Notice of King John has been concentrated on questions of date; revision; polemic purpose; treatment of history; influence of the Image of Hypocrisy, Kirchmayer's Pammachius, Lindsay's Satire of the Three Estates, and Tyndale's Obedience of a Christian Man; and relation to the morality play and the chronicle play, between which it seems transitional, with its effect upon the latter, especially upon the Troublesome Reign and Shakespeare's King John. Herbert Barke notices here and there the historical basis of its use of the Roman rite. Otherwise there has been almost no notice of a substance and technique that, beyond this basis, articulate structure, unite allegory and history, and must have made the propaganda emotional for a mid-sixteenth-century audience.