SOURCE: “King John and The Troublesome Raigne: Sources, Structure, Sequence,” in Philological Quarterly, Vol. 74, No. 1, Winter, 1995, pp. 37-56.

In the following essay, Boyd argues that Shakespeare's play King John provided source material for The Troublesome Raigne of King John.

The debate goes on: is Shakespeare's King John a source or a derivative of the anonymous The Troublesome Raigne of King John (1591)? In 1989 “the ‘orthodox’ opinion that The Troublesome Raigne precedes King John” seemed to one critic “now … so strong as to need no further elaboration or support.”¹ A year later, another made the best case yet for the “unorthodox” position that King John spawned rather than sprang from The Troublesome Raigne.²

Everyone concurs that The Troublesome Raigne is intimately related to and manifestly inferior to King John, but there agreement ends. To some, a writer with the merest fraction of Shakespeare's talent could not have followed King John...