Product Description

This important new edition of one of Shakespeare's more neglected plays offers a wide-ranging critical introduction, concentrating on its relevance to Elizabethan political issues and on the role played in it by women, the family, and the law. There is a comprehensive stage history, and full and helpful annotation pays special attention to the play's language and staging.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #169446 in Books
• Published on: 1998-09-10
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
One of Shakespeare's most unpopular history plays, King John deals with the life and death of King John, who reigned from 1199 to 1216. This is as early as Shakespeare goes in his treatment of English history, concentrating more successfully on the later 14th and 15th centuries in the plays which stretch from Richard II to Henry VI. As a result King John suffers from being so historically distant in time, as well as offering a rather weak and vacillating king, who lacks the charisma and authority of Richard III or Henry V. The play begins with King John struggling to retain his throne, under attack from rebellious courtiers and Philip, the king of France. As the quarrel escalates into war with France, the play begins to take on a contemporary Elizabethan flavour--the feared invasion from a foreign (Catholic) nation, and the extent to which such an invasion is based on the questionable paternity of King John (like Queen Elizabeth, John is accused of being a bastard and is excommunicated). The play is saved from its rather colourless political machinations by Philip the Bastard, John's favourite, a dramatic forerunner of dubious but charismatic malcontents like Edmund in King Lear. It is also Philip who is given the most powerful and patriotic lines, when he claims that "This England never did, nor never shall,/Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror". King John's mysterious and anticlimactic death through illness at the end of the play deflates expectations - something that could be said of the play as a whole. --Jerry Brotton

Review
"Advanced students and scholars working with King John and its text will find the edition invaluable."--Choice

Book Information
King John of England is pitted against the united powers of France, Brittany, Austria and the Papacy. Will England be destroyed by his fatal indecision?

As alliances are made, broken and remade, the paranoid and erratic John reveals his weakness and reliance on those around him, including his powerful mother Queen Elinor and Faulconbridge, the cynical and witty bastard son of the dead King Richard I.

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