Cannons, Arden of Faversham, Troublesome Reign of King John, and King John

Topic: Cannons, Arden of Faversham, Troublesome Reign of King John, and King John

Source-Control Update, 2026-05-29

• This packet has been moved from lead to mixed. The play-text witnesses for Troublesome Reign, Arden of Faversham, and King John are now partly checked against local EarlyPrint/EEBO and early-modern drama databases. The authorship inference remains interpretive.
• The 1591 EarlyPrint/TCP witness A68278 verifies the Troublesome Reign cannon passage quoted by the blog: the line has Cannons crack and battlements of heauen in the old-spelling text.
• The 1611 EarlyPrint/TCP witness A04520 is the combined "first and second part" quarto whose title page includes Written by W. Sh. It repeats the cannon passage and also verifies the part-two furnace passage in old spelling: fornace seuen-fold hote.
• The local Early Modern Plays database splits Troublesome Reign into PLAY_ID 341 and PLAY_ID 342. In that normalized corpus, Part 1 has one cannon hit and three orisons hits; Part 2 has one furnace hit and one orisons hit. This supports the blog's "four times" orisons count across the two parts.
• The 1592 EarlyPrint/TCP witness A20951 verifies the Arden of Faversham cannon passage: cannons burst, ruinated wall, and the nearby forge distressefull looks phrase. It also has a separate Cannon bullet passage.
• The King John side is controlled by the related hardened packet. The safe wording is not that King John has an exact ordnance reading, but that it has dense cannon/artillery/bullet language and one ordinance line in the Angiers siege scene.
• Do not use this packet as a proof of Neville/Shakespeare authorship of Troublesome Reign or Arden. The Casson, Peele, and apocrypha-authorship claims still need direct secondary-source and comparative checks.

1. Verified Sourced Facts

Bibliographic and Corpus Controls

• EarlyPrint local EarlyPrint database identifies A68278 as the 1591 The troublesome raigne of Iohn King of England, author Unknown.
• EarlyPrint local EarlyPrint database identifies A04520 as the 1611 combined The first and second part of the troublesome raigne of Iohn King of England, author Unknown; the title metadata includes Written by W. Sh.
• Folger Shakespeare Documented confirms the attribution history: the play was first published anonymously in 1591; the 1611 quarto adds Written by W.Sh.; the 1622 quarto expands the attribution to W. Shakespeare.
• Folger Shakespeare Documented also reports that Brian Vickers's George Peele case is followed by Charles Forker's 2011 Revels edition. That supports "Peele is a serious scholarly attribution lane," not "Peele is settled fact" for this packet.
• EarlyPrint local EarlyPrint database identifies A20951 as the 1592 Arden of Faversham, author anon.
• EarlyPrint local EarlyPrint database identifies A11954 as the 1623 First Folio, Mr. VVilliam Shakespeares comedies, histories, & tragedies, author William Shakespeare.
• The local Early Modern Plays database records:
• PLAY_ID 341, 1 The Troublesome Reign of King John, 1591, 14,384 tokens.
• PLAY_ID 342, 2 The Troublesome Reign of King John, 1591, 9,883 tokens.
• PLAY_ID 378, Arden of Faversham, 1590, 20,200 tokens.
• PLAY_ID 505, King John, 1596, 20,775 tokens.

Troublesome Reign

• Local EarlyPrint FTS search word_text:"Cannons crack" returns A68278 only among the returned exact hits. Raw A68278 text verifies the old-spelling passage with damned orisons, Cannons crack, and battlements of heauen.
• Local EarlyPrint FTS search word_text:"damned orisons" returns two witnesses: A68278 (1591) and A04520 (1611).
• Local EarlyPrint FTS search word_text:"battlements of heauen" returns 17 rows, including A68278 and A04520. This phrase should not be treated as unique to Troublesome Reign without a narrower date/genre control.
• Raw A04520 verifies the furnace passage in the second part: fornace seuen-fold hote. Local FTS confirms it with word_text:"fornace seuenfold hote" and lemma_text:"furnace sevenfold hot", both returning A04520.
• The local Early Modern Plays database gives these normalized controls:
• Part 1 has one cannon hit: the echo of a cannon's crack discharged against the battlements of heaven.
• Part 1 has three orisons hits, including damned orisons.
• Part 2 has one furnace hit: That rageth as the furnace sevenfold hot.
• Part 2 has one orisons hit.

Arden of Faversham

• Raw A20951 verifies the old-spelling cannon passage in Arden of Faversham: cannons burst, ruinated wall, and the nearby forge distressefull looks.
• Local EarlyPrint FTS search word_text:"ruinated wall" returns A20951 only among returned exact hits.
• Local EarlyPrint FTS search word_text:"cannons burst" returns A20951 and A06270 (A Larum for London, 1602), so the phrase is not unique but the Arden witness is real.
• The local Early Modern Plays database records two cannon hits in Arden: the cannon's burst passage and a separate Cannon bullet passage. It also records three bullet hits and one substantive gun powder hit.

King John and Neville Ordnance Control

• The related hardened King John ordnance packet confirms that local Folger King John has dense cannon, artillery, bullet, battery, and iron-indignation language in the Angiers siege scene.
• That packet also corrects the inherited ordnance claim: local Folger King John has no exact ordnance hit; it has ordinance once in 2.1.
• Raw A11954 First Folio text supports the same guardrail. The Angiers passage has The Canons haue their bowels full of wrath, Their Iron indignation, and By the compulsion of their Ordinance.
• The Neville/BRO ordnance side is controlled through the related Mayfield and King John ordnance packets, especially D/EN/O23 documents concerning cast-iron ordnance and Neville's 1599 diplomatic letter about the casting of 50 or 60 peeces. This overview should cite those packets rather than repeat their full source apparatus.

Demoted or Unchecked Claims

• The Ken Feinstein blog claim that cannon imagery can test apocryphal Shakespeare/Neville authorship remains an interpretive lead.
• The John Casson attribution claim has not been directly checked in this packet.
• The Peele comparison examples listed in the blog have not yet been checked against direct Peele texts here.
• The Edward III cannon material in the blog is not structurally necessary for this packet and should probably be separated into an apocrypha/cannon-imagery packet if used.

2. Ken Feinstein Twitter and Blog Information

• A Ken Feinstein blog post dated 21 Nov. 2018 states:

“Mayfield manor and park had come into Neville hands through Neville’s mother, Elizabeth Gresham, and included a furnace used for casting iron ordnance.”

• The same post states:

“through most of the 1580s and 1597, Sir Henry Neville was intimately involved in the manufacture of ordinance (cannons).”

• The same post states:

“cannon imagery is a hallmark of Shakespeare's works”

• The same post states:

“When trying to determine whether a certain apocryphal work was actually written by Shakespeare/Neville, my first check is always for cannon imagery.”

• The same post states:

“John Casson suggests that the Troublesome Reign of King John was written by Neville/Shakespeare.”

• The same post states:

“A quarto of this play was published in 1591”

• The same post quotes The Troublesome Reign:

“As is the eccho of a Cannons crack / Dischargd against the battlements of heauen.”

• The same post states:

“Conventional wisdom is that George Peele wrote the play.”

• The same post states that the word orisons:

“appears four times in the play and appears in several Shakespeare plays”

• Folger's Shakespeare Documented page for the 1611 second edition of The Troublesome Reign of King John confirms that the play was first published anonymously in 1591, that the 1611 quarto added Written by W.Sh., and that a 1622 quarto expanded that attribution to W. Shakespeare.

• Folgerpedia's King John page states that Shakespeare's King John was probably written in 1594-96, published in the 1623 First Folio, and that The Troublesome Reign of John King of England may be a source.

• Source check, 2026-05-29: the quoted Troublesome Reign cannon passage is verified directly in A68278 and A04520. The furnace passage is verified directly in A04520 and in normalized form in the local Early Modern Plays database, but a separate 1591 second-part page witness remains to be identified.
• Source check, 2026-05-29: the blog's orisons count is supported in the local Early Modern Plays database as three hits in Part 1 and one hit in Part 2.
• Source check, 2026-05-29: the Arden cannon passage is verified directly in A20951.
• Source check, 2026-05-29: the King John ordnance wording requires correction to ordinance, following the related hardened packet.

3. Citations

• Feinstein, Ken. "Cannons, Arden of Faversham, Troublesome Reign of King John, and King John." kenfeinstein.blogspot.com, 21 Nov. 2018, https://kenfeinstein.blogspot.com/2018/11/cannons-arden-of-faversham-troublesome.html. Local preservation: blog_cannons_arden_troublesome_reign_2018-11-21.md.
• Kirwan, Peter. “The Troublesome Reign of King John, second edition.” Shakespeare Documented, Folger Shakespeare Library, https://shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/resource/document/troublesome-reign-king-john-second-edition.
• “King John.” Folgerpedia, Folger Shakespeare Library, https://folgerpedia.folger.edu/King_John.
• Local Early Modern Plays database: local early modern plays database, especially PLAY_ID 341, 342, 378, and 505.
• Local EarlyPrint corpus database: local EarlyPrint database, especially A68278, A04520, A20951, and A11954.
• Local EarlyPrint FTS database: local EarlyPrint FTS index. Checks used include word_text:"Cannons crack", word_text:"damned orisons", word_text:"battlements of heauen", word_text:"fornace seuenfold hote", lemma_text:"furnace sevenfold hot", word_text:"cannons burst", and word_text:"ruinated wall".
• cannons_in_the_canon_iron_ordnance_in_king_john.md, hardened related packet controlling the King John and BRO ordnance lane.
• mayfield_manor_and_ironworks.md, related Mayfield packet.
• cannons_in_the_canon_blast_furnaces.md, related blast-furnace packet.

4. Notes on Access

• This is now a mixed source-control packet, not a blog-only lead packet.
• This packet preserves a Ken Feinstein blog post.
• The locally preserved Blogger export records no embedded images for this post.
• The Troublesome Reign and Arden play-text claims now have local database witnesses; the authorship claims do not.
• The exact EarlyPrint public/local corpus boundary matters. The local FTS and raw XML checks are independent local controls, not a substitute for final page-image collation from quarto scans.
• The bibliographic relationship between Troublesome Reign and Shakespeare's King John is real and source-discussed, but the cannon-imagery/authorship extension remains a Ken Feinstein interpretive lead until direct textual comparison and secondary scholarship are checked.