King john, p.1
King John, page 1
T H E A R D E N S H A K E S P E A R E
* * *
ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELL edited by G.K. Hunter*
ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA edited by John Wilders
AS YOU LIKE IT edited by Juliet Dusinberre
THE COMEDY OF ERRORS edited by Kent Cartwright
CORIOLANUS edited by Peter Holland
CYMBELINE edited by Valerie Wayne
DOUBLE FALSEHOOD edited by Brean Hammond
HAMLET, Revised edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor
HAMLET, The Texts of 1603 and 1623 edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor
JULIUS CAESAR edited by David Daniell
KING EDWARD III edited by Richard Proudfoot and Nicola Bennett
KING HENRY IV PART 1 edited by David Scott Kastan
KING HENRY IV PART 2 edited by James C. Bulman
KING HENRY V edited by T.W. Craik
KING HENRY VI PART 1 edited by Edward Burns
KING HENRY VI PART 2 edited by Ronald Knowles
KING HENRY VI PART 3 edited by John D. Cox and Eric Rasmussen
KING HENRY VIII edited by Gordon McMullan
KING JOHN edited by Jesse M. Lander and J.J.M. Tobin
KING LEAR edited by R.A. Foakes
KING RICHARD II edited by Charles Forker
KING RICHARD III edited by James R. Siemon
LOVE’S LABOUR’S LOST edited by H.R. Woudhuysen
MACBETH edited by Sandra Clark and Pamela Mason
MEASURE FOR MEASURE edited by J.W. Lever*
THE MERCHANT OF VENICE edited by John Drakakis
THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR edited by Giorgio Melchiori
A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM edited by Sukanta Chaudhuri
MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING, Revised edited by Claire McEachern
OTHELLO, Revised Edition edited by E.A.J. Honigmann, with an Introduction by Ayanna Thompson
PERICLES edited by Suzanne Gossett
ROMEO AND JULIET edited by René Weis
SHAKESPEARE’S POEMS edited by Katherine Duncan-Jones and H.R. Woudhuysen
SHAKESPEARE’S SONNETS, Revised edited by Katherine Duncan-Jones
THE TAMING OF THE SHREW edited by Barbara Hodgdon
THE TEMPEST, Revised edited by Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan
TIMON OF ATHENS edited by Anthony B. Dawson and Gretchen E. Minton
TITUS ANDRONICUS, Revised edited by Jonathan Bate
TROILUS AND CRESSIDA, Revised edited by David Bevington
TWELFTH NIGHT edited by Keir Elam
THE TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA edited by William C. Carroll
THE TWO NOBLE KINSMEN, Revised edited by Lois Potter
THE WINTER’S TALE edited by John Pitcher
* Second series
The Editors
Jesse M. Lander is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of Inventing Polemic: Religion, Print, and Literary Culture in Early Modern England (2006). In addition to editing Macbeth (New York, 2007) for the Barnes & Noble Shakespeare, he was textual editor for 1 Henry IV in the third edition of The Norton Shakespeare (New York, 2015). Most recently, he joined Zachary Lesser and Heidi Brayman to edit a collection of essays entitled The Book in History, The Book as History: New Intersections of the Material Text (New Haven, 2016).
J.J.M. Tobin, Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Boston, is a former Woodrow Wilson Fellow and Fulbright Scholar who has taught at Boston College, York University, in Toronto, and Boston State College. He has served as general editor of the nine-volume Evans Shakespeare Series (Boston, Mass., 2011), for which he edited Hamlet, and contributing editor to the second edition of The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston, Mass., 1997). He is the editor of The Complete English Poems of George Herbert (Harmondsworth, 1992, second edition 2001), and in addition to a number of notes and articles has published Shakespeare’s Favorite Novel (Lanham, MD, 1984), dealing with the sources, chronology and texts of Shakespeare, Milton and other Renaissance writers.
For Susannah Barton Tobin
and
for Jennifer Macliesh Lander
CONTENTS
List of illustrations
General editors’ preface
Preface
Introduction
Date
Politics: international and national
Reformation and the papal deposing power
Conscience and commodity
Legitimacy and legitimation
Oath-taking and vow-breaking
Disenchantment
History plays and historiography
Rhetorical patterns
Afterlives
Textual note
The manuscript source
Act and scene divisions
KING JOHN
Appendix: casting chart
Abbreviations and references
Index
LIST OF
ILLUSTRATIONS
1 Still from the first Shakespeare film, King John, American Mutoscope & Biograph, 1899 (courtesy of the EYE Film Institute Netherlands)
2 ‘Herbert Beerbohm Tree as King John in King John by William Shakespeare’, by Charles A. Buchel (courtesy of the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Charles A. Buchel Estate)
3 Page image from expurgated Valladolid Folio, Shakespeare, Mr. William Shakespeares comedies, histories, and tragedies, 1632 (courtesy of the Folger Shakespeare Library)
4 ‘A Catalogue’ from the First Folio, 1623 (courtesy of the Folger Shakespeare Library)
5 ‘The description and manner of the poysoning of king Iohn’, John Foxe, Acts and Monuments, 1563 (courtesy of the Folger Shakespeare Library)
6 Mrs Siddons, kneeling with her arms raised over her head, her hands curled into a fist, by John Flaxman, 1783 (courtesy of Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection)
7 ‘Lady Constance, Arthur and Salisbury’, by Henry Fuseli, 1783 (courtesy of the Smith College Museum of Art)
8 ‘Prince Arthur and Hubert’, by L.J. Pott, engraved by D.I. Desvachez, in Charles Knight (ed.), The Works of Shakespere: Imperial Edition, 1873–5 (© The British Library Board, 1871.f.1, between pp. 464 and 465)
9 Playbill for Planché’s 1823 production of King John at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden (courtesy of the Folger Shakespeare Library)
10 ‘Costume for the Bastard’, by J.K. Meadows, from J.R. Planché, Costume of Shakespeare’s historical tragedy of King John, 1823 (courtesy of the Folger Shakespeare Library)
11 ‘Costume for the Earl of Pembroke’, by J.K. Meadows, from J.R. Planché, Costume of Shakespeare’s historical tragedy of King John, 1823 (courtesy of the Folger Shakespeare Library)
12 Henry Hall as King John in Gilbert Abbot A’Beckett’s 1837 burlesque King John (With the Benefit of the Act), by W. Newman, 1837 (© The British Library Board, Add Mss 42, 944, fols 249–61b)
13 King John and the handing over of the Magna Carta in Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s 1899 production (© The University of Bristol)
14 Patrick Stewart as King John in Buzz Goodbody’s 1970 production of King John with the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford-upon-Avon (Joe Cocks Studio Collection © Shakespeare Birthplace Trust)
15 Daniel Rabin (Salisbury), Barbara Marten (Eleanor of Aquitaine), Jo Stone-Fewings (King John), Aruhan Galieva (Blanche of Castile) and Alex Waldmann (The Bastard) in James Dacre’s 2015 touring production of King John for Shakespeare’s Globe at Temple Church (photograph by Bronwen Sharp © Shakespeare’s Globe)
GENERAL EDITORS’
PREFACE
The earliest volume in the first Arden series, Edward Dowden’s Hamlet, was published in 1899. Since then the Arden Shakespeare has been widely acknowledged as the pre-eminent Shakespeare edition, valued by scholars, students, actors and ‘the great variety of readers’ alike for its clearly presented and reliable texts, its full annotation and its richly informative introductions.
In the third Arden series we seek to maintain these well-established qualities and general characteristics, preserving our predecessors’ commitment to presenting the play as it has been shaped in history. Each volume necessarily has its own particular emphasis which reflects the unique possibilities and problems posed by the work in question, and the series as a whole seeks to maintain the highest standards of scholarship, combined with attractive and accessible presentation.
Newly edited from the original documents, texts are presented in fully modernized form, with a textual apparatus that records all substantial divergences from those early printings. The notes and introductions focus on the conditions and possibilities of meaning that editors, critics and performers (on stage and screen) have discovered in the play. While building upon the rich history of scholarly activity that has long shaped our understanding of Shakespeare’s works, this third series of the Arden Shakespeare is enlivened by a new generation’s encounter with Shakespeare.
THE TEXT
On each page of the play itself, readers will find a passage of text supported by commentary and textual notes. Act and scene divisions (seldom present in the early editions and often the product of eighteenth-century or later scholarship) have been retained for ease of reference, but have been given less prominence than in previous series. Editorial indications of location of the action have been removed to the textual notes or commentary.
In the text itself, elided forms in the early texts are spelt out in full in verse lines wherever they indicate a usual late twentieth-century pronunciation that requires no special indication and wherever they occur in prose (except where they indicate non-standard pronunciation). In verse speeches, marks of elision are retained where they are necessary guides to the scansion and pronunciation of the line. Final -ed in past tense and participial forms of verbs is always printed as -ed, without accent, never as -’d, but wherever the required pronunciation diverges from modern usage a note in the commentary draws attention to the fact. Where the final -ed should be given syllabic value contrary to modern usage, e.g.
Doth Silvia know that I am banished?
(TGV 3.1.214)
the note will take the form
214 banished banishèd
Conventional lineation of divided verse lines shared by two or more speakers has been reconsidered and sometimes rearranged. Except for the familiar Exit and Exeunt, Latin forms in stage directions and speech prefixes have been translated into English and the original Latin forms recorded in the textual notes.
COMMENTARY AND TEXTUAL NOTES
Notes in the commentary, for which a major source will be the Oxford English Dictionary, offer glossarial and other explication of verbal difficulties; they may also include discussion of points of interpretation and, in relevant cases, substantial extracts from Shakespeare’s source material. Editors will not usually offer glossarial notes for words adequately defined in the latest edition of The Concise Oxford Dictionary or Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, but in cases of doubt they will include notes. Attention, however, will be drawn to places where more than one likely interpretation can be proposed and to significant verbal and syntactic complexity. Notes preceded by *discuss editorial emendations or variant readings.
Headnotes to acts or scenes discuss, where appropriate, questions of scene location, the play’s treatment of source materials, and major difficulties of staging. The list of roles (so headed to emphasize the play’s status as a text for performance) is also considered in the commentary notes. These may include comment on plausible patterns of casting with the resources of an Elizabethan or Jacobean acting company and also on any variation in the description of roles in their speech prefixes in the early editions.
The textual notes are designed to let readers know when the edited text diverges from the early edition(s) or manuscript sources on which it is based. Wherever this happens the note will record the rejected reading of the early edition(s) or manuscript, in original spelling, and the source of the reading adopted in this edition. Other forms from the early edition(s) or manuscript recorded in these notes will include some spellings of particular interest or significance and original forms of translated stage directions. Where two or more early editions are involved, for instance with Othello, the notes also record all important differences between them. The textual notes take a form that has been in use since the nineteenth century. This comprises, first: line reference, reading adopted in the text and closing square bracket; then: abbreviated reference, in italic, to the earliest edition to adopt the accepted reading, italic semicolon and noteworthy alternative reading(s), each with abbreviated italic reference to its source.
Conventions used in these textual notes include the following. The solidus / is used, in notes quoting verse or discussing verse lining, to indicate line endings. Distinctive spellings of the base text follow the square bracket without indication of source and are enclosed in italic brackets. Names enclosed in italic brackets indicate originators of conjectural emendations when these did not originate in an edition of the text, or when the named edition records a conjecture not accepted into its text. Stage directions (SDs) are referred to by the number of the line within or immediately after which they are placed. Line numbers with a decimal point relate to centred entry SDs not falling within a verse line and to SDs more than one line long, with the number after the point indicating the line within the SD: e.g. 78.4 refers to the fourth line of the SD following line 78. Lines of SDs at the start of a scene are numbered 0.1, 0.2, etc. Where only a line number precedes a square bracket, e.g. 128], the note relates to the whole line; where SD is added to the number, it relates to the whole of a SD within or immediately following the line. Speech prefixes (SPs) follow similar conventions, 203 SP] referring to the speaker’s name for line 203. Where a SP reference takes the form, e.g. 38+ SP, it relates to all subsequent speeches assigned to that speaker in the scene in question.
Where, as with King Henry V, one of the early editions is a so-called ‘bad quarto’ (that is, a text either heavily adapted, or reconstructed from memory, or both), the divergences from the present edition are too great to be recorded in full in the notes. In these cases, with the exception of Hamlet, which prints an edited text of the Quarto of 1603, the editions will include a reduced photographic facsimile of the ‘bad quarto’ in an appendix.
INTRODUCTION
Both the introduction and the commentary are designed to present the plays as texts for performance, and make appropriate reference to stage, film and television versions, as well as introducing the reader to the range of critical approaches to the plays. They discuss the history of the reception of the texts within the theatre and scholarship and beyond, investigating the interdependency of the literary text and the surrounding ‘cultural text’ both at the time of the original production of Shakespeare’s works and during their long and rich afterlife.
PREFACE
We all know that the world of the theatre and playwrighting is profoundly collaborative, and some of us have come to realize just how collaborative editing can be. In editing King John, a play modest in reputation but rich in its sequence of highly skilled editors, I have profited especially from the work of R.L. Smallwood, L.A. Beaurline and A.R. Braunmuller, each of whom benefited, even as I have, from the Arden 2 edition of the play by E.A.J. Honigmann, a gifted scholar and generous friend. And of course, it has been a collaborative project in the most immediate sense: I have greatly valued Jesse Lander as a partner in this endeavour.
The last three decades have provided a recrudescence of interest in this play, with productions in Stratford-upon-Avon, London, Boston, New York, Washington, DC, Lenox (Massachusetts) and elsewhere: I am grateful to the University of Massachusetts Boston for sabbatical and travel support which enabled me to attend a number of them. I am particularly grateful to Richard Proudfoot for his company at several of these performances and his insightful comments about a play he has long valued. While editing has its pleasures and pains, few understand these two feelings as well as does David Kastan, who has passed through the cursus honorum of academia even as he suffered as a Red Sox fan in New York. He has been supportive in his early and continuing interest in King John and helped greatly ‘to set a form upon [this] indigest’.
Let me note the exquisite and binary skill of simultaneously admonishing and encouraging demonstrated by Margaret Bartley, our publisher. I thank with the deepest appreciation Jane Armstrong, copy-editor without equal in terms of problem-solving and patience. Thanks also to an earlier leader of the Arden 3 team, Jessica Hodge, and to the librarians at the British Library, Bodleian Library, Widener Library, Houghton Library and the Healey Library at UMass Boston.
If there were a place for a necrology of influences upon this edition, I would have us remember, in addition to Ernst Honigmann, G. Blakemore Evans, Harold Jenkins, Antony Hammond, Charles Forker, P.A. Duhamel and Daniel Aaron.
I am grateful to my students at UMass Boston, my colleagues, several department chairs and university provosts, including Robert Crossley and Winston Langley.
For insights, criticism, and inspiration, I want to thank Vincent Petronella, Robert A. Greene, John Klause, Thomas Merriam (even when I have disagreed with some of his most tempting insights), Edward O’Toole and Virginia Mason Vaughan.
Finally, but most importantly, I thank Rosemary Barton Tobin for her near infinite patience and profound understanding of the classics and of Shakespeare. I also thank our daughter, Susannah Barton Tobin, who, from the days when she inveigled an innocent colleague at Cambridge to take the train to Stratford-upon-Avon to see all three parts of Henry VI to the present moment, has been a lover of Shakespeare and an invaluable support and most wise critic. On the acknowledgment page of the second edition of The Riverside Shakespeare, G. Blakemore Evans thanked Susannah, ‘who, at a moment of crisis, single-handedly took over’. Her grateful father says that, if applied to this edition of King John, Gwynne’s words would be a clear understatement.
