Considering this play in its double
aspect of tragedy and history, we might say that the English hero becomes
the central figure of the poem as seen from its historic side, while John
remains the central figure of the poem as seen from its tragic side; the
personal interest that depends on personal crime and retribution is
concentrated on the agony of the king; the national interest which he,
though the eponymous hero of the poem, was alike inadequate as a craven
and improper as a villain to sustain and represent in the eyes of the
spectators was happily and easily transferred to the one person of the
play who could properly express within the compass of its closing act at
once the protest against papal pretension, the defiance of foreign
invasion, and the prophetic assurance of self-dependent life and self-
sufficing strength inherent in the nation then fresh from a fiercer trial
of its quality, which an audience of the days of Queen Elizabeth would
justly expect from the poet who undertook to set before them in action
the history of the days of King John. That history had lately been
brought upon the stage under the hottest and most glaring light that
could be thrown on it by the fire of fanatical partisanship; _The
Troublesome Reign of King John_, weakest and most wooden of all wearisome
chronicles that ever cumbered the boards, had in it for sole principle of
life its power of congenial appeal to the same blatant and vulgar spirit
of Protestantism which inspired it.
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