If there's a contest for the least known of Shakespeare's plays, we feel King John would certainly be in the running. With a meandering plot and characters that don't exactly sizzle on the page or stage, it's a tough play to rank amongst the very best that Shakespeare wrote. However, we're well past Shakespeare's early dalliances with drama, and this play reveals a level of intellectual depth, nuance, and contradiction that makes for excellence podcast fodder.

We hope you'll join us for a discussion of the characters and themes of this play set in the high middle ages that nonetheless manages to focus on some very Elizabethan concerns. 

Ancient Bickerings:

This episode we discussed a topic that's always doomed to interpretation and mis-interpretation: authorial intention. We tried to answer the question, "Who did Shakespeare want to be the King from amidst the characters of the play?" 

Notes:

Shmoop Themes and Related Questions on King John: https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/king-john/themes 

The Always Useful Wikipedia Entry on Magna Carta: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magna_Carta

The Bastard may have loosely been based on Philip of Cognac, who was an illegitimate son of Richard I: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_of_Cognac