Greg Walker's study of John Heywood, known as a Tudor dramatist, against the backdrop of English Reformation politics, magisterially reveals the inadequacy of that common soubriquet.

Employed at the court of Henry viii as a singer and musician through the mid-1520s, Heywood in 1528 lost his employment for obscure reasons. The following year launched his ‘most urgent and active’ phase as a producer, author and performer in ‘politically inflected interludes’. (p. 152). He produced a clutch of debate plays for courtly and metropolitan audiences that engaged deceptively lightly with the impending crises of the English Reformation. Walker identifies the dramaturgy, tropes and ideas that make the plays a coherent body. Most take what seems to be a pressing issue, explore it through the mechanisms of schoolroom debate, before returning things to the status quo but with a renewed sense of the implications of change:

Aside from Johan Johan, an adaptation of a French farce, Witty and witless is the earliest known of Heywood's interludes. The four PP, influenced by Thomas More's Dialogue of heresies and Erasmus' Lucianic sketch Rash vows (1522), is a light-hearted critique of their preoccupations. Gentleness and nobility was influenced by Henry Medwall's 1497 Fulgens and lucres, but plays with audience expectations, undermining the givens of contemporary social understanding. The elevation of Heywood's uncle, Sir Thomas More, to the office of Lord Chancellor, is convincingly paired with Heywood's A play of love, then an analysis of The play of the weather echoes the tenor of More's first opening speech to parliament. The pardoner and the friar, a darker play about violence and sacrilege, is matched by Walker with a specific event of church desecration recorded in the London Chronicle.

But Heywood lost his outlets for drama in 1533 with John Rastell's stage no longer available after he was estranged by religious conversion, and with William Rastell abandoning printing for a politically safer career in the law. Heywood went back to singing and music, forging connections with St Paul's cathedral and school, and with John Redford and Sebastian Westcott. Lyrics by Heywood survive from this period, which Walker defends against charges of vacuity on the grounds that context is all. The comparison with Eric Idle's ‘Always look on the bright side of life’ is apt in that the ‘manifest inadequacy’ (p. 170) of anodyne injunctions to merriness in the mid-1530s surely invoked the reverse. Walker's striking account of the condemnation and sadistically drawn-out execution of Thomas More points to the gallows speech in which the condemned man wishes that he and his judges might ‘merrily all meet together to our everlasting salvation’ (p. 184), coining a trope that would characterise the nostalgic politics of English Catholicism for years to come.

Readers will encounter from Walker a number of apologies for the quality of Heywood's verse, but encouragement to read on to discover how it played in historical context. More's death was traumatic enough for Heywood, but then in 1543 he himself became entangled in the event that proved almost fatal for himself. On a charge of treason which was largely a crime of association, Heywood was brought to the hurdle from where he watched the hideous fate of associates before being himself reprieved, and probably recanting.

The next period of the great survivor's writing life is that in which he produced his Dialogue of proverbs and epigrams, An hundred epigrams, Two hundred epigrams upon two hundred proverbs, Three hundred epigrams, Four hundred epigrams, Five hundred epigrams and Six hundred epigrams. This enterprise carried Heywood through into the reign of Elizabeth serving the humanist-inspired taste for aphorism. He also, through the reign of Edward and into that of Mary, was able to fashion his own relative harmlessness and activate small and permeable social circles made up of family, former tutees, including royal ones, and others to meet his needs. He was always both well, and badly, connected.

The accession of Mary brought him direct preferment, engaged in orchestrating both the coronation pageant and later the more ticklish marriage pageant of the monarch whom he had known from her girlhood. Again Walker's historical acuity is brought to bear in efforts to recuperate Heywood's Ballad, with its unpromising allegory of Mary as a lion to Philip's eagle, as something both self-deprecating and witty. This is a minor task compared to the revisionism with which he tackles The spider and the fly. We are offered a more nuanced reading than is customary, and a revised dating of this poem, but the concession that ‘on the issue of its tediousness the critics have a point’. Suffice to say that Walker's careful unpicking of the gestation of the long poem, to its eventual printing in 1556, is a deal more engaging than that poem itself.

Greg Walker clearly developed both affection and compassion for his subject in the course of his investigations, so that although apologies for dullness and ephemerality continue, we are encouraged to persevere to subtler understandings of the works set within the precise moments of crisis in the Tudor state in which they are pinpointed for us. The Elizabethan Heywood eventually followed many of his associates into exile, and both his sons became committed Jesuits. His last surviving work, the poem ‘When all that is to was is brought’, addresses the situation in 1564, the year after the Treason Act. Walker here follows Dennis Flynn in pointing out how the play on parts of the verb ‘to be’ wittily conveys ideas of duration and brevity beyond the religious commonplace and take cues once more from Thomas More; this time from the Dialogue of comfort. Octogenarian Heywood's final forced flight, from Mechelen to Antwerp, then to Cologne, then back to Antwerp, then to Louvain, where he was to die shortly after his son and companion, Ellis, is movingly recounted.

This absorbing, detailed and witty tour de force even has an apt dust jacket: the repetition of the woodcut portrait of Heywood from The spider and the fly suggests Warhol's comment on the work that it mimics: ‘The more you look at the same exact thing, the more the meaning goes away, and the better and emptier you feel.’