‘Needful Woe’: Tragedy, King John and the Gods

Abstract

Religious interpretations of Shakespeare's King John (1595–96) have emphasised the play's various forms of involvement in the doctrinal and sectarian debates of late Tudor England. This article draws on Walter Benjamin's notion of Trauerspiel, or mourning-play, to reassess these religious concerns. Shakespeare's aesthetics of lamentation is understood as the expression of a religiously informed idea of historical experience. The play stresses its characters' anxieties in their attempts to attune their faith in an all-governing providence to a historical condition characterised by ignorance, misrecognition and despair. Grief becomes the allegorical vehicle channelling the play's representation of the effects of historical catastrophe.