ABSTRACT
If one considers the two decades that followed Niccols’s Mirrour for Magistrates, it is fairly obvious that the time had passed for de casibus tragedies like his as well as for the chronicles that had bred them. Not surprisingly, the history play, another genre existing in a symbiotic relationship with the chronicles, became equally moribund in this period—perhaps, if Helgerson is correct, because its aims as an “instrument devised to achieve the very transformation in the theater’s institutional role” as a nation-builder had already been achieved. 1 To be sure, occasional history plays did from time to time get produced by the companies, or reprinted, but their heyday was indeed in the now distant past. Unlike most other English kings who had materialized out of the pages of the chronicles and traversed the professional stage in the 1590s, King John was never quite forgotten.
