ABSTRACT
Sometimes called the first Tudor drama, A mery play betwene Johan Johan the husbande, Tyb his wyfe, and Syr Johan the preest (London: Rastell, 1533) is a verse play John Heywood translated from a late-fifteenth-century French farce, La Farce du Pasté.1 The French play was one of hundreds of such farces, but the translation is in most respects unusual in its English context. Heywood’s singular, skillful handling of the play’s common themes actually heightens the misogamist and misogynist content. His transformations of French poetic forms and conventions, his changes to the names in the play, and his changes to the play’s ending all intensify the play’s central problems: the absent woman and the fear of cuckoldry.
