The fiirst medical practitioners in English drama: medical knowledge and quackery in The Play of the Sacrament and in John Heywood’s The Foure PP

The article studies two characters of early English drama for the first time in the light of the latter’s contemporary medical science. Mayster Brendiche of Braban in The Play of the Sacrament is the first medical practitioner on the English stage, whereas the Poticary in The Foure PP is the first of the profession indicated by his name. Although belonging to different ‘guilds’, they seem to operate according to very similar lines of behaviour. From the analysis of their lexical choices concerning medicines, herbs and diseases, of their boasting attitudes and of the very negative reception they meet on stage there emerges how the playwrights present the two characters in a highly parodic and satiric way, thus transforming their supposed medical knowledge into despicable quackery, through a process of subtle but overt degradation