Okay, so today's lecture is about King John. I think King John's a fabulously interesting play,

a very under-read play, and a play I hope, one of my aims in this lecture is to suggest to you

some of the things I think King John is trying to ask about, it's trying to think about,

it's a remarkably sophisticated

play in its themes and in the way it uses historical sources, and that's one of the things

I want to try and bring out. It was probably written in 1595, or maybe slightly earlier. It isn't

the first of Shakespeare's history plays, probably the second part

of Henry VI, is the first history play that Shakespeare writes, but it is chronologically

the earliest bit of medieval history that Shakespeare touches on. So these are events at the end

of the 12th, beginning of the 13th century. King John's not published until the first folio in 1623,

and then logically it's the first in the history play category, because, as I just said, it's the chronologically earliest monarch of King John.

So the question I'd like to frame this lecture around is Prince Arthur.

I'll tell you a bit about Prince Arthur in a minute, but the question is who killed Prince Arthur, who killed Prince Arthur?

But let's start by summarising the plot of the play.

So King John is a sardonic and rather unheroic history play

in which the question of rightful succession, the question of who is the rightful king, is subjected to

a sustained deconstruction. So the play is all about claim and counterclaim about who should be

the king of England.

The main claimants are King John himself and the young prince Arthur, his nephew.

Each of the claimants has a powerful female advocate and one of the ways the play is structured

is through these kinds of parallelism.

For John, the advocate is his mother, Eleanor, and for Arthur, his mother, Constance.

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