1438200 1623 Shakespeare. King John. Complete.
9387.
King John. From the First Folio. 1623.
First Printing. Complete.
SHAKESPEARE. The Life and Death of King John. Complete. [Extracted from: Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories & Tragedies. London: Isaac Jaggard and Ed. Blount, 1623]. Folio, period-style full calf gilt; pp. a1-b5 (1-22).
The 1623 first printing of Shakespeare’s King John 'one of his boldest experiments with making drama out of history' extracted from the landmark First Folio of the Bard’s works. Most likely composed sometime between 1595-97 - roughly contemporaneous with Richard III and The Merchant of Venice - Shakespeare’s dramatization of John’s struggle for the English throne plumbs the often-corrupting realities of political power. Bastard Falconbridge (sometimes hailed as the Bard’s first true hero) emerges as an exemplar of 'a new kind of stage character walk[ing] out of their plays into the space of what A.D. Nuttall rightly calls ‘a new mimesis’' (Harold Bloom, The Western Canon, 47). 'Though located furthest from the present day, from a 21st-century perspective King John seems one of Shakespeare’s most modern works, as well as his boldest experiment with making drama out of history' (Dickson, 160). In 1598, Francis Meares made the first contemporary mention of the play. The First Folio includes the text’s first publication and remains the sole textual authority for it. See Jaggard, 350. The First Folio was prepared by Shakespeare’s associates John Heminges and Henry Condell, and published by William and Isaac Jaggard along with the bookseller Edward Blount in 1623. Of Shakespeare’s thirty-nine undisputed plays, eighteen - including King John - survive solely because they appear in the 1623 Folio, making the book 'Intrinsically the most valuable volume in the whole range of English Literature' (Grolier 100 19). Fewer than 250 copies of the First Folio survive, and most of those copies are incomplete. Individual plays extracted from the First Folio are exceptionally scarce and desirable. Expertly washed, restoration to margins. An excellent copy.
There are no quartos of King John prior to 1623, thus the First Folio version is for all intents and purposes a first edition of a Shakespeare play. The play is written entirely in verse, one of only two works in the canon to contain not a single line of prose (the other being Richard II.)
King John was immensely popular in the nineteenth century and appears to have been a particular favorite of Jane Austen. In the RSC notes for the play, editor Jonathan Bate notes the following:
“During April 1811, Jane Austen was staying in London with her brother Henry. In a letter home to her sister Cassandra, she complained of ‘a very unlucky change of the Play for this very night - Hamlet instead of King John - and we are to go on Monday to Macbeth instead, but it is a disappointment to us both.’” Bate goes on to note that Austen “was a seasoned admirer of Sarah Siddons, the greatest actress of the age, one of whose most celebrated roles was that of impassioned Queen Constance, as rewarding a female role as any in the whole corpus of Shakespeare’s English history plays.”
More recently, Clair Bloom, in her video “Shakespeare’s Women”, cites the role of Constance as among her favorites, and in the RSC video of the play delivers an outstanding performance as the besieged widow of Geoffrey who sees her son Arthur as being the rightful monarch.
Perhaps an even more fascinating character is that of the Bastard, Philip Falconbridge. The Bastard can be seen as forerunner to Iago in Othello or that other bastard, Edmond, in Lear. Philip, however, is the only genuinely sympathetic male character in the play. It is he who confides in us, tells of his strategies before deploying them and thus wins our confidence. In the end, Philip serves as a stand-in for the recently departed Richard the Lionhearted and very nearly ascends the throne himself.
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