ABSTRACT
The Play of the Weather was probably performed at Greenwich between Christmas 1532-23 and Easter 1533. It was nominated as an ‘enterlude’ when it was published in the same year and yet, unlike contemporaneously published Heywood texts such as A Play of Love (1534) and The Pardoner and the Friar (1533), the play seems generically mixed when compared to interludes from the same period. The long declamatory sections spoken in rhyme royal by Jupiter at the opening and closing of the play militate against the staged debate of the theatrical ‘dialogue’, for instance, seeming more reminiscent of the lengthy monologues of the Henrician pageant. Yet, between Jupiter’s speeches at the beginning and end of The Play of the Weather, the audience are treated to an array of English types – a Gentleman, a Merchant, a Ranger, a Wind Miller and Water Miller, a Gentlewoman, a Laundress, and finally a Boy – typologies who provide access to how persons from the lower orders and women may have been perceived in the early Tudor period, at least within the courtly milieu in which the play was performed. The secular body of the play is thus in conflict with the elevated dramatic form of its beginning and end. Nevertheless, a close textual analysis of The Play of the Weather combined with a less monolithic notion of how courtly audiences were composed might provide a way of accounting for the apparently mixed modes of Heywood’s dramaturgy.
