SOURCE: Grennan, Eamon. “Shakespeare's Satirical History: A Reading of King John.” Shakespeare Studies 11 (1978): 21-37.

In the following essay, Grennan contends that Shakespeare's idiosyncratic King John reflects a pivotal change in the historiographic method of the dramatist's earlier chronicle history plays and his source material.

Among Shakespeare's Histories, King John is the odd man out.¹ Common scholarly practice places it between the first and second tetralogies, after Richard III, that is, and before Richard II, but it seems more sui generis than a close relative of either of these groups.² It is in many ways a strange play, lacking the coherent framework of the Yorkist sequence without possessing the rich human and dramatic substance of the Lancastrian. Among all of its author's works it must be one of the least popular, least known, and least produced. Apologizing in advance for brashness, I might add that the reason for its...