illustrated portrait of King John

King John

by William Shakespeare

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  • Alexander, Peter, "The Histories," in Shakespeare, Oxford University Press, 1964, pp. 163-203. (Discusses possible source material for Shakespeare's King John, asserting that it is unlikely the anonymous play The Troublesome Reign of King John is one of those sources.)
  • Barish, Jonas, "King John and Oath Breach," in Shakespeare: Text, Language, Criticism. Essays in Honour of Marvin Spevack, edited by Bernhard Fabian and Kurt Tetzeli von Rosador, Olms-Weidmann, 1987, pp. 1-18. (Explores Shakespeare's preoccupation with the theme of the pledging and breaking of oaths in King John.)
  • Beaurline, L. A., "An Introduction to King John," Cambridge University Press, 1990, pp. 1-57. (Examines the styles of speech used in King John as well as the play's symmetrical structure and political themes.)
  • Berman, Ronald, "Anarchy and Order in Richard III and King John," Shakespeare Survey 20 (1967): 51-9. (Argues that both King John and Richard III confront the “anarchic nature of the individual” but end by reasserting the ideals of rationalism and materialism.)
  • Berry, Edward I., "The Later Histories: From History to Character," in Patterns of Decay: Shakespeare's Early Histories, University Press of Virginia, 1975, pp. 104-25. (Describes King John as Shakespeare's "first political play," and argues that it is built thematically around the "contrasted evolution" of the two major characters, the Bastard and King John.)
  • Berry, Ralph, "King John: Some Bastards Too," in The Shakespearean Metaphor: Studies in Language and Form, Macmillan, 1978, pp. 26-36. (Interprets King John as a play about right and authority informed by the controlling metaphors of bastardy and legitimacy.)
  • Berryman, John, "1590: King John," in Berryman's Shakespeare, edited by John Haffenden, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999, pp. 296-307. (Characterizes Shakespeare's early dramatic style as illustrated by King John. This is an unfinished essay, originally written by Berryman in 1960.)
  • Boklund, Gunnar, "The Troublesome Ending of King John," Studia Neophilologica 40, no. 1 (1968): 175-84. (Maintains that despite Faulconbridge's seeming arguments to the contrary, commodity and self-interest, rather than honor, remain the dominant political principles at the close of Shakespeare's King John.)
  • Braunmuller, A. R., "An Introduction to The Life and Death of King John," Clarendon Press, 1989, pp. 1-93. (Discusses King John in light of the political history of England between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries.)
  • Bromley, John C., "The Allegory of the Garden: King John and Richard II," in The Shakespearean Kings, Colorado Associated University Press, 1971, pp. 41-60. (Compares the imagery and themes in King John with those in Richard II, observing that both plays explore the practical relationship between a king and his subjects.)
  • Brooke, Stopford A., "King John," in Ten More Plays of Shakespeare, Constable, 1913, pp. 227-51. (Discusses Shakespeare's portrayal of John, the Bastard, and Constance in King John.)
  • Brownlow, F. W., "The Life and Death of King John," in Two Shakespearean Sequences: Henry VI to Richard II and Pericles to Timon of Athens, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977, pp. 78-94. (Explores Shakespeare's portrayal of King John.)
  • Burgoyne, Sidney C., "Cardinal Pandulph and the ‘Curse of Rome,’" College Literature 4, no. 3 (fall 1977): 232-40. (Maintains that Pandulph, the papal legate, is a highly influential character in the play and serves as a primary source of the corruption from which England suffers.)
  • Candido, Joseph, "Blots, Stains, and Adulteries: The Impurities in King John," in King John: New Perspectives, edited by Deborah T. Curren-Aquino, University of Delaware Press, 1989, pp. 114-25. (Contends that the ambiguities in King John result from the struggle of political and moral purity against the world of realpolitik.)
  • Candido, Joseph, "Introduction to Shakespeare: The Critical Tradition: ‘King John,’" edited by Joseph Candido, Athlone, 1996, pp. 1-30. (Offers a detailed survey and discussion of the critical assessments of King John from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries.)
  • Carr, Virginia Mason, The Drama as Propaganda: A Study of The Troublesome Raigne of King John, Institut für Englishe Sprache und Literatur, 1974, 185 p. (Provides a book-length study of The Troublesome Raigne of King John that evaluates the merits of this anonymous drama and offers a comparative analysis with Shakespeare's King John.)
  • Champion, Larry S., "The ‘Un-end’ of King John: Shakespeare's Demystification of Closure," in King John: New Perspectives, edited by Deborah T. Curren-Aquino, Associated University Presses, 1989, pp. 173-85. (Discusses the unusual ending of King John, and Shakespeare's call for a new historiography.)
  • Colmo, Christopher, "Coming Home: The Political Settlement in Shakespeare's King John," in Shakespeare's Political Pageant: Essays in Literature and Politics, edited by Joseph Alulis and Vickie Sullivan, Rowman & Littlefield, 1996, pp. 91-101. (Examines the competing elements of commodity and honor in the political conflicts of King John.)
  • Dusinberre, Juliet, "King John and Embarrassing Women," Shakespeare Survey 42 (1989): 37-52. (Examines the role of women in King John.)
  • Elliot, John R., "Shakespeare and the Double Image of King John," Shakespeare Studies 1 (1965): 64-84. (Examines Shakespeare's juxtaposition of two common Elizabethan perceptions of the historical King John—the national hero and the “villainous failure.”)
  • Feingold, Michael, "Monarch Notes," The Village Voice 45, no. 5 (8 February 2000): 71. (Reviews the Theatre for a New Audience production of King John directed by Karin Coonrod, and finds that the production suffered from Coonrod's attempt to remove the grandeur of the play in an effort to make it more accessible to modern audiences.)
  • Halio, Jay L., "Alternative Action: The Tragedy of Missed Opportunities in King John," Hebrew University Studies in Literature and the Arts 11, no. 2 (spring 1983): 254-69. (Examines the play’s tragic pattern of missed opportunities, contending that Shakespeare developed this theme more successfully in subsequent works.)
  • Heberle, Mark A., "‘Innocent Prate’: King John and Shakespeare's Children," in Infant Tongues: The Voice of the Child in Literature, edited by Elizabeth Goodenough, Mark A. Heberle, and Naomi Sokoloff, Wayne State University Press, 1994, pp. 28-43. (Considers the importance of child characters in Shakespearean drama, with a focus on Arthur of King John.)
  • Hobson, Christopher Z., "Bastard Speech: The Rhetoric of ‘Commodity’ in King John," Shakespeare Yearbook 2 (spring 1991): 95-114. (Weighs differing interpretations of Lord Faulconbridge's “commodity” speech in Act II, scene i of King John, offering a rhetorical analysis of the soliloquy, and finding an implied warning against Machiavellism in his discourse.)
  • Hodgdon, Barbara, "Fashioning Obedience: King John's ‘True Inheritors,’" in The End Crowns All: Closure and Contradiction in Shakespeare's History, Princeton University Press, 1991, pp. 22-43. (Focuses on the problem of rule as the central issue of King John, and considers the drama's ambiguous ending, particularly as it has been interpreted on the stage.)
  • Hogan, Patrick Colm, "Literary Interpretation—Interpreting Aesthetical Intent: Anomaly and Structure in King John and King Lear," in On Interpretation: Meaning and Inference in Law, Psychoanalysis, and Literature, University of Georgia Press, 1996, pp. 180-93. (Analyzes and tries to account for the contradictions and apparent lapses in logic in Hubert's treatment of the child Arthur in King John.)
  • Honigmann, E. A. J., "Introduction to King John," by William Shakespeare, edited by E. A. J. Honigmann, Methuen and Co., 1954, pp. xi-lxxiii. (Surveys the imagery of King John in relation to the play's themes and stylistic devices, concluding that John, although unsatisfactory as the hero of the drama, is nevertheless structurally central.)
  • Jones, Emrys, "Reclaiming Early Shakespeare," Essays in Criticism 51, no. 1 (January 2001): 35-50. (Reassesses three of Shakespeare's earliest dramas—King John, the three parts of Henry VI, and Titus Andronicus. Emrys argues that King John was composed in about 1590, before the publication of The Troublesome Reign of John, King of England.)
  • Klause, John, "New Sources for Shakespeare's King John: The Writings of Robert Southwell," Studies in Philology 98, no. 4 (fall 2001): 401-27. (Maintains that the works of Robert Southwell were a source for Shakespeare's King John.)
  • Lane, Robert, "'The Sequence of Posterity': Shakespeare's King John and the Succession Controversy," Studies in Philology 92, no. 4 (Fall 1995): 460-81. (Describes King John as a veiled commentary on public and political worries over the lack of a designated successor to Queen Elizabeth I.)
  • Lewis, Allan, "Shakespeare and the Morality of Money," Social Research 36, no. 3 (autumn 1969): 373-88. (Studies Faulconbridge's references to “commodity” in terms of the more contemporary connotation of “merchandise” (a meaning Shakespeare was aware of), rather than in its definition as “self-interest” or “expediency,” as it has more frequently been glossed by editors and critics.)
  • MacKenzie, Clayton G., "Renaissance Emblems of Death and Shakespeare's King John," English Studies 79, no. 5 (September 1998): 425-9. (Traces the thematic significance of the death and rebirth imagery in King John.)
  • Mattsson, May, Five Plays about King John, Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1977, 185 p. (Analyzes five plays about King John: Shakespeare's King John, John Bale's King Johan (c. 1538), The Troublesome Reign of John, King of England (1591), and two subsequent dramatic adaptations of Shakespeare's play.)
  • Morey, James H., "The Death of King John in Shakespeare and Bale," Shakespeare Quarterly 45, No. 3 (Fall 1994): 327-31. (Considers the similarities between King John and John Bale's King Johan.)
  • Mullini, Roberta, "‘But Thou Didst Understand Me By My Signs’: The Instability of Signs in King John," in Italian Studies in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, edited by Michele Marrapodi and Giorgio Melchiori, University of Delaware Press, 1999, pp. 206-19. (Attributes a number of indeterminacies and confusions in King John to tensions between Tudor historiography and Shakespeare's dramatic interpretation of history.)
  • Ortego, Philip D., "Shakespeare and the Doctrine of Monarchy in King John," CLA Journal 13, no. 4 (June 1970): 392-401. (Comments on Shakespeare's critique of the Tudor Monarchical Myth in King John, his omission of the Magna Carta from the drama, and his concern with historical truth versus simple historical fact.)
  • Pugliatti, Paola, "The Scribbled Form of Authority in King John," in Shakespeare the Historian, St. Martin's Press, 1996, pp. 77-101. (Examines the ways in which Shakespeare used current events and possible source material (Holinshed's Chronicles and The Troublesome Reign) while writing King John.)
  • Rowan, Nicole, "Some Aspects of the Relationship Between King John and The Troublesome Reign," Studia Germanica Gandensia 21 (1980-81): 233-46. (Compares King John with its likely source, The Troublesome Reign of John, King of England.)
  • Saccio, Peter, "John: The Legitimacy of the King," in Shakespeare's English Kings: History, Chronicle, and Drama, Oxford University Press, 1977, pp. 187-208. (Compares Shakespeare's interpretation of King John's life (and Shakespeare's addition of fictional characters like the Bastard) with twentieth-century understanding of the history of King John.)
  • Sibly, John, "The Anomalous Case of King John," ELH 33, no. 4 (December 1966): 415-21. (Contends that Shakespeare's introduction of the theme of usurpation into King John allowed him to make a detailed argument against the historical claims of the Papacy in regard to the English crown.)
  • Simon, John, "Review of King John," New York Magazine 33, no. 7 (21 February 2000): 101-2. (Reviews the 2000 Theatre for a New Audience production of King John, directed by Karin Coonrod, and finds the production lacking on nearly all counts, from acting and interpretation to set design, reserving praise only for dramatic lighting and two supporting roles.)
  • Smallwood, Robert L., "An Introduction to The New Penguin Shakespeare: King John," in King John and Henry VIII: Critical Essays, edited by Frances A. Shirley, Garland Publishing, 1988, pp. 175-205. (Analyzes the meaning of the epilogue in the context of British political history.)
  • Sterling, Eric, "Shakespeare's King John and the Dangers of Commodity," in The Movement Towards Subversion: The English History Play from Skelton to Shakespeare, University Press of America, 1996, pp. 39-55. (Compares King John with The Troublesome Raigne, and argues that Shakespeare advocated loyalty to England.)
  • Stroud, Ronald, "The Bastard to the Time in King John," Comparative Drama 6, no. 2 (summer 1972): 154-66. (Asserts that the Bastard becomes a symbol of honor in King John through his renunciation of the aberrant values of his society.)
  • Stubblefield, Charles, "Some Thoughts about King John," CEA Critic 35, No. 3 (1973): 25-8. (Identifies the central issues of King John.)
  • Vaughan, Virginia M., "King John: A Study of Subversion and Containment," in King John: New Perspectives, edited by Deborah T. Curren-Aquino, Associated University Presses, 1989, pp. 62-75. (Highlights King John's critique of patrilineal politics and the community-based feudal social order.)
  • Vaughan, Virginia Mason, "Between Tetralogies: King John as Transition," Shakespeare Quarterly 35, no. 4 (Winter 1984): 407-20. (Argues that King John would not have been overlooked by scholars if it had been part of a larger whole such as the tetralogy which includes Henry V or the one including Richard III.)
  • Weimann, Robert, "Mingling Vice and ‘Worthiness’ in King John," Shakespeare Studies 27 (1999): 109-33. (Discusses Shakespeare's rhetorical, representational, and thematic conflation of virtue and vice in King John, with particular focus on the figure of Faulconbridge, the Bastard.)
  • White, Howard B., "Bastards and Usurpers: Shakespeare's King John," in Ancients and Moderns: Essays on the Tradition of Political Philosophy in Honor of Leo Strauss, edited by Joseph Cropsey, Basic Books, 1964, pp. 148-76. (Dissects King John for the purpose of more fully understanding Shakespeare's interest in the philosophical problems associated with political legitimacy.)
  • Womersley, David, "The Politics of Shakespeare's King John," Review of English Studies 40, no. 160 (November 1989): 497-515. (Relates the development of the Bastard's character over the course of King John to Shakespeare's representation of heterodox political views.)

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He Is But a Bastard to the Time: Status and Service in The Troublesome Raigne of John and Shakespeare's King John
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