SOURCE: "Commodity and Honour in King John" in The University of Toronto Quarterly, Vol. XXIX, No. 3, April, 1960, pp. 341-56.

In the following essay, Calderwood asserts that King John achieves structural unity via the play's juxtaposition of two conflicting themes: commodity and honor.

Most critics of King John, even since the advent of the now no longer new criticism, have given their attention chiefly to the source problems of the play, especially to the relationship between King John and The Troublesome Raigne. As one result Shakespeare's play as a work of art in its own right has largely been ignored. The sporadic vigour of its verse and the vitality of the Bastard have often been remarked—the Bastard's Commodity speech is usually cited as a conspicuous example of both—but not so much for what they accomplish in the play as for what they tell us about Shakespeare's maturing...