SOURCE: “Renaissance Emblems of Death and Shakespeare's King John,” in English Studies, Vol. 79, No. 5, September, 1998, pp. 425-29.

[In the essay below, MacKenzie examines the imagery of regeneration in King John, arguing that Shakespeare emphasizes the importance of death, rather than life, in the play.]

The fourth print in Hans Holbein's Icones Historiarvm Veteris Testamenti reveals Adam in a postlapsarian world. He tills the soil, assisted and shadowed by a skeletal Dance of Death figure. It is a vision of toil and hardship, and the 1547 verse accompaniment to the Lyons edition emphasises the consequences of Adam's transgression.

En grand labeur, & sueur de son corps
Le pere Adam a sa uie gaignee,
Heue tandis en doloreux effortz
Subiecte a l’Homme enfante sa lignee.(1)

The reference is to Genesis 3:17-19. In eating the fruit of the forbidden tree, Adam has incurred the doom of mortality. No longer undying and happy in the Garden of Eden, he must labour and perish in the barren landscape of the fallen world. The shadowing Death figure reminds him, and all those who glance at this symbol of his mortal misfortune, that the punishment of transgression was death.

This seems a distressing image at first. But the mood of the print is not pessimistic. Sitting in the background, almost unnoticed, a smiling Eve nurses their first born child. The verse accompaniment, with its allusion to ‘pere’ and ‘enfante’, quietly endorses the visual subtext. The immortality of Eden may have been lost, but there is a new kind of immortality here—the immortality of earthly procreation, of one generation spawning the next in a never-ending cycle of physical life, death, and rebirth. In essence, and despite the Biblical mythology of the Fall that underpins the image, Holbein presents a celebration of the regenerative potential of the human condition.

Holbein's theme of earthly regeneration found common expression in the emblem books of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Here, the notion of ‘life in death’ is accorded varied representation—see, for example, the work of Lubbaeus,² Covarrubias,³ Paradin,⁴ Reusner,⁵ Coornhert,⁶ and Wither.⁷ Two woodcuts are particularly striking. Juan de Horozco y Covarrubias, in Emblemas Morales (1591), depicts a pile of skulls from which grows a young healthy plant (p. 194). The accompanying motto reads: ‘Enla Mverte esta la Vida’ (‘In Death there is Life’). Claude Paradin, in Les Devises Heroiques (1561), offers a pile of bones from which wheat stalks grow, their heads scattering seeds down into the bones below (p. 151r). To this image he appends the adage: ‘Spes altera vitae’ (‘The hope of another life’ or ‘Another hope of life’). In each case, the inspiration is probably Biblical—the notion of spiritual life following physical death. But the images of its expression are physical images. It is physical life that follows physical death.

Shakespeare showed considerable interest in the ‘life from death’ construct. This is how Hereford hails his father as he prepares for combat in Richard II:

O thou, the earthly author
of my blood,
Whose youthful spirit, in me regenerate,
Doth with a twofold vigour lift me up
To reach at victory above my head.
Add proof unto mine armour with thy prayers,
That it may enter Mowbray's waxen coat
And furbish new the name of John
o’ Gaunt,
Even in the lusty haviour of his son.

(I.iii.69-77, emphasis added.)⁸

Here, the notion of heroic English resurrection is encapsulated in terms of physical inheritance. Old Gaunt's ‘youthful spirit’ is in Hereford ‘regenerate’. And, through his actions, Hereford hopes to ‘furbish new’ his father's famous name, through ‘the lusty haviour of his son’. The physical process of rebirth has come to represent an ongoing rebirth of earthly glory. So it is that, in the same play, the return of Bolingbroke to claim the rights of his lately deceased father is styled thus by Northumberland

… even through the hollow eyes of death
I spy life peering.

(Richard II II.i.270-1)

Though Gaunt has died, his son is the new hope of England, the ‘life peering’ even in the midst of death. And this is how Ely encourages King Henry to embark on a glorious conquest of France in Henry V:

Awake remembrance of these valiant dead,
And with your puissant arm renew
their feats.
You are their heir; you sit upon their throne;
The blood and courage that renowned them
Runs in your veins

(I.ii.115-9, emphasis added)

Again, the actions of the past inspire the actions of the present. The individual becomes not simply the physical heir of his ancestor but the chivalric heir as well. There is almost an incumbency on the inheritor to emulate the progenitor, to live up to an ancestry whose immortality is founded upon rejuvenating earthly excellences. In the manner of the emblematists, immortality is sought through an earthly physical process, and not through the Hebraic conception of religious spiritual life after earthly physical death. Shakespeare establishes Gaunt's vision of ‘this other Eden, demi-paradise’ (Richard II II.i.42) as a distinctly English paradise, finding its immortality not through the Biblical prelapsarian scheme of things but through the physical familial perpetuation of an heroic greatness of English character and action.

In King John, the question of familial perpetuation is of seminal importance. This is how the young Arthur speaks to his patron, King Philip of France:

God shall forgive you Coeur-de-lion's death
The rather that you give his offspring life,
Shadowing their right under your wings of war.

(II.i.12-14)

Some lines later, Philip himself, addressing King John, says of Arthur:

Look here upon thy brother Geffrey's face:
These eyes, these brows, were moulded out of his;
This little abstract doth contain that large
Which died in Geffrey, and the hand
of time
Shall draw this brief into as huge a volume.

(II.i.99-102, emphasis added)

The requisite principles appear to be present. A glorious ancestry seeks new life; the inheritance of chivalric worth is promised in due course of time. In a world where men must labour in the shadow of death, the seeds of new birth and revived glories may yet take hold and flourish.

But as alluring as these hopes may seem, an Elizabethan audience would have found them disquieting on two counts. Firstly, Arthur is a claimant to the English throne—and in suggesting that King John has ‘Cut off the sequence of posterity’ (II.i.96), Philip styles the English monarchy as usurped. This view ran contrary to the main thrust of Tudor historical interpretation which tended to overlook details of legitimacy and to regard King John's kingship in a rather favourable light. Holinshed, for example, describes John as a man who ‘had a princely heart in him and wanted but faithful subjects to have wroken himself of such wrongs as were done and offered to him’.⁹ Secondly, it is a Frenchman, King Philip, who suggests that he will put these wrongs to right. The prospect of a foreigner, and particularly a French foreigner, threatening to exact reparation from the English would have been enough to raise the hackles of even the most sanguine Elizabethan groundling. As Barnaby Rich observes unequivocally in his Farewell to Militarie profession (1581), ‘the Frenche hath euer been our enemies by Nature’.¹⁰

In light of such misgivings, Arthur's request perhaps merits a re-evaluation. A comparison of his words at II.i.12-14 with Richard's promise to Elizabeth in Richard III may prove instructive:

eliz Yet thou didst kill
my children.
rich But in your daughter's
womb I bury them;
Where, in that nest of spicery, they will breed
Selves of themselves, to your recomforture.

(IV.iv.422-5)

In both cases the regenerative concept has become corrupted. The ‘breeding’ postulated by Richard is as false a regeneration as it is a ‘recomforture’. The womb, a potent symbol of life—as in Gaunt's ‘teeming womb of royal kings’ (Richard II, II.i.51)—is here confused by Richard with the notion of burial. The process promised in the ‘nest of spicery’ is a process of substitution, not revival. Far from representing any kind of heroic renewal, Richard offers one lineage in place of a destroyed other.

So, too, Arthur's image of life is founded upon a false premise. In the legendary order of things, it should in fact be Coeur-de-lion's ancient heroic spirit that gives him ‘life’, and not, as suggested, the King of France: ‘The rather that you give his offspring life’. As in Richard II, to the slayer of heroic potential is given the task of rejuvenation. Imagistically, Shakespeare both establishes and flaws Arthur's claim to ancestral regeneration. It is perhaps no coincidence, then, that subsequent images of life from death linked with the boy are subject to increasingly grotesque perversions. This is how Constance slanders Elinor:

                     … this is thy eldest son's son,
Infortunate in nothing but in thee.
Thy sins are visited in this poor child;
The canon of the law is laid on him,
Being but the second generation
Removed from thy sin-conceiving womb.

(II.i.177-8)

Constance alludes to Exodus 20.5. Hebraic material is pressed, by Shakespeare, into the service of an inverted system of earthly regeneration. In this inversion, the concept of resurrection is adjusted into a vision of repetitive misfortune, and the image of the ‘womb’, as in Richard III, perverted into a figure of rank malignancy. Arthur has become the inheritor of ‘sin’ rather than of chivalric excellence. The perversion of regenerative images continues. Later, when Arthur faces death at the hands of Hubert de Burgh, he begs that one of his unwilling executioners be allowed to return:

Let him come back, that his compassion may
Give life to yours

(IV.i.89-90, emphasis added)

And that grim nuance is reworked a few lines later when, looking at a burning coal with which he intends to burn out Arthur's eyes, Hubert threatens: ‘But with my breath I can revive it, boy’ (IV.i.112).

The images of rebirth and revival, familiarly used in the emblem books as expressions of hopeful inheritance, are offered what seems to be a glorious first statement in the text of King John but echo with increasing malignity. The principle of reviving greatness is coerced into a new scheme of pessimism, one in which the reproductive cycle is perverted into a force of evil rather than of life. Ironically enough, it is left to the English king himself to confirm these inversions with regard to Arthur and to offer a negation of the certainties of heroic resurrection:

They burn in indignation. I repent.
There is no sure foundation set on blood,
No certain life achiev’d by others' death.

(IV.ii.103-5)

In this new world of false mortal renewal it is the cycle of death, rather than the cycle of life, that wins pre-eminence and the disintegration of celebratory and optimistic notions of Death in relation to Arthur's aspirations in King John represents an important avenue of Shakespeare's exploration of heroism.

King John seems to stand as an experimental play, positioned between the first flurry of the Yorkist Tetralogy and the great adventure of the cycle to come. A catalogue of motifs (Neptune, the soul, Mars, myth heroism, the disintegrating of chivalric mores, and others) is referred to in King John but finds more coherent and cohesive development in the later work. The image of Death in King John is certainly part of an evolving process of imagistic refinement which finds powerful and subtle fulfilment in Richard II and Henry V.¹¹ Iconographic representations of Death by Renaissance emblematists, such as Holbein, could well have assisted in the unfolding of the dramatist's ideas, informing and perhaps defining his maturing schemes of imagistic usage.

Notes

1. Hans Holbein, Icones Historiarvm Veteris Testamenti, ed Henry Green (Facsimile rpt. Manchester: A. Brothers, for the Holbein Society, 1869), sig. Biv. The book was first published at Lyons in 1538.

2. Richard Lubbaeus, Emblemata Moralia et Oeconomica, De Rervm Vsv et Abvsv (1579, first publ.: Arnhemi: Apud Ioannem Iansonium Bibliopolam ibidem, sumptibus Theodori Petri Bibliopolae Amstelrodamiensis, 1609), sig. Elv.

3. Iuan de Horozco y Covarrubias, Emblemas Morales de Don Iuan de Horozco y Couaruuias (En Segouia. Impresso por Iuan de la Cuesta, 1591), pp. 194 & 252.

4. Claude Paradin, Les Devises Heroiques, De M. Claude Paradin, Chanoine de Beaujeu, Du Signeur Gabriel Symeon, & autres Aucteurs (1551, first publ.; Anvers: De l’Imprimerie de Christophle Plantin, 1561), p. 151r.

5. Nicolas Reusner, Emblemata Nicolai Revsneri (Impressvm Francoforti ad Moenvm, per Ioannem Feyerabendt, Impensis Sigismundi Feyerabendii, 1581), p. 50.

6. Dirck Volckertszoon Coornhert, De Rervm Vsv et Abvsv (Antwerpiae apud Christophorum Plantinum, 1585), p. 19. This is a translation of Bernard Gerbrand Furmer's 1575 edition of the same name.

7. George Wither, A Collection of Emblemes, Ancient and Moderne (1635). ed. Rosemary Freeman (Columbia, 1975), p. 21

8. William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Peter Alexander (London & Glasgow, 1978). All quotations from Shakespeare are from this edition.

9. Quoted by M. M. Reese, The Cease of Majesty (London, 1961), p. 265.

10. Barnaby Rich, Riche his Farewell to Militarie profession (London: J Kingston for Robert Walley, 1581), sig. B4v.

11. See Clayton G. MacKenzie, ‘Paradise and Paradise Lost in Richard II’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 37:3, 1986.