Abstract
Critics have long recognized the capacity of the Tudor interlude to present its largely aristocratic audiences with political counsel. John Heywood’s Play of the Wether (ca. 1533) is an example of the instructive potential of the form, its didacticism writ large in a narrative affirming the value of impartial princely mediation. Yet it can be difficult to reconcile this deliverance of counsel with the bawdy humor of the interlude; jokes charged with sexual and scatological themes distract from the main plot with dangerous references to Henry VIII’s personal life. Through considering ideas about the function of folly emergent from Heywood’s earlier interlude, Wytty and Witless (ca. 1525–33), this essay presents a complicity between carnivalesque themes and the core didactic function of the interlude. It concludes that the play’s sexual and scatological humor is foundational to invoking self-knowledge—an epistemic state prized by humanist civic ideals—and thus serves a subtler pedagogic end than often supposed.
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