SOURCE: “The Historiographic Methodology of King John,” in King John: New Perspectives, edited by Deborah T. Curren-Aquino, Associated University Presses, 1989, pp. 29-40.

[In the following essay, Robinson considers the ways in which Shakespeare satirizes the moral interpretation of past events.]

One of the distinctive stylistic features of the Shakespearean history play is the artful recreation of history as past, present, and future. Calling attention to the “network of references” to both the past and the future in these plays, Wolfgang Clemen observes that “Shakespeare not only handled episodes from the historical past, but he translated into drama elements inherent in history itself. For history demonstrates how the past grows into the present and leads on to the future.”¹ In the history plays these retrospective and prospective passages not only reflect Shakespeare's consciousness of the historical process but serve as a commentary on the historiographic process. While recall imitates the way by which historical events are retrospectively reframed and emplotted by the historian (whose rhetorical and generic fashioning of the past informs it with meaning),² prognostication often dramatizes the self-conscious shaping of historiographic meaning by the makers of history.

For many readers King John proves disappointing precisely because it does not manifest the stylistic qualities which Clemen identifies as the definitive marks of the Shakespearean history play. Evaluating King John in terms of stylistic expectations created by the first tetralogy, Robert Ornstein, for example, observes that “Even as the opening scene lacks prophetic overtones, it creates no historical perspective, no sense of the past such as exists in the plays of the first tetralogy.” For Ornstein, the play's failure to evoke a sense of the historical process is evidence of a “‘falling off’ of Shakespeare's artistry.”³

Rather than conclude that King John is an artistic failure because it does not measure up to the stylistic expectations created by the two tetralogies, I wish to argue that the play reveals Shakespeare's experiment with a fresh approach to history. As David Scott Kastan argues, Shakespeare discovers in the writing of King John that history is itself an “artifact” and that its “fictions of stability” are the cultural counterparts of the dramatist's fictional ordering of the past.⁴ More than just acknowledging these artifacts as myths, Shakespeare reexamines the rhetorical structures by which historical knowledge is communicated. His aim in this play is not merely to recreate the past but to dramatize the process by which historical experience is translated into historiographic meaning. Parodying conventional historiographic statement and ironically juxtaposing actual events and the meanings assigned to them, Shakespeare exposes the disparity between the events of history and their conventional representations. The distinctive historiographic methodology of King John supports this satiric depiction of the past. First of all, rather than framing the dramatic present, the “now” of history, in retrospective and prospective passages that so often impose historiographic interpretations on that present, King John parodies such strategies. In addition, interpretive patterns ascribed to events are ironically discredited by the testimony of the facts. As a result, the locus of the play is neither the past (historical retrospection) nor the future (speculation). Approaching historical experience inductively through his presenter the Bastard, Shakespeare places the auditor in the historical present as an eyewitness to events. Through the Bastard's naïve and unbiased eyes, we observe the historical process unfold firsthand, assessing the motives that actually direct historical choices and drawing conclusions about the patterns that govern historical change. This empirical examination of the past is implicitly set against those retrospective and prospective emplotments that impose generic form upon the past.

In the history plays of the first and second tetralogies, recall is often used to invoke an ideal past against which the present can be measured, to articulate historiographic patterns that legitimate or condemn a present course of action, or to interpret present events in terms of historiographic patterns invested with teleological meaning. Thus, for example, Richard II's deviance from the historiographic models embodied by his noble grandfather and father is articulated in York's idealized recall of Edward III and the Black Prince (Richard II 2.1.171-83). Unlike his own son, the Black Prince reenacts the chivalric feats of his father, renewing in his own person his father's historiographic fame. Richard's failures to renew a glorious past are characterized in terms of conventional formulas for national and monarchical success—domestic peace and foreign conquest. Similarly, in Henry V, Henry's achievements are consciously reframed in terms of historiographic expectations and models. Passages of recall repeatedly invoke the past, and we are to perceive Henry's exploits as not only a reenactment of the past—a renewal of the “feats” of his “mighty ancestors,” Edward III and the Black Prince (Henry V 1.2.102,116)—but a re-creation of the conventional accounts in which the conquest of France is emplotted as epic or romance. Shakespeare thus demonstrates the way in which the historical present embodied by sons as successors is comprehended in terms of the historiographic interpretations of a more distant past.

In King John, however, the present is consciously divorced from the past. The device of recall is parodied, and historiographic models of the past are challenged. In the very opening moments of the play the legitimation of the present in terms of past models is immediately countered by the Bastard's acknowledgment of his illegitimacy as well as Elinor's admission that John's authority is legitimized not by inherited titles bequeathed from the past but by his de facto power (1.1.40). The Bastard's celebration of his illegitimacy—“Legitimation, name, and all is gone” (1.1.248)—might in fact serve as a clue to the historiographic strategy of the entire play in which historical experience is inductively studied apart from the presuppositions or arrangements provided by conventional historiography. The official past is not used to impose meaning upon the present; names and titles—suggestive of historic reputation often falsely perpetuated by the historian—are discredited, and the process of legitimation by which the status quo is invested with moral and teleological significance is exposed. Rejecting inheritance, a symbol of the influence of the past on the present—“I am I, howe’er I was begot” (1.1.175)—the Bastard not only contravenes the retrospective glance of historiography but establishes the experiential present as the focus of the play.⁵

The pattern continues in act 2 when Philip ironically invokes the past and the glorious chivalric reputation of Arthur's “great forerunner” (2.1.2), Coeur de Lion, for an inglorious end, winning the helpless Arthur's submission to an ignoble alliance with Richard's murderer, Austria:

Arthur, that great forerunner of thy blood,
Richard, that robb’d the lion of his heart,
And fought the holy wars in Palestine,
By this brave duke came early to his grave;
And for amends to his posterity,
At our importance hither is he come
To spread his colors, boy, in thy behalf,
And to rebuke the usurpation
Of thy unnatural uncle, English John.
Embrace him, love him, give him welcome hither.

(2.1.2-11)

Shakespeare thus satirizes the self-serving invocation of the past to legitimize choices which are solely a response to occasion.

While Shakespeare's use of recall challenges conventional notions of historical continuity, his treatment of Richard Coeur de Lion's heroic reputation parodies historiography's aggrandizement of the past. Austria's recounting of the chivalric deeds of this idealized figure is reductively juxtaposed with a less flattering account of his exploits. Recalling Richard's sexual conquest of Lady Faulconbridge as a mock-heroic version of his fabulous conquest of the lion, the Bastard exposes Coeur de Lion's famed valor—his “fury and unmatched force” (1.1.265)—as the expression of an amoral aggression, thus tarnishing the reputation perpetuated by the historian's idealized treatment of the past as epic or romance. The Bastard thus removes his father from the realm of historic fictions into the brazen world of history. While exemplars dignify and unify the record, historical experience suggests that the amorphous self cannot be represented by such patterns, nor can any single incident supply an accurate portrait of character when behavior so often reflects the shaping of circumstances.⁶ The Bastard's cynicism about historical reputation and the good-natured tolerance with which he accepts a picture of the past more dissonant and disturbing than the official version establish a disinterested and realistic perspective that prepares the auditor for the task of distinguishing historical fact from the fictions created to refashion the past.

Like recall, prognostication in King John also serves to satirize historiographic interpretations. Instead of creating a historical perspective which foreshadows the historiographic meanings that will be assigned to the events being dramatized (as is the case in Shakespeare's other histories),⁷ prognostication in King John calls into question the very process of ascribing patterns to events, thereby severing history as event from historical contemplation. Rather than connecting past and future into a coherent story, prophetic passages, by proving false and disconfirming the historical models they project, deny such coherence and suggest the arbitrary and subjective character of historical interpretation.

It is important to note that prognostications do more than predict events; they often set forth models of history which appear to describe a metaphysical or teleological order inherent in events themselves. In King John this mythologizing of history is recognized as a politic stratagem. Pandulph, its chief practitioner, describes the methodology involved when he assures the Dolphin that the English nobles will seize upon Arthur's death as an opportunity to “check” John's reign, justifying their rebellion by translating “natural” events into historical signs and patterns:

No natural exhalation in the sky,
No scope of nature, no distemper’d day,
No common wind, no customed event,
But they will pluck away his natural cause
And call them meteors, prodigies, and signs,
Abortives, presages, and tongues of heaven,
Plainly denouncing vengeance upon John.

(3.4.153-59)

By portraying such mythologizing of the past as a tactic of those who would usurp history and shape it to their wills, Shakespeare ridicules historical interpretations and questions the processes by which historical explanation is generated.

Philip of France provides another example of the way in which anticipation is used satirically to expose the distance between events and the historiographic meanings assigned to them. Anticipating the rebirth of Geoffrey's royal prerogative in his son Arthur, Philip identifies the “sequence of posterity” as the inherent model or pattern for historical and legal succession. Thus he metaphorically conflates historical change or succession with biological regeneration:

This little abstract doth contain that large
Which died in Geffrey; and the hand of time
Shall draw this brief into as huge a volume.

(2.1.101-3)

The representation of Arthur as an abstract of his father—a renewal of the past in the present—and as a volume yet to be written—a symbol of the historiographic future—links biological inheritance with the chronicle record, which ironically does not confirm the “sequence of posterity.” Not only does Geoffrey's record die in Arthur, whose projected place in history is not borne out, but the record of John's succession belies the inviolability of the pattern of primogeniture that Philip describes as natural and inevitable.

Once again pronouncing on the historical record, Philip anticipates the historiographic significance of the alliance he has forged with England. Predicting that “this blessed day / Ever in France shall be kept festival” (3.1.75-76), Philip anticipates the yearly commemoration of the wedding of Lewis and Blanch as a “holy day” (82). Like an “alchymist” (78), the sun, an emblem of Providence, seems to Philip to confirm his expectations, transforming the prosaic world of history into a golden one, and disconfirming Constance's anticipation of a day of infamy (83-95). This alchemic transformation proves to be but an illusion as the “holy legate” (3.1.135), Pandulph, God's official representative, immediately appears to divest the alliance and the day of the sanctification and the historical significance ascribed to it. By juxtaposing affirmations of transcendent meaning with interpretation and an outcome that belie the ceremonial significance of the wedding day, Shakespeare calls attention to historical patterns as the product of human fashioning. His dramatization of the reversal of ceremonial expectations elicits in the auditor the very response which the nobles, warning John, identify as the effect of his arbitrary invocation of ceremony:

It makes the course of thoughts to fetch about,
Startles and frights consideration,
Makes sound opinion sick, and truth suspected. …

(4.2.24-26)

Arousing our suspicion of historical interpretations that invoke ceremonial patterns, Shakespeare exposes the falsehood of those who invest historical events with teleological meaning in order to legitimate partisan choices and perpetuate their own biases, identifying them with divine purpose or natural law.

By confronting the auditor with the arbitrary and subjective nature of those patterns which seem indigenous to events and by introducing prognostications which never materialize, Shakespeare undermines the very patterns that would unify events and create a coherent continuum, thereby rendering the present and the future discrete. Thus neither the projected reign of Arthur nor the alliance of England and France becomes part of the record. Moreover, the historiographic patterns these nonevents are said to support are themselves revealed as the fictions of men who would control history. Even Pandulph's prediction about the politic behavior of the nobles (3.4.145-59), a pattern based on actual observation of political behavior, does not totally account for the historic process, for although he correctly anticipates the opportunism of the nobles, he does not anticipate that Lewis's purpose will be finally thwarted by the responses of men like Melun and the Bastard. Only the mysterious prophecy of Peter of Pomfret (4.2.147-54), an empirical statement predicting nothing more than the date and time of John's demise and offered as fact (154), is borne out. Significantly, this datum is associated with the interpretations and speculations of those who would attempt to invest time with a meaning that favors their own covert purposes. While for Pandulph Ascension-day commemorates John's oath of allegiance to the Pope (5.1.22-23), for John himself, privy to the prophecy, it takes on quite a different meaning as one speculation is temporarily supplanted by another:

Is this Ascension-day? Did not the prophet
Say that before Ascension-day at noon
My crown I should give off? Even so I have.
I did suppose it should be on constraint,
But (heav’n be thank’d!) it is but voluntary.

(5.1.25-29)

The schism between event and meaning or fact and interpretation is indicative of the historiographic perspective of King John. The focus of the play is the “now” of history. By literally cutting himself off from the past and rejecting the political manipulation of history represented by recall and prognostication, the Bastard becomes the spokesman for this perspective. Rather than viewing the past through an historiographic lens, he inductively examines the present from the point of view of an outsider who has no legitimate relationship to the past. The Bastard has neither a bias to support nor a historiographic model to uphold. In the person of the Bastard, Shakespeare observes events as they transpire and translates the rhetoric in which they are framed as historic deeds into a language that penetrates the pretensions of kings and princes.

The Bastard's role as the experiential observer of political events echoes the new approach to the past that characterizes the thinking of Jean Bodin, Machiavelli, and others. Campaigning for a more objective historiography, Bodin decries the power of emotion, which prevents men from honestly examining the past, and expresses serious reservations about an historiography that supplies moral judgments rather than presenting the facts and allowing the reader to make his own assessments.⁸ Because history is a record of the emotional biases of engaged minds—its patterns a reflection of the relationship of the historian to his material—Bodin warns the reader of history to consider “whether the historian has written a treatise about his own concerns or those of others; whether his work deals with compatriots or foreigners; enemies or friends; military discipline or civil; finally, whether it is of his own age or of an earlier period, for his contemporaries or for posterity.”⁹ Bodin thus draws a distinction between the events of history and the arbitrary and selective nature of the historic record which imperfectly reflects the past and therefore cannot be wholeheartedly embraced. For Bodin the “truth of the matter” can only be discerned if one approaches history with a disengaged mind and a cautious skepticism: “We must remember what Aristotle sagely said, that in reading history it is necessary not to believe too much or to disbelieve flatly.”¹⁰ Likewise concerned with objectivity, Machiavelli points to the proliferation of idealized histories describing states that never existed “in the real world” as evidence of the habit of “neglect[ing] the real to study the ideal.”¹¹ Machiavelli views the capacity for empirically observing experience from a realistic perspective—“an intelligence that sees things as they are”—as a prerequisite for the successful prince.¹²

Gifted with such an intelligence, the Bastard inductively examines specific events and independently forms his own assessment of their significance, which is at variance with official historiographic interpretation. For example, before Angiers he stands apart from a conventional scenario in which sovereignty is disputed and the question of rightful allegiance demands that participants make a moral or legal choice. Dispelling the illusion, created by each king's assertion of his rights, that historical choices are moral ones, the Bastard observes the cynical posture of the citizens of Angiers and likens them to spectators in a theater who merely gape at the horrors and injustices of history as a kind of spectacle. Not only does the Bastard call attention to the pragmatism of the citizens of Angiers and the moral pretenses of John and Philip, he counters the historiographer's conventional (moral or romantic) plotting of historical experience with his own satiric model of events. A reductio ad absurdum, this cynical model takes the form of a modest proposal.¹³ The Bastard humorously urges the two kings to join hands against the stubborn citizens of Angiers—“Turn thou the mouth of thy artillery, / As we will ours, against these saucy walls” (2.1.403-4)—and having ravaged the city, to then “Turn face to face and bloody point to point” (390), defying each other (406) in deadly combat. The Bastard's proposal creates a metaphorical picture of the political and historical process that the play dramatizes. The battlefield becomes an image of history's stage. The physical movement and deployment of armies, strategically shifting positions on the field, reiterated in the term “turn,” imitate the amoral indirection or bias operative in historical choices. Such choices, the Bastard inductively concludes, are pragmatic responses to occasion and not expressions of moral purpose or intent (2.1.580). Ridiculing history's absurd dramas, the Bastard's politic scenario echoes in its very language—“turn”—the mental flexibility that Machiavelli recommends to the successful prince: “It is good to appear merciful, truthful, humane, sincere, and religious; it is good to be so in reality. But you must keep your mind so disposed that, in case of need, you can turn to the exact contrary.” The Bastard shows us that the historical process is the working out of opportunistic thought, a reflection of minds “ready to shift as the winds of fortune and the varying circumstance of life may dictate.”¹⁴

The Bastard thus prepares us to experience history as realistic or ironic drama. From France's betrayal of Arthur to the final frenzied scenes of the play in which King John and the nobles shift positions in relation to each other and to France in response to the grotesque assault of “occasion” (4.2.125), the moral and psychological patterns that we expect will unite the past with the present are belied by the experience of history itself. Although isolated and unexpected expressions of human integrity—Hubert's defiance of John and Melun's confession—momentarily reaffirm these expectations, circumstance, not principle, ultimately appears to determine the outcome of events.

Rather than look for continuity between the past, present, and future, we come to acknowledge that change is often governed by the unpredictable responses of opportunistic men to the shifting winds of circumstance. Our bewildered response to history as experienced is articulated in the Bastard's troubled reaction to the enigmatic death of Arthur:

I am amaz’d, methinks, and lose my way
Among the thorns and dangers of this world.
How easy dost thou take all England up
From forth this morsel of dead royalty!
The life, the right, and truth of all this realm
Is fled to heaven; and England now is left
To tug and scramble, and to part by th’ teeth
The unowed interest of proud swelling state.

(4.3.140-47)

We sense the peril evoked in the implicit image of history as a moral wilderness, and also, overwhelmed by what Shakespeare elsewhere calls the “revolution of the times” (2 Henry IV 3.1.46), we, with the Bastard, confess our inability to find our way. Events themselves prove unamenable to the patterns that would lend them significance or coherence.

In light, then, of the Bastard's role as an observer of events as they happen, along with his skepticism about historical interpretation and his realistic estimation of the historic process itself, how do we explain his final identification with the voice of the biased historian? Is he a demythologizer turned mythologizer? Certainly his prognostication of England's invincibility (5.7.110-18) cannot be unequivocally embraced by an audience that has shared the Bastard's present-oriented skepticism and witnessed the disparity between actual events and the meanings prospectively ascribed to them.

One might suggest that in juxtaposing a detached and engaged perspective, Shakespeare reiterates a tension that Bodin recognizes as an obstacle to a more objective historiography. Not only do bad men appropriate history for their own ends, but good men, in their moral zeal, often falsify the past: “The first attempts to embroider history occurred when it was thought fine to use an honorable lie for the praise of virtuous characters and the vituperation of evil.”¹⁵ Capable of skepticism and detachment, the Bastard is at once a man of integrity with a vision of what ought to be, an attachment to right, and a loyalty to his own country.¹⁶ It is these commitments (or biases if you will) that emerge as the Bastard shifts roles. His statements about the past and future imitate the retrospective and prospective discourse we have come to identify with historicizing, and his passionate tones echo the emotional engagement of a partisan observer or court historian. Read as the words of a compatriot, his pronouncements, as Bodin would have recognized, describe not what is but what might be or should be. The prediction of English success is conditional—“If England to itself do rest but true” (118)—and represents that element of historicizing which cannot be regarded as fact.

The historiographic methodology of King John might well be summarized by briefly comparing it with the methodology of Henry V. In the final play of the second tetralogy Shakespeare creates an idealized perspective, retrospectively evoking the past through the lens of a partisan narrator who emplots that past as epic or romance. In King John, however, our perspective is that of a disengaged presenter who inductively examines the historical moment apart from the retrospective interpretations of the historiographer and who responds with a satiric emplotment that mocks both the historical process and the historiographic one. While the Chorus in Henry V allows us to transform historical deeds into the ceremonial history of the court historian,¹⁷ instructing the auditor to “see” and “behold” the past through the selective eye of an idealizing imagination, the Bastard, witnessing events as immediate experience, comments on what he actually sees. In the light of this predominantly realistic perspective, the audience views with detachment any effort to impose a moral or teleological pattern on events, conscious that such patterns represent the efforts of participants (be they benign or self-serving) to control or refashion history. One might conclude, then, that in King John the parody of historiographic strategies like recall and prognostication, coupled with the play's focus on the immediate experience of the political world, reflects Shakespeare's consciousness of the disparity between history as objective fact and history as subjective reenactment of the past. In the politic world of King John, historiography becomes the handmaiden of commodity, supplying the legitimation that lends dignity and authority to political decisions dictated by the “tug and scramble” of expediency.

Notes

1. Wolfgang Clemen, “Past and Future in Shakespeare's Drama,” Proceedings of the British Academy 52 (1966): 233.

2. Hayden White, “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact” in The Writing of History: Literary Form and Historical Understanding, ed. Robert H. Canary and Henry Kozicki (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), 43-47. White argues that the historian perceives the past generically, “emplotting” it as tragedy, comedy, romance, or satire. In this essay I use White's term “emplotment” and its variants to refer to both this process and the historical artifact itself.

3. Robert Ornstein, A Kingdom for a Stage, 88.

4. David Scott Kastan, “‘To Set a Form Upon That Indigest,’” 4-5, 14-15.

5. In “Truth in King John,” 401-2, 409, Robert C. Jones, discussing the Bastard's role as a fictional character who speaks for truth as fact as well as truth as right, notes that it is he who pursues the heroic role of avenging his father's death. Jones identifies the Bastard himself with the ideal historiographic icons of the first and second tetralogies. One might add, however, that while in the other plays the ideal is presented as chronicle history and associated with the historical past, in King John the fictions of history are recognized for what they are. Supplanting the conventional romantic emplotment of the past with a realistic one, Shakespeare demythologizes history. As Jones argues, the heroism dramatized by the avenging Bastard is a fictive event that not only has no counterpart in the record, but is contrary in its spirit and motivation to the actual events of history.

6. James R. Siemon, Shakespearean Iconoclasm (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985), 71-74. Siemon discusses the contrast between Sidney's iconic view of character as idea or exemplar and Montaigne's iconoclastic conception rooted in historical experience. Siemon argues that Montaigne, challenging poetic pattern, contends that the self is “shapeless and diverse” and defends this position by demonstrating that individual incidents in a man's life will support contradictory notions of his character. Circumstances, Montaigne concludes, shape behavior, and no single incident can be translated into a pattern or even be comprehended apart from its specific context.

7. For example, in Henry VIII Shakespeare juxtaposes the realistic and treacherous political milieu that gave birth to Elizabeth with Cranmer's famous prognostication. Invoking what Paul Hernadi has described as the “revisions of history by historiography” (“Re-presenting the Past: A Note on Narrative Historiography and Historical Drama,” History and Theory 15 [1976]: 50), Shakespeare rehearses in the rhetoric of Biblical eschatology and pastoral nostalgia the idealization of Elizabeth's reign, interpreting the often tragic present of the play as the prologue to a golden age.

8. Jean Bodin, Method for the Easy Comprehension of History, tr. Beatrice Reynolds (New York: Columbia University Press, 1945), 51-54.

9. Bodin, Method, 43.

10. Bodin, Method, 42.

11. Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. Robert M. Adams (New York: Norton, 1977), 44.

12. J. W. Allen, A History of Political Thought in the Sixteenth Century (London: Methuen, 1928), 469.

13. H. M. Richmond, Shakespeare's Political Plays, 106-7. Richmond notes the “Swiftian irony” of the Bastard's “proposal.”

14. Machiavelli, The Prince, 50-51.

15. Bodin, Method, 43.

16. See R. Jones, “Truth in King John,” 402. Jones observes that the Bastard becomes less the representative of the actual and more the spokesman for “what ought to be” as “the actual and the right … drift more hopelessly apart.” One might suggest then that the closing commentary, moving beyond the realm of historical discourse into the realm of poetry, reiterates the tension between fiction and history personified by the Bastard. As Bacon argues in The Advancement of Learning (The Advancement of Learning and New Atlantis, ed. Arthur Johnston [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974], 81), poetry inspires by “submitting the show of things to the desires of the mind” rather than the testimony of reason which “doth buckle and bow the mind unto the nature of things.”

17. Eamon Grennan, “‘This Story Shall the Good Man Teach His Son’: Henry V and the Art of History,” Papers on Language and Literature 15 (1979): 371-72.

Works Cited

Only those articles, books, and parts of books dealing exclusively or at some length with King John that have also been cited by the contributors are included in this bibliography.

Axton, Marie. The Queen's Two Bodies: Drama and the Elizabethan Succession. Royal Historical Society Studies in History, 5. London: Royal Historical Society, 1977.

Berman, Ronald. “Anarchy and Order in ‘Richard III’ and ‘King John.’” Shakespeare Survey 20 (1967): 51-59.

Berry, Edward I. Patterns of Decay: Shakespeare's Early Histories. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1975.

Berry, Ralph. The Shakespearean Metaphor. Totowa, N.J.: Rowan and Littlefield, 1978.

Blanpied, John W. Time and the Artist in Shakespeare's English Histories. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1983.

Boklund, Gunnar. “The Troublesome Ending of King John.” Studia Neophilologica 40 (1968): 175-84.

Bonjour, Adrien. “The Road to Swinstead Abbey: A Study of the Sense and Structure of King John.” Journal of English Literary History 18 (1951): 253-74.

Braunmuller, A. R., ed. The Oxford Shakespeare King John. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Bullough, Geoffrey, ed. Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare. Vol. 4. London: Routledge, 1962.

Burckhardt, Sigurd. Shakespearean Meanings. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968.

Burgoyne, Sidney C. “Cardinal Pandulph and the Curse of Rome.” College Literature 4 (1977): 232-40.

Calderwood, James L. “Commodity and Honour in King John.” University of Toronto Quarterly 29 (1960): 341-56. Reprinted in Shakespeare: The Histories, edited by Eugene M. Waith, 85-101. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1965.

Campbell, Lily Bess. Shakespeare's Histories: Mirrors of Elizabethan Policy. 1947. Reprint. San Marino, Cal.: Huntington Library, 1968.

Carr, Virginia M. The Drama As Propaganda: A Study of The Troublesome Raigne of King John. Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, 1974.

Champion, Larry S. “‘Confound Their Skill in Covetousness’: The Ambivalent Perspective of Shakespeare's King John.” Tennessee Studies in Literature 24 (1979): 36-55.

———. Perspective in Shakespeare's English Histories. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980.

Charlton, H. B. Shakespeare, Politics, and Politicians. London: The English Association, 1929.

Clemen, Wolfgang. Shakespeare's Dramatic Art. London: Methuen, 1972.

Danby, John F. Shakespeare's Doctrine of Nature. London: Faber and Faber, 1968.

Dusinberre, Juliet. Shakespeare and the Nature of Women. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1976.

Edwards, Philip. Threshold of a Nation: A Study in English and Irish Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979.

Elliott, John R. “Shakespeare and the Double Image of King John.” Shakespeare Studies 1 (1965): 64-84.

Ellis-Fermor, Una M. The Frontiers of Drama. London: Methuen, 1964.

Elson, John. “Studies in the King John Plays.” In Joseph Quincy Adams Memorial Studies, edited by G. E. Dawson and E. E. Willoughby, 183-97. Washington, D.C.: The Folger Library, 1948.

Furness, Horace H., ed. The Life and Death of King John. A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1919.

Grennan, Eamon. “Shakespeare's Satirical History: A Reading of King John.” Shakespeare Studies 11 (1978): 21-37.

Hirvela, David. “King John: An Interpretation Using Its Stage History.” Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1971.

Honigmann, E. A. J. Introduction to the New Arden Edition of King John. London: Methuen, 1954.

———. “King John, The Troublesome Reigne, and ‘documentary links’: A Rejoinder.” Shakespeare Quarterly 38 (1987): 124-26.

Jones, Emrys. The Origins of Shakespeare. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977.

———. Scenic Form in Shakespeare. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971.

Jones, Robert C. “Truth in King John.” Studies in English Literature 25 (1985): 397-417.

Kastan, David Scott. Shakespeare and the Shapes of Time. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1982.

———. “‘To Set a Form Upon That Indigest’: Shakespeare's Fictions of History.” Comparative Drama 17 (1983): 1-16.

Knights, L. C. Some Shakespearean Themes. London: Chatto and Windus, 1959.

Leggatt, Alexander. “Dramatic Perspective in King John.” English Studies in Canada 3 (1977): 1-17.

Levin, Richard. “King John's Bastard.” The Upstart Crow 3 (1980): 29-41.

Manheim, Michael. The Weak King Dilemma in the Shakespearean History Play. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1973.

Masefield, John. William Shakespeare. New York: Holt, 1911.

Matchett, William. Introduction to the Signet Classic King John. New York: New American Library, 1966.

———. “Richard's Divided Heritage in King John.” Essays in Criticism 12 (1962): 231-53. Reprinted in Essays in Shakespearean Criticism, edited by J. L. Calderwood and H. E. Toliver, 152-70. New York: Prentice-Hall, 1970.

Mattsson, May. Five Plays About King John. Uppsala: Borgatroms Tryckeri AB, 1977.

Miller, Tice. “King John.” In Shakespeare Around the Globe: A Guide to Notable Postwar Revivals, edited by Samuel Leiter, 283-95. New York: Greenwood Press, 1986.

Moore, Tommy Glenn. “Shakespeare's King John: The Critical History.” Master's thesis, University of South Carolina, 1974.

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