Shakespeare's experiments in King John

An important transition play

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”.