You may remember that sometime back I talked with Andy Kesson about John Lilley, an

neglected writer of the Tudor period. Today I'm delighted to be considering another

forgotten playwright who was, as my guest today has written, as close to a

literary celebrity as Tudor England possessed, John Haywood. This is not Thomas Haywood,

a later playwright, nor Sir John Haywood, an Elizabethan historian. This is John Haywood,

born 1496 or seven, who died around 1580 and whose extraordinary life and wit has

much to teach us about Tudor England.

I'm delighted to be joined today by Professor Greg Walker. Greg is a regist professor of

rhetoric and English literature at the University of Edinburgh. He's the fellow of more royal

societies and you can shake a stick at. And he's responsible for among many other books,

the Oxford Anthology of Tudor Drama and the Oxford Handbook of Tudor Drama, which is

co-editor. And he also has written many books himself. He says he's been fascinated with

John Haywood since his second book, Plays of Persuasion Drama and Politics at the Court

of Henry VIII, which came out in 1992. And in 2010, Greg staged with Tom Betridge, a

rye cofter and the director Gregory Thompson, a research-led production of Haywood's Play

of the Weather in the Great Hall at Hampton Court, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research

Council, Wheel to Importantly Note, which I was lucky enough to see. And Greg has now written

a marvellous, elegant, wonderful new book on John Haywood called, appropriate enough, John Haywood,

Comedy and Survival in Tudor England, which was published by OUP in 2020. And so it's

John Haywood that we're going to be talking about today. But first of all, I thought, Greg,

I'd like to ask you about your approach to literature because you've got this magnificent

title of being a professor of rhetoric and English literature. But your approach to

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