The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 16.0360  Tuesday, 22 February 2005

[1]     From:   Jack Heller <
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        Date:   Monday, 21 Feb 2005 09:24:30 -0500 (EST)
        Subj:   Re: SHK 16.0343 Date of King John

[2]     From:   Bob Grumman <
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        Date:   Monday, 21 Feb 2005 09:31:26 -0500
        Subj:   Re: SHK 16.0343 Date of King John

[3]     From:   Edmund Taft <
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        Date:   Monday, 21 Feb 2005 12:03:45 -0500
        Subj:   Date of King John


[1]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From:           Jack Heller <
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Date:           Monday, 21 Feb 2005 09:24:30 -0500 (EST)
Subject: 16.0343 Date of King John
Comment:        Re: SHK 16.0343 Date of King John

Michael Egan's post advancing Shakespeare as a possible collaborator
with George Peele on Troublesome Reigne ends with these assertions:

 >This conclusion continues to be resisted by scholars only because TR's
 >verse (not its plot) seems so unlike what we find in King John. <snip>

Yet this

 >hypothesis accounts not only for everything that is known about the
 >publication and performance histories of both works but (more important)
 >their contrasting stylistic qualities, plot similarities and narrative
 >contradictions. It also extends by one the list of Peele's and
 >Shakespeare's known collaborations.

I'll resist this conclusion for a very different reason: ideological
differences between the two plays. Troublesome Reigne is the work of a
writer (or writers) with militant Protestant sympathies consistent with
its source, John Foxe's Acts and Monuments. While I am agnostic on the
Lancastrian theories of Shakespeare's recusant Catholicism (a change
from my earlier endorsement of such theories), I still find Shakespeare
taking positions opposed to Foxe's ideology, both in his King John and
in the creation of Falstaff/John Oldcastle in the second Henriad.
Troublesome Reigne presents John as a flawed but essentially godly
militant proto-Protestant martyr. Shakespeare presents John as a
would-be Machiavel, one who would envy Richard III's steely resolve.
There are more differences between the two plays than what Michael Egan
allows for.

Jack Heller

[2]-------------------------------------------------------------
From:           Bob Grumman <
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Date:           Monday, 21 Feb 2005 09:31:26 -0500
Subject: 16.0343 Date of King John
Comment:        Re: SHK 16.0343 Date of King John

 >This conclusion continues to be resisted by scholars only because TR's
 >verse (not its plot) seems so unlike what we find in King John. But
 >Vickers has recently conclusively demonstrated that the verse writer was
 >Peele.

Conclusively?  I don't see how he could have.  You were making good
sense up to there, for me.

--Bob G.

[3]-------------------------------------------------------------
From:           Edmund Taft <
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Date:           Monday, 21 Feb 2005 12:03:45 -0500
Subject:        Date of King John

Michael Egan writes:

"But Vickers has recently conclusively demonstrated that the verse
writer was Peele. Until now however no one has considered the
possibility that T.R. might have been a collaboration between him and
the young Shakespeare, who created TR's Author's Plot and perhaps
contributed a few phrases."

This is an intriguing hypothesis. Shakespeare learned a lot from Peele,
and in more than one genre. Surely MND is deeply indebted to Peele's
conceptions of comedy, and _Henry V_ has a chorus much like Peele's in
_The Battle of Alkazar_. It's not inconceivable that they collaborated
on _TR_.

Ed Taft

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