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King Johan is a sixteenth-century English play. Written by a former Carmelite friar named John Bale, it is considered a possible influence on William Shakespeare's later work King John. The play was groundbreaking as it was the first English-language play to cast a historical English monarch as a character of virtue.
The play was written by Bale in 1538 and significantly revised during the reign of Elizabeth I. [1] Considered a piece of Protestant propaganda, the play told the story of John of England, who reigned during the thirteenth century in England. King John is represented as the champion of English church rites, as opposed to the Catholic Pope:—
But the English people remained in the bondage of Rome,—
Elsewhere John is called a Lollard and accused of "heretycall langage." He is shown to be against a number of Catholic villains, but is eventually assassinated by Sedition and Dissimulation before being defended by Verity. Allegorical characters are mixed with the real persons. Ynglonde vidua (Widow England) represents the nation, and the jocular element is provided by Sedwyson (sedition), occupying the role of Vice in a pure morality play. One actor was obviously intended to play many parts, for stage directions such as "Go out Ynglond, and dress for Clargy" are by no means uncommon.
King Johan debuted in the royal court of Henry VIII of England, and was unlikely to have been performed beyond the 1560s. The play itself was probably intended to reflect sixteenth-century England, as the play acted as an affirmation of the King of England's rejection of European Catholicism.
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The original manuscript of Kynge Johan was discovered between 1831 and 1838 among the papers of Ipswich Corporation (i.e. local government for Ipswich, where the play was probably performed, as there are references to charitable foundations by King John in the town (which received its Town Charter from John in 1200 AD) and neighbourhood. It is described at the end of the manuscript as two plays, but there is no obvious division, only the end of the first act being noted. The first part is corrected by Bale: the second half is in his handwriting, but his name nowhere occurs. In the list of his works, however, he mentions a play De Joanne Anglorum Rege (Of King John of the English), written in idiomate materno (in the mother tongue).
The text was edited by John Payne Collier for the Camden Society in 1838. [2]
Asser was a Welsh monk from St David's, Dyfed, who became Bishop of Sherborne in the 890s. About 885 he was asked by Alfred the Great to leave St David's and join the circle of learned men whom Alfred was recruiting for his court. After spending a year at Caerwent because of illness, Asser accepted.
William Camden was an English antiquarian, historian, topographer, and herald, best known as author of Britannia, the first chorographical survey of the islands of Great Britain and Ireland that relates landscape, geography, antiquarianism, and history, and the Annales, the first detailed historical account of the reign of Elizabeth I of England.
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The Praier and Complaynte of the Ploweman unto Christe: written not longe after the yere of our Lorde. M. and three hundred is a short, anonymous English Christian text, probably written in the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century and first printed in about 1531. It consists of a prose tract, in the form of a polemical prayer, expressing Lollard sentiments and arguing for religious reform. In it, the simple ploughman/narrator speaks on behalf of "the repressed common man imbued with the simple truths of the Bible and a knowledge of the commandments against the mighty and monolithic conservative church". The pastoral-ecclesiastical metaphor of shepherds and sheep is used extensively as a number of criticisms are made about such things as confession, indulgences, purgatory, tithing and celibacy. The Prayer became important in the sixteenth century, when its themes were taken up by proponents of the Protestant Reformation.
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