Editor’s Preface

The present issue offers a tribute to the scholarship of John N. King (1945-2020), former editor of Reformation (2006-2009). It opens with two pieces, by Arthur Marotti and Mark Bayer, on Shakespeare’s response to the ethical and political ideas of the Reformation. Although King did not consider himself to be a Shakespearean, he cultivated an interest across his career in the effect of the Reformation on Shakespeare’s plays. According to King, “[t]hat Shakespeare joined his contemporaries in restaging many theatrical encounters between kings and satirical embodiments of papal power demonstrates that memories of the conflict between ecclesiastical and secular authority long outlived the generations who came of age during the many religious crises that occurred between the 1534 Reformation Parliament and the Elizabethan settlement of religion in 1559.” In crafting his history plays, King argues, Shakespeare was sensitive to “the regal vices of pride, extravagance, and licentiousness” which could be mitigated via royal counsel, a “problem” “raised by works ranging from Utopia to 1 Henry IV.” Because “[t]he Italianate settings of Jacobean plays inherit a polemical Protestant edge,” “Shakespeare and his successors recreate the Reformation image of Italy in such plays as Othello, Volpone, and The Duchess of Malfi.” With characteristic erudition, King locates an analogous use of Othello’s abusive epithet “goats and monkeys,” which Othello hurls at Desdemona, in the mid-Tudor satirist William Baldwin’s translation of Matthias Flaccius’s Wonderfull newes of the death of Paule the. iii. last byshop of Rome (c. 1552). King’s point is not that Shakespeare necessarily read Flaccius, but that his dramas were unmistakably a product of Reformation literary culture. Mandated official homilies read weekly from most pulpits during Elizabeth’s reign “enables one to read these texts as a summary of the world view of Sidney and Spenser, Shakespeare and Donne,” according to King. This assertion leads him to identify “commonplaces from the homily on obedience” in Ulysses’ speech on order and degree, from Troilus and Cressida.” Reformation literary voices “helped to spawn masterworks by William Shakespeare.” “[P]lays such as Hamlet and Othello dramatize controversial issues related to conscience, confession, free will, and purgatory....Dramatization of