King John (Mis)Remembered by Igor Djordjevic (review)

The mistaken memories alluded to in the title of this work concern the representation of King John in popular dramas produced four hundred years after his reign. What is apparent from Igor Djordjevic’s careful and thought-provoking study, which will be of interest both to cultural historians and to literary specialists, is the extent to which John’s reputation was transformed during the early modern period. Recent scholarship, while by no means trying to ignore John’s many faults, has at least attempted to consider the monarch on his own merits by taking a highly cautious approach to the vitriolic assessments of his contemporaries (see, for example, my review of Paul Webster’s King John and Religion (Boydell, 2015), infra). Furthermore, it is well known that much of the adulation given to Magna Carta, and by extension the animosity directed at John for opposing it, was a product of seventeenth-century conflicts between Parliament and the Stuart monarchs. Djordjevic’s study has the great virtue of reminding us that during most of the Tudor period, John was far from being a figure of hatred and could even be held up (however inaccurately) as a sort of proto-nationalist, proto-Protestant hero, especially in his opposition to papal intervention in English affairs. It is in this guise that he appears in Holinshed and Foxe, among others, as the author demonstrates.

What changed? For Djordjevic the key factor was a group of plays, many associated with the Lord Admiral’s Men, which drew upon a previously neglected source known as the Dunmow Chronicle. John Stow had quoted at length from this little-known medieval text in his 1580 Chronicles of England and from there its spurious version of John’s career was taken up by Anthony Munday and Michael Drayton in their dramatic works. The Dunmow text had included salacious and unsubstantiated details about John’s sexual misadventures, especially with the daughter of his baronial opponent Robert Fitzwalter. These crowd-pleasing stories transformed the positive view of John into one where he appears more frequently as an unbalanced tyrant driven by his lusts.

Yet Djordjevic does not argue for a simplistic transition from one image of John to another. The process developed over several decades, in his view, and included a number of works in which the more benign interpretation of John once again temporarily prevailed. Thus, the author outlines a form of cultural dialogue, especially between rival theatre companies, which offered competing versions of the monarch and his reign, with Shakespeare’s King John being the best-known earlier example.

The plays examined here also bear closely upon the Robin Hood tradition, a related and overlapping set of cultural references that gained increasing popularity in the Tudor period. Indeed, Djordjevic re-christens the group of texts sometimes known as ‘Robin Hood plays’, studied by Stephen Knight among others, as ‘King John plays’, suggesting that hitherto separate lines of scholarly enquiry need to be integrated in order to arrive at more satisfying interpretations of the material. Munday’s works are central to the argument: The Downfall of … and The Death of Robert, Earl of Huntington, probably produced around 1598 and printed in 1601, nominally deal with a figure who is a version of Robin Hood but who, in the author’s view, is ‘probably the least interesting of all’ the characters in the two plays (p. 78). Instead, they deal with a John whose lasciviousness becomes the casus belli for the baronial rebellion of 1215, led by a Fitzwalter now portrayed as a patriotic freedom fighter rather than an ungrateful traitor. The connection is strengthened by the fact that Fitzwalter’s daughter Matilda, supposedly a victim of John’s indiscretions, becomes a model for Robin’s companion Maid Marian.

Close readings of these and other dramatic texts produced well into the seventeenth century form the core of the analysis throughout the book. The author is insistent that scholars should recognise the benefits of treating...