Buggeswords: the Case of Sir John Hayward’s Life of Henry IV

Abstract

Dr John Hayward’s The first part of the life and reign of King Henry IV is known to literary scholars if for no other reasons than that the history it recounts is essentially the same as that depicted in Shakespeare’s Richard II, that both texts appear to have come under the particular scrutiny of the authorities, and that both texts were associated, however inadvertently, with the Earl of Essex’s rebellion in February, 1601 (Albright, 1927b, 1931; Heffner; Schoenbaum, 1985; Barroll, 1988; Clegg, 1997b).¹ Samuel Harsnett is known, if at all, as the author of A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures (1603), a satirical exposure of supposed Roman Catholic exorcisms, which provided Shakespeare with a vocabulary of demonic possession which is most forcefully deployed in King Lear, but also surfaces in other plays, including Othello and The Winter’s Tale. What brings Hayward and Harsnett together (other than the fact, as we shall see, that they were at college together in Cambridge) is that Harsnett was the man who granted a licence to Hayward’s book, an action which had far-reaching, and potentially fatal, consequences for both of them.