SOURCE: Saeger, James P. “Illegitimate Subjects: Performing Bastardy in King John.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 100, no. 1 (January 2001): 1-21.

In the following essay, Saeger discusses the Bastard's illustration of the developing relationship between identity and political legitimacy in King John, arguing that in the course of the drama Faulconbridge endeavors to assert an authentic nature for himself and for England.

Like the English history plays he wrote before and after it, Shakespeare's The Life and Death of King John dramatizes a relationship between personal identity and political legitimacy. Unlike his other history plays, however, King John does not combine its questions about the personal and political within a single character. Instead, Shakespeare divides the inquiry between John, the center of the play's public political struggle, and the Bastard Philip Faulconbridge, on whom Shakespeare concentrates his extended investigation into the nature of personal legitimacy and individual identity. The...