Ground Zero

Among English sixteenth-century plays focusing on King John, the most studied have been John Bale’s Kynge Iohan (c. 1536–1538), The Troublesome Reign of King John recently attributed to George Peele (performed c. 1589–1590, printed in 1591), and, of course, Shakespeare’s King John (c. 1595–1596). ¹ There has been so much lively and productive discussion of these plays over the last century that there seems to be scarcely anything new that any critic can add. Indeed, the relationship of the plays to their chronicle sources, to each other, their participation in the cultural and political life and discourse of early modern England, and especially the possible topicality and exemplarity of the episodes of John’s reign selected by playwrights as commentaries on the Elizabethan present need no further elaboration. ² While this study may not have anything necessarily new to offer in the particular readings of certain episodes as reflections of the early modern political context, it will nevertheless interrogate the validity of many of the scholars’ sweeping conclusions about the period’s dominant attitudes towards and uses of the memory of King John. In particular, as the subsequent chapters will show, some of the broad conclusions about the Elizabethan understanding of John’s exemplum derived from readings of these texts prove to be in need of revision mainly because they rest upon an assumption of the exemplarity of the attitudes of two authors and two plays performed in the span of a decade, ³ while disregarding the significant intertextual dialogue launched by the appearance of the Lord Admiral’s Men’s plays at the close of the same decade. It is time to reconsider some of these broader conclusions about what Tudor or Stuart Englishmen thought about King John, notwithstanding the validity of the critical readings of Peele’s and Shakespeare’s individual uses of the reign of King John for their own works.