Why is King John an important play?
It’s hardly the most entertaining or significant of the histories. It used to be popular because stars loved to play the major roles. Mrs Siddons could always fill a house with King John. But it is not very popular simply on its own terms. It is not a great play.
But it is an experimental play. Shakespeare is always experimenting. He puts rhetorical techniques to a multiplicity of uses. He re-works similar stories and characters and ideas and dynamics again and again. Reading his works in order shows you how elements of Hamlet evolve from Romeo, how there is something of the Ariel-Prospero relationship present in the scene in King John.
After the great fire of London, Christopher Wren rebuilt dozens of churches. Each one was constrained in some way. The plot was an odd shape. There were some old stones left over. Parishioners had their demands. Wren was developing the new classical style within those constraints. Each church is thus an experiment. Go to one and you see how the dome and pillars of St. Paul’s were developed, to another how he worked out how to fill a church with so much light it becomes a lantern.
Shakespeare is like this. Each play has new constraints, from the source, from audience demand, and from the implicit censorship of the times. Market competition is constantly forcing him to be inventive, too. So he is always experimenting.
In “Between Tetralogies: King John as Transition”1 Virginia Mason Vaughan argues that King John acts as a hinge between the two history tetralogies. Eight of the history plays run in chronological order from Richard II to Richard III, covering a century and more of English history. But they are not aesthetically coherent. There is a great gulf between the first four plays he wrote (the three parts of Henry VI and RIII) and the second four (RII, two parts of Henry IV, and HV).
What happened between the two tetralogies to make them so different?
King John begins in medias res. It presents an isolated series of episodes that are linked to the reign of one king. And these episodes are important, not for their interconnectedness with other events, nor for their consequences to Britain's future, but for their own sake. In King John we miss a sense of history as continuing process. What we gain, however, is an intense focus on the political present—the here and now of decision-making.
Mason Vaughan quotes various critics to argue that Shakespeare begins to disregard Elizabethan ideas in King John. Order and degree give way to a complex network of personal relationships. This is the experimental break-through of the play.
King John shows the dramatist newly aware that political questions are seldom as easy to answer as the traditional hierarchical model suggests. In this sense, King John represents an important transition between the two tetralogies. In particular—and here is the focus of the present essay—King John demonstrates Shakespeare's experimentation with more sophisticated dramaturgical techniques to convey political complexities…
What are those dramaturgical techniques?
To see what King John accomplished, we need to see what happened in the earlier plays first.
The Henry VI plays are mostly “episodic”, “presentational”, and “simplistic.” There is very little engagement with the characters. The “abstract political message” predominates. They are “as much homiletic as dramatic.”
Throughout the Henry VI plays Shakespeare interrupts the action with choral figures who declaim on civil war.
Various characters simply tell us what to think. The moral is so clear it becomes dull. Emblematic scenes like the Temple garden with the red and white roses become almost allegorical. Many speeches are “pure exposition”.
In the most emblematic scene of 2 Henry VI, Jack Cade is killed. His foe, Alexander Iden, represents the pastoral ideal of life away from court factions. Yet this brief glimpse of what English life should be is followed immediately by Clifford's Senecan declamations and York's Marlovian determination to pursue the crown. These passages do not end the play, however. Though the final scene does celebrate the Yorkist victory at St. Albans, it looks ahead to the next episode in Shakespeare's saga, the Parliament that begins 3 Henry VI. Thus, while Shakespeare might have ended on a rhetorical climax, he chose instead an open ending, a continuation of the episodic structure.
Even Richard III, a generally much better play, is like this. It is full of prophecies and curses that come to pass. Richard is almost a real person, but he is an archetype too. It’s all still a bit Hollywood.
The ghosts' psychomachia in Act V is another emblematic scene, reducing the conflict at Bosworth to a simplistic clash between good and evil. Richmond is a deus ex machina who ends England's civil carnage and proudly proclaims the concluding moral.
Mason Vaughan says the plays are still sophisticated accomplishments, but that they are not political per se: “they do not analyze political behavior.”
King John and political behaviour
King John is different. In clashes between “John and Arthur, the Bastard and his brother, Constance and Elinor, Pandulph and John, Lewis and John, the barons and John, and finally, Pandulph and Lewis, each side has some legitimacy.”
As Mason Vaughan says, “The scenes are arranged so as to give the audience divided loyalties: politics becomes embedded in personal relationships rather than abstract ideas.”
Before the closing lines, which do moralise, the play “probes rather than pronounces.” The play is a debate, not a homily. “In King John patriotic fervor is continually muted by doubt and skepticism… The audience is forced to see the action from several perspectives at once, not simply from within the framework of Tudor myth and English patriotism. In other words, the tensions so often noted in the Henriad begin to appear in King John.”
Look at that last sentence again. “In other words, the tensions so often noted in the Henriad begin to appear in King John.”
In her discussion of how King John relates to another play about the same story The Troublesome Reign, Mason Vaughan discusses how Shakespeare defies the expectations of his time. I have bolded key sentences.
While Shakespeare's audience may have delighted in the Bastard much as we do, it was probably surprised by the rest of the play. Shakespeare's John is not the John of sixteenth-century propaganda. He is not the warlike Christian who temporarily defied Rome in John Bale's King Johan, Foxe's Booke of Martyrs, the Homilie Against Disobedience, and The Troublesome Raigne. Shakespeare makes very little of John's excommunication or his death. John does briefly declare himself "supreme head" and insist that "No Italian priest / Shall tithe or toll in our dominions" (III.i. 153-55). But that is as far as he goes. His failure in this play stems not from defiance of the Pope but from his role in planning an innocent child's murder. Arthur's death alienates the nobles, which in turn assures Lewis' success. The religious issue is muted throughout. Shakespeare was more interested in the concept of legitimacy, which he further explored in the Henriad. King John's plot may be from The Troublesome Raigne, but Shakespeare condensed his material to emphasize repeated reversals of expectations.
We immediately think of Macbeth, an achievement Shakespeare could not have made without the experiments of King John.
One key dramatic method of King John is “frequent turns of events”, which means both characters and audience are constantly surprised. We alternate between claims to authority and actions that undermine those claims. This “allows him to juxtapose characters who think they are in control of "the times" with events which drastically undercut their assurance.”
Think of the marvellous juxtapositions of the court and country scenes in the two parts of Henry IV, especially the Gloucestershire scene in 2 Henry IV, which are almost never played well, but which are, on the page, some of Shakespeare’s finest work. (It is the actors’ fault they do not play well, to be clear.)
In King John, this technique reaches its heights in the battle of Angiers scene.
Although Shakespeare was limited by his chronicle sources, he manipulated those sources for the best effect. In this scene he crams a series of political events into an extended episode. And despite the heavy stylized speeches, Shakespeare forces “the audience to experience the complex life of the dramatized world and its inhabitants.” His treatment is not as sophisticated as it will be in the Henriad, but the audience is caught in a web of personal relationships that embody politics’ divided loyalties.
Conclusion
I do not love King John. I cannot bring myself to admire it in my memory. But Mason Vaughan shows me that Shakespeare’s genius for showing how the simple abstraction of ideas transmogrifies into the convolutions of human behaviour owes a great deal to his experiments in King John.
Read more about King John
Twenty-two facts about King John
On 3rd June, I am discussing Electric Spark with Frances Wilson at Blackwells in Oxford. And on 17th July I am discussing The Genius Myth with Helen Lewis at Dr. Johnson’s House.
Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 35, No. 4 (Winter, 1984), pp. 407-420