ABSTRACT
Although there is no conclusive evidence for the date of King John’s first production (estimates range from 1591 to 1598), many scholars place it between the two tetralogies. It is tempting to accept that suggestion, because the play seems in many ways to have been conceived as an antithesis to-or perhaps a reaction againstRichard III. Of all Shakespeare’s Elizabethan histories, Richard III is the one that brings the action closest to the present, and of all of them, it is most fully invested in the official Tudor version of England’s medieval past, which claimed that only with the marriage of Henry Tudor and Elizabeth of York was England saved from a devastating civil war that had been God’s punishment for the deposition of a legitimate king, Richard II. Looking backward to the preceding plays and forward to the Elizabethan present, Richard III retrospectively imposes a tidy ending on the first tetralogy: old crimes are punished, every chicken comes home to roost, and the moral account books are neatly balanced to provide a providential warrant for the accession of Henry VII. Separated from the temporal and genealogical chain that unites the two tetralogies, King John moves farthest back into the past, and the entire action seems designed to foreground every kind of moral and political and historiographic ambiguity. The providential justice that determines the outcome in Richard III is nowhere to be seen, and every attempt to resolve the action or make sense of it is immediately frustrated by the moral ambiguities of an episodic plot where success and failure ride on the shifting winds of chance. Whatever its date of composition, King John exposes the ideological faultlines that threatened to undermine the genealogical narratives that could make the marriage of Henry Tudor and Elizabeth of
York seem a secure resolution to the civil strife which preceded it, the turning of brother against brother, father against son. If the play was produced between the two tetralogies, that may help to explain why the story of the loss and recuperation of royal authority and national integrity that ended so neatly in Richard III had to be restaged, but with much more difficulty and in a different way, in the second tetralogy.
