Abstract
King John demonstrates the pervasiveness as well as the radical nature of Shakespeare’s interest in illicit language. The status of monarchical speech — as well as those forms of language that question or oppose this — provides the source, as with Greene’s James IV, of the dramatist’s most forceful political insights. Furthermore, disruptive speech is not simply a topic of King John, but a key ingredient in its formal composition: in brief, the play views historical events from the vantage-point offered by the discourse of rumour. As with counsel in Gorboduc, Shakespeare’s play both explores and enacts a specific form of speech; both plays also comprehend how historical pressures complicate understanding of seemingly disorderly discourses and their opposites. This is a large and unfamiliar claim for King John and it will need careful elaboration.
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Notes
For a comprehensive study, see Carole Levin, Propaganda in the English Reformation: Heroic and Villainous Images of King John (Lewiston, New York: Edwin Meilen Press, 1988).
Cited in John R. Elliot, ‘Shakespeare and the Double Image of King John’, ShakS, 1 (1965): 64–84, 68.
Penny Roberts, ‘Arson, Conspiracy and Rumour in Early Modern Europe’, Continuity and Change, 12 (1997): 9–29, 11. For further analysis, see Hans-Joachim Neubauer, The Rumour: a Cultural History, trans. Christian Braun (London and New York: Free Association Books, 1999).
George Cavendish, The Life and Death of Cardinal Wolsey, ed. Richard S. Sylvester, Early English Text Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 3.
Gilbert Burnet, The History of the Reformation of the Church of England, ed. Nicholas Pocock (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1865), 7 vols., VI, p. 223; p. 224. I owe this reference to Dr Alexandra Gillespie.
James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990), pp. 144–8.
Simon Walker, ‘Rumour, Sedition and Popular Protest in the Reign of Henry IV’, P&P, 166 (2000): 31–65. Walker is drawing here on the categories formulated by James C. Scott’s earlier study, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985), ch. 7.
Thomas Birch, Memoirs of the Reign of Queen Elizabeth, From the Year 1581 till her Death, 2 vols (1754), II, p. 81.
Lily B. Campbell, Shakespeare’s ‘Histories’: Mirrors of Elizabethan Policy (San Marino, California: Huntington Library, 1947), p. 169.
Frank Whigham, Ambition and Privilege: the Social Tropes of Elizabethan Courtesy Theory (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1984), p. 3.
Emrys Jones, The Origins of Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), p. 234.
Pauline Kiernan, Shakespeare’s Theory of Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 128.
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© 2003 Dermot Cavanagh
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Cavanagh, D. (2003). Misreading History: Rumour in King John . In: Language and Politics in the Sixteenth-Century History Play. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230005839_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230005839_5
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