ABSTRACT
Bastardy as a plot device is certainly not confined to history plays in Renaissance drama, as Alison Findlay has demonstrated. As Michael Neill has noted, bastardy as a feature in drama increases in the late sixteenth century and early seventeenth century, roughly corresponding to a known rise in levels of illegitimacy over the same period and punitive legislation relating to extramarital sex and illegitimate births. Genealogy, the family, and identity are the visible manifestations which support the abstract principle of legitimate succession, and the bastard, by his (or her) very nature, is inimical to all of these structures. In King John, the illegitimacy that Shakespeare presents as inherent in John's assumption of the throne is physically manifested in the figure of the bastard. The metaphor of the bastard within the political language of the family and the state is a literary strategy that problematizes and undermines the image of the parent-monarch.
