[In the following essay, Adams acknowledges King Johan's unique attributes while refuting the theory that the play greatly influenced later works.]

Most students of the Elizabethan drama agree that King Johan exerted no direct influence on either the Troublesome Raigne or Shakespeare's King John. W. W. Greg's opinion that all three plays “follow in common a Protestant tradition” in their treatment of King John has not won universal acceptance, but it has at least discouraged attempts to link Bale's play very closely with the later King John plays.¹ Certainly it seems unlikely on the face of it that a playwright from the 1580's or 1590's would be familiar with a manuscript play written at least fifty years earlier and which has left no record of performance later than 1539. Only through very compelling internal evidence could a direct relationship be established, and such evidence has not been found.

The only noteworthy attempt to overturn the prevailing consensus is far from successful. John Elson, who comes just short of proposing King Johan as an immediate source of the Troublesome Raigne, claims to have discovered “more than a hundred parallel passages and instances of similarity.”² Although Elson believes that “some forty” of these “carry appreciable weight,” he cites only six, the most interesting of which involve the following two passages from Bale's play, the first spoken by the Interpreter and the other by John. Both rest on an analogy between John and the biblical David.

As a stronge Dauid at the voyce of verytie,
Great Golye, the pope, he strake downe with hys
          slynge,
Restorynge agayne to a Christen lybertie
Hys lande and people. …

(ll. 1114-17)

Most mercyfull God, as my trust is in the,
So comforte me now in this extremyte;
As thow holpyst Dauid in his most hevynes,
So helpe me this hour of thy grace, mercye and
          goodnes.

(ll. 1650-53)

The John-David analogy also appears in the Troublesome Raigne, but with an obviously different application:

But in the spirit I cry vnto my God,
As did the Kingly Prophet Dauid cry,
(Whose hands, as mine, with murder were attaint)
I am not he shall buyld the Lord a house,
Or roote these Locusts from the face of earth:
But if my dying heart deceaue me not,
From out these loynes shall spring a Kingly braunch
Whose armes shall reach vnto the gates of Rome,
And with his feete treads downe the Strumpetes pride,
That sits vpon the chaire of Babylon.

(II.viii.98-107)³

Although all three passages are flattering to King John, they illustrate more the richness of the biblical figure than any meaningful connection between the two plays. And if, as Elson suggests, Bale was influenced by a passage in Matthew Paris in which the same analogy is drawn to emphasize John's claim to the throne by election rather than by strict descent, we have still another example of how the same figure could be variously interpreted.⁴

It is equally unlikely that King Johan played a significant part in disseminating the “Protestant tradition” of King John as the determined opponent of papal domination.⁵ Writers of the last three or four decades of the century could have found a fully developed Protestant interpretation of John and his reign in Foxe and Grafton, not to mention Tyndale's Obedience. These works, with perhaps Holinshed's somewhat less doctrinaire treatment of the subject, would seem to represent the main channels by which the tradition reached both dramatic and nondramatic writers of the later sixteenth century. It is just possible, however, that Bale personally contributed something to Foxe's story of John as it appears in the first and later English editions of the Actes and Monuments. The two lived and worked together at different times after 1548, and there is reason to believe that Foxe formed some of his ideas, particularly his attitude toward English history, under the informal tutelage of his older contemporary.⁶ But beyond this it is difficult to go.

Attempts to determine Bale's indebtedness to particular plays or individual dramatists have been only moderately successful. C. H. Herford's suggestion that Bale drew some details from Sir David Lindsay's Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis is now quite properly discounted: the similarities between the two plays are not close, Bale gives no indication in his catalogs of having known Lindsay's play, and the A-version of King Johan almost certainly antedates the Satyre.⁷ Herford is also responsible for the theory that King Johan, particularly in its construction, is modeled on Thomas Kirchmeyer's famous neo-Latin Antichrist play, the Pammachius, first printed at Wittenberg on May 13, 1538—less than eight months before the earlier version of King Johan was presented before Cranmer.⁸ The chronology here does not of course rule out the possibility that Bale knew the Pammachius even before he composed the A-version of King Johan, although it does at least suggest that any influence of Kirchmeyer's play would be confined to the B-text. And in fact the few places in which Bale's play does closely resemble specific passages in the Pammachius are B-text additions or interpolations (see especially notes at ll. 991 and 2193). There are other less tangible similarities (discussed below) which may also indicate that Bale had read the Pammachius in the interval between the composition of the A- and B-texts and as a result deliberately heightened certain effects in revision. But in any case it is sufficiently obvious that Bale's most important dramatic models are to be found not in the Continental drama of contemporary reformers but in the tradition of the native morality play.

Bale's debt to this tradition is usually said to consist in his use of “allegorical” personae, by which is meant personified abstractions like Sedition and Usurped Power and more or less generalized types like Nobility, Clergy, and Civil Order. It is also generally held that his distinctive advance over the morality genre lies in his combining in one way or another these kinds of characters with literal, historical individuals. Sedition, for example, not only exists throughout much of the play as the historical Stephen Langton, he also operates, even in his nonliteral mode of existence, in the same world with King John, who is consistently presented as a particular historical person. This conventional view of Bale's achievement in King Johan, although fundamentally sound, is seriously limited by its tendency to view the play almost exclusively in terms of its characters. The allegorical personae provide an obvious clue to Bale's dramatic antecedents, but once we are led to the morality play, it is not enough simply to point to these personae and note how Bale's characters differ from them. It is at least equally important for a proper historical and critical understanding of the play to attend to Bale's use and adaptation of the means by which the morality dramatist put his figures in action and developed this action according to a predetermined homiletic purpose. This necessarily involves a consideration of allegory, structure, and theme, as well as character.

The distinguishing trait of the English morality play is that it makes significant use of one or more traditional allegories or extended metaphors which exist independently of the play itself. The allegory may be exploited fully, as it is in The Castle of Perseverance where both the spiritual war (or, more specifically, the siege) and the debate of the Four Daughters of God are simply translated from narrative into dramatic form. On the other hand, it may be treated only allusively as a kind of objective reference point which reinforces the dramatic action. In Everyman, for example, one of the underlying allegories is that of the spiritual journey, according to which death and judgment are viewed as inevitable stages in a progress through time. Yet even though Everyman explicitly undertakes a journey, the basic metaphor is never thoroughly developed. It does nonetheless exert a significant measure of control over the play's plot and thematic development, and in this respect it is essentially no different from the traditional allegories which govern The Castle of Perseverance.

Obviously there is no such traditional allegory lying behind King Johan. Its place is taken partly by more or less authoritative historical narrative, which determines to an extent the plot development of the play, but more basically by a schematic view of history which for Bale gave the historical data their special interest and relevance. According to this view—one espoused by a number of sixteenth-century Protestant thinkers—the key to the understanding of history is to be found in the perennial opposition between the forces of Christ and Antichrist as expounded mystically in the Apocalypse. Except for the thousand-year period from the Nativity to Pope Sylvester II, during which time Satan remained bound and sealed in the bottomless pit (Apoc. xx.1-3), the faithful few in each age have been persecuted by the various manifestations of the general Antichrist—particularly the papacy. This state of affairs is to continue until the glorious Second Coming and the descent of the New Jerusalem, understood in a spiritual sense as a return to the uncorrupted doctrine and practice of the primitive Church.⁹

Bale does not attempt to prove or even explain any of this in King Johan; instead, he assumes it as an independent structure with an established and generally accepted validity, much as the morality dramatist assumed the validity of his received allegory. Nevertheless this apocalyptical theory of history does have its effect on the play. It accounts for the frequent reference to Antichrist and related eschatological matters (see, for example, ll. 677, 1091, 2081, 2190, 2645, 2679—many of these in B-text additions), but more important it underlies and reinforces the analogy between John and Henry VIII which is implicit through much of the play and spelled out fully in the Interpreter's speech (ll. 1086-1120). Since John was one of those called upon to champion the true faith at a time when Satan was at large and held sway (ll. 1091-92), his defeat was virtually inevitable. But given the apocalyptical orientation of Bale's theory of history, this defeat could only be a prelude to the ultimate victory of the Church, which Bale, conscious of living in the “latter time” of spiritual regeneration prophesied by St. John, was prepared to see in Henry's successful defiance of Rome. John is thus in a very real sense a type of Henry, and Bale has obviously selected and arranged the historical data to emphasize this fact. He has also contrived to bring Henry (in the guise of Imperial Majesty) onstage in the last scene of the play. This is perhaps a somewhat unsubtle device, but it cannot be dismissed as simply a clumsy anachronism. It represents a consistent working out of the structural plan which governs the entire play, and as such it forms an integral part of Bale's dramatic design.

Kirchmeyer's Pammachius, which is much more heavily and explicitly eschatological, presents Julian, the last Roman emperor, in what amounts to a very similar historical framework. In accordance with popular eschatological thinking, his submission to Pope Pammachius, the Antichrist, signals the approach of the last days. The parousia of course is not represented; as explained in the epilogue, it is to be the subject of a fifth act, which Kirchmeyer has purposely left unwritten. But it is clearly foreshadowed by the advent of “Theophilus” (Luther), whose doctrine is expounded throughout much of Act IV. Julian, then, is not strictly a type of Luther as John is of Henry, nor is he in most other respects comparable to Bale's hero. But like John he does have a recognizable place in the apocalyptical view of history which saw the Reformation as a glorious victory over the forces of Antichrist comparable to—if not precisely identical with—the ultimate victory foretold by St. John. In terms of dramatic structure, with the Reformation standing as an essentially comic resolution to an otherwise tragic story, the two plays are thus closely parallel, and it may be that this resolution in King Johan—absent from the surviving A-text—was added by Bale in revision under the influence of Kirchmeyer's play. It is more likely, however, that the eschatological concept and the resulting structural design were implicit in Bale's plan from the beginning and that Kirchmeyer's work simply encouraged him to give these elements a greater prominence.

The dualistic scheme derived from the Apocalypse and applied to the history of the Church has a counterpart in the traditional view of the opposition between Virtue and Vice in the spiritual life of the individual Christian. As modified and formalized in the most popular type of English morality play, this conflict presented a neutral protagonist poised between the representatives of moral good and evil and aligning himself with each in turn.¹⁰ The plot of these plays is thus defined by a series of reversals, each representing a moral choice by which the protagonist commits himself to Virtue or Vice. The number of reversals might vary from one to four, but theological considerations required that the protagonist's final movement be toward the forces of good.¹¹ Nor was this pattern confined to the earlier moralities, operating within the realm of specifically Christian ethics. Humanistic and secularized “moralities” like John Rastell's Four Elements exhibit the same form even though the protagonist's choices are no longer strictly moral.

Bale must have seen in this dramatic formula a microcosmic reflection of that larger conflict which governed the movement of history. He has accordingly used the formula extensively, at the same time adjusting it freely to accommodate it more effectively to his apocalyptical view of English history. While King John is obviously the central figure of the play, he does not stand in the position of a neutral protagonist like Mankind or Magnificence. The fundamental difference is that his will is unchanging. At his first appearance he reveals himself as a noble ruler concerned above all for the welfare of his subjects:

I haue worne the crown and wrowght vyctoryouslye,
And now do purpose by practyse and by stodye
To reforme the lawes and sett men in good order,
That trew iustyce may be had in euery bordere.

(ll. 18-21)

His dying speech is a reiteration of these sentiments seasoned with a Christian resignation born of experience:

I haue sore hungred and thirsted ryghteousnesse
For the offyce sake that God hath me appoynted;
But now I perceyue that synne and wyckednesse
In thys wretched worlde, lyke as Christe prophecyed,
Haue the ouerhande; in me is it verefyed.
Praye for me, good people, I besych yow hartely,
That the lorde aboue on my poore sowle haue mercy.

(ll. 2167-73)

At no point does he embrace evil. His one questionable act—the resignation of the crown to Cardinal Pandulphus—has been carefully extenuated by Bale in passages bearing the marks of careful and thorough revision, with the result that the capitulation is a sign not of the king's frailty but of his compassion. This attitude is made explicit in John's appeal to the widow England:

O Englande, Englande, shewe now thyselfe a mother;
Thy people wyll els be slayne here without nomber.
As God shall iudge me, I do not thys of cowardnesse
But of compassyon, in thys extreme heauynesse.

(ll. 1717-20)

Bale's hero, in short, is unsuited for the role of neutral protagonist precisely because his will is unalterably committed to good. The forces of evil which oppose and eventually subdue him create crises and reversals in the action, but these are no longer illustrative of moral choice on the part of the principal character.

Bale has assigned the essential characteristics of the neutral protagonist to Nobility, Clergy, and Civil Order, and it is these characters who engage in the familiar movement between good and evil formerly reserved for the central figure. Clergy first appears as one already corrupted by the forces of evil: his entrance is marked by an argument with John, which he concludes with a disrespectful “Yowr grace ys fare gonne; God send yow a better mynd” (l. 372). The fact that he is capable of conversion, however, is proof that he is not inherently evil.¹² Nobility and Civil Order are also presented as characters essentially innocent although inclined toward wickedness. In their initial encounter with John, they at first give evidence of a rebellious spirit; but soon, together with Clergy, they request and willingly accept instruction from the king (ll. 526 ff.). At this point the forces of good have reached a temporary ascendancy by winning the allegiance of the tripartite protagonist. In Act II Bale makes use of the temptation motif employed extensively in the moralities to motivate the series of moral choices which defined the plot, and, significantly, it is not John but Nobility, Clergy, and Civil Order who are tempted. Sedition approaches each in turn and gains his support against the king. While Nobility at first offers resistance (ll. 1176-79), his eventual fall is swift and decisive: “Than I submyt me to the chyrches reformacyon” (l. 1183). Clergy and Civil Order submit even more readily to Sedition's proposals (ll. 1207-12). Then, as the play draws to a close, all three undergo a sudden conversion in the manner of the neutral protagonist of the morality plays:

Nob. For Gods loue, nomore!
Alas, ye haue sayde
          ynough.
Cler. All the worlde doth
knowe that we haue done
          sore amys.
C. Ord. Forgyue it vs,
so that we neuer heare more of
          thys.

(ll. 2306-08)

In these successive reversals we have the conventional plot of the conflict morality, preserved in a strikingly different context through a redistribution of the functions assigned the various characters.

The purpose of these modifications is clear. The neutral figure of a morality must, of course, suffer a fall from virtue, and such a fall would obviously be unsuitable to Bale's martyr-king. Furthermore, by making Nobility, Clergy, and Civil Order collectively the morally neutral protagonist, Bale has been able to reserve for John the position normally occupied by the chief representative of virtue, the character pitted against the vice-tempters in the struggle for domination over the neutral hero. At the same time, insofar as John is also mortal and not precisely a personified abstraction, his encounter with the forces of Antichrist leads to his death, with the result that he becomes, as Samuel Frederick Johnson has pointed out, the earliest example in English drama of the isolated hero whose essential virtue and nobility in a world of evil bring about his tragic downfall.¹³ Bale, however, was not writing tragedy, and the tragic implications of his hero's death are purposely thwarted by the comic resolution inherent in the play's eschatological framework. Although John is human and consequently susceptible to tragedy, he is at the same time a prototype of Henry VIII and an embodiment of “imperial majesty” as Bale conceived it. These latter considerations more than John's predicament as a particular individual have dictated the play's structure and made it a comedy.

Although the structure of King Johan owes much to a theory of history which is fundamentally religious, Bale's ultimate concern is not so much religious as political. Both plot and theme center on Pope Innocent's appointment of Stephen Langton as Archbishop of Canterbury in opposition to John's wishes. It is the power of the king to assert his sovereignty in his own realm that is at stake, and Bale's purpose of course is to defend the royal authority as supreme in matters spiritual as well as temporal. The issue touches religion as well as politics, and this fact, together with Bale's violently polemical disposition, accounts for the vicious satire of Roman Catholic religious practices and institutions which fills the play and obscures some of its artistic qualities. To call King Johan a theological play, however, is clearly a mistake.¹⁴ Although the standard topics of sectarian dispute—the papacy, indulgences and pardons, “voluntarye workes,” the mass, the Scriptures in English, etc.—are mentioned frequently enough, these are never considered theologically but only as they impinge on problems of social harmony. Auricular confession, together with the whole Catholic penitential system, is thoroughly satirized, travestied, and otherwise denounced,¹⁵ not on the basis of doctrinal dispute over the sacrament of penance but because private confession supposedly offered a threat to political stability. Nor is the play a “moral” play in the strictest sense. In place of the essentially unchanging and universal questions of salvation which occupied earlier homiletic dramatists, we find secular topics of particular concern to thirteenth- and sixteenth-century Englishmen presented in a deliberately modified version of the literary formula popularized by the morality playwrights. And it is this calculated use of a traditional artistic form that makes King Johan more than a curious survival of sectarian propaganda.

Bale, to be sure, was not the only early Tudor dramatist to adapt the methods and conventions of the morality genre to non-moral purposes. As William O. Harris has demonstrated, Skelton had earlier set himself a similar task, and, by modifying the traditional English morality in the light of the Stoic-Christian tradition of fortitude, had given effective dramatic presentation to his ideas on the nature of kingship and the royal virtues.¹⁶ Other plays of the period, like the so-called youth and educational plays, while retaining the formal characteristics of the traditional morality are similarly limited in scope even though not specifically political in intent. In the earlier Hickscorner, and even in the traditional Wisdom, there is precedent for Bale's practice of substituting a multiple for a single protagonist. Hickscorner also illustrates the tendency—somewhat less clearly observable in The Interlude of Youth—to obscure the moral neutrality of the central figure in the traditional conflict plot. Nevertheless King Johan stands out as one of the most ambitious and thoroughgoing attempts by an early Tudor playwright to exploit the resources of the native English religious drama. It also reveals the extent to which this drama, unaffected by classical precepts or models, could be made to retain its appeal and relevance in an age uncongenial to its most fundamental presuppositions.

Notes

1. See “Bale's Kynge Johan,” MLN, XXXVI (1921), 505. Greg's judgment, at least as it applies to Bale's relationship with the Troublesome Raigne, is accepted by John Dover Wilson as a general assumption (New Cambridge King John [Cambridge, Eng., 1954], p. xix).

2. “Studies in the King John Plays,” in Joseph Quincy Adams Memorial Studies, ed. James G. McManaway et al. (Washington, D.C., 1948), pp. 191-192.

3. Tr. Reign. The reference is to part, scene, and line.

4. See Elson, pp. 192-193. The original is to be found in Paris' Chronica, II, 454-455, and also (with variations) in his Historia, II, 80. In both works the passage is part of a sermon supposedly delivered by Archbishop Hubert at John's coronation.

5. The existence of such a “tradition” is undeniable: see the references to William Allen, Thomas Smith, William Lambarde, and others in the New Arden edition of Shakespeare's King John, ed. E. A. J. Honigmann (London, 1959), p. xxvi. But see also Lily B. Campbell, Shakespeare's “Histories”: Mirrors of Elizabethan Policy (San Marino, 1947), Ch. xii. Miss Campbell's sources indicate that the later Elizabethans could derive more than one lesson from John's career. Henry Chettle and Anthony Munday's Robert, Earl of Huntington plays also attest the existence of a quite different King John tradition.

6. See William Haller, The Elect Nation: The Meaning and Relevance of Foxe's “Book of Martyrs” (New York, 1964), pp. 67, 70, 72, 162.

7. Charles H. Herford, Studies in the Literary Relations of England and Germany in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge, Eng., 1886), p. 135. Cf. Douglas Hamer, ed. The Works of Sir David Lindsay of the Mount (Edinburgh, 1936), IV, xxvi, 138, and especially 160.

8. Pages 136-138. Herford seems to have assumed a relatively late date for King Johan, even though he was aware of the 1539 performance before Cranmer. Bale first mentions his translation of the Pammachius in his Summarium (1549).

9. See Bale's lengthy commentary on the Apocalypse, The Image of Both Churches, particularly the third part (1548?, reprinted in Select Works of John Bale, ed. Henry Christmas [Cambridge, Eng., 1849]). See also Haller, pp. 64-70, and Ernest Lee Tuveson, Millennium and Utopia: A Study in the Background of the Idea of Progress (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1949), Ch. ii.

10. See Robert Lee Ramsay, ed. Magnyfycence: A Moral Play by John Skelton, EETS, ES 98 (London, 1908), pp. cxlvii-cl.

11. See Spivack, pp. 244-245, who observes that the traditional morality, because of its application to humanity in general, could not end tragically without implying a kind of blanket damnation contrary to Christian thought; tragedy in a Christian morality play could become possible only when the central character had lost his universal signification.

12. See the discussion of New Custom in William Roy Mackenzie, The English Moralities from the Point of View of Allegory (Boston, 1914), p. 50 and n. 1.

13. “The Tragic Hero in Early Elizabethan Drama,” in Studies in the English Renaissance Drama, ed. Josephine W. Bennett et al. (New York, 1959), p. 170.

14. Cf. Elbert N. S. Thompson, “The English Moral Plays,” Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, XIV (New Haven, 1910), 363. Thompson refers to King Johan as an “exponent of Puritan dogma.”

15. See Miller, pp. 802-822.

16. Skelton's “Magnyfycence” and the Cardinal Virtue Tradition (Chapel Hill, 1965), pp. 145 ff.