'King John' and 'The Troublesome Raigne': Sources, Structure, Sequence
1995; University of Iowa; Volume: 74; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0031-7977
Autores Tópico(s)Renaissance and Early Modern Studies
ResumoThe debate goes on: is Shakespeare's King a source or a derivative of anonymous The Troublesome Raigne of King (1591)? In 1989 the `orthodox' opinion that The Troublesome Raigne precedes King John seemed to one critic now ... so strong as to need no further elaboration or support.(1) A year later, another made best case yet for unorthodox position that King spawned rather than sprang from The Troublesome Raigne.(2) Everyone concurs that The Troublesome Raigne is intimately related to and manifestly inferior to King John, but there agreement ends. To some, a writer with merest fraction of Shakespeare's talent could not have followed King almost scene for scene and often speech for speech and yet have repeatedly substituted his own awkward limp for forceful stride Shakespeare's language has throughout this play.(3) To others, a writer with so little talent would never have been able to reshape Holinshed and other historical sources so well that Shakespeare could work from it, again, almost scene for scene and often speech for speech.(4) Although both conclusions sound plausible, first can be set aside if, as Suzanne Gary and L. A. Beaurline suggest, author of The Troublesome Raigne was working from a mere scenario of King John, perhaps in form of an author's plot such as we know were made in Elizabethan theater.(5) If someone with little experience as a dramatist had access to an outline of Shakespeare's scenes but not to details of his language, he could easily have produced what we find in The Troublesome Raigne. The second conclusion, however, becomes more and more difficult to dislodge. All participants in debate agree that the author who worked first from chronicles undertook a massive reorganization of historical (Smallwood, p. 367). John's reign naturally falls into three periods: 1199-1206, dominated by disputes with King Philip of France and Prince Arthur over John's claim to Angevin territories in France; 1207-1213, confrontation with Pope; and 1213-1216, barons' rebellion and French invasion. One of two authors makes these three crises coalesce by dint of a daring rearrangement of events. In long sequence outside Angiers, he even fashions a single stylized day(6) from destruction of Angiers (1206),(7) marriage between Blanche and Louis (1200), papal excommunication of (1207-1211), battle of Mirabeau (1202), killing of Limoges (1199), abortive French invasion prompted by Pope (1213) and Dauphin's invasion (1216).(8) So boldly and brilliantly has history been reshaped that even those who argue for priority of The Troublesome Raigne sometimes feel that nobody but Shakespeare could have moulded material so well, that somehow or other he must at least have had a hand in The Troublesome Raigne before rewriting it as King John.(9) No one doubts that Shakespeare had imagination and skill to reconstruct chronicles, since throughout his career he radically rearranged and recombined sources. So thoroughgoing indeed are his transformations of his material, historical and dramatic, in rest of canon that it is difficult to suppose that in this one instance he would have meekly followed a mediocre novice. Shakespeare already had to his credit not only his first comedies and tragedy but four English history plays that had opened up possibilities of genre, whereas author of The Troublesome Raigne appears to have written nothing else.(10) As even supporters of The Troublesome Raigne's priority admit, play shows him to be--apart from reinvention of John's reign--an insipid versifier and an uninspired journeyman playwright (Dover Wilson, p. xxxix), whose construction is loose and whose working-out in detail . . . is clumsy (Bullough, 4:9), and who can even be capable of outright imbecility (Hamel, p. …
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