Monarch Troubles

KING JOHN or JINGALO-- Laurence Housman--Scribner ($2.50).

White-bearded, elegant Laurence Housman, 72, a younger brother of the late Great Poet A. E. Housman (A Shropshire Lad), holds the distinction of being England's most censored playwright. Beginning in 1902, when his Bethlehem was suppressed, he has seen 32 of his plays banned by English censorship, Victoria Regina among them. Like that play, his others have come under the censor's ban not because of any raciness or hurtful satire, but merely because of a technicality which prevents public performance of plays portraying his favorite subjects: living royalty and the "holy family."

But if Housman could not get across his rather innocuous message by way of the English stage, he was able to do so in his novels and stories. One of these (Housman's favorite) was a mildly ironic, long-winded, pleasant phantasy called King John of Jingalo, which he wrote 25 years ago. Long out of print, it is now offered to U. S. readers because of a supposed similarity to the case of Edward VIII. A closer similarity is the one between its plot and that of Bernard Shaw's The Apple Cart.

Until he had been on the Jingalese throne 25 years, King John was just another rubber-stamp monarch who did as he was told. But sometimes he thought wistfully that it would be nice to know a little bit what it was all about. Or maybe just have a friend to talk to. Lately these troubled moods had been recurring more frequently. He even went so far as to argue with a Cabinet minister, which upset him to the point where he fell down a stairway and knocked a bone loose in his head. Later in the day, having recovered completely, he began unaccountably asking the why of things, had his first intimate talk with his handsome, radical-minded son Max, who immediately egged his father on to put the Cabinet ministers in their place. Princess Charlotte, quick-witted and unconventional like her brother, also went to work on King John. As the result of this radical coaching the King soon had his ministers half crazy with alarm. When they tried to maneuver an election to hamstring the power of the church, the King sided with the bishops. He attended a racy play. When he ran out of his own arguments, he borrowed his son's. Discovering a knack for writing his own speeches, he dug into history books for precedents to back his aggressive stand. His popularity with the people was going sky high.

At home he asserted himself by arguing with the Queen that the children should be allowed a little more choice about marrying. Max had fallen in love with a church social worker, who put him to work scrubbing floors. When the Cabinet learned she was the daughter of their worst enemy, the Archbishop, they threatened to resign unless the King did something about it. The King beat them to the draw by handing in his own resignation. On the day the King's abdication was to take place, the Prime Minister threw a bomb close enough to his carriage to make it look like an attempted assassination, so that abdication now would look like cowardice rather than a rebuke to his Cabinet. King John admitted he was licked. Soon after he became seriously ill, the loose bone was discovered and fixed, whereupon the King recovered rapidly, became his old rubber-stamp self again.

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