Delahunty on Commonwealth and Commodity: Shakespeare's "King John"

Robert J. Delahunty, University of St. Thomas School of Law, is publishing Commonwealth and Commodity: Shakespeare's 'King John' in the Journal of Catholic Legal Studies. Here is the abstract.Shakespeare increasingly, and deservedly, enjoys the reputation of being a political thinker of the first rank. In his King John (ca. 1595) — one of his most infrequently performed and unappreciated plays — Shakespeare uses a twelfth century crisis over King John’s right to succeed to the Crown as a vehicle for exploring the subtle interplay of law, custom and power in the fashioning of political legitimacy. The play is an extended meditation on the effects of John’s illegitimate kingship. Shakespeare presents us with a decentered moral universe that is spiraling towards self-destruction and that is governed solely by the principle of power-seeking or “commodity.” The action of the play concerns how the disintegrating world of…

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