In the opening scene of Shakespeare's Henry V, the Archbishop of Canterbury complains to the Bishop of Ely that there are plans afoot to divest the church of some of the property which has been bequeathed to it in the wills of lay people: ‘all the temporal lands which men devout / By testament have given to the Church / Would they strip from us’. Stuart Elden explains that

The tension between spiritual and temporal overlordship of lands is also present in other early modern plays. Scenes in which lay persons seeking justice are stopped on the threshold of spiritual spaces occur in Ford's Tis Pity She's a Whore and in Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors, while in Webster's The Duchess of Malfi, the Duchess is taken by surprise when a trip to Loreto brings her into the power of her brother the Cardinal; the uneasy relationship between temporal and spiritual is troubled still further here by the fact that the Cardinal has donned armour. More subtly, in Middleton's The Lady's Tragedy the Tyrant commands one of his followers ‘Bring me the keys of the Cathedral straight’ (4.2.39), but First Soldier is unhappy about the idea of robbing a church because he believes that ‘What's got from grace, is ever spent in law’ (4.2.57)3; the Tyrant may feel he has the right to enter the cathedral, but ironically First Soldier thinks that whether or not there is a divine or an ecclesiastical response to his sacrilege, the secular power of the courts will certainly be brought to bear in a case involving church property.

I want to start by focusing on a play which is ostensibly free of tensions between the spiritual and temporal but which in fact offers subtle hints of the problematic conceptual boundary between sacred and secular. Nicole Marafioti notes that at some point during the reign of William the Conqueror ‘the monk Sulcard was commissioned to write an account of Westminster [Abbey]'s construction’. Echoes of that history can be found in an anonymous play called Thorney Abbey, which offers an origin story for the Anglo-Saxon foundation which preceded the Norman Westminster Abbey (and stood on the same site, so is not to be confused with the Thorney Abbey near Peterborough). Thorny-Abbey, or The London-Maid; a Tragedy, by T.W. was first printed in 1662 in Gratiae Theatrales, or A choice Ternary of English Plays, Composed upon especial occasions by several ingenious persons, the other members of the ‘ternary’ being The Marriage-Broker or The Pander; a Comedy, by M. W. M. A. and Grim the Collier of Croydon, or The Devil and his Dame; with the Devil and St. Dunstan: a Comedy, by I. T. Despite the title page's attribution to ‘T. W.’ Lucy Munro notes that William Rowley and Thomas Heywood have both been suggested as authors and tentatively dates the play c. 1606–16.

Thorney Abbey offers an account of the foundation of the future Westminster Abbey during the reign of an unnamed king of England who has a brother (and heir) called Edmund. This was a suggestive name. Francis Young's book Edmund: In Search of England's Lost King notes the extraordinary importance and continuing resonance of the story of the Anglo-Saxon St Edmund, who ‘became a shorthand with which kings could summon up, in one image, an idea of old-fashioned English monarchy’: ‘St Edmund's royal symbolism remained potent enough for a tiny figure of the saint to be included in Henry VIII's crown’; he features in Acts and Monuments; and he was mentioned by Drayton and Laurence Nowell.

The anonymous play A Knack to Know a Knave was first performed on 10 June 1592 and published in 1594, although Hanspeter Born has argued that the version published was not identical to the one performed but had been revised by Shakespeare. It features Bishop Dunstan, who was initially Abbot of Glastonbury, subsequently Archbishop of Canterbury, and finally canonised, and Edgar, king of Mercia and Northumbria (c. 944–975), who was known as Edgar the Peaceful. Both Edgar and Dunstan carried considerable cultural heft. Dunstan was a complex and controversial figure who meant very different things at different periods: his association with miracles that savoured of trickery meant that to early Reformers he was even more suspect than most saints. Paul H. Kocher observes that a marginal note in Henry Holland's 1590 A Treatise Against Witchcraft couples ‘Faustus’ and ‘Drunken Dunstan’ and posits that although ‘Drunken Dunstan eludes identification’, ‘No doubt it is some sort of attack on Dunstan, to whom, with other Catholic saints, Protestants gave a reputation for dissoluteness and magic’; however, Alexandra Walsham observes that ‘As time progressed and passions attenuated it even became possible to rejuvenate parts of the legends of saints like St Dunstan, whom an earlier generation of polemicists had refashioned as the archetype of the proud prelate, worker of lying wonders, and arrogant usurper of temporal authority’.

Edgar was also a contested figure. As we see in A Knack to Know a Knave, he figured in a story about lust and murder, but he was the subject of two panegyrics in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, preserved in a manuscript which Mercedes Salvador-Bello observes was in the Cotton collection and so accessible to at least some early modern readers, and he too was canonised because ‘In 1052 AEthelweard, abbot of Glastonbury, opened King Edgar's grave and found his body to be incorrupt; it was then placed in a silvergilt casket, over the altar, with relics of St Apollinaris and St Vincent, and miracles followed’.

If some of these plays engage with Hamlet and Macbeth, then King Lear in turn engages with some of them. Although the supposedly historical figure of King Lear belonged to a time before the Romans, the play points at the Anglo- Saxon past in a number of respects: its use of the names Edmund, Oswald and Edgar (who apparently succeeds as King Edgar); its representation of an England being divided into different constituent realms; and its interest in female succession and in the question of whether illegitimacy was a bar to inheriting the throne, as in the apparently vexed question of Athelstan. The blinding of Gloucester might recall the use of mutilation to disqualify possible successors, as when Edward the Confessor's elder brother Alfred Aetheling was blinded by Earl Godwin, and Lear's discovery that he cannot stop rain perhaps recalls Canute's supposed failure to turn back the tide. Lost battles too were a feature of Anglo-Saxon England, both Essendon and Hastings being perceived as disastrous and era-ending. Above all, the play seems to show us a world which is both pre-Christian yet at the same time post-Catholic, since Edgar, as has often been pointed out, resembles an Elizabethan priest on the run and Kent refers to stretching on the rack, and we certainly hear the legacy of Rome in Cordelia's instruction ‘a century send forth’. This is a world that seems troubled by the memory of Rome in something of the same way as the great Anglo-Saxon poem The Ruin.