ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the Kildare Rebellion (1534–35) and the early stages of the Henrician reform alongside John Bale’s King Johan (1538). Bale’s play appropriates the conflict between John and Pope Innocent III to legitimize constitutional and religious reform. The play’s centerpiece – the victimization of king and nation by a corrupted papal power – presents religious identity as a measure of good and evil, and as a platform to just rule and governance. But religious ideology depicted in Kygne John does not figure as the most significant obstacle for the legislation of the Act of Supremacy or the implementation of constitutional change. Bale’s interpretation of King John’s relationship with the church and his administration of Ireland areespecially problematic. Bale’s conflation of two very different histories of Ireland and his depiction of the opposition between king and church call attention to the unstable power structures that underpin the reformation process. The play assumes that religious ideology dictates morality and guarantees loyalty. In an Irish context, this framework exposes the underlying problems of long-distance rule, where the systematic reformation of religion was limited, and where representation in parliament comprised men with very different vested interests than their counterparts in England. Discord among king and clergy is drowned out by religious imperatives in King Johan but it is nonetheless conspicuous in Bale’s Tudor-inspired John. The clash of church, subjects, and king haunts King Johan. Off-stage, the play maps the fault lines of the religious settlement of Ireland as an English kingdom in the 1530s.
