King John Themes

When it comes to the theme of power in King John, Shakespeare is mostly interested in these three questions: What makes a monarch fit to rule? What gives a monarch the legal right to rule?What...

Family relationships are always messy in Shakespeare's plays, especially when royal families are involved. And by "messy," we don't just mean complicated; we mean they're bloody, too. In King John,...

There's more backstabbing in King John than in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. And that's saying a lot because Julius Caesar literally gets stabbed in the back... about a gajillion times.)From beginni...

Even though Shakespeare's King John is set around the turn of the 12th to 13th centuries, the events in the play parallel events from Shakespeare's 16th-century world. It turns out that writing abo...

The picture of war we get from Shakespeare's King John isn't all that different from what we find in a lot of other works of literature. We hear a lot about the horror of war (especially in Act 2,...

If we didn't know better, we'd think Shakespeare was listening to "Macho Man" on his iPod when he wrote King John. In the medieval warrior culture of this play, there are totally different expectat...

Move over Lady Macbeth, because women characters (especially mothers) play interesting and important roles in King John. Rather than sit back and let the men control all the action, Constance and E...

You probably noticed that the characters in the play have some serious chops when it comes to language and communication—they can bend language to all sorts of different purposes. The most playfu...

In a play that's obsessed with the theme of power, it's only natural that a prominent place would be given to that theme's opposite: weakness. Only by considering the horrible position that weak pe...

Compassion and forgiveness are major themes in King John, but do they always go hand-in-hand? If you think about compassion as a feeling of pity or empathy that comes from within, then it probably...

It's hard to sum up the picture we get of loyalty in King John, since loyalty here seems to be a pretty flimsy thing. It's hard to tell if these characters are just totally weak or if they're just,...