The experience of watching Deborah Warner’s RSC production of King John in the Pit at the Barbican two days after having seen the whole Henry VI-Richard III cycle, adapted as The Plantagenets, in the main theatre convinced me that in King John scenes are more subtly and dramatically conceived than in the Henry VI plays. They are more apt to be built around conflicts within characters as well as between them, to pose moral dilemmas, to be sharpened by ironies and shaped by tensions, and to develop towards climax and resolution. The progress in Shakespeare’s art is apparent both in public scenes in which those motivated by ‘commodity’ manoeuvre to defend or enhance their power and in more private scenes in which individuals suffer the consequences of these political machinations. And the poetry is more complex, the verse more flexible. A. R. Braunmuller must surely be right in deciding, after a careful consideration of the matter, that the anonymous The Troublesome Reign of King John (1591) was not derivative from Shakespeare’s play but served as a source for it, and that ‘King John was composed and performed in the mid 1590s, most probably 1595–6’ (p. 15).