King John and The Troublesome Raigne: Sources, Structure, Sequence - King John and The Troublesome Raigne: Sources, Structure, Sequence
King John and The Troublesome Raigne: Sources, Structure, Sequence
Brian Boyd, University of Auckland
The debate goes on: is Shakespeare's King John a source or a derivative of the anonymous The Troublesome Raigne of King John (1591)? In 1989 "the 'orthodox' opinion that The Troublesome Raigne precedes King John" seemed to one critic "now … so strong as to need no further elaboration or support."1 A year later, another made the best case yet for the "unorthodox" position that King John spawned rather than sprang from The Troublesome Raigne.2
Everyone concurs that The Troublesome Raigne is intimately related to and manifestly inferior to King John, but there agreement ends. To some, a writer with the merest fraction of Shakespeare's talent could not have followed King John almost scene for scene and often speech for speech and yet have...
[The entire page is 8556 words long]
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