Disrespecting Bacon
When planning pageants, writers had to be careful in how they portrayed historical characters: as heroes, as villains, and noble knights or comic fools. Misjudging a town’s local hero could be very harmful. Thus King John appears as the bad King John forced by the barons to sign Magna Carta or, at Bury St Edmunds, taking the Abbey’s treasures. However, as at the Stafford or Bridport Pageants, he appears as the King who ...