King John - Summation by Anti-Host

Gilbert writes:

Word bethumpers,

King John is a puzzlement. It is just not in any stream of awareness, main- or otherwise. Those Shakespeare festivals committed to the entire canon must do it, but my guess is that Ashland, Oregon, has done one King John for every six Midsummer Nights. As I noted, my undergraduate Shakespeare course started with John because the professor was certain no one had ever read or seen it. Maurice Charney gives it ten pages, though if he didn’t he couldn’t call his book All of Shakespeare, while Marjorie Garber writes eleven pages on John but twenty-nine on As You Like It in her Shakespeare After All. Thus, the Will Shakespeare Experience had a tabula rasa, and as we wrote on it, three foci emerged: women, history, and insights from structure, both the penetrating insight into moral dilemmas that Randall outlined (“tracing the link between politics and morals, Shakespeare is less cocksure and doctrinaire,” says Herschel Baker) and speculations on the Bastard, both central to and somehow detached from the play.

Cindy Calder was struck, then smitten with Lady Constance, assertive, passionate and wily, though I [Gilbert] might add one more little adjective, mad. In the cat fight with her mother-in-law, Queen Eleanor, she continues the earlier Faulconbridge argument mocking paternity, as each woman accuses her rival of adultery. Constance at least defends her son with the earlier “parts” argument: “this boy [Arthur] / Liker in feature to his father Geffrey/ Than thou [Eleanor] and John in manners, being as like/ As rain to water, or devil to his dam.” [Mike—here’s another water image to add to your collection.] Constance can ring changes on “plague,” and can reduce Eleanor’s appeal to Arthur to a parody of baby talk:

Do, child, go to it grandame, child,
Give grandame kingdom, and it grandame will
Give it a plum, a cherry, and a fig.
There’s a good grandame. (II.i.160-63)

In all our glances at Shakespeare’s language, have we ever seen him quite so playful, except when he goes a-Dogberrying? Yet when a messenger reports her son has become a pawn in the political manipulation, engaged to marry Blanch of Spain (perhaps especially devastating to a mother, given that Shakespeare has heavily underscored that Arthur is still a boy), she veers toward madness:

Believe me, I do not believe thee, man,
I have king’s oath to the contrary.
Thou shalt be punish’d for thus frighting me,
For I am sick and capable of fears,
Oppress’d with wrongs, and therefore full of fears,
A widow, husbandless, subject to fears,
A woman, naturally born to fears. (III.i.9-15)

Her grief at the loss of her son, long before Arthur’s death (suicide?), swells to a threnody of inconsolable motherhood. Cindy cited the crescendo: “Death, Death, O amiable lovely Death!” Thus, structurally, King John starts with an essentially comic scene of Lady Faulconbridge faced with both her sons insisting on her infidelity, passes through a battle royal version of this between two royals (Constance is wife to a prince), then darkens to the mother-queens losing their sons, until, in what Marjorie Garber calls “acute dramatic irony, the passing of these two enemies and rivals twinned,” both die within days of each other.

Derek was moved to speculate that in order to be a tough woman in a Shakespearean play, you have to be an old, preferably widowed matriarch figure, and certainly the young woman in King John, Blanch of Spain, seems to be only a mousey cipher. But I’d like to make a case for fourteen-year-old Juliet, who in every comparison, is stronger and wiser than Romeo, and at last recognizes “If all else fail, myself have pow’r to die.” And after Rosalind and Viola, let’s relish the chance to be awed by the “sexed” and unmatronly (!) Cleopatra.

As to history, King John seems too muddled to be the accomplished generic practice that makes Richard II possible. It zigzags among John against Phillip; no, John and Philip against Pandulph; no, Salisbury and Phillip against…well, I lose track…all inflated with what Herschel Baker calls “tumid rhetoric.” Most puzzling for me is Hubert, citizen of Angiers, matchmaker, but later John’s assassin-designate, but who gives way to sentiment and conscience when he spares, movingly, young Arthur.

So, King John is not a fine example of the History genre, yet it does create all these triangles. Randall’s posting, “The Flow of Time,” explores how Shakespeare’s revision of history to set up balanced, though questionable, claims to the throne, create dramatic tensions, that will be the heart and muscle of the three great Histories which follow (leaving Henry V aside as political propaganda—masterful-—without this sort of dramatic tension). Yet without the magnetic field of Tudor history, Shakespeare does create the “three depictions of moral dilemmas—Philip’s, Hubert’s, and Salisbury’s—[which] expose very complex personal [not historical] views,” as Randall noted in “Moral Dilemmas,” and, together with the free radical Bastard, put us closer to Shakespeare than we have been in earlier History.

And finally, from this dramatization of the entwining of politics and morality, Shakespeare has left instruction to Barack Obama:“To set a form upon that indigest/Which he [your predecessor] hath left so shapeless and so rude” (V.vii.26-7).

Gil, aka Thumper

RE: King John and Shakespeare the Bastard

Randall writes:

Gentle friends,

I didn't want to let go of King John without responding to Gil's argument about Shakespeare and Philip Faulconbridge aka The Bastard. As I was reading the play, I shared Gil's question about whether there is another character like the Bastard in Shakespeare's works. The three "types" that occurred to me were "vice," "chorus" and "fool." I don't have my book in front of me (because I'm at a Shakespeare conference in New Hampshire and we're reading Antony and Cleopatra, so King John is at home on my desk) so I won't belabor the various supports and counter-arguments I might try Faulconbridge with. Instead I'll just toss out a few thoughts that occurred to me reading and have stuck with me since.

Outsider? Absolutely. I haven't put my finger on the right term for this yet but there's something about the way a character comments on action within a Shakespeare play that sets him/her apart. Faulconbridge has this quality, one that seems to me chorus-like, even though he is within the play. Gil points to Faulconbridge's freedom from class and "excess moral scruple" (this latter reminds me of some of Shakespeare's later fools: Feste in Twelfth Night, the Fool in King Lear), and I'd agree with both the categorization and the compelling argument that follows. What I'd add is this: Faulconbridge seemed to me fairly unique when I put the play down. Then finishing Antony and Cleopatra last weekend, I thought I found strong similarities in the character of Enobarbus.

In one scene in particular, Antony and Caesar are airing out their mutual grievances. Maecenas suggests that they cease arguing and focus on present needs -- the coming battle with Sextus Pompey. Enobarbus quips "Or, if you borrow one another's love for the instant, you may, when you hear no more words of Pompey, return it again. You shall have time to wrangle in when you have nothing else to do" (2.2.124-127). Antony shuts him down: "Thou art a soldier. Speak no more." And Enobarbus famously closes with "That truth should be silent I had almost forgot."

So here again is the outsider (soldier), whose anti-hypocritical comment on the primary action accords him the status of truth-speaker, elevating him above the action. Enobarbus in not quite as outside as Faulconbridge -- he lacks the same degree of ironic detachment -- but after his exchange with Antony, I think we as readers listen to him differently and he becomes an occasional chorus-like figure.

And I don't think Enobarbus is the only character like this. I wonder if the plays we're reading now signal a period in which Shakespeare consistently includes characters who have a portion of the quality that Gil defines, be they fools, friends, or foils. Even the quality of commenting on inflated rhetoric seems thematic in the plays we're currently reading (think Henry at the end of Henry V, wooing Katherine). Is this Shakespeare putting himself into his plays? I think we're always on dangerous ground when we say anything about Shakespeare the man (as I did in my last post), but I would find it hard to deny that in the outsider or commentator-type characters, a world view beyond character seems to emerge. I'd like to be more specific about this, so I'll note it as a characteristic to consider as we continue with our reading.For now I'll turn mute.

Your considerate stone,
Randall

King John - Mere Echoes or More?

Randall writes:

Companions,

A number of us have concurred with the chronological placement of King John's writing between the two tetralogies. Some critics that I've looked through, though, place Richard II immediately prior to King John (Edmund Chambers, Sylvan Barnet, Derek Traversi), dating it 1595-96 to John's 1596-97. Whatever the order, I am interested in certain echoes in character and sentiment that turn up, which I believe point to Shakespearean attitude. We praise Shakespeare for his nearly unlimited variety in character, in fully developed and unique motivation, in tone. Yes. But I want to look sometimes at those moments when characteristics recur or similar speeches are mouthed by different people because I think these kinds of repetitions allow us to examine concepts imported to the play.

One frequently cited example is Shakespeare's views on theater which turn up in characters as diverse as Hamlet and Jacques. But Richard II and King John provide a different echo, and one question might be: do such confluences occur because the two (history) plays are written so close together, or because Shakespeare takes opportunities regardless of the common moment of the two plays to mount some soapbox?

Take dying John of Gaunt's cornucopia of patriotic epithets in Richard II:

This royal throne of kings, this scepter'd isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,
This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings,
Fear'd by their breed and famous by their birth,
Renowned for their deeds as far from home,
For Christian service and true chivalry,
As is the sepulchre in stubborn Jewry,
Of the world's ransom, blessed Mary's Son,
This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land,
Dear for her reputation through the world,
Is now leased out. (Richard II 2.1.40-59)

I wouldn't be surprised to see this speech excerpted and put on inspirational posters in English classrooms. It's something of a diva speech, recalling Shakespeare's early willingness to pull out all the language stops in plays like Love's Labor's Lost and Romeo and Juliet. The overwhelming abundance of appositional phrases, not to mention the hugely delayed predicate whose absence emphasizes the preceding phrases all the more, shift our attention from Gaunt to Shakespeare. It's like when, in the blues or rock, a guitarist finds a brief phrase and repeats it over and over and over, until the crowd begins to cheer, recognizing that their focus has been shifted by the repetition from art to artist. Hence, it's easy to lose sight in this speech of what it's about ― pride in one's country and disappointment that others have failed in their allegiance.

A slight echo emerges in King John, when the Duke of Austria pledges allegiance to Arthur, whom he believes to be the rightful King of England. He promises:

That to my home I will no more return
Till Angiers and the right thou hast in France,
Together with that pale, that white-faced shore,
Whose foot spurns back the ocean's roaring tides
And coops from other lands her islanders,
Even till that England, hedged in with the main,
That water-walled bulwark, still secure
And confident from foreign purposes,
Even till that utmost corner of the West
Salute thee for her king. (King John 2.1.21-30)

While Austria reduces Gaunt's 17 versions of England to a mere five, his words elaborate on Gaunt's "fortress built by Nature" and expand Gaunt's epithets by adding personification. But in both we hear the clear tones of patriotic reverence, in one even from a foreigner (something that will occur again in Henry V when members of the French court speak in awed tones about the English power).

Certainly many characters in Shakespeare love their country (Othello commits himself to Venice, Titus kills a son for Rome, Hamlet is concerned about something rotting in Denmark), but Gaunt's effusive speech, Austria's addition of a paean to England to his promise of support for Arthur, and the King of France's quaking fear of Edward the Black Prince strike me as more than moments of rounded character. In repetition, in echo, they become themselves evidence of a motif that goes beyond character and highlights Shakespearean attitude.

So, while he prepares plays about recent kings that explore the complexities of usurpation, the confusion of political discord, the instability of allegiance, and the imprecision of moral choice, and then sets those stories in front of Elizabethan aristocracy, it must be reassuring to Shakespeare to know that at some point, some character is delivering a speech to remind his audience that, above all, Shakespeare loves England, and that England should be the god of one's idolatry. I'd cue up England's national anthem about now, but England doesn't actually have one (they have a commonwealth anthem). Perhaps someone should nominate a version of Gaunt's speech. Something like this:

(To the tune of "God Save the Queen.")

This royal throne of kings,
this earth of majesty,
this scepter'd isle.

This land of such dear souls,
this blessed plot, this earth,
this other Eden, this dear dear land.

This precious stone set in
the silver sea, this realm, this little world.

This happy breed of men,
Renowned for distant deeds,
For Christian service and
true chivalry.

This teeming womb of kings
feared for their lineage, famous by birth.
This fortress Nature-built
dear for her reputation through the world.
This England.

Oh, my stars and stripes,
Randall

RE2: King John - Constance

Gil writes:

Cindy, and the Lords on the left,

My original focus in King John, engendered deep down by my undergraduate prof William Matchett, was on a triangle among power or possession (John), right (Arthur), and character―duty, reputation, honor, or patriotism (the Bastard). Historically, John had a legitimate claim to the throne according to his brother Richard I's will, but the Elizabethan audience could listen to an argument for Richard's late older brother Geoffrey's son Arthur on grounds of primogeniture (we will soon be tangled in the wrangle between Mortimer and Bolingbroke). Shakespeare establishes this conflict from the beginning when the French ambassador refers to John's "borrowed majesty" (I.i.4) and to young Arthur, "thy nephew and right royal sovereign." John rebuts with "Our strong possession and our right," and his mother Queen Eleanor underscores that: "Your strong possession much more than your right," i.e., possession is nine-tenths of the law. So, once again in the Histories, the issues of usurpation, possession, and succession are in play.

But the creation of the non-historical Bastard makes it more complex, because he is given (bar)sinister royal blood, the direct son of Richard I, Coeur-de-lion, so he would have the most legitimate claim to the throne were he not born on the wrong side of the sheets: "something about, a little from the right,/ In at the window, or else o'er the hatch./ Who dares not stir by day must walk by night,/ And have is have, however men do catch" (I.i.170-73). It is neat he rhymes rather than blusters about his own illegitimacy, taking the sting from the possibility that Shakespeare nearly created King FitzRichard Ia.

Eventually, by character and action, the Bastard rises to viceroy of England: "Now hear our English King,/ For thus his royalty doth speak in me" (V.ii.128-9) and emerges victorious over the French, Rome, and his own treasonous lords, who whine "That misbegotten [literally] devil Faulconbridge,/ In spite of spite, alone upholds the day" (V.iv.4-5). John is poisoned by a monk, one of those pesky Catholics (Holinshed writes John died "through anguish of mind"). But a brand new character (baaad Shakespeare), young Prince Henry, is introduced in Act V, scene vii, duty or honor prevails, and the Bastard kneels "with all submission, on my knee./ I do bequeath my faithful services/ And true subjection everlastingly" (V.vii.103-5), and English history is again on track. Cindy and I are both pleased we do not need to go on to The Long Boring Life of King Henry III. Bring on Dick, the Tooth.

Cindy redirected me (though I spent 56 days in computer limbo and many hours in hospital waiting rooms) to the mother-son relationships. We first see a comic version, in which the Faulconbridge brothers appear before the king to argue contentiously that their mother has cuckolded their father. One thinks that we will see the old joke about a wife/mother's fidelity (e.g., Don Pedro: "I think this is your daughter." Leonato: "Her mother hath many times told me so," Much Ado, I.i.104-105), but this time questioning legitimacy is in earnest:

BASTARD
I, a gentleman
…and eldest son,
As I suppose, to Robert Faulconbridge…
Most certain of one mother
…and, as I think, one father
But for the certain knowledge of that truth.
I put you o'er to heaven and to my mother.
Of that I doubt, as all men's children may. (I.i.50-52, 59-63, italics mine)

Eleanor defends motherhood: "Out on thee, rude man, thou dost shame thy mother,/ And wound her honor with this diffidence" (I.i.64-5), though she does note a physical resemblance to her own son, Coeur-de-lion. King John, Coeur-de-lion's brother, caps it: "Mine eye hath well examined his parts,/ And finds them perfect Richard" (I.i.89-90). That settles it; in those pre-DNA times, parts is parts. Robert Faulconbridge insists King Richard had much employed his father, but the Bastard redirects him, " Your tale must be how he employ'd my mother."

Soon, the resolution is agreed upon: Robert, though not the eldest son and heir, gets the land, but Philip/Sir Richard Plantagenet/ aka the Bastard gets the face, the blood of his great father, and the honor to follow his grandmother Queen Eleanor, though his blunt, rude humor immediately emerges: "My father gave me honor, yours gave land./ Now blessed be the hour by night or day/ When I was [be]got, Sir Robert was away!' (I.i.104-6), though 'honor' may be a tenuous word, if one notes that 'hour' and 'whore' are homophones in Elizabethan England.

Enter Lady Faulconbridge: "O me, 'tis my mother," who is mighty piqued that her two sons have come before the king to besmirch her reputation, yet she must acknowledge that King Richard Cordelion was the Bastard's father; he "that art the issue of my dear offense,/ So strongly urg'd past my defense." The Bastard's rationale to absolve his mother from sin ("your fault was not your folly;" "Needs must you lay your heart at his dispose / Subjected tribute to commanding love') is touching. This guy ripped the heart out of lions; what defense would a mere woman have?

Cindy feels the Bastard lets his mother off easily, yet he truly thanks her that she has given him the heart of a lion, far better than a landed income of 500 pounds a year. I rehearse this at length because if the play underscores mother-son relationships, this first, as with everything we associate with the Bastard, is fraught with delicious irony. Yet, by the end of the play, it is the Bastard's honor, duty, patriotism, and character that prevail. And, thanks to his mother, we can see the root [pace Eric Partridge] from which this grew.

Gil

RE: King John - Its Place in the Flow of Time

Randall writes:

Ernst, et. al,

One good cheat deserves another. I notice in the excerpt of Herschel Baker's intro to King John, he writes that Shakespeare's play gives us a story of a king "plagued by a rival with a better claim." I like Peter Saccio's expansion and review of this idea in Shakespeare's English Kings: History, Chronicle and Drama. Saccio writes:

Shakespeare is unique (at least among sixteenth-century writers dealing with John) in his interpretation of the reign. In the contest with Arthur, Shakespeare's John is flatly a usurper. Eleanor of Aquitaine is made to remark that he holds the crown "by strong possession much more than … right." As we have seen, this notion entails stricter views of royal inheritance than were in fact current in 1199. It implies a firm legitimist rule of dynastic descent that was to develop only in much later times. The notion is also at variance with Tudor accounts of John. Most Tudor historians do not question the legitimacy of John's crown. In Holinshed there is no serious doubt about his right: Richard I wills all his dominions to John, the English lords swear fealty accordingly, and only a few French towns consider that Arthur has a better claim. Only if we go back to Polydore Vergil, a Catholic historian who reflects medieval monastic chroniclers hostile to John because of his defiance of the pope, do we find charges of usurpation. Even The Troublesome Reign, while manifesting the same pattern of events, does not harp on this string. (Saccio 202-203)

So my question is this: does the view of John as usurper take shape in the play because Shakespeare himself is a product of a time concerned with "legitimist rule" or because it is necessary for a more dramatic text? What leads to this particular characterization?

One place we might look is the earlier Richard III (I'm accepting various people's placement of King John between the two tetralogies). When we discussed Richard III, Gil connected us to Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time, a detective novel in which the protagonist, Alan Grant, explores the veracity of the Richard character we've come to know from Shakespeare's play. Gil wrote: "Recognizing that the popular 'knowledge' of Richard is a monster, the crunchbacked murderer of the princes in the Tower, Grant sends young Carradine on multiple research missions, and 'solves' the historical truth ('Truth is the daughter of time') about the king. The history that we all know was written by John Morton (Bishop of Ely in our play), transcribed by Saint Sir Thomas More as The History of King Richard the Third, adapted by Hall, then Holinshed, and the latter three were Shakespeare's sources. All were writing under the patronage of the Tudors, Henry VII, Henry VIII, and then Elizabeth. Winners write history. Henry VII had a most marginal claim to the throne, his father Owen Tudor, married the granddaughter of John of Gaunt's illegitimate son. We know from Henry IV through Henry VI how usurpation is the stain from which there is no escape. Henry VII, with such tenuous legitimacy, then disposed of every more legitimate claimant, including ― TA DA! ― the princes in the tower. Then, his historians 'murdered' Richard's reputation post mortem. Richard was not even deformed, though apparently thin and one shoulder was slightly higher than the other. Yeah, it's only a detective novel, but it apparently is built on the more accurate account of Richard who, after the Tudor reign and their creation of the Tudor myth, has been rehabilitated."

So in Richard III, Shakespeare takes his popular history from Tudor sources and Richard is depicted as a Vice. But Saccio suggests that Tudor historians did not see John as a usurper, yet in King John John's legitimacy is seriously at question. What's more this inconsistency is reflected in Holinshed. One conclusion we might draw from this is that Shakespeare stages stories, not political propaganda. Richard III, as politically expedient as it may be in establishing a Tudor myth, is a whopping great tale ― seduction, murder, betrayal, war, absent horses. King John becomes a better tale as Shakespeare increases the dramatic tensions. What happens, after all, to the conflict between John and Rome if Arthur's claim to the throne and more specifically Philip's allegiance with Arthur do not become movable pieces in that chess game? We may think of King John as a lesser play (when comparing it to the Henrys IV and Henry V), but it is a cleverly and powerfully structured play.

I'm still wondering, maybe even more so now, what Elizabeth play-goers would have made of all this? When Oliver Stone directed JFK, the press was full of declaming sputtering about historical accuracy and the irresponsibility of promoting conspiracy theories in a popular medium. We have always allowed Hollywood to run rough-shod over historical accuracy, but we do get our dander up when it comes to important political figures. If the Globe Theatre is the Hollywood of its time, does that audience (aristocrats and groundlings both) ever raise a stink over the portrayal of kings, and if so, what documentation of that controversy survives?

Randall

King John and Shakespeare the Bastard

Gil writes:

Long "lost" friends,

Despite the linear mile of shelf-feet in libraries of such titles as Shakespeare’s Ideas, Meaning by Shakespeare, Materialistic Shakespeare, or Shakespeare Right and Left, I am reluctant ever to assert “according to Shakespeare.” Instead, I’m more comfortable with ‘Othello believes, while Iago insists’ or ‘according to King Henry IV, but alien to Falstaff.’ In King John, Cardinal Pandulph denounces King Philip: “So mak’st thou faith an enemy to faith,/ And like a civil war set’st oath to oath,/ Thy tongue against thy tongue” (III.i.262-4) and follows with a perfect example of strict and rigorous ratiocination, an example, I’m told by Garber and EAJ Honigmann, of the doctrine of equivocation. This casuistry, impossible, I imagine, for an audience to follow, proves all form is formless, all order orderless. Yet it does not “prove” Shakespeare is a nihilist; rather it articulates flawlessly a Roman Catholic doctrine, anathema to Elizabethan Protestants. Pandulph, and the Church he represents, is intelligent, powerful, arrogant, and — twisted. This argument creates dramatic tension within the play between the Church and the pusillanimous Kings Philip and John. Shakespeare the playwright speaks in many tongues.

Nevertheless, I am tempted to equate Philip Faulconbridge, the Bastard, to Shakespeare himself allowing his personal perspective and ironic asides into this chronology play. Faulconbridge is a fictional creation, not subject to the template of events, politics, betrayals, or even the history overseen by father Holinshed. From the first, he is an outsider, beyond hereditary class and freed of any excess moral scruple. After witty and bawdy calumniation of his mother’s honesty, thereby gaining an (unhistorical) lineage as the bastard son of Richard I, Coeur-de-lion, he can resign his rights in the English landed gentry and rely on his merit and virility, taking his chances with Queen Elinor when she, remarkably, declares “I am a soldier” (that is, she is man enough for him). His one constant is devotion to English patriotism. He declares independence: “And I am I, howe’er I was begot”― freedom, though still within the limits of time and place.

Is there another such character in Shakespeare? Berowne? Much of Richard III? Later some of King Lear’s Edmund (as a bastard)? Outside Shakespeare, perhaps some of Ernst’s malcontents such as Chapman’s Bussy d’Ambois, or Dryden’s blustery Almanzor (“For I alone am king of me”) though neither has a sense of irony. But preventing him from being a tragic figure, the Bastard maintains a detached, ironic counterpoint to politics, mores, hypocrisy. After John knights him as Sir Richard, Plantagenet, he muses on how he must behave now he is nominally a courtier, ‘a foot of honour better than he was,’ and he wonderfully parodies the artifices of court life, how to ‘make a leg,’ suck his teeth, and memorize pickup lines from an absey-book, and “from the inward motion to deliver/ Sweet, sweet, sweet poison for the age’s tooth.” An outsider’s aside, outside the plot. Where else does Shakespeare just fool around with phony court behavior? Maybe with Bushy, Bagot, and Green in Richard II, but they are historical figures, integral to the plot and elemental to Richard’s character and reputation.

In the military action before the besieged city of Angiers, we return to warrior virility, the Bastard as a man of action, so forceful that Austria calls him a “cracker.” The Bastard dismisses wavering by both kings: “O now doth Death line his dead chaps with steel;/ The swords of soldiers are his teeth, his fangs/ … Cry ‘havoc!’ kings (II.i.352-3, 357), poetry so rhetorically rich as to border on satire if we still remember his send-up of courtly artifice. The next time one hears “Cry havoc!” it will be Henry V, the perfect warrior. But here, the Kings of England and France, after all their threats and bloodshed, compromise into an emasculating truce negotiated by the marriage of Louis the Dolphin to John’s niece, Blanche of Spain, and the Bastard muses on how self-interest and opportunism dilute patriotism, honor, and human character in his analysis of “commodity,” prefaced with “mad world, mad kings, mad composition!”

I find the commodity soliloquy one of the great pieces of commentary in Shakespeare, akin to Henry V on “ceremony” or Ulysses on “degree.” It is personal, illustrated by images from observed life (even noting that self-interest will cheat the poor maid of her only possession, her virginity), yet at the end of the soliloquy the Bastard deflects it with an ‘or not!’

Well, whiles I am a beggar, I will rail,
And say there’s no sin but to be rich;
And being rich, my virtue then shall be
To say there is no vice but beggary.
Since kings break faith upon commodity,
Gain, be my lord, for I will worship thee! (II.i.503-8),

a sing-song pair of couplets deflating the penetrating philosophy. I hear Shakespeare seeing into the mad world, then Philip the Bastard joking his way out of high seriousness.

Yet, in the field before Angiers, Austria has worn a lion’s skin, a trophy from killing Coeur-de-lion, and the ‘cracker’ Bastard again and again baits him by calling it a calf’s skin—four times!—deflating the strutting warrior image as he has earlier been bemused by court artifice. Yet he is not a Dogberry (‘write me down an ass’) or a Thersites, because, despite his seeming levity, he still avenges his ‘father’s’ death, and displays Austria’s head on his pike. Finally, the Bastard is wryly amazed at Hubert’s swollen rhetoric relative to the truce of Angiers: “Here’s a large mouth indeed…zounds, I never was so bethumped with words/ Since I first call’d my father dad” (II.i.457, 466-67). So commenting, the Bastard is a critic of rhetoric (written, remember, by Shakespeare) akin to Hamlet’s famous advice to the players. It is often acknowledged that “Hamlet” is Shakespeare lecturing his acting company. Does it not seem that the Bastard steps outside the chronicle to comment on the rhetoric of chronicle plays?

Shakespeare the Bastard nears the end of his fifth chronicle play: “I am amaz’d, methinks, and lose my way/ Among the thorns and dangers of the world” (IV.iii.140-1). So he steers through the maze [Ernst—I’m placing King John before the Henriad] to four unified plays — that most lyrical exploration of sovereignty and the king’s two bodies, Richard II; the perfectly navigated course between King Henry IV and Falstaff toward sovereignty in 1 Henry IV; the touching display of old age in Northumberland, Falstaff and King Henry in 2 Henry IV; and the perfect portrait of the public political figure of King Henry V, all rising thanks to the objective outsider’s eye from the rather disjointed and sometimes overblown chronicle of King John.

Re-wired,
Gil

King John - Its Place in the Flow of Time

Ernst writes:

Brethren and sistern,

This is a cheat, but I think it is important that we realize when King John was probably written, and that is sometime between Richard III and Richard II―i.e. around 1594 or so. Knowing that, one can consider Shakespeare's themes and characterization in relation to the appropriate plays. It also seems to be a play that may have been started quite early in Shakespeare's writing career and fiddled with over a period of several years―all of which makes its dating increasingly difficult, although I think, by and large, that around 1594 will work well.

The arguments for seeing the play in these terms I take from Hershel Baker's introduction to the play in The Riverside Shakespeare. I append the excerpt below.

Ernst

KING JOHN — INTRODUCTION
(Herschel Baker, from The Riverside Shakespeare)

"The date of King John, a play noted by Francis Meres in 1598 and, so far as we know, first printed in the Folio of 1623, is difficult to fix. Although 1594-95 would seem to be the safest guess, external evidence is altogether lacking and internal evidence is, as usual, oblique and inconclusive."'Basilisco-like" (I.i.244) no doubt derives from the name of a character in Soliman and Perseda, a play written between 1589 and 1592 and perhaps subsequently revived. The action of King John, about an English monarch who is plagued by a rival with a better claim, by the enmity of Rome, and by a strong invading power, suggests the tangled relationships between Elizabeth, her cousin Mary Stuart, and the King of Spain; but to construe the play as an allegory of the Armada years is to press the case too hard, Moreover, attempts to fix a (date from alleged topical allusions to the defeat of the Armada (1588) in the loss of the French fleet, to Henry IV's apostasy (1593) in the vacillation of King Philip and the Dauphin Lewis, and to the death of Shakespeare's son Hamnet (1596) in Constance's laments for Arthur do not impart conviction.

"The Troublesome Reign of John, King of England—an anonymous play published in two parts in 1591, ascribed to "W. Sh." on the title-page of the second quarto in 1611, to "W. Shakespeare" in the third quarto in 1622, and subsequently to almost everyone who was writing for the stage in the early 1590's—poses special problems about the source and date of Shakespeare's play and has therefore prompted much conjecture. That The Troublesome Reign and King John are somehow intimately related is not open to dispute; indeed, the close parallelism of their plots, which, although Shakespeare's play is some three hundred lines shorter than its companion piece, exhibit virtually the same episodes in the same order, makes it clear that one play is based upon the other, unless a common source, now lost, is postulated. This kinship is confirmed by smaller details as well, as when both confusingly identify Viscount of Limoges, with Leopold, Archduke of Austria (II.i.5), or deprive Constance of her third husband in order to present her as a strident widow (II.i.32) or show scores of verbal similarities, though only two that extend to as much as a whole line of verse (II.i.528, V.iv.42). The Troublesome Reign has long been held a source—in Dover Wilson's opinion, indeed, the only source—of King John; but Peter Alexander and E. A. J. Honigmann have separately advanced the theory that King John was written first (about 1590-91) and that The Troublesome Reign should be regarded as a reported text, or "bad" quarto, of Shakespeare's play. However, the data cited to support this view are at best tangential, and in the absence of more compelling evidence most scholars still prefer to think that Shakespeare wrote King John, as E. K. Chambers said, with a copy of The Troublesome Reign at hand.

"It is most unlikely that Shakespeare knew of John Bale's King John, a virulently anti-Catholic play of the 1530's, but he certainly used Holinshed's Chronicles and probably Fox's Acts and Monuments [a series of tales about Protestant “martyrs” at the hands of Catholics such as Queen Mary] for details not included in The Troublesome Reign, and he may also have looked at Matthew Paris' Chronica Majora. Mr. Honigmann thinks that he got the date of Queen Elinor's death (IV.11.1.20)—which was apparently unavailable in any printed source—from the Latin manuscript Wakesfield Chronicle and that for the great scene (IV.i) between Hubert and Arthur he followed the Latin chronicle of Ralph Coggeshall.

"Stylistically, King John is marked by tumid rhetoric. It is filled with violent action, but the action often serves as the occasion for debate or disputation, and consequently the play is very verbal. For example, in a wryly comic scene almost at the beginning Faulkenbridge and his puny brother contest their patrimony; and the second act presents a sequence of debates—or at any rate of declamations—with John opposed to Philip, Elinore to Constance, the French and English heralds before the city of Angiers, Faulkenbridge and Hubert, each advancing his proposal. Elsewhere the action hovers on such forensic exhibitions as Pandulph’s equivocating defense of oath-breaking (III.i.253-97), Arthur’s moving plea to Hubert for his life (IV.i.253 ff.), and the Dauphin’s explanation of his plan to conquer England (V.ii.78-108). Most conspicuous of all are Constance’s lamentations, in Acts II and III, for the injuries to her son. “I deny counsel all redress,” she says when he is captured,

But that which ends all counsel, true redress:
Death, death. O amiable lovely death!
Thou odiferous stench! Sound rottenness! . . .

"Philip’s comment on the appalling woman’s rhetoric (which has endeared the role to many actresses) is one that every reader will endorse: “You are as fond of grief as of your child.” On the other hand, scenes such as John’s exchange with Hubert (III.iii.64-66) about getting rid of Arthur are so tight and so alive with drama that they mark a new advance in Shakespeare’s style:

K. John: Thou are his keeper.
Hubert: And I’ll keep him so,
That he shall not offend your majesty.
K. John: Death.
Hubert: My lord?
K. John: A grave.
Hubert: He shall not live.
K. John: Enough.

"A puzzling and uneven play, King John is a daring exploration into the murky details of Realpolitik. In Shakespeare’s earlier history plays—the Henry VI trilogy and Richard III, politics is treated as a branch of morals. The course of events, apparently so jagged and complex, is shown to have a pattern and a direction that reveal a moral purpose coextensive with the will of God. Even if evil seems to triumph over good, as when the tyrant Richard wades through blood to reach the throne, we know that God directs events—the convulsions of dynastic struggle no less than the fall of a sparrow—and that His intentions are benign. This doctrine of providential history, which St. Augustine devised and which most Tudor chroniclers thriftily converted into a tool of party politics, begins to yield to something darker and more subtle in King John. Shakespeare is still concerned with politics, of course, but in tracing the link between politics and morals he is less cocksure and doctrinaire. Slogans no longer serve his purpose, nor do inert, reassuring commonplaces of Hall and Holinshed supply the need for explanation. Instead, the ambiguities of character assert themselves, and history is presented not as a paradigm of moral purpose but as a tangled skein of good and evil, where mixed motives are revealed in indecisive actions, and where even a good man fears to lose his way.

"This being a history play, the dynastic situation itself (which Shakespeare, as usual,distorts for his own purpose) exemplifies equivocation. In John, Arthur, and Faulconbridge we are presented, as it were, with three aspects of kingship: a sovereign whose very title is suspect, his youthful rival whose better claim is made the pawn of scheming politicians, and a bastard son of royalty who, finding his identity, is compelled to exercise the awful functions wherein the other two have failed. In other words, the bad, weak man in possession of the throne flouts the helpless rightful heir, brings his kingdom to distraction, and dies as the very "module of confounded royalty" while the Bastard rises to assume the kingly burden that the King himself could not sustain. By juxtaposing these contrapuntal ambiguities Shakespeare does great violence to the notion that might and right are always intertwined, but he makes us look anew at what Edmund Burke called the solemn plausibilities whereby we order our existence."

Excerpt copyright 1974, Houghton Mifflin Company.