During April 1811 Jane Austen was staying in London with her brother Henry. In a letter home to her sister Cassandra, she complained of ‘a very unlucky change of the Play for this very night – Hamlet instead of King John – and we are to go on Monday to Macbeth instead, but it is a disappointment to us both’. Two centuries on, we are likely to be astonished that so discerning a woman as Jane Austen would rather have seen King John than Hamlet or Macbeth. There is, however, a simple explanation: Austen was a seasoned admirer of Sarah Siddons, the greatest actress of the age, one of whose most celebrated roles was that of the impassioned Queen Constance, as rewarding a female role as any in the whole corpus of Shakespeare’s English history plays.

King Richard I, the revered ‘Lionheart’, is dead. His brother John has become King of England, but the French argue that the throne should belong to the boy Arthur, son of John’s deceased older brother Geoffrey. Matching the dispute over the throne is a dispute over inheritance in the noble Falconbridge family. It is discovered that Philip Falconbridge (the ‘Bastard’) is the illegitimate son of Richard I; he is accordingly knighted ‘Sir Richard and Plantagenet’. The struggle is strikingly cold-blooded and brutal.

William Shakespeare ( 26 April 1564—23 April 1616) was an English poet, playwright, and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon". His extant works, including some collaborations, consist of around 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and a few other verses, of which the authorship of some is uncertain. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright.