By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘Grief fills the room up of my absent child’: so begins perhaps the most celebrated and moving speech in all of King John, which is not exactly a Shakespeare play that’s replete with celebrated speeches. The play lurks somewhere in the attic of Shakespeare’s […]
Tag: King John
An Interesting Character Study: King John
King John is the most unheroic of Shakespeare’s protagonists. He is not the cruellest, but he is perhaps the most craven, the one lacking in personal depth and, for want of a better word, character. He is more put-upon than anything, which somehow succeeds in making his acts of violence […]
An Interesting Character Study: Faulconbridge from Shakespeare’s King John
For Harold Bloom in Shakespeare: The Invention Of The Human, the Bastard, Faulconbridge, is one of Shakespeare’s first truly ‘Shakespearean’ characters, because with this character Shakespeare was not trying to emulate Christopher Marlowe’s rhetoric from Tamburlaine but drawing on ‘nature’ and reality for inspiration. As a result, Faulconbridge is the […]
A Summary and Analysis of William Shakespeare’s King John
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) In 1899, the great Victorian theatre director Herbert Beerbohm Tree made a short silent film to promote his forthcoming stage production of William Shakespeare’s history play, The Life and Death of King John. This short piece of silent cinema included footage of King John’s […]
Interesting Facts about Magna Carta
A short and interesting history of Magna Carta and its surprising legacy So few of the facts about Magna Carta in popular circulation are true. Its enduring place in popular consciousness is, however, indisputable. Its influence even extends to music: Kurt Weill composed a cantata, The Ballad of Magna Carta, about it. […]