Philosophical Musings of a Book Nerd

Okay, I said this many times before but this time one of the commentators at the end of the book pointed out that reading some plays doesn't bring the play out the same way that watching it performed does, but the reason Sylvia Barnett made this comment is because this is one of those plays that is very rarely performed – namely because people simply are not that interested in it. In fact when she was looking at the various productions of this play she noted that when it was produced in the 60s by the Royal Shakespeare company it was an absolute failure. It's not that you can't put on a good production of this play, it's just that when you do people, especially people who know about Shakespeare, look at it and say 'yeah, King John, I think I have to feed my cat that night'.

Look, it's not a bad play, it's just that people really don't like it, which is a shame because Shakespeare really does know how to write a good political intrigue. The problem is that there are actually two plays on the same subject, this play and another one written by an anonymous author called The Troublesome Reign of King John (I knew I could find the text on the internet). It is interesting that there is some debate about which came first, and also who copied who, or whether they drew their inspiration from a third, lost, source (though I would probably fall into the category of rejecting the existence of this ur-text).

King John is a play about the question of succession. Despite the fact that John was nominated heir by his father Richard the Lion Heart, as the play unfolds it becomes clear that there are some other claimants to the throne, one prince Arthur, and some guy named Phillip the Bastard. The play is basically about the struggle between John and Arthur over who should have the throne, even though John spends a lot of time running around France beating up the French and also seeking to behead the King of Austria who was responsible for the death of his father.

This is actually one of those plays that happens to have one really cool character – Phillip the Bastard (or simply 'The Bastard'). The thing about Phillip is that he is quite a noble character and sticks by King John right until the end. At the beginning he is having a tussle with his brother as to who should inherit their deceased father's estate, that is until it is revealed that his mother had a liaison with the king (as you do) and that he isn't actually a legitimate heir. As such he has a choice – maintain the claim to his father's estate or accept that he is a bastard. He takes the second option and is made a knight of the realm.

The thing with bastards in Shakespeare is that they are generally not painted in a particularly pleasant light – take Edmund from King Lear for example: he is one really nasty piece of work. However Phillip is one of the most noblest characters in the play, and not only that he sticks to John's side despite all of the other nobles deserting him. In fact he has the very last line in the play, a position which in Elizabethan drama is normally reserved for the highest ranking character left alive. Mind you, the real Phillip (Phillip of Cognac – I wonder if he drank a bit of the stuff) is one of those really obscure historical figures that would have disappeared into the mists of antiquity if Shakespeare hadn't immortalised him. Still, considering the fact that he is in King John may still end up consigning him to obscurity.

The one thing that really stands out in this play is that the one reason that King John is still remembered today, the signing of the Magna Carta, is completely absent. In fact it is due to the dispute with prince Arthur that all of the lords desert John, not because he is a tyrannical prick that was blowing England's wealth on his wars in France. However I do want to speculate a bit as to why Shakespeare ended up neglecting this rather historical event (and if he were to have included it it would have been somewhere near the end because King John died the year after it was signed).

Okay, maybe it had to do with the whole Magna Carta thing disrupting the flow of the play and not having anything to do with the themes that Shakespeare was trying to explore, which is probably more likely than not (and the more I think about it the more I suspect that that is the case). However I have another theory, and that is that the people of Elizabethan England never considered the Magna Carta that big a deal. Remember King John pretty much tore the agreement up as soon as he had the chance and it never really had a huge affect until much later. Anyway, it wasn't the beginning of the Parliamentary system – William the Conqueror had a group of advisors when he first invaded England.

The thing with Parliament is that it didn't actually appear in its present form until the Tudors were on the throne, and even then most of them tended to be lackies of the king. However the reason Parliament existed is because the king didn't raise taxes directly from the people, he would raise them from the feudal lords, who would in turn suck the peasantry dry. In fact the Magna Carta did didly squat for the average punter, and it was not until the era of the Stuarts that it started fighting with the king for political power. It is only these days that we look back at the Magna Carta and go 'gee, what a wonderful document'. Back in Shakespeare's day I suspect that the average theatre goer would have said 'Magna Carta? As if that has anything to do with me – it's simply a nobles' thing'.