Excerpt from King John in Fact and Fiction A Little less than one hundred years after the death of King John, a Scottish Prince John changed his name, upon his accession to the throne and at the request of his bles, to avoid the ill omen which darkened the name of the English king and of John of France. A century and a half later, King John of England was presented in the first English historical play as the earliest English champion and martyr of that Protestant religion to which the spectators had newly come. The interpretation which thus depicted him influenced in Shakespeare's play, at once the greatest literary presentation of King John and the source of much of our common kwledge of English history. In spite of this, however, the idea of John w in the mind of the person who is student of history is nearer to the conception upon which the old Scotch bles acted. According to this idea, John is weak, licentious, and vicious, a traitor, usurper and murderer, an excommunicated man, who was compelled by his oppressed barons, with the Archbishop of Canterbury at their head, to sign Magna Charta. In story, he is a plotter against his glorious and magnanimous brother, and the pursuer of Matilda Fitzwalter, Maid Marian. History of the secondary schools has retained deep impression of the French wars but has emphasized the horror of the excommunication and of John's absolute isolation during the time of it. Because of this, we read into Shakespeare what is in our own minds, making his King John weaker and worse than in fact he is; and Bale's Kynge Johan seems at first an invention out of the whole cloth, in its apparent turning of a universally execrated man into a hero. But some essential germs of truth must underlie even such diverse conceptions. It is the object of this study, then, to examine the epic figure of King John from his earliest appearance in literature, in his own lifetime, down to the present day, and by comparison with the historical figure, to show where lie the roots of the various elements of the epic character, and to demonstrate that these elements are t fundamentally incompatible. Through this examination we shall, perhaps, come to understand why Magna Charta, which looms so large to us, did t appear in the Elizabethan plays, even the historical ones, and how one man became at once the martyr of Bale's play, the villain of the stories of Richard Coeur de Lion and of Robin Hood, and the rallying point of English patriotism, as he appears in Shakespeare's King John. To do this, it is necessary to study t only the veritable historical character, but also that character as understood at different times in sober history. For it is only recently that John's true strength and ability have been recognized. Among the failures of his career and the subtleties of a mind in some respects beyond his age, these traits were unkwn to some of the best of the contemporary chroniclers, and to others were obscured by prejudice. The two studies, historical and epic, cant be maintained independently; the delineations of John in contemporary literature influenced those of later history and these in turn reacted upon the literature contemporary with that history. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art techlogy to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
Product Identifiers
Publisher
Forgotten Books
ISBN-10
1332148409
ISBN-13
9781332148400
eBay Product ID (ePID)
220904234
Additional Product Features
Content Note
Black & White Illustrations
Format
Paperback / Softback
Language
English
Author(s)
Ruth Wallerstein
Date of Publication
27/09/2015
Format Details
Trade Paperback (US) ,Unsewn / Adhesive Bound
Subject
Regional History
Imprint
Forgotten Books
Country of Publication
United States
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