Abstract: This essay offers a reading of two well-known early sixteenth-century plays, John Bale’s Kynge Johan and John Heywood’s Play of the Wether , in terms of their Henrician (and possibly early Elizabethan) political resonances. Unlike most such critical accounts of these plays, which often consider them in terms of their relevance to specific episodes of ecclesiastical or courtly controversy, this study suggests that Bale and Heywood represent a particular political practice in order to stage a more broadly theoretical political intervention. I argue that the plays’ interest in acts of petitioning—the licit process through which English subjects may seek redress of grievances from the courts, Parliament, or the Crown—serves to legitimate the condition of need as a basis for broad political participation. In Kynge Johan and The Wether , material need and its more abstract cousin “necessity,” expressed through acts of petitioning, are capable of performing remarkable reorientations of political and ethical duty, as well as of power more generally. Not all of these reorientations, as Kynge Johan in particular demonstrates, are positive, and both plays are conscious of and hesitant about the potentially destabilizing force of need. Yet ultimately, both plays move toward a more collective and less proto-absolutist political model in which need can, through acts of petitioning, be articulated and managed.