King John

By William Shakespeare

First published in the “First Folio” in 1623 and likely written in the 1590s, “King John” is one of William Shakespeare’s best historical plays. It centers on the events of King John’s reign of England during the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. King John, son of Henry I of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine, inherits the throne after the death of his older brother, King Richard I. John’s claim to the throne is challenged by the King of France, Philip, who believes that John’s young nephew, Arthur, is the rightful heir to the throne. King Philip threatens violence if John does not step down and Philip’s claim is supported by Austria, who may have arranged Richard’s death. With John and Philip fighting over who should wear the crown, a tumultuous series of alliances, betrayals, and murders follow. John is shown to be a harsh and brutal ruler who is willing to do anything to stay in power, including torture his own nephew. Shakespeare’s “King John” is a classic tale of the struggle for power and influence in all its cold-blooded brutality. This edition includes a biographical afterword, annotations by Henry N. Hudson, and an introduction by Charles Harold Herford.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Digireads.com Publishing
• Release date: Jul 12, 2020
• ISBN: 9781420974263

William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare (1564–1616) is arguably the most famous playwright to ever live. Born in England, he attended grammar school but did not study at a university. In the 1590s, Shakespeare worked as partner and performer at the London-based acting company, the King’s Men. His earliest plays were Henry VI and Richard III, both based on the historical figures. During his career, Shakespeare produced nearly 40 plays that reached multiple countries and cultures. Some of his most notable titles include Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet and Julius Caesar. His acclaimed catalog earned him the title of the world’s greatest dramatist.

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KING JOHN

By WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Annotated by

HENRY N. HUDSON

Introduction by

CHARLES HAROLD HERFORD

King John

By William Shakespeare

Annotated by Henry N. Hudson

Introduction by Charles Harold Herford

Print ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-7367-9

eBook ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-7426-3

This edition copyright © 2021. Digireads.com Publishing.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Cover Image: a detail of a painting of ‘King John’, Act IV, Scene 1, Hubert and Arthur, by James Northcote (1746-1831), c. 1789 (oil on canvas) / © Royal Shakespeare Company / Bridgeman Images.

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CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION.

DRAMATIS PERSONAE.

ACT I.

SCENE I.

ACT II.

SCENE I.

ACT III.

SCENE I.

SCENE II.

SCENE III.

SCENE IV.

ACT IV.

SCENE I.

SCENE II.

SCENE III.

ACT V.

SCENE I.

SCENE II.

SCENE III.

SCENE IV.

SCENE V.

SCENE VI.

SCENE VII.

BIOGRAPHICAL AFTERWORD

INTRODUCTION.

The Life and Death of King John first appeared in the Folio of 1623, where it opens the series of the Histories. The text is relatively accurate, with the exception of some confusion in the indication of the Acts.

The definite limits of the date of King John are as follows:—

(1) The older play upon which Shakespeare founded his History,—The Troublesome Reign of King John,—cannot be earlier than c. 1587, for its sounding rhetoric and facile blank verse as well as the explicit language of the preface, quoted below, proclaim it to have been inspired by Marlowe. It was printed in 1591.

(2) Shakespeare’s King John is mentioned by Francis Meres in 1598.

But these wide limits admit of being considerably narrowed. Of the ten Histories, six can be dated with some certainty. Henry VI. Parts 2 and 3, and Richard III. are fixed by Greene’s diatribe to 1592-3; Henry IV., Parts 1 and 2, and Henry V. by the Essex allusion in Henry V. chorus v. to 1598-9. Far more clearly than Richard II., King John belongs to the interim between the first and second group of Histories. It has palpable links with both. The absence of prose, the rarity of rhyme, the approximation to tragedy, connect it with the earlier, Marlowesque, group; the wealth of humour, the plastic characterisation, with the later. John is modelled with a maturer touch than Richard II.; but the tragedy of which he is the contriver has striking affinities of situation to that of Richard, and continually recalls it in spite of equally striking diversities of treatment. Constance is not Margaret, nor Arthur Edward, but they are new and poignant melodies upon the same motifs; the frenzied mother, the assassin uncle, are still dominant and unexhausted themes. On the other hand, the character of Falconbridge links the play yet more closely to the great trilogy of Henry V. The madcap prince who shows himself a master of war and of peace the moment the need arrives, is of the same mould as the blunt soldier ‘one way Plantagenet’ whose motley covered the lion’s heart of Cordelion; the mythical Bastard foreshadows the historical conqueror of Agincourt. He opens the cycle of Histories founded upon humour and heroism, as John closes the cycle founded upon anguish and crime. These considerations tend to fix King John near the middle of the probable interval between the last of the earlier group and the first of the later, i.e. about 1595.

King John is probably, of all Shakespeare’s Histories, the most distantly related to History. Theological fanaticism, that potent myth-maker, had, since the middle of the century, laid a powerful grasp upon the tradition, already not without its mythic elements, recorded in the Chronicles; and the wonderful transformation which this legend underwent in Shakespeare’s hands was certainly not undertaken in the interest of historical truth. Indeed his most striking alterations only serve to detach it more completely from the Chronicles, and to draw it more explicitly into the sphere of irresponsible poetry. What manner of legend it was that underwent this apotheosis may be gathered from two dramas, one of them certainly unknown to Shakespeare, the other the immediate basis of his work. The English Reformers saw in the worst of the Plantagenets an early Protestant,—an unsuccessful precursor of Henry VIII.; and in Bale’s incoherent Kyng Johan (c. 1545) the lineaments of the historic John wholly disappear in a single trait enforced with almost frenzied emphasis: his defiance of the Roman ‘Antichrist.’ Doctrinal theology played little part in shaping the Elizabethan drama; but the ‘Protestantism of the Protestant religion’ flourished as bravely in the playhouse as in the conventicle; and the events of 1588, which thrilled every fibre of the national self-consciousness, threw a heightened passion and inspiration, with which religion had very little to do, into the national protest against Rome. Nearly at the same moment the genius of Marlowe revealed the dramatic potency of protest, and filled the stage with imitations of the Titanism of Tamburlaine and Faustus. Both influences had told strongly upon the anonymous author of The Troublesome Reign of King John.{1}

In the prefixed lines ‘To the Gentlemen Readers’ he expressly invites applause for his hero as a Protestant Tamburlaine:—

You that with friendly grace of smoothed brow

Have entertaind the Scythian Tamburlaine,

And given applause unto an Infidel;

Vouchsafe to welcome (with like curtesie)

A warlike Christian and your Countreyman.

For Christ’s true faith indur’d he many a storme,

And set himselfe against the Man of Rome,

Untill base treason (by a damned wight)

Did all his former triumphs put to flight.

The appeal was well calculated, and it was enforced by a bold manipulation of history. The sympathy of the spectators was enlisted at the outset by the extravagance of the French claim. The historical Philip had claimed for Arthur only continental provinces; the dramatic Philip demanded England and Ireland also. But the scheme presented one grave difficulty: the English and Protestant Tamburlaine had to be introduced finally submitting to the ‘Man of Rome.’ The writer was far from ignoring this difficulty, and he called in all his dramatic resources to meet it. He invests John’s act with the pathos of tragic error, makes him yield in a moment of physical and mental collapse (‘my heart is mazed, my senses all foredone’), and lets him, at the point of death, recognise the calamitous consequences (‘since John did yield unto the Priest of Rome, nor he nor his have prospered on the earth’), and cry with David: ‘I am not he shall build the Lord an house,’ but that other, sprung of him, ‘whose arms shall reach unto the gates of Rome.’ But a bolder expedient remained. If John was no Tamburlaine, his brother Richard lived in the popular imagination as a hero of the same colossal mould; and though Richard could not well be brought in in person to aid his successor, an unknown inheritor of his thews and lion-heart might be raised up to play that rôle.{2} It is plain from the title-page that ‘the discovery of King Richard Cordelions Base Son’ was one of the most popular features of the old play, and it must be allowed to be a happy device; for which the writer found, at most, scattered suggestions in the Chronicles.{3} The spectators saw a new Richard arise from obscurity, taught by mystic whisperings of birds and boughs that he is Richard’s son;{4} they saw him vow vengeance upon Richard’s two arch-enemies—united in a single grotesque effigy,-and solemnly ‘offer Austria’s blood for sacrifice unto his father’s ever-living soul’; they saw him renew the fabulous prowess of Richard in the field, fight with ‘King Richard’s fortune hanging from his helm,’ flame amazement in the corrupt monasteries, and triumphantly retrieve the disasters wrought by John’s fatal submission. Thus Cœurdelion still rules England ‘from his urn’; his spirit, like Cæsar’s, lives to overthrow the enemies of his country. It is true that in execution all this fell much short of its vigorous conception.

For the rest, The Troublesome Reign makes no attempt to enlarge the somewhat rigid categories of Marlowesque character. There is no tenderness, obvious as the openings for it were in the story of Arthur as told by Holinshed Holinshed’s Arthur is not, it is true, Shakespeare’s gentle boy, but a headstrong youth ‘that wanted good counsel, and abounded too much in his own wilful opinion’; and the older dramatist retains this character, making him vigorously intervene in the debate between the kings in defence of his rights. But neither his death nor the grief of Constance approaches pathos, and he pleads with Hubert for his eyes in verses which struggle fatuously for sublimity on the Icarus-wings of sounding Latinisms and mythical allusions. Constance herself has termagant touches which ally her to the Margaret of the Contention and the True Tragedy. She already, however, presents the germ of Shakespeare’s Constance, an honour we can hardly assign to the Constance of history, who repudiated her second husband and married a third in the very year in which her dramatic counterpart gives Austria ‘a widow’s thanks’ for championing her son (Stone’s Hol. p. 53). The older writer treats history in general with a more than Shakespearean daring. To him is due (to take one interesting example) the complete perversion of the events which preceded Magna Charta. The gathering of the barons at St. Edmundsbury was in reality the occasion of their league to extort the charter from John: the old playwright has brought it into connexion with Lewis’s invasion, and made him the recipient of their oaths.

The Troublesome Reign thus provided the entire material of King John. Shakespeare has followed his original almost scene for scene, retaining the outer mechanism of the plot unchanged, or at most dismissing into the background events which the earlier dramatist exhibited with genial prolixity on the stage.{5} But he has essentially altered the significance of the action, and immensely strengthened and vitalised what he retained We may say, generally, that, while the Troublesome Reign is patriotic, Protestant, and Marlowesque, King John is the work of a man whose patriotism was more fervent, whose Protestantism

Reviews for King John

[john257hopper · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Having finished the last of a trilogy of novels about Eleanor of Aquitaine last night, I was prompted to read this, one of Shakespeare's less well known and now rarely performed plays. It prevents a telescoped version of the events early in John's reign in 1202-3, where he fought, triumphed over and probably murdered his nephew Arthur of Brittany, who had an arguably superior claim to the throne of England, being the son of one of John's older brothers, Geoffrey. It also presents a fictitious version of John's death and succession by his son, Prince Henry, who was not in reality born until a few years after Arthur's death. (Magna Carta does not exist in this fictionalised version of events). The events are dramatic, but it mostly lacks the memorable and pithy dialogue and quotations of many of the plays, and is one of only two Shakespeare plays written entirely in (mostly blank) verse.

[antiquary_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Has powerful moment when Prince Arthur is pleading with Hubert for his life.

[leslie398 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I think I would like a modern English version of this historical (fiction?) play as there was plenty of action. However I struggled with Shakespeare's writing too much to enjoy it.

[391_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I love, love, love King John. I can see why it's hardly ever performed, though - there's several characters that only show up for a scene or two before leaving (the three women - Constance, Queen Elinore and Blanche disappear after act three), plus it would be hard to find a child actor that could memorize and speak Arthur's role. But, dear God, the characters! Constance and Philip the Bastard may be two of my favorite characters in all the histories. Constance is just so nuts - her catfight with Queen Elinor is hilarious - and the Bastard is so completely epic in every way. His constant haranguing of Austria is hilarious, and his utterly mad schemes of warfare (that always end up working!) are just...he's just awesome.

[amerynth · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Certainly not among Shakespeare's greatest plays, "King John" isn't among his worst either. I found it pretty middle of the road overall -- a decent plot and good pacing, but lacking in those memorable lines of dialog that have filtered into modern times.The plot, like most of the bard's historical plays, focuses on the struggle over the throne as a vacillating and somewhat weak-willed King John fights with the French. All this is viewed through his brother's illegitimate son's eyes.I'm not sure why this is ranked with Shakespeare's least popular plays -- it's not half bad.

[prop2gether · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This play has absolutely the best line in Shakespeare: Let that be thy message and go rot!

[coach_of_alva · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The Bastard Faulconbridge, illegitimate son of Richard the Lion-Hearted, is welcomed at the beginning of the play into the retinue of his uncle John. He spends most of the rest of the play being shocked at the inability of the medieval powers that be to keep their word or maintain their honor or stay the course or even show decent familial feelings when "commodity" enters the picture. This dour play, almost a satire, puts King John in Richard III's position, i.e., having a young boy as a dangerous political rival, but John behaves more like Richard II than III, giving the death order rashly, then whining over its consequences.

[dinadansfriend · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

WS sees John as a lesser man coming to the throne in the wake of the Glorious Richard Lionheart. He's not that good, and drags the country down, gets it interdicted by the Papacy and invaded by the French. He's also the murderer of his older brother's son, a child with a good claim to the throne. WS creates., a point of view character "Bastard Fauconbridge" who represents the playwright's vision of what the English thought of John. there's no mention of the Magna Carta, because in Elizabeth I's England, it wasn't thought of as an important document. I've recorded it as read 4 times.

[mrslee_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

My memory is sketchy on the facts of John's reign, this may be colored by Shakespeare's need to please Queen Elizabeth and re-write history a bit, but then, who reads Shakespeare for history? There are certainly many pithy, witty and funny lines within this drama. Though it isn't my favorite, it was good to read. I really enjoyed the two women sending verbal barbs at each other, and even teared up a bit at Arthur's death.