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King John (Mis)Remembered

DOI link for King John (Mis)Remembered

King John (Mis)Remembered book

King John (Mis)Remembered

DOI link for King John (Mis)Remembered

King John (Mis)Remembered book

ByIgor Djordjevic
Edition 1st Edition
First Published 2015
eBook Published 9 March 2016
Pub. location London
Imprint Routledge
DOI https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315591094
Pages 216 pages
eBook ISBN 9781315591094
SubjectsArts, Humanities, Language & Literature
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Djordjevic, I. (2015). King John (Mis)Remembered. London: Routledge, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315591094

King John’s evil reputation has outlasted and proved more enduring than that of Richard III, whose notoriety seemed ensured thanks to Shakespeare’s portrayal of him. The paradox is even greater when we realize that this portrait of John endures despite Shakespeare’s portrait of him in the play King John, where he hardly comes off as a villain at all. Here Igor Djordjevic argues that the story of John’s transformation in cultural memory has never been told completely, perhaps because the crucial moment in John’s change back to villainy is a literary one: it occurs at the point when the 'historiographic' trajectory of John’s character-development intersects with the 'literary' evolution of Robin Hood. But as Djordjevic reveals, John’s second fall in cultural memory became irredeemable as the largely unintended result of the work of three men - John Stow, Michael Drayton, Anthony Munday - who knew each other and who all read a significant passage in a little known book (the Chronicle of Dunmow), while a fourth man’s money (Philip Henslowe) helped move the story from page to stage. The rest, as they say, is history. Paying particular attention to the work of Michael Drayton and Anthony Munday who wrote for the Lord Admiral’s Men, Djordjevic traces the cultural ripples their works created until the end of the seventeenth century, in various familiar as well as previously ignored historical, poetic, and dramatic works by numerous authors. Djordjevic’s analysis of the playtexts’ source, and the personal and working relationship between the playwright-poets and John Stow as the antiquarian disseminator of the source text, sheds a brighter light on a moment that proves to have a greater significance outside theatrical history; it has profound repercussions for literary history and a nation’s cultural memory.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

chapter |12 pages

Introduction: Of Critics and Dashed Scholarly Expectations

chapter 1|8 pages

Reclaiming John from the Monks

chapter 2|22 pages

Ground Zero: Peele, Shakespeare, and the Birth of the Topical Cluster

chapter 3|24 pages

John Stow at the Crossroads of Memory, Legend, and Theatrical History

chapter 4|28 pages

Munday’s Alternate History and the Topical Cluster of King John

chapter 5|22 pages

The Sexy Side of History and the Specter of Bastardy: Look About You

chapter 6|14 pages

Historical Poesy Strikes Back

chapter 7|34 pages

Dunmow Redivivus: Vallans, Daniel, and Davenport

chapter 8|26 pages

Connecting the Dots: The Long Shadow of Dunmow

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