ABSTRACT
Following the late Elizabethan playwrights’ intense intertextual conversation about the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, a veritable cluster of interrelated plays introduced, developed, and established an alternate history of John’s life, character, and reign. Although it came to be dominated by details to a large extent indebted to the Dunmow fragment reproduced by Stow, not everyone was converted to its vision of history in the first decade of the Stuart century.
