whose relationship with Henry was often strained.

In retrospect, Henry seems like one of those men who would have uttered that old adage about women, you can't live with them, and you can't live without them.

And it's theoretically possible that he could have said something like that because his old friend Erasmus had included a version of that adage in his collection of Latin proverbs.

In one of the passages, he referenced a quote from the Roman statesman Cato about wives.

He wrote, Life with wives is uncomfortable, but without them, one cannot live at all.

Well, that could have been Henry VIII's motto.

And interestingly, a few weeks after Henry had his fifth wife executed, Erasmus' proverb collection was published in English.

The translation was prepared by an English writer named Nicholas Udall,

and unlike the limited translation I mentioned earlier, this was an extensive translation of Erasmus' work.

In addition to the many proverbs, Udall's translation is interesting because it provided the first recorded use of several words in English.

We find the first use of the word straiten based on the Old English word strait.

We find the first use of the Latin word civic.

And we find the first use of the word pixie for a fairy.

Pixie has an uncertain origin.

Both Celtic and Norse origins have been suggested.

The translation also contains the first use of the word twang, which originally referred to the sound made by someone plucking a stringed instrument.

It was used in reference to a minstrel who was quote the worst that ever twanged, end quote.

It developed into a common English adage in the 1500s and 1600s.

Some one might refer to a person who is very good at something as the best that ever twanged, and a person who is bad at something as the worst that ever twanged.

The term was later applied to a person with a nasally voice that resembled the twang of a plucked string, and it then came to be applied more generally to certain accents or manners of speech.

You might think I speak with a twang.

Well, that term originated with Nicholas Udall's translation of Erasmus's Proverb Collection in 1542.

The translation also contains the first recorded use of certain Greek words in English, words like oligarchy, rhapsody, and sophist.

It isn't surprising that the translation uses a lot of Greek terms like that because Erasmus worked from ancient Greek sources when he was assembling the proverbs.

He translated them from Greek into Latin, and then Udahl translated them from Latin into English.

Erasmus was considered to be one of the leading Greek scholars in Europe, but even he sometimes made a mistake when he was translating those Greek words.

And one of those mistakes gives us a very common English proverb, to call a spade a spade.

It means to say it like it is, or to use blunt language.

The proverb refers to a digging tool with a word that goes all the way back to Old English.

And it refers to that digging tool thanks to a mistake made by Erasmus which was then carried forward by Nicholas Udall in his English translation.

Here's what happened.

The original Greek version referred to someone who would call a fig a fig and a trough a trough.

So it was a way of saying that the person was plain spoken and used straightforward language.

And the saying used the Greek words for a fig and a trough because those items were very common in ancient Greece.

Well, the Greek word for trough was scafe.

It meant a trough or basin or something hollowed out.

But when Erasmus translated the phrase, he mistook the word scaphae, meaning a trough, for the Greek word scaphaean, which meant a digging tool.

The two words were almost identical except for the extended ending in the second word.

Since he misinterpreted the word to mean a digging tool, he rendered the phrase in Latin with the Latin word ligo, which also meant a spade or digging tool.

Then Nicholas Udall took Erasmus' version and he translated the Latin word lego into English with the word spade, which had essentially the same meaning.

And that gave us the modern phrase to call a spade a spade, when it really should be to call a trough a trough.

But that's how little mistakes can shape the language over time.

By the way, the original version of the proverb is apparently still common in modern Greek, and it still uses the Greek word for trough.

Now Udall's English translation of Erasmus was published in the year 1542, and within a few months of that publication, Henry VIII was planning his sixth and final marriage.

The sixth wife was Catherine Parr, a member of the household of Henry's daughter Mary.

That's where she caught Henry's attention.

He soon proposed to her, and in July of 1543 the two were married.

Now, Catherine was very well educated.

She spoke several languages, including French, Latin, and Italian.

She was also very devout and a committed Protestant, and a couple of years after marrying Henry, she published a book called Prayers or Meditations.

It was one of the earliest English books written by a woman to be printed in England.

But even though Catherine was Henry's wife, she still had to tread very carefully around him.

There were many within Henry's court who didn't like her outspoken Protestant views.

There's even one report that a prominent bishop named Stephen Gardiner tried to bring heresy charges against her.

But after Catherine profusely apologized to Henry, Henry dismissed the charges.

It was a reminder that Henry was still a tyrant who demanded complete obedience, and anyone could find themselves in Henry's crosshairs.

Around the time that Henry married Catherine Parr, someone else found himself in Henry's crosshairs, and that was John Haywood, the poet and playwright who wrote many of those early interludes or plays that were so popular at the time.

Well, I noted earlier that he was a devout Catholic, and he took a low profile when Henry started to demand that people swear an oath recognizing recognizing him as the head of the English Church.

Well, in late 1543, Haywood was arrested and imprisoned for refusing to swear that oath.

He remained in prison until the following year.

Finally, facing execution for his refusal, Haywood backed down and swore the oath.

He was released from prison in the spring of 1544.

Interestingly, after Haywood's legal problems and near execution, there was a bit of a resurgence of interest in his earlier works.

Some of the plays he had written a decade earlier were republished with his name prominently featured on the title page, suggesting that there was a renewed interest in his writings.

But it appears that Haywood no longer had a passion for writing plays.

His interest had turned to something else, proverbs.

Much like Erasmus, Haywood was intrigued by proverbs.

But unlike Erasmus, who focused on the sayings of emperors, kings, and ancient philosophers, Haywood was more interested in the common sayings that he heard on the streets of London.

He started to keep a record of all the ones he heard, and all the ones he could think of.

His goal was to document all of the proverbs that were in common use in English at the time, and he began to assemble them into a long, extended poem.

The poem concerned a young man who's faced with a dilemma.

He has the option of marrying two different women.

One is a pretty young maiden who's very poor.

The other is an old, unattractive widow who is very rich.

The young man poses his dilemma to the narrator of the poem and asks for the narrator's advice.

This provides the jumping-off point for the many proverbs that Haywood had collected.

The work was published in the year 1546 under the very long title, A Dialogue Containing the Number in Effect of All the Proverbs in the English Tongue, Compact in a Matter Concerning Two Manner of Marriages.

Now given that long title, the book is sometimes simply referred to as The Proverbs of John Haywood.

The extended poem contains literally hundreds of proverbs.

Many of them have fallen out of use over time, but a lot of them are still common today.

Since Haywood was a collector of proverbs, many of the sayings can also be found in earlier documents.

But there are also a few proverbs that are recorded for the first time in this particular poem.

Now, for obvious reasons, the poem is important to historians of English because it attempts to record every common proverb that was in use in the language at the time.

But it's also important for another reason.

The published version of the poem was very popular.

Four editions of the book were published in the 15 years that followed its initial publication.

And the popularity of the book may have helped to preserve some of these proverbs, and it may have contributed to the widespread use of some of these proverbs over the following centuries.

As I noted, there are hundreds of proverbs in the poem, so I'm not going to go through all of them.

In fact, the majority of them are rarely heard today or have disappeared from the language altogether.

But there are also a lot of proverbs that we still use.

So I want to give you a sense of the poem and the way Haywood incorporated the proverbs into the narrative.

To do that, I'm going to take you through part of the poem, roughly the first third or so.

Again, the poem is structured in the form of a conversation between a young man seeking advice on marriage and the narrator who supplies him with anecdotes and sage advice.

In an early passage, the narrator warns the young man against rushing into marriage.

He says, Some things that provoke young men to wed in haste show after wedding that haste makes waste.

Of course, this is the well known adage that haste makes waste.

This was a very old saying that Erasmus had included in his Latin collection, and which Nicholas Udall had translated into English four years earlier.

A little later in the same chapter Heywood includes the following passage

Thus by these lessons ye may learn good cheap, In wedding and all things to look ere ye leap.

leap.

Of course, this is an early version of the phrase look before you leap.

Haywood used look ere ye leap, air ERE, being an old word meaning before.

The modern version look before you leap with the word before is found a few decades later in the late 1500s.

The Oxford English Dictionary also records essentially the same proverb in the prior century in the line first look and afterward leap.

So again this is an old idea which Haywood applies to someone rushing into marriage.

At this point the young man responds to the narrator's sage advice by noting that if he's to marry the wealthy old widow he can't afford to take his time because she might die before the marriage and then he wouldn't inherit her wealth.

So the man is a bit of a gold digger.

He says when the sun shineth make hay, which is to say, take time when time cometh, lest time steal away.

And one good lesson to this purpose I pike, from the Smith's forge, when the iron is hot, strike.

Then he adds, Time is tickle, and out of sight, out of mind, then catch and hold while I may, fast bind, fast find.

And he concludes, I hopping without for a ring of a rush, and while I at length debate and beat the bush, There shall step in other men and catch the birds, And by long time lost in many vain words

Between the two wives make sloth speed confound,

While between two stools my tail goes to the ground.

So within these lines we find the adage, When the sun shineth, make hay, which is an early version of Make hay while the sun shines.

Hay needs to be harvested when it's dry, so a farmer has to take advantage of a sunny day to do the work.

This is the first known use of that proverb in English.

Of course, it means essentially the same thing as to strike while the iron is hot, which Haywood included in the following line.

He had to reword the phrase to make the rhyme work, so he rendered it as when the iron is hot, strike.

Of course, the phrase refers to the fact that iron has to be heated to make it soft and pliable, and in order to forge it, the blacksmith has to strike it and hammer it while it's hot before it cools down.

The passage I read also includes the phrase out of sight, out of mind.

This was a proverb also recorded by Erasmus earlier in the century, and it's a phrase that can be traced all the way back to Homer and the Odyssey.

The passage also included the proverb beat the bush, or as we know it today, beat around the bush, or beat about the bush.

I discussed this saying in an earlier episode, but you might recall that it refers to the hunters who had beat a bush to drive the birds out so that other hunters could catch or kill them while they were fleeing.

The implication was that the person beating the bush had the easy job, and was doing something preliminary to the real job, which was catching or killing the birds.

So to beat around the bush was just a preliminary activity, which led to the sense of the phrase as a pointless delay.

That original sense is fully captured here when Haywood writes, and while I at length debate and beat the bush, there shall step in other men and catch the birds.

That was also a play on words because the word bird was also a slang term for a woman or maiden.

So while he's beating around the bush or debating which woman to marry, other men are catching the birds or getting married.

Haywood concluded the passages I just read with the line, While between two stools my tail goes to the ground.

This is an early version of the phrase fall between two stools, meaning unable to choose between two alternatives.

If someone can't decide which stool to sit on, he or she may try to sit in the middle of both of them and fall to the ground.

That adage, to fall between stools, is more common in the UK than the US, but it's found here and can be traced back even further than that to the 1300s.

In a later passage, the young man says, Of two ills, choose the least, which is an early version of choose the lesser of two evils.

The young man then makes a case for the old widow with the following passage, where he expresses the basic idea that beauty is skin deep.

To take lack of beauty, but as an eyesore, the fair and the foul by dark are like store.

When all candles be out, all cats be grey, all things are then of one colour, as who say.

And this proverb saith, for quenching hot desire Foul water as soon as fair will quench hot fire.

Where gifts be given freely, east, west, north, or south, no man ought to look a given horse in the mouth.

So in this passage we find an interesting proverb.

When all candles are out, all cats are grey.

Again, this is just another way of saying that beauty is skinned deep.

He then includes another proverb that was apparently popular in the 1500s.

Foul water will quench fire as well as fair water.

Again, it isn't the style of the thing that matters, it's the substance of the thing that's most important.

Then he concludes the passage with the line, No man ought to look a given horse in the mouth, which is just an early version of don't look a gift horse in the mouth.

This proverb is an old adage that can be found in the Latin Bible, where the Latin version is translated as never inspect the teeth of a given horse.

The phrase comes from the fact that it was once common for people to inspect a horse's teeth to determine the age of the horse.

So if someone gives you a horse, be grateful and accept it.

Don't inspect its teeth to see if it's too old.

And from that notion we got the idea that one shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth.

We then come across a passage where the narrator recalls the marital problems of a couple who were his neighbors.

The couple consisted of a young man and a poor maiden.

He recalls how there was marital bliss at first.

Then we have the following passage.

Yea, there was God, quote he, when all is done, abide, quote I, it was yet but honeymoon.

Now, believe it or not, this is the first recorded use of the word honeymoon in an English document.

Honey and moon are both Old English words, so this compound term was formed within English.

It probably reflects a notion that there was a period of about a moon cycle or a month in which there was a period of sweetness in the marriage.

So that was the honeymoon.

It's a sense that we still have in a phrase like the honeymoon period, meaning the period when everything is new and fresh, and when people are getting along with each other before they start to get on each other's nerves.

Of course, today we associate the word honeymoon with a trip that a married couple takes after the wedding ceremony to celebrate the marriage.

The word almost certainly predates John Haywood, but again, we find it for the first time here.

The narrator then tells us that after that period of marital bliss, the couple started to argue.

Without money, they ran into financial problems.

The narrator says that he advised the husband and then the wife to seek help from their relatives.

He recalls addressing the wife with the following passage.

And if your husband will his assent grant, go he to his uncle, and you to your aunt.

Yes, this assent he granteth before, quoth she,

for he ere this thought this the best way to be.

But of these two things he would determine none, without aid, for two heads are better than one.

Now that concluding line contains the first known use of the phrase, two heads are better than one in the English language.

The narrator then recalls that the young wife went to her aunt's home to ask for help, but the aunt's daughter Alice got in the way.

The wife says of her cousin Alice, To tell tales out of school, that is her great lust.

Look what she knoweth, blab it whist and out it must.

Now this is the first known use of the phrase tell tales out of school in the English language.

The young wife is saying that her cousin couldn't keep a secret and was prone to spreading gossip.

The aunt then criticizes the young wife, saying that her humility masks her indiscretions and bad behavior.

She says, There is nothing in this world that agreeth worse than doth a a lady's heart and a beggar's purse.

But pride she showeth none, her look reason alloweth.

She looketh as butter would not melt in her mouth.

Well, the still sow eats up all the draught, Alice.

All is not gold that glisters by told tales.

In youth she was toward and without evil, but soon ripe, soon rotten, young saint, old devil.

So here the aunt says that the wife looks as if butter would not melt in her mouth.

It's a proverb that refers to someone who looks innocent and calm, but it's usually used as here to imply that the person is hiding some bad behavior.

The sense is that the person is so cold that butter wouldn't melt in his or her mouth.

We also have the phrase, all is not gold that glisters, which is an early version of all that glitters is not gold.

The original wording of the phrase in the early sources is glisters, not glitters.

And the passage concludes with proverbs like soon ripe, soon rotten, and young saint, old devil.

Again, the idea is that something that was innocent in youth can turn bad over time.

The young wife's aunt refuses to give her anything with the following passage.

Hold fast when ye have it, quoth she, by my life, the boy thy husband, and thou the girl his wife, shall not consume that I have laboured for thou art young enough, and I can work no more.

The narrator then recalls asking the young wife where her uncle was while this discussion was taking place.

Here's that passage.

Forsooth, quote I, ye have besteard or roused ye well, but where was your uncle while all this fray fell?

Asleep by, quoth she, routing like a hog, and it is evil waking of a sleeping dog.

So this passage contains an early version of the proverb, let sleeping dogs lie, meaning to leave well enough alone.

In this case, it was better to let her uncle sleep than to arouse him and have him add to the fray.

And that concludes the portion of the poem about the young wife.

The poem continues on from there, again that's roughly the first third of the poem, and in the end, the young man who is considering which woman to marry ultimately decides to marry neither one.

But along the way, we're introduced to lots more proverbs, including several more that are recorded for the first time in English, including a rolling stone gathers no moss, nothing ventured, nothing gained, one good turn deserves another, the worse for wear, tit for tat, there's no fool like an old fool, to know which side your bread is buttered, and you can't have your cake and eat it too.

Haywood also gives us the first use of the phrase, the hair of the dog that bit you, to refer to a sip of alcohol to help soothe the symptoms of a hangover.

The phrase comes from the medieval belief that someone bitten by a rabid dog could cure the infection by applying some of the same dog's hair to the wound.

So, in this case, the effects of excess alcohol can be tempered by taking an extra sip or two of the same alcohol.

In the end, John Haywood's Book of Proverbs proved to be his most popular work, and in fact, it was one of the most popular books printed in England during the 1500s.

It was published ten different times during the second half of the century.

A few months after Haywood's Book of Proverbs appeared in 1546, Henry VIII became sick in what would prove to be his final illness.

Over the prior two years, he had launched another massive invasion of France, which proved to be costly and unproductive.

Henry had inherited a lot of wealth from his father, and he had seized even more wealth during his reign, but at the end of his life he was in massive debt.

By late 1546, he was weak, tired, severely overweight, and suffering from recurring fevers.

By January of 1547, it was clear that Henry was dying, but his own doctors were afraid to tell him that because it was treason to even talk about the king's death.

Henry VIII finally died on January 28, 1547, and the crown passed to his nine-year-old son, Edward.

At the time of Henry's death, John Haywood was just starting to enjoy the second phase of his career as a proverb collector.

Over the next couple of decades, he continued to collect proverbs and published additional collections.

All in all, Haywood documented about 600 proverbs and idioms that were in common use in English in the mid-1500s.

Interestingly, Haywood never showed much interest in returning to his roots as a playwright, even though he had been a key figure in the development of English drama, and especially in the development of secular plays and farces.

By the way, England wasn't the only place where important developments were taking place in the realm of drama, and especially in the art of comedic performance.

Around this same time in the mid-1500s, a new type of comedy was starting to appear in Italy.

It featured certain stock characters who performed sketches that were partly improvised.

This new type of comedy was called Comedia dell'arte, which literally means art comedy.

The performances usually consisted of a general plot to guide the actors, but much of the dialogue was improvised and tailored to the specific audience that was watching.

Much of the action was physical and featured miming, pranks, and other physical comedy.

Sometimes one character would beat another character with a prop stick called a battaccio.

It was made of two slats of wood, and when an actor would swing the device, the pieces of wood would smack together and create a loud slapping sound.

It was often used when one character would pretend to beat another character with it.

Well, in English, that device or battaccio was called a slap stick, and that term slapstick came to refer to a broad style of physical comedy.

The word entered English in the 1800s, but it can be traced back to the Italian Comedia dell'arte of the 1500s.

Again, the characters were largely the same from one performance to the next.

There were a handful of stock characters, and they usually wore masks.

By the way, the word mask was a new word in English in the mid-1500s, with origins in the Italian word mascara.

The same word is also the root of the word mascara, which originally referred to cosmetics used by actors to highlight their eyes.

Well, this particular form of Italian comedy became so popular across Europe that it influenced theater in other countries as well, including England.

And some of of those stock characters also had a cultural influence that has persisted to this day.

For example, the stock character called Arlequino was a servant, but he usually presented as a type of clown who wore a colorful costume with a diamond shaped pattern.

The character name was rendered in English as Harlequin, and it contributed to the development of the modern clown.

By the way, clown is another word that entered English in the mid fifteen hundreds.

Some modern playing cards use a joker design that's modeled on the character of Harlequin.

And speaking of jokers, the DC Comic Universe features the character Harley Quinn, whose name is also derived from Harlequin.

Harlequin was one of several stock characters who were tricksters and played the role of servants.

These types of characters were called the Zani, apparently a Venetian rendering of the name Giovanni in much the same way that English used the name name Jack as a general term for a man.

Well, those Zanni characters were clown-like, and the Italian word Zanni eventually made its way into English in the late 1500s as the word zany.

If something is zany, it's foolish and hilarious.

Another stock character who was also a Zanni was a character called Pulchinella, which the English rendered as punchinello.

It was later shortened to punch, and it evolved into the character featured in the punch and judy puppet shows, which became popular in England in the 1600s.

Another stock character was called Scaramuccia.

I mentioned him way back in episode 119.

He was a rogue and a braggart whose name meant little sword fighter in Italian.

In English it became scaramuch, and it was apparently the source of the term used by Freddie Mercury in the operatic section of the song Bohemian Rhapsody.

In that earlier episode, I also mentioned the stock character called Patalone, a merchant and miser who only cared about money.

You might remember that the character's costume almost always featured a pair of red leggings, which ultimately developed into the English word pantaloon for long trousers.

And within American English, the word was shortened to pants.

So the word pants originated with a popular character in the Italian Commedia dell'Arte of the 1500s.

But pants didn't emerge as a distinct word until the 1800s.

So pants is a relatively modern word in that regard.

But there's something very interesting about the word pants.

Even though it's less than a couple of centuries old, it has produced quite a few sayings and idioms in modern English.

The head of a household is the one who wears the pants in the family.

To be caught caught off guard is to be caught with your pants down.

To dominate someone in a game is to beat the pants off of them.

To have sex with someone is to get into their pants.

And to do something instinctively without planning is to do it by the seat of your pants, originally in reference to pilots who flew planes by responding to the vibrations and feel of the plane itself.

That shows how prone we are to coining new phrases and idioms and proverbs within English.

Language change never stops.

Old sayings and proverbs routinely disappear, and new ones enter the language.

And that's why John Haywood's Proverb Collection, from the same time period as the Commedia dell'Arte, is so valuable to historians of the English language.

It captures the sayings and proverbs that were common in the language at the time.

And in doing so, it shows us how much the language has changed since then.

Next time, we're going to move the story into the second half of the 1500s, and we're going to look at one of the great debates in the history of English, the so-called inkhorn debate.

By the mid and latter part of the 1500s, English writers were starting to debate the nature of the language, what it should sound like, how it should be written, and in the case of the inkhorn debate, what words should be used.

Should the language continue to embrace loan words from Latin and Greek, or should it focus more on its native vocabulary?

It was a fascinating debate because it presented an alternate version of the language, and had that alternate version been accepted, it would have produced a very different form of English than the one we have today.

So, next time we'll look at that debate.

Until then, thanks for listening to the History of English podcast.