Ebook The Works of William Shakespeare

King John was first printed in the First Folio, where it occupies the first place in the division of Histories. The ten plays belonging to this series form as it were a great national Epic on the crises in English History from the reign of Richard II to that of Richard III, with King John and Henry VIII respectively as the Prologue and Epilogue of the whole. The Editors of the Folio were guided absolutely by chronological sequence in their ar rangement of these plays: hence the place of King John.