The Strangeness of King John

Abstract

THESE DAYS, JOHN is chiefly remembered for not being good. A. A. Milne puts it best: In the sixteenth century, however, John's moral status was less clearly defined. English reformers saw him as a saintly proto-Protestant, whose defiance of the pope on the question of which of them should appoint the next archbishop of Canterbury prefigured England's break with Rome. The proto-Protestant John was most extravagantly celebrated in a two-part play by the radical reformer John Bale, King Johan. Written and revised in the turbulent years of religious struggle from the 1530s to the 1550s, Bale's play presents John as a man determined to ‘Reforme the lawes’ and protect Widow England (an allegorical precursor of Shakespeare's Widow Constance) from the ‘false hypocrysye’ of the Catholic clergy.2 Widow England describes these priests and monks as her ‘bastardes’ (p. 4), foreshadowing Shakespeare's exploration of illegitimacy in his play. For Bale, the problems of John's reign were entirely engineered by the pope's desire to set his authority above the king's, and so to obliterate English identity by subsuming it into a new Roman empire in Europe.

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