SOURCE: "Politics and Conscience," in King John, edited by L. A. Beaurline, Cambridge University Press, 1990, pp. 46-57.

In the following excerpt, Beaurline demonstrates how the world of King John concerns power, personal necessity, and realpolitik rather than ethics or divine Providence.

. . . The foundation of King John is political, for, like all Shakespeare's history plays, it deals with questions of law and power. And as in many of the early histories the trappings of divine providence and mystique of kingship figure only provisionally in the England and France of this drama.¹ The state is for the most part demythologised. Portents, tongues of heaven, and other cosmic signs have had the wonder taken out of them and are reduced to natural causes by the hardheaded representative of the church, Pandulph. Although fanatically devoted to a higher cause, his 'prophetic spirit' envisions little more than the pressures of realpolitik, for behind...