_King John_ is not in the least what Mr Masefield, under this dangerous influence, has persuaded himself it is. It is simply the effort of a young man of great genius to rewrite a bad play into a good one. The effort was, on the whole, amazingly successful; that the play is only a good one, instead of a very good one, is not surprising. The miracle is that anything should have been made of _The Troublesome Raigne_ at all. The _Variorum_ extracts show that, of the many commentators who studied the old play with Shakespeare's version, only Swinburne saw, or had the courage to say, how utterly null the old play really is. To have made Shakespeare's Falconbridge out of the old lay figure, to have created the scenes between Hubert and John, and Hubert and Arthur, out of that decrepit skeleton--that is the work of a commanding poetical genius on the threshold of full mastery of its powers, worthy of all wonder, no doubt, but doubly worthy of close examination.
But 'ideas of treachery'! Into what cloud cuckoo land have we been beguiled by Coleridge's laudanum trances? A limbo--of this we are confident--where Shakespeare never set foot at any moment in his life, and where no robust critical intelligence can endure for a moment. We must save ourselves from this insidious disintegration by keeping our eye upon the object, and the object is just a good (not a very good) play. Not an Ibsen, a Hauptmann, a Shaw, or a Masefield play, where the influence and ravages of these 'ideas' are certainly perceptible, but merely a Shakespeare play, one of those works of true poetic genius which can only be produced by a mind strong enough to resist every attempt at invasion by the 'idea'-bacillus.
In considering a Shakespeare play the word 'idea' had best be kept out of the argument altogether; but there are two senses in which it might be intelligibly used. You might call the dramatic skeleton Shakespeare's idea of the play. It is the half-mechanical, half-organic factor in the work of poetic creation--the necessary means by which a poet can conveniently explicate and express his manifold æsthetic intuitions. This dramatic skeleton is governed by laws of its own, which were first and most brilliantly formulated by Aristotle in terms that, in essentials, hold good for all time. You may investigate this skeleton, seize, if you can, upon the peculiarity by which it is differentiated from all other skeletons; you may say, for instance, that _Othello_ is a tragedy of jealousy, or _Hamlet_ of the inhibition of self-consciousness. But if your 'idea' is to have any substance it must be moulded very closely upon the particular object with which you are dealing; and in the end you will find yourself reduced to the analysis of individual characters.