Comparative Drama

It has become a critical commonplace that King John was a figure laden with significance for Elizabethan historical dramatists. Maligned by medieval commentators such as Matthew Paris, who wrote that hell itself was made fouler by the dead monarch, after the Reformation John could be seen on the strength of his quarrel with the Papacy as a kind of dry run for Henry VIII. John Bale, for example, would cast “noble kynge Iohan” as Moses to Henry’s Joshua, with the later king finally leading the English to “the lande of mylke and honye” (King Johan, ed. John Henry Pyle Pafford, Malone Society Reprints, 1931; 1097, 1103). In King John (Mis)Remembered, however, Igor Djordjevic offers a much more nuanced picture of John’s literary afterlife. For one thing, he brings together materials that have tended to interest different groups of critics: historical chronicles, the King John plays of George Peele and William Shakespeare, the Admiral’s Men plays about Robin Hood, and Samuel Daniel’s Jacobean historiography. For another, some of the plays he considers, such as the anonymous Look About You and Robert Davenport’s King John and Matilda, have largely failed to capture the interest even of aficionados of obscure early modern drama. This gives his book admirable range and ambition.

Of crucial importance in Djordjevic’s account is the Dunmow Chronicle, a medieval text partially reproduced in John Stow’s Chronicles of England of 1580. This fragment offers a fanciful account of thirteenth-century history including a sympathetic portrayal of the feudal magnate Robert FitzWalter who, not coincidentally, was a major benefactor of the Augustine priory at Little Dunmow, Essex. In a version of history overlooked by other Elizabethan chroniclers, it attributes the baronial wars to a “discord” that arose “because of Mawde called the Faire, daughter to Robert Fitz Water, whome the King loued, but hir father woulde not consente” (The Chronicles of England, London, 1580; 242). Although ignored by Peele and Shakespeare, whose dramatic treatments of King John Djordjevic discusses in his second chapter, the Dunmow narrative evidently interested some [End Page 123] writers. One was Michael Drayton, who used it as the basis for his 1594 poem Matilda, and for a dialogue in Englands Heroicall Epistles; Djordjevic suggests that Drayton saw in the story “an English historical world-changing exemplum to rival the tragic power of Tarquin and Lucrece” (59). Another was Anthony Munday, who seems to have been the first dramatist to associate King John with Robin Hood (in his Earl of Huntingdon plays). As with Drayton, Djordjevic finds Munday in these plays using the story of John and Maud/Matilda as a means of figuring something bigger: “the role of a king’s overwhelming passions in the history of a nation” (84). While this treatment of Munday as a serious, historically aware dramatist rather than a theatrical hack is welcome, it does, however, involve a marginalizing of Robin Hood as merely a “device” (93) for the plays’ exploration of John’s kingship—a reading I find overstated given how insistently the frame narrative presents The Downfall of Robert Earl of Huntingdon as a play about Robin Hood. It also involves a marginalizing of Henry Chettle—not merely the reviser of Munday’s work, as Djordjevic has it (73), but apparently a substantial contributor to Part Two, for which the Admiral’s Men paid him twenty shillings in comparison to Munday’s fifteen (although Philip Henslowe’s records do not specify how the remaining balance was allocated) (Henslowe’s Diary, ed. R. A. Foakes and R. T. Rickert, 2nd ed., Cambridge University Press, 2002; 87). As the reviser of Stow’s Survey of London, and a figure of notoriously uncertain religious sympathies, Munday fits much more neatly than Chettle into Djordjevic’s overall narrative.

Djordjevic’s reading of Look About You characterizes it, like the Huntingdon plays, as...