[In the following the introduction to a collection of early English chronicle plays, Armstrong details the importance of John Bale's Kynge Johan as one of the first chronicle plays, then discusses later works in the genre, including Edward III, Woodstock, John Ford's Perkin Warbeck, and Robert Davenport's King John and Matilda.]

Great enterprises often have unexpected origins. The creative process which culminated in Shakespeare's history plays was probably set in motion by William Tyndale's terse but pointed criticism of Catholic chroniclers in The Obedience of a Christian Man (1528): ‘Consider the story of King John, where I doubt not but they have put the best and fairest for themselves, and the worst of King John: for I suppose they make the chronicles themselves.’ This hint no doubt prompted John Bale to rehabilitate John by making him the hero of the first English history play a few years later. Imbued with the doctrines of reform propagated by Wyclif and Tyndale, Bale was a strong supporter of Henry VIII in his quarrel with the Papacy, and King John is the most important of a series of polemical plays that he wrote in the royal cause. The first version was probably written by 1534, a second was completed in 1538, and further revisions appear in the unique manuscript of the play, which dates from about 1561.

In conception, King John was a highly original play. The medieval morality play had dramatized a conflict between personified forces of good and evil for the possession of man's soul, showing how its salvation depended on the doctrines and sacraments of the Church. A significant shift of interest is shown in John Skelton's morality, Magnificence (written about 1519), in which the main character is a king, not Everyman, in which the personifications of good and evil are wise or wicked counsellors, and in which the central issue is the welfare of the state. Bale's innovations were even more radical. He combines historical with allegorical personages and reinterprets the conflict between King John and Pope Innocent III, presenting John as a martyr who upheld doctrines soundly based on the Bible, who surrendered to the Papacy to save his kingdom from being ravaged by war, and who died from a poisonous draught administered by a traitorous monk. As Bale's Interpreter observes at the end of Act I, this ‘mirror’ of past events throws reflections on the recent struggle between Henry VIII and the Pope. This interconnexion of past and present is systematically developed in Act II, where Sedition, the chief agent of John's downfall, is brought low by Verity and Imperial Majesty, who clearly represents Henry himself, for he is given titles—‘supreme head of the church’ and ‘true defender’ of the Christian faith—borne by Henry VIII. Underlying Bale's interpretation of history is the Protestant doctrine of kingship and obedience which had been eloquently expounded by Tyndale in The Obedience of a Christian Man. Basing his arguments on Biblical texts in the approved Protestant fashion, John asserts that kings are appointed by God, that ‘God speaketh in their lips’ when they give judgement, that only God may sit in judgement on kings, that it is a sin for their subjects to resist them, and that rebels will come to the same bad end as Dathan and Abiram, who defied Moses and were swallowed up by the earth.

Much of King John is thus more homiletic than dramatic, but Bale has some theatrical skill. He has arranged his dialogue so that the nineteen roles can be performed by nine actors and extracts dramatic irony from this economy by directing the actors who play Usurped Power, Private Wealth, and Sedition to appear also as the Pope, Cardinal Pandulphus, and a Monk respectively. He dresses England in widow's weeds as a visual reminder of how the wicked clergy have exiled her husband, God. England's son, Commonalty, is blind for want of knowledge of the Gospels and has to grope his way on and off the stage. There is another shrewd piece of stagecraft when Sedition is carried in by Usurped Power, Private Wealth, and Dissimulation. But what Bale bequeathed to later writers of history plays was not a settled dramatic form but a set of potentialities. He showed how chronicle material could be adapted to illustrate the new theories of kingship, commonweal, and obedience, how it could reveal the general working of divine justice in human affairs, and how it could be linked with particular matters of moment in contemporary politics by the use of ‘mirror’ scenes.

Bale's King John emphasizes most of all the obedience which subjects owe to their divinely appointed monarchs. By persistently enforcing the same lesson, later homilists and historians obliged thoughtful men to consider its corollary, namely, the duty owed by kings to their subjects, the commonweal, divine law, natural law, and civil law. Various forms of literature were used to enjoin this duty on kings. Prose treatises like Sir Thomas Elyot's The Governor offered monarchs precepts and examples of good rule. Verse narratives like The Mirror for Magistrates showed, among other things, how God favoured virtuous kings and punished tyrants. Some writers of history plays also treated these matters in detail and thus kept drama in contact with one of the most vital political issues of the day. Among the most distinguished of these writers were the anonymous authors of Edward III and Woodstock. Some critics have been puzzled by the structure of Edward III. Act I is based mainly on Holinshed's chronicle and shows Edward verifying his right to the throne of France and relieving the castle of Roxborough, which has been treacherously attacked by the treaty-breaking king of Scotland, David. Act II, however, derives mainly from William Painter's adaptation of an Italian novella in his Palace of Pleasure, and shows Edward first trying to seduce the Countess of Salisbury then bringing his passions under control. In the succeeding three acts, the playwright reverts to historical materials and deals with the English campaigns in France, but his attention seems divided between Edward and the Black Prince, his son. Once it is appreciated, however, that the basic themes of the play are the education of princes and the illustration of king-becoming virtues, its various episodes assume a meaningful relationship. The education comes especially through learning to respect those covenants on which honour and civilization depend. The eloquent Countess of Salisbury convinces Edward that his passions have put him in danger of committing ‘high treason against the King of Heaven’, who instituted the marriage bond before He appointed kings. Similarly, Villiers convinces Charles of Normandy that princes cannot countermand the parole given by a soldier. Later, when King John of France would revoke the safe-conduct which Charles has given to Salisbury, he, too, is taught that kings must not abuse their powers. The kingly virtues are illustrated by Edward's care in ensuring that war against France would be just, by the fortitude displayed by the Black Prince at Crecy and Poitiers, and by Edward's clemency towards the six burghers of Calais. Contrasts are used to throw these themes into relief; David of Scotland is a breaker of covenants, and when John uses Frenchmen to fight for his usurped crown, he is represented as a tyrant, a ‘thirsty tiger’ tearing the entrails of the realm.

The rich vocabulary, iterative imagery, and fine eloquence of Edward III have led some critics to suggest that it was written or revised by Shakespeare. Completed in the early fifteen-nineties, it certainly anticipates Shakespeare's portrayal of the education of Prince Hal in the two parts of Henry IV and of his ideal kingship in Henry V. Woodstock, written between 1591 and 1595, was well known to Shakespeare, whose Richard II is in some respects a sequel to it. The author of Woodstock drastically altered the historical characters and events described by Holinshed and Stowe in order to present a tragic conflict between a king and his counsellors. In the chronicles, Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester and uncle to Richard II, is a man of self-centred ambition who is murdered for plotting treason and war; in the play, on the other hand, Woodstock is an honest and altruistic patriot who serves his nephew loyally despite great provocation. Richard is a flawed but complex character. Anxious at times to emulate the greatness of his father, the Black Prince, and ever conscious of his position as ‘the highest God's anointed deputy’, he is fatally deficient in the quality which Tudor moralists defined as ‘affability’, i.e. the capacity for accepting good counsel. When Richard renounces the Protectorship of Woodstock and the counsel of York, Lancaster, Surrey, and Arundel, he severs contact with the ideals of order, degree, and justice upheld by these patriotic aristocrats, with their endorsement of hereditary rights and responsibilities and their desire to give every social class its due. In their place Richard sets the upstart lawyer, Tresilian, and a faction of flattering, luxury-loving courtiers—Greene, Bagot, Bushy, and Scroope. Swayed by these pernicious guides, Richard becomes the enemy of order and equity, rack-renting the common people to feast and clothe his minions, elevating Tresilian to the position of Lord Chief Justice, extorting money by compelling men of substance to sign and seal blank charters, and farming out his revenues to his favourites in return for a monthly stipend of £7,000. His tyranny reaches its nadir when he has Woodstock kidnapped, deported, and murdered in Calais.

Tyrannical though he is, Richard has succeeded to his throne by hereditary right. A king of this kind, according to orthodox Elizabethan political theory, was not to be resisted but endured as a divine visitation on the collective sins of the nation and left to the judgement of heaven. Woodstock professes this doctrine and is eventually a martyr to it, but he adheres to it with difficulty, and his creator finds so much justification for the rebellion against Richard after the killing of Woodstock that his play is rather a challenge to orthodoxy than a confirmation of it. The imaginative power as well as the intellectual independence of Woodstock make it one of the finest of Elizabethan history plays. This imaginative power is especially apparent in the coherence and balance of the plot, in the clarity and force of the language, in the controlled irony of the humorous passages, in the illuminating images drawn from bird and animal life, and in the economic but telling use of special costumes and stage spectacle. The plain freize dress worn by Woodstock contrasts with the luxurious and highly coloured attire of Richard's favourites, but the playwright's purposes go deeper than allegorical antitheses, and the complexity of his art is seen at its best in Act IV, Scene ii, where pathos, irony, spectacle, and foreboding images of disorder are blended as Woodstock characteristically interprets his wife's dream as a premonition of the destruction of England, not of himself, and then welcomes the armed masquers while warning them that he will not join in any plot against the king, not realizing that they are his enemies in disguise, led by Richard himself.

Tudor historians and playwrights were profoundly interested in the sequence of events which followed the death of Woodstock. Most of them regarded the Wars of the Roses as a consequence of the deposition of Richard II, and the victory of Henry Tudor at Bosworth as the beginning of a period of peace and order. After the death of Elizabeth I, the history play became less popular, but Bacon's History of King Henry the Seventh (1622) encouraged John Ford to dramatize in Perkin Warbeck certain events of the period immediately after that of Shakespeare's Richard III. Ford elaborates contrasts between two legitimate kings, Henry VII of England and James IV of Scotland, and Perkin Warbeck, pretender to the English throne. He makes Henry better and James worse than Bacon had done in his biography. Ford's Henry, indeed, exhibits most of the virtues of the ideal kings described by contemporary writers of specula principum. He is introduced as the physician of the state who has healed the wounds of civil war and has brought hopes of lasting peace by marrying Elizabeth of York. In domestic matters, he is thrifty, eschewing luxury and favourites. In foreign affairs, he accepts the wise counsel of the Bishop of Durham, and Hialas, the Spanish ambassador. In war, he tempers justice with clemency; when Warbeck and followers are overcome, he treats the pretender's wife with meticulous courtesy. James, by comparison, is capricious, imperious, and reckless. Dazzled by Warbeck's stately language and regal bearing, he accepts him as a true Plantagenet without proper proofs. He invades England, but suddenly grows sceptical of Warbeck's claims, and renounces them entirely when offered the hand of Henry's daughter.

As a statesman, Henry is manifestly superior to James, and most Elizabethan playwrights using Ford's source-materials would have made Henry the hero of the play with Warbeck as its villain, damned as upstart, rebel, and would-be usurper. Not so Ford, however; here, as elsewhere, his sympathies go out to the character who defies conventional standards, and he almost vindicates Warbeck by the ideality of the passion with which he invests him. In the chronicles, Warbeck is reduced to confessing the falseness of his claims, whereas Ford's quixotic hero never falters in his belief that he is Richard of York, and his folie de grandeur is transfigured by a vision of magnanimity which gives him an infallible command of the kingly gesture in every crisis. When James abandons him, he majestically comments, ‘I am my father's son still’. When Henry captures him, he begs for mercy for his followers, but not for himself; Henry may break his neck, but not his heart, which

Will mount till every drop of blood be frozen
By death's perpetual winter

and he goes to execution in this exalted spirit, happy in the knowledge that his wife, Dalyell, and his low-born counsellors have remained loyal to him.

Like Shelley's Prometheus, Warbeck is capable of aspiring ‘till Hope creates from its own wreck the thing it contemplates’, and the element of romantic individualism which he brings into the history play challenges the ideal of hereditary right and fixed social hierarchies which it so often endorses. Written in the early sixteenth-thirties about the same time as Perkin Warbeck, Robert Davenport's King John and Matilda also combines old and new themes. Eschewing chronicles, Davenport takes most of his source-materials from a play by Henry Chettle and Anthony Munday, The Downfall of Robert, Earl of Huntington (1601). His plotting and characterization are much influenced by John Fletcher and his followers. The fortunes of King John are made to rise and fall in every act to provide the maximum of suspense and excitement. Far from being the pioneer of Protestant virtues, Davenport's John is a lustful tyrant who neglects the commonweal to pursue Matilda Fitzwater, daughter of one of the barons with whom he has quarrelled. His worst crime is to have her poisoned after she has entered a monastery to escape from him. A Jacobean interest in lust is also apparent in the sub-plot, which shows how Brand, a jailor, starves Lady Bruce and her son to death when she will not submit to his demands.

Despite these sensational elements, King John and Matilda is a history play and not a febrile excursion into Fletcherian tragedy. Its political ideas are solid and consistent, and are firmly based on Elizabethan foundations. In its treatment of illicit passion and the covenants that kings must respect, it has much in common with Edward III. By pursuing Matilda, John ignores her vow to die a maid, which he has sworn to respect. Only after her death does he repent and acknowledge that ‘Whilst passion holds the helm, reason and honour Do suffer wrack’. Correspondingly, John is at odds with Fitzwater and his followers because he has not kept the covenants made in the Magna Carta. Blunt in utterance and plain in dress, Fitzwater is modelled on Woodstock in the earlier history play. Like Woodstock, he reverences ‘the high calling of a king’, but claims the right of ‘modest admonition’, opposing exactions for private coffers and exorbitant concessions to the Papacy. Once John becomes a man of his word, Fitzwater renounces the French allies of the barons and forgives the murder of his daughter in the interests of national unity. ‘We will be all one soul again’, he exclaims, and in this ecstatic phrase, more so than in any other in the play, the Elizabethan vision of the harmony of king and subject within the nation-state as an almost sacramental concord is memorably affirmed. King John and Matilda has been neglected and underestimated; like Edward III, Woodstock, and Perkin Warbeck, it is among the most stageworthy of Elizabethan history plays, and all four merit revival in the theatre.