A01=Igor Djordjevic
admirals
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
Ancient Funerall Monuments
Anonymous Playwright
Author_Igor Djordjevic
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Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=DSB
Category=DSBD
cluster
COP=United Kingdom
cultural memory studies
De Braose
Delivery_Pre-order
early modern drama
Englands Heroicall Epistles
English Renaissance theatre
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
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fitzwalter
Henry III
historiography England
Innocent Iii
John's Reign
johns
John’s Reign
King Henries
King Iohn
King Richard III
Language_English
literary reception history
lord
Lord Admiral's Men
Lord Admiral’s Men
Lord Chamberlain's Men
Lord Chamberlain’s Men
men
Munday's Plays
Munday’s Plays
Ottava Rima
PA=Temporarily unavailable
Peele's Play
Peele’s Play
Pope Innocent III
Price_€100 and above
PS=Active
reign
Richard Coeur De Lion
Richard III
robert
Robert FitzWalter
Robin Hood
Robin Hood tradition
softlaunch
Stuart Century
topical
Topical Cluster
transformation of royal reputation
troublesome
Troublesome Reign
William Vallans
Young Man
Product details
- ISBN 9781472462046
- Weight: 560g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 28 Jul 2015
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
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King John’s evil reputation has outlasted and proved more enduring than that of Richard III, whose notoriety seemed ensured thanks to Shakespeare’s portrayal of him. The paradox is even greater when we realize that this portrait of John endures despite Shakespeare’s portrait of him in the play King John, where he hardly comes off as a villain at all. Here Igor Djordjevic argues that the story of John’s transformation in cultural memory has never been told completely, perhaps because the crucial moment in John’s change back to villainy is a literary one: it occurs at the point when the 'historiographic' trajectory of John’s character-development intersects with the 'literary' evolution of Robin Hood. But as Djordjevic reveals, John’s second fall in cultural memory became irredeemable as the largely unintended result of the work of three men - John Stow, Michael Drayton, Anthony Munday - who knew each other and who all read a significant passage in a little known book (the Chronicle of Dunmow), while a fourth man’s money (Philip Henslowe) helped move the story from page to stage. The rest, as they say, is history. Paying particular attention to the work of Michael Drayton and Anthony Munday who wrote for the Lord Admiral’s Men, Djordjevic traces the cultural ripples their works created until the end of the seventeenth century, in various familiar as well as previously ignored historical, poetic, and dramatic works by numerous authors. Djordjevic’s analysis of the playtexts’ source, and the personal and working relationship between the playwright-poets and John Stow as the antiquarian disseminator of the source text, sheds a brighter light on a moment that proves to have a greater significance outside theatrical history; it has profound repercussions for literary history and a nation’s cultural memory.
Igor Djordjevic is Associate Professor of English at York University, Canada. He is also the author of Holinshed's Nation (2010).
