Language and Verse

This chapter describes the poetic forms and language devices in the drama and suggests their many functions. The Water Miller uses some quatrains and achieves slightly greater subtlety in language than the Wind Miller who speaks in couplets exclusively. The devices of ethos are also heard in the language of the supposedly high-minded and nobler characters. The problem of analyzing bawdy in the language of another period is difficult because the sexual euphemisms are unfamiliar. A more negative statement about life is made when bawdy becomes the language of sexual revulsion, symbolic of the evil in man. Bawdy deals with the physical functioning of the body, particularly sexual, excretory, and oral, and is intended to achieve surprising, shocking, and comic effects by means of absurdity, exaggeration, and strangeness. John Heywood intends for the audience to chuckle when the bawdy meaning is recognized, and nod in agreement to what he proposes to be the element of truth it contains.