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 closely analyzes The Troublesome Reign of King John, arguing that this inferior play is not the source for Shakespeare's King John or for its character the Bastard, but that King John is in fact the source for The Troublesome Reign.

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...