Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1859, by RICHARD GRANT WHITE, In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the Southern District of New York. RIVERSIDE, CAMBRIDGE: PRINTED BY H. 0. HOUGHTON AND COMPANY. STEREOTYPED AT THE BOSTON STEREOTYPE FOUNDRY. The Life and Death of King John occupies twenty-two pages in the folio of 1623; viz., from p. 1 to p. 22 inclusive, in the division of Histories, each of the three great divisions of that volume having its own numeration of pages. The play is there divided into Acts and Scenes, but with a transposition, in the second Act, of Actus Secundus and Scena Secunda. It is without a list of Dramatis Personæ, which was first supplied by Rowe. (6) KING JOHN. INTRODUCTION. HAKESPEARE'S Historical Plays are often discoursed SH about as if they were a projected series of interdependent works, written in pursuance of a plan, the purpose of which was to illustrate English History. That they illustrate history, and in a certain sense were meant to do so, is manifest upon their very face; but that they do this in conformity with a systematic design, there is neither external nor internal evidence to show. The origin of a contrary opinion must be traced to a tradition first mentioned by Gildon, according to which Shakespeare told Ben Jonson, that "finding the nation generally very ignorant of history, he wrote plays in order to instruct the people in that particular." But of all the unfounded stories told of Shakespeare, this is the most difficult of belief. Such a declaration could not have been made by one of those men to the other with a grave face, actors though they were. For Historical Plays, or Histories, as they were called, were in vogue with our ancestors before Shakespeare began to write for the stage; and so far was he from seeking to impart historical knowledge to the audiences at the Blackfriars, that he did not even attempt to correct the grossest violations of historical truth in the older play upon which he founded one of his Histories—this very King John; and in other instances, in which he went for his story directly to the Chronicles, he did not hesitate to bring together events really separated by years, (though connected as cause and effect, or means to a common end,) when, by so grouping them, he could produce a vivid and impressive dramatic picture of the period which he undertook to represent. In writing the Histories he had the same purpose as in writing the Comedies and Tragedies; that purpose always being, to make a good play: and with him a good play was one which would fill the theatre whenever it was performed, and at the same time give utterance to his teeming brain, and satisfy his dramatic intuition. He wrote Histories because they suited the taste of the day; and in their composition, no less, and no more, than in that of Comedies and Tragedies, he used, as the basis of his work, the materials nearest at hand and best suited to his purpose. He would have written a play upon the life and death of King Lud, had any incidents in the reign of that monarch susceptible of dramatic treatment been known to him; and, above all, had some dramatist of the preceding generation produced a successful play founded upon them which he could have used as foundation or as scaffolding. The Wars of the Roses and the events which led to them offered him a succession of stirring scenes filled with famous actors, which could be worked into dramatico-historical pictures of the reigns of the monarchs under whom they took place, and which would appeal directly to the love of knowledge, the chivalric sympathies, and the patriotism that animated the audiences for which he wrote. The bloody struggle that began with the deposition of one Richard at Westminster, and ended with the death of another at Bosworth Field, its long succession of internecine horrors relieved only by the glorious episode of Agincourt, had for our ancestors in Shakespeare's time the charms of fable united to the sober interest of history. The nearest events were so remote that their harsh features were mellowing by distance, and their sharp outlines crumbling into the picturesqueness of antiquity, while those of earliest occurrence were yet sufficiently near to be familiar objects of contemplation, preserved from oblivion as they were in the traditions of men removed only by a few generations from the actors who took part in them. To this interest in the subject, to the audience intrinsic, to the dramatist extrinsic, historical plan or instructive purpose of any kind, we owe the series of plays beginning with Richard the Second and ending with Richard the Third. The epic of our race became a drama : our Homer sang upon the stage; our Virgil recited to the people. an interest and not to The Historical Plays having been produced in this spirit, with this motive, and, as we shall see when we consider them in detail, without system or order,* no examination of them as *There is, in my opinion, no room for doubt that they appeared in the following order: Henry VI., Richard II., King John, Richard III., Henry ÍV., Henry V., Henry VIII. |