The Arden Shakespeare is the established scholarly edition of Shakespeare's plays. Now in its third series, Arden offers the best in contemporary scholarship. Each volume guides you to a deeper understanding and appreciation of Shakespeare's plays.
This edition of King John provides:
- A clear and authoritative text, edited to the highest standards of scholarship.
- Detailed notes and commentary on the same page as the text.
- A full, illustrated introduction to the play's historical, cultural and performance contexts.
- A full index to the introduction and notes.
- A select bibliography of references and further reading.

With a wealth of helpful and incisive commentary, The Arden Shakespeare is the finest edition of Shakespeare you can find.
King John tells the story of John's struggle to retain the crown in the face of alternative claims to the throne from France and is one of the earlier history plays. The new Arden Third Series edition offers students a comprehensive introduction exploring the play's relationship to its source and to later plays in the history cycle, as well as giving a full account of its critical and performance history, including key productions in 2015 which marked the anniversary of Magna Carta. As such this is the most detailed, informative and up-to-date student edition available.

Jesse M. Lander is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of Inventing Polemic: Religion, Print, and Literary Culture in Early Modern England (2006). In addition to editing Macbeth (New York, 2007) for the Barnes & Noble Shakespeare, he was textual editor for 1 Henry IV in the third edition of The Norton Shakespeare (New York, 2015). Most recently, he joined Zachary Lesser and Heidi Brayman to edit a collection of essays entitled The Book in History, The Book as History: New Intersections of the Material Text (New Haven, 2016).
J.J.M. Tobin, Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Boston, is a former Woodrow Wilson Fellow and Fulbright Scholar who has taught at Boston College, York University, in Toronto, and Boston State College. He has served as general editor of the ninevolume Evans Shakespeare Series (Boston, Mass., 2011), for which he edited Hamlet, and contributing editor to the second edition of The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston, Mass., 1997). He is the editor of The Complete English Poems of George Herbert (Harmondsworth, 1992, second edition 2001), and in addition to a number of notes and articles has published Shakespeare's Favorite Novel (Lanham, MD, 1984), dealing with the sources, chronology and texts of Shakespeare, Milton and other Renaissance writers.