King John

Our play-reading group has decided to work its way through Shakespeare's history plays, alternating with plays by others, mostly comedies. It's my job to assign the parts, which since there are only 4 of us consists mostly of ensuring there aren't too many places where we have to exchange lines with ourselves, while insuring continuity of parts and balance as much as possible.

Since the history plays require backgrounds, I attached to the e-mail assigning parts for King John, the first one, a short preface of my own. My colleagues appreciated this, so I intend to continue this. Here's the one I wrote for King John:

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This play is largely about royal inheritance. A large part of Act 1 concerns an illegitimate son and how he therefore cannot inherit, even though his father turns out to be someone different than he was expecting.

John is King of England, but he also has inherited title to various territories in France. He is Duke of Normandy through his ancestor William the Conqueror, Duke of Anjou through his grandfather Geoffrey Plantagenet, and Duke of Aquitaine through his mother Eleanor. On these accounts he is subordinate to the King of France as overlord, but king of France was a weak title at the time, and as also an independent monarch John is under less control. None of which the King of France, Philip II, can be expected to like, so John (and his father Henry II before him) spend a lot of time in France on military campaigns to defend their holdings, at which John doesn't do very well.

But there's a further wrinkle. John was his father's youngest son, and by strict primogeniture succession the crown should have gone to the line of the next oldest brother, Geoffrey, who's dead but who left behind him a young son, Arthur, who was 12 when John became king. (Arthur's mother, Constance, is still around: like her mother-in-law Queen Eleanor, she had inherited lordship of part of France, in her case Brittany.) In those days strict primogeniture was only beginning to arise, and the king was usually elected by the nobles among the most promising relatives of the late king. John was an adult and Arthur only a boy, so he took over from his even elder brother Richard the Lionheart without controversy. But it suits King Philip to weaken John by arguing on Arthur's behalf, and that's how the play begins.