SOURCE: "King John: A Study in Subversion and Containment," in King John: New Perspectives, edited by Deborah T. Curren-Aquino, Associated University Presses, Inc., 1989, pp. 62-75.

In the following essay, originally a paper presented at a conference sponsored by the Shakespeare Association of America in 1986, Vaughan asserts that in King John, Shakespeare intentionally reflects the conflicts and contradictions between the old feudal sense of community and the emerging Renaissance belief in individuality and realpolitik.

Alone among Shakespeare's English histories, King John portrays the early Plantagenet rule when England was feudal, its governors and culture Anglo-Norman rather than distinctively English. If, as Graham Holderness has recently argued, the Henriad depicts Shakespeare's sophisticated understanding of the fourteenth/fifteenth-century decline of feudal society,¹ surely King John is even more remarkable, for it reveals the dramatist's awareness of conflict between collective identities and the individual, between centralized royal authority and independent nobles, and...