Cultural depictions of John, King of England

John of England has been portrayed many times in fiction, generally reflecting the overwhelmingly negative view of his reputation.

King John as shown in Cassell's History of England (1902)

Art

The North Wall Frieze in the courtroom of the Supreme Court of the United States depicts King John granting Magna Carta.[1]

Literature
  • King John is the protagonist of John Bale's sixteenth-century Protestant play King Johan, in which he is depicted positively as a bulwark against the papacy.
  • John was the subject of an anonymous Elizabethan play, The Troublesome Reign of King John, in 1591. The play reflects the sympathetic view of King John during the English Reformation; it depicts John as "a fearless resister of the Papacy".[2] This play is believed by many Shakespeare scholars to have been a source for Shakespeare's play.[2]
  • King John appears in the plays The Downfall of Robert Earl of Huntington and The Death of Robert Earl of Huntington (1598) by Anthony Munday. Munday's two plays feature the exploits of Robin Hood, and John is depicted as Robin's enemy in these plays. Munday's work thus incorporated King John into the Robin Hood legends.[3] As a result of this, John and one of his Justices in Eyre, the Sheriff of Nottingham, are frequently portrayed as villain and henchman in later versions Robin Hood legends. These usually place the Robin Hood stories in the latter part of Richard I's reign, when Richard was in captivity and John was acting as unofficial regent.[3]
  • John was the subject of a Shakespearean play, King John (written c. 1595, and published in 1623).[2]
  • Prince John is a central figure in the 1819 historical romance Ivanhoe, by Sir Walter Scott, and is depicted in subsequent adaptations. Ivanhoe helped popularize the image of King John as cruel and villainous.[4] The novel also calls John a "Norman", although contemporary historical documents from John's reign do not refer to the monarch as a Norman.[4]
  • King John features in the three-decker novel Forest Days (1843) by G. P. R. James, about the First Barons' War.[5]
  • The children's novel The Constable's Tower: or the Times of Magna Charta (1891) by Charlotte Mary Yonge, revolves around John signing the Magna Carta, and also features the Siege of Dover during the First Barons' War.[6]
  • The novel Uncanonized (1900) by Margaret Horton Potter features King John.[5]
  • King John is the subject of A. A. Milne's poem for children, King John's Christmas (1927), which begins "King John was not a good man", but slowly builds sympathy for him as he fears not getting anything for Christmas, when all he really wants is a rubber ball.[7]
  • In the comic parody 1066 and All That (1930) John is depicted as "an Awful King".
  • The Devil and King John by Philip Lindsay (1943) is a highly speculative but relatively sympathetic account.[8]
  • Philip José Farmer, a science fiction author, featured King John as one of several historical figures in his Riverworld Saga.
  • Below the Salt (1957) by Thomas B. Costain depicts the First Baron's War and John's signing of the Magna Carta.[9]
  • John is a character in James Goldman's 1966 play The Lion in Winter, which dramatises Henry II's struggles with his wife and sons over the rule of his empire. John is portrayed as a spoiled, simple-minded pawn in the machinations of his brothers and Philip II of France.[10]
  • James Goldman also wrote a novel called Myself As Witness (1979), a fictional record of the later years of John's reign purportedly kept by the chronicler Gerald of Wales.[11]
  • John is a character in Maureen Peters' 1983 novel Lackland's Bride, which deals with his marriage to Isabella, Countess of Gloucester.
  • Sharon Penman's Here Be Dragons deals with the reign of John, the development of Wales under Llewelyn's rule, and Llewelyn's marriage to John's illegitimate daughter, Joan, who is depicted in the novel as "Joanna". Other novels of hers which feature John as a prominent character are The Queen's Man, Cruel as the Grave, The Dragon's Lair, and Prince of Darkness, a series of fictional mysteries set during the time of Richard's imprisonment.
  • John is featured in several books by Elizabeth Chadwick, including Lords of the White Castle, The Champion, and The Scarlet Lion.
  • Judith Tarr features a sympathetic Prince John as the protagonist of her fantasy novel Pride of Kings (2001).[12]

Film

John has been portrayed on film by:

Television

John has been portrayed on television by:

Radio

John is played by Neil Stuke in Mike Walker's BBC Radio 4 series Plantagenet (2010).

Comics

King John was depicted in a 1955 Classics Illustrated adaption of Scott's Ivanhoe.[13]

References
  1. "US Supreme Court Courtroom Friezes" (PDF). Retrieved 19 February 2019.
  2. "King John", in Michael Dobson, Stanley Wells, Will Sharpe, Erin Sullivan (eds.) The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare. Corby : Oxford University Press 2015. ISBN 9780198708735 (pgs. 276-279)
  3. Knight, Stephen Thomas,Robin Hood : A Mythic Biography. Ithaca, N.Y. : Cornell University Press 2009. ISBN 9780801489921 (pgs. 52-55).
  4. Brownlie, Siobhan, Memory and Myths of the Norman Conquest. Woodbridge, Suffolk; Boydell & Brewer Ltd., 2013. ISBN 1843838524 (pp. 124-5)
  5. McGarry, Daniel D., White, Sarah Harriman, Historical Fiction Guide: Annotated Chronological, Geographical, and Topical List of Five Thousand Selected Historical Novels. Scarecrow Press, New York, 1963 (pgs. 62. 64).
  6. Myron J. Smith, War story guide: an annotated bibliography of military fiction. Scarecrow Press, 1980. ISBN 978-0810812819 (p. 17).
  7. "Milne's King John—alone, without friends, receiving Christmas greetings only from himself and never getting presents—seems designed as an object lesson encouraging readers, but especially its children-listeners, to be good so as to receive gifts from Father Christmas." Hodgdon, Barbara, The End Crowns All : closure and contradiction in Shakespeare's history. Princeton; Princeton University Press, 1991. ISBN 9780691608808 (p.22)
  8. "Review: The Devil and King John by Philip Lindsay". The Spectator Magazine, 16 April 1943 (pg. 20).
  9. Smith, Myron J. War Story Guide: an annotated bibliography of military fiction. Scarecrow Press, 1980. ISBN 978-0810812819 (p. 25).
  10. Palmer, R. Barton (2009). "Queering the Lionheart: Richard I in The Lion in Winter on stage and screen". In Kathleen Coyne Kelly & Tison Pugh (ed.). Queer movie medievalisms. Ashgate. p. 58.
  11. Evans, Michael R. Inventing Eleanor: The Medieval and Post-Medieval Image of Eleanor of Aquitaine. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014. ISBN 9781441146038 (p. 112)
  12. "Pride of Kings by Judith Tarr". Publishers' Weekly, September 4th, 2001. Retrieved May 26th, 2020.
  13. Jones, William B. Classics Illustrated: A Cultural History, with Illustrations. McFarland, 2002. ISBN 9780786410774 (pgs. 49 , 163)
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