²¹ My thinking about King John is generally indebted to the substantial body of criticism on gender and Shakespeare’s history plays. See especially Howard and Rackin’s chapter on King John in Engendering a Nation, 119–33; Juliet Dusinberre, King John and Embarrassing Women’, Shakespeare Survey 42 (1990), 37–52; Katherine Eggert, Showing Like a Queen: Female Authority and Literary Experiment in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 51–99.

²² Several scholars have commented on the disappearance of women after the third act and the sudden masculinist turn in the action. See Dusinberre, ’King John and Embarassing Women’, 51–2; Howard and Rackin, Engendering a Nation, 125–6; Virginia M. Vaughan, King John: A Study in Subversion and Containment’, in Curren-Aquino (ed.), New Perspectives, 72.