²⁵ See Peter Saccio’s discussion of Shakespeare’s adaptation of the historical sources in Shakespeare’s English Kings: History, Chronicle, and Drama (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1976), 192–3. For more general discussion of Shakespeare’s selective approach to his sources, see A. B. Braunmuller, ’King John and Historiography’, ELH 55 (1988), 309–32.

²⁶ Although the First Folio assigns this speech to Hubert, some editors and commentators assign it instead to the Citizen who speaks for the people of Angiers throughout the scene. I tend to agree with them not only because the tenor of the speech accords with the Citizen’s previous lines, but also because an unnamed Citizen of Angiers proposes the same treaty in The Troublesome Reign of King John (printed 1591), a play whose close relationship to Shakespeare’s King John is a point of recurrent debate. For further discussion of the speech attribution, see A. B. Braunmuller, ‘Who Is Hubert? Speech Headings in King John, Act II’, in Shakespeare’s Speech Headings: Speaking the Speech in Shakespeare’s Plays, ed. George Walton Williams (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 1997), 46–60.