King John and Matilda is a Caroline era stage play, a historical tragedy written by Robert Davenport.
[1][2] It was initially published in 1655; the cast list included in the first edition provides valuable information on some of the actors of English Renaissance theatre.
The title page of the first edition states that the play was acted by Queen Henrietta's Men at the Cockpit Theatre; the actors in the cast list belonged to that company.
The volume includes an epistle addressed "To the knowning Reader" that is signed with the initials "R. D." This has been taken by some commentators to indicate that Davenport was still alive when the play was printed.
The epistle opens with a notable and sometimes-quoted line, "A good reader helps to make a book; a bad injures it."
It includes three female characters of the play, Matilda, Queen Isabel, and the Lady Abbess, but does not identify the actors who filled the roles.
King John had an important role in the political, religious, historiographic mindset of the English Renaissance and Reformation – he was both hero and villain.
As the play opens, John is at odds with the rebellious barons – the ones who in history made him sign the Magna Carta.
(In the first of Munday's Robin Hood plays, The Downfall of Robert Earl of Huntington, the heroine is Maid Marian for the first 780 lines, then suddenly becomes Matilda, no explanation given.
John's queen, Isabel, scratches and abuses the girl as a harlot; but Matilda retains her traditional feminine virtues of chastity and patience.
Matilda's patient virtue placates the Queen's resentment, and even Hubert comes to sympathize, "forcibly charmed by her tears and entreaties."
Lady Bruce and her young son are shown suffering the pangs of hunger in prison; they both die of starvation onstage.