SOURCE: Lerner, Laurence. “King John, König Johann: War and Peace.” Shakespeare Survey 54 (2001): 213-22.

In the following essay, Lerner compares Shakespeare's King John with Friedrich Dürrenmatt's König Johann (1968), an adaptation of Shakespeare's work with marked changes in tone and characterization. The critic considers such issues as the more overt cynicism of Dürrenmatt's play with respect to political motivations for the pursuit of war and Shakespeare's subtle treatment of whether to use military force or diplomacy to settle the conflict between France and England.

Friedrich Dürrenmatt's König Johann, published in 1968,¹ is described as a Bearbeitung (reworking or adaptation): it departs considerably from Shakespeare's original, inventing and modernizing freely, and sometimes inserting material from The Troublesome Reign of John, King of England.²

Dürrenmatt's version is certainly more cynical (or at least more openly cynical) than Shakespeare's. There is, for instance, the arrival of the...