SOURCE: “Mingling Vice and ‘Worthiness’ in King John,” in Shakespeare Studies Annual, Vol. XXVII, 1999, pp. 109-33.

[In the following essay, Weimann characterizes Faulconbridge as a new type of vice character, a type that merged the serious with the jocular.]

With the advent of Marlowe the aims of representation in the Elizabethan theater were sharply redefined. As the prologues to Tamburlaine suggested, the dramatist literally felt authorized to “lead” the theater to a new horizon of legitimation, one against which the hero could more nearly be viewed as a self-contained “picture.” Such a portrait would “unfold” the scene “at large”; the character “himself in presence” would dominate the performance. This at least is how the Prologue to The Second Part of Tamburlaine the Great proceeded to elucidate the uses of “this tragic glass” in the earlier Prologue:

But what became of fair Zenocrate,
And with how many cities' sacrifice
He [Tamburlaine] celebrated her sad funeral,
Himself in presence shall unfold at large.(1)

As promised on the title page, the heroic character's “presence” continued to be felt in “his impassionate fury.” As Richard Jones, the printer, assumed in his Preface to the Octavo and Quarto editions of 1590, these fruits of a literary imagination would have appealed “To the Gentlemen Readers and others that take pleasure in reading Histories.” Moving easily from stage to page, these eminently readable representations, forthwith available in print, recommended themselves in terms of what “worthiness” the “eloquence of the author” could profitably deliver to a gentle preoccupation with “serious affairs and studies.” The flow of authority now seemed to be not simply from text to performance, but—an even closer circuit—from the dramatic writing—via the printing—into the studies of those familiar with “reading Histories.” Or so at least Jones, a not entirely unbiased observer, would have it. London theater audiences, even when hugely thrilled by Edward Alleyn's portrait of Tamburlaine, appeared to take a different view, even when what they “greatly gaped at” did not find its way into the printed text.

Here, to recall the partisan position Jones betrays in his Preface provides us with an illuminating foil against which to read the treatment, between Marlowe and Shakespeare, of how comic or grotesque “jestures” were mingled, or otherwise, with the “worthiness of the matter itself.” In Marlowe's plays it was possible, at least in print, to view serious matter as incompatible with such “graced deformities” as performances on public stages entailed. Participating in the countermanding flow of authority, even snatching part of it for himself as a discriminating reader, the printer, apparently without intervention on the part of the dramatist, saw fit radically to cancel out the most gaped-at elements of performance. Since, obviously, the latter were viewed as having no authority of their own, the tragical discourse was not to be contaminated by “some fond and frivolous” traces of mere players; these needed to be refined out of existence, as befitted “so honorable and stately a history.”

Unfortunately, we can do little more than conjecture Marlowe's perspective on the issue of this cultural difference in question, even though, of course, we recall the dismissal of jigs and “mother-wits” in the Prologue to the first part of Tamburlaine. But then we have Shakespeare's own word that the difference between the worthy matter of history and the “unworthy” stage of its performance was perceived, and that it loomed large, in the theater of the Lord Chamberlain's men as well. Only, as I have suggested elsewhere, the prologue to Henry V was designed both to expose and to appropriate the gap between noble matter and its common staging, to “digest” the use and “Th’abuse of distance.” No doubt, Shakespeare, in a different manner, sought to grapple with the cultural divide—in a manner that was so much closer to the matrix in which the stamp of his own life and work was cast.

There was then, in both Marlowe's and Shakespeare's theater an awareness of this “distance” between the represented locale in the world-of-the-play and the location of playing-in-the-world of Elizabethan London. Implying a difference of not only geographical and spatial but also temporal and social dimensions, this distance must have affected, as well as reflected, the enabling conditions under which to mingle the tradition of Vice and the “matter of worthiness.” In Shakespeare's playhouse, the distance was between “this unworthy scaffold” and “so great an object” (Henry V, prologue, 10-11) in the emergent discourse of history. If the gulf between them was generic as well as cultural, it provided a challenging threshold that had to be crossed both ways. Performers in a mere “cockpit,” precisely because they could not traverse the “vasty fields of France” (11-12), had to assimilate the worthy matter of history in their own terms. In doing so, they, as it turned out, had a way of metamorphosing certain discourses into deformity, “minding true things by what their mock’ries be” (4.0.50).

At this point, our recourse to the theater of Marlowe helps throw into relief how, on the “unworthy scaffold” of both Richard III and King John, it was possible to assimilate cultural difference in and through an unfixed space for (dis)continuity between dramatic text and performance practice. Introducing the performative energy of the old Vice into the “tragic glass” of history and personality, the dramatist's idea was not to eliminate these “fond and frivolous jestures” from the realm of “serious affaires and studies” but, as it were, to digest the distance between them. The project was not to accept but to transgress and so reform the socially sanctioned boundary endorsed by Jones between those “graced deformities” and the “worthiness of the matter itself.” Thus, the protagonist in Richard III, in his hybrid mingling of Vice and “worthiness,” could absorb significant ‘deformity’ in the very image of the tragic hero. Reducing any unnecessary “digressing” in purely presentational practice, this vicious protagonist, in a grim version of frivolity, was “himself in presence” designed to “unfold at large” the play in question.

However, in King John (1596)² the mingling of Vice and “worthiness” achieved a bewildering new turn, one that, in the assimilation of contrariety, was potentially even more experimental and, from a providential point of view, much less reassuring than Richard III and the entire first tetralogy. It is true, King John does project, through the stamp of a non-vicious protagonist, the frivolous figuration to the point of its containment: Faulconbridge is made faithfully to rehearse most of the attributes of the Vice, only to go beyond them. But in doing so, he reaches out, with a remarkable twist, for something new. He seeks to redeem the unbridled energy of the valiant performer on behalf of his arduous task in the building of, historically speaking, an anachronistic image of the nation-state. Along these lines, Faulconbridge may even be said somewhat to anticipate the more highly qualified appropriation of the Vice figure in Hamlet, where, partially, memories of this figure are infused into an antic, mad version of “graced deformities”—one that was motivated by a desire to scourge the world and “set it right.” In the tragedy, the very gap between madness and “matter,” frivolity and “worthiness,” was projected as part of a composite structure, in its own way constituting “two meanings” in one play. Whether or not in the wake of this operation the tragic glass of Renaissance subjectivity cracked and the “unmatched form and feature” of Renaissance “youth” was “blasted with ecstasy” (3.1.168) or, as in Richard Gloucester's case, “curtailed of this fair proportion” (1.1.18), the result was unprecedented and paradoxical to the extreme. Decorum, discretion, and the kind of authority that was postulated in the worthy discourse of princely conduct was confronted with its own “great disgrace,” as that was folding out from within “so honourable and stately a history.”

The strategy of integration between the uses of rhetoric, eloquence, and representation in writing and the inscription therein of an excessive and ‘ecstatic’ type of performance practice was not, of course, confined to history plays such as 2 Henry VI, Richard III, and the two parts of Henry IV. But here, and this marks the mingling of Vice and “worthiness” in King John, the aim was not to abandon “worthiness” in the discourse of history; rather, the nonhumanist tradition, with its mad, frivolous performative was effectively inserted into these literate images of high Renaissance endeavor. In the language of Marlowe's prologues to Tamburlaine, the self-contained “glass” of representation, the unfolding “presence” of the hero's own “picture,” the locus of his “stately tent” and station were churned by an alien energy, a leavening of kinetic force and otherness quite unknown to neoclassical poetics and rhetoric.

Thus, through the assimilation of an eccentric source of performative energy, the matter of representation itself was turned into a vehicle of cultural contrariety. To have, as in Richard III, a martial hero, but to have him “rudely stamped” (16) made it feasible on the stage to unfold “th’abuse of distance” from within the act of performance. The distance is social station and language use between the mirror of a Renaissance prince and the cultural practices of Elizabethan players (by many regarded as vagabonds and beggars) came to fruition when the fearsome Duke shared out the indiscretion in his triumphant, gleeful display of how to sue a royal “wench;” when the Prince himself began to moralize two meanings in the twinkling of his eye, in one word, one gesture, one grim jest; and when, in the greatest of tragedies, the most venerably overweening of royalty himself turned mad beggar. Thus, in the mingling of Vice and “worthiness,” there accrued a site for “bifold authority” (Troilus and Cressida, 5.2.147) in the matter of representation itself. Such mingle-mangle made it impossible to have things as they should be. To have the “glass of fashion and the mould of form” (Hamlet, 3.2.152), the image of a worthy hero, “himself in presence,” blasted by “ecstasy” implicated (when read as ‘exstasis’) the disruption of “stasis” if the latter can be defined as a “state of equilibrium or inactivity caused by opposing equal forces” (Webster).

If, in this context, decorum and discretion were undermined, one of the reasons was that their deformation was inseparable from the performative resilience in the legacy of the Vice. This legacy, as Alan Dessen has shown, was well remembered, at least up to 1610, in the Elizabethan theater.³ Remarkably, the memory of it resonated with a sense of the Vice's duplicity and “impudence.” For the comic and the serious descendants of the Vice to “mistake the word” (The Two Gentlemen of Verona, 3.1.283), to “play upon the word” (The Merchant of Venice, 3.5.43), and to “moralize two meanings in one word” was to do and “to gainsay” the distortion, to accomplish and then to deny the deformation. But such disavowal, always duplicitous in an ambidextrous manner, was conspicuous for its performative zest that made the impudent game irresistible in the first place. Almost certainly we have an echo of this in Leontes' words:

                                                                                I ne’er heard yet
That any of these bolder vices wanted
Less impudence to gainsay what they did
Than to perform it first.

(3.2.54-57)

As Blakemore Evans annotates the passage, “Less” here stands “where a modern ear expects ‘More’,” (intensifying the “wanted.”) The element of “impudence”—going, as im-pertinence or nonpertinence, against the grain of the “necessary question” in representation—must have been close to what “performant function,” in Jean Alter's sense, there was in juggling. Thus, as late as in Ben Jonson's The Staple of News (1626), “the old way” of the Vice is remembered “when Iniquity came in like Hokos Pokos, in a Juglers jerkin, with false skirts.”⁴ Here as elsewhere, memories of the Vice are closely related to the presentational practice of jesters and jugglers.

In this direction, Faulconbridge's residue of jesting and presenting, compounded as it is with “worthiness,” serves as both leaven and lever for a theatrical treatment of history. His attributes of “impudence,” bastardy, dispossession, and opportunism were symptomatic of how the unsanctioned world of cultural “deformities,” always already “unmeet for the matter,” could actually be made integral to it. In his figuration, there was a determined attempt to be aware of, and yet use (and abuse), the “distance” between the placid Renaissance mirror of nobility and the highly nonstatic site of kinetic energies in performance. The idea was to explore the frivolous, fond, deforming, and unsettling contours of this site from within the uses of “this tragic glass” itself.

Going further than any other adaptation of the figure called “Vice” in Tudor drama, Faulconbridge ended up by suspending his initial dispossession and apartness. In King John, the process of adaptation was not marked by the absence in a Renaissance figure of nobility of “this fair proportion”; there was no ungentle hunchback that irrevocably conveyed a “misshapen” (1.2.250) character's sense of being socially apart. Whereas in Richard Gloucester's case this apartness was given, at least up to his self-directed coronation, Faulconbridge determines not to stand apart but in his own way to meet the madness of the world, the rule of commodity itself. Henceforth, the Vice cannot serve the alien energy of otherness, when “there is no vice but beggary” (2.1.597). Thus, in this “worshipful society,” time-serving is the watchword:

For he is but a bastard to the time
That doth not smack of observation—

(1.1.207-8)

But “observation” as a servile, sycophantic complaisance is entirely compatible with an altogether different “inward motion” or inclination “to deliver” a purgation or, at least, some “poison for the age's tooth.” Thereby, the grounds of apartness are finally surrendered when the “inward” impulse is to be, rather than “a bastard to the time,” its true child and agent.

At this point, the footsteps of this “mounting spirit” (1.1.206) potentially begin to lead away from what was the material correlative in theatrical space, the platea-function, of Faulconbridge's initial position in the play. It is true, the force of this “inward motion” continues to be at least partially intercepted by his lingering resistance to closure, reaching out into the epilogue-function of his concluding speech. Still, the absorption of the Bastard by the discourse of historiography seems undeniable when compared with related adaptations of Vice. In most cases, the images of isolation or apartness were distinctly accompanied by, hence interactive with, the allotment of a material, unenclosed downstage type of performance space. It was in this decentered space, “aside” from the central action, that a surplus of awareness and audience rapport would redeem or at least set off self-isolating illegitimacy and all kinds of social, lineal, racial, and economic apartness. Thus, Aaron in Titus Andronicus tends to “speak aside” (3.1.187-190, 201-4; 4.2.6, 26). His position of difference was borne out by a site symbolically encoded by his “slavish,” “servile” memories and his blackness, coupled with a fierce desire for self-liberation:

Away with slavish weeds and servile thoughts!
I will be bright, and shine in pearl and gold.

(2.1.18-19)

In Iago, the sense of being underprivileged, even dispossessed and cheated, dramatically affirms (and, to a degree, motivates) stringent apartness in his plans for evil manipulation. His sardonic signature tune, “Put money in thy purse” (Othello, 1.3.341-43, 345; etc.), effectively recalls the chorus-like refrain of the old Vice, even when it symbolically associates the absence of material means, an awareness of the hardness of things, the need to make ends meet. In an altogether different vein, Edmund, the illegitimate son of the Earl of Gloucester, more brutally a “whoreson” (The Tragedy of King Lear, 1.1.23), feels ‘branded’ in his relation to the legitimate Edgar:

                                                            Why brand they us
With ‘base,’ with ‘baseness, bastardy—base,
base’?

(1.2.9-10)

Such iteration resounds with a sarcastic crescendo of exuberant energy and inversion when delivered as in affirmation of the “lusty stealth of nature” and other sources of “fierce quality” (11-12). Thus, the enforced apartness of the underprivileged is turned into a resilient site of aggressive mobility on which the peculiar mingling of vice and virtue, à la Faulconbridge, is consistently deferred.

Not unlike Richard Gloucester, Edmund presents himself as overcharged by something deeply anomalous; each is responding excessively to a particular social or psychological logic, which response requires scheming, counterfeiting, and evil gaming. There is a need for all of them, and Iago especially, to be double-faced; the native art of counterfeiting thrives, even culminates, in a great density and mobility, an ecstasy, as it were, of performative practice. In all these figurations, a strong performative exceeds rational or socially responsible motivation to the point that, as in Aaron, Gloucester, and Iago, it celebrates itself as a motiveless malignity that, ultimately, is unaccountable (as well as self-defeating) in terms of any mirrored locus of verisimilar action.

As against the resolute malignity in these descendants of the allegory of evil, Bastard Faulconbridge has a far more checkered genealogy and serves a new hybridity of functions.⁵ The thoroughly experimental note in his amalgamation of Vice and worthiness emerges when his deliberate time-serving turns out to be “honest” in that it does not go hand in hand with strategies of deceitful counterfeit but, rather, a brash, undisguised stance of sarcasm. At the same time, the complicity of scourge and minister was so adapted that the performative surplus of vicious speech and “jesture” could, in the course of the play, be domesticated and at least partially harnessed to the representation of bravado and virility in the service of the nation-state. Without altogether surrendering the boisterous quality of his early irreverence, Faulconbridge, once turned into a represented agent of courageous patriotism, ends up bastardizing his own hybrid extraction.

Thus, the conflation of Vice and worthiness is turned into a potent and profoundly ambivalent site on which the strong performative of popular playing and the Renaissance discourse of Machiavellian politics are made to interact. This interaction culminates in the speech on “commodity” where the contrarious dramaturgy in the figuration of the Bastard—presentational and representational—culminates in a strange contradiction between the unveiling language of the commentator and the complicity of the participant. The speech is significant because contrariety itself is projected into both the theme and its ironic treatment, when Faulconbridge addresses

[…] that same purpose-changer, that sly devil,
That broker that still breaks the pate of faith,
That daily break-vow, he that wins of all,
Of kings, of beggars, old men, young men, maids,
Who having no external thing to lose
But the word “maid,” cheats the poor maid of that,
That smooth-fac’d gentleman, tickling commodity,
Commodity, the bias of the world—
The world, who of itself is peized well,
Made to run even upon even ground,
Till this advantage, this vile-drawing bias,
This sway of motion, this commodity,
Makes it take head from all indifferency,
From all direction, purpose, course, intent—
And this same bias, this commodity,
This bawd, this broker, this all-changing word. …

(2.1.567-82)

Here, the Bastard, alone on stage, face to face with the audience, provides a sample of that “abundance of superfluous breath” (2.1.147) which is part of his overcharged articulation. At the same time, such superfluity is the mark of both the “disorderly motion”⁶ in the play's imagery and that “vast confusion” (4.3.153) in the play at large that results from the attempt “To tug and scamble, and to part by th’ teeth / The unowed interest of proud swelling state” (4.3.146-47). The speech, therefore, addressing the political economy of self-interest on almost every level, focuses on a crucial point of realignment. It is the point where the historical “matter of worthiness” is unravelled through and in commotion and commodity. The Bastard, viewing “the battlements” of Angiers “As in a theatre” (2.1.375), grasps “commodity” as “the bias of the world.” In other words, covetous self-interest is metaphorically defined in terms of a slanting sport of bowls where the “off-centered weight” of “a wooden ball,”⁷ thanks to a piece of lead—the “bias”’—“Makes it take head,” or rush from, a straightforward trajectory toward a curved course. The Bastard's version of “how this world goes” (King Lear, 4.5.150-51 [quarto text]) maps an oblique path, a direction marked by an asymmetrical play that perfectly links up with the representation of a decentered motion in the world-picture. As against “all direction, purpose, course, intent,” this “sly devil,” “this vile-drawing bias” obtains as an “all-changing word.” Turned into a transitive/intransitive language, this word in the mirroring picture is swayed by a motion that is out of control, beyond all “indifferency.”

Since Faulconbridge himself is a self-styled “devil” (or at least “One that will play the devil”—135), he himself fully participates in the rush from “indifferency,” from settled meanings and balanced purposes. Disordered motion itself is shared out between his own sense of “Legitimation, name, and all is gone” (1.1.248) and what contingency is contained in the world of the play at large. In other words, by recognizing the world as a place of disorder (“Mad world, mad kings, mad composition!” [561]), the bastard's own eccentricities seek to comply with the absence of “direction, purpose, course, intent.” Here, his own mad, illegitimate make-up can fully participate, even achieve a representative function. In other words, Faulconbridge serves as both a medium of revelation and a source of contamination vis-à-vis the absence of genuine “worthiness” in the matter of history.⁸

Thus, revelation, insight, knowledge, and form itself all help define the deformation, and vice versa, just as “indifferency” (or impartiality) helps constitute a notion of partiality. The Bastard, in exploiting the instability of his own (re)presentational position, is free to quibble himself out of having to make a choice: the “sway of” motion is such that, playfully, his open hand is stretched out “When fair angels would salute my palm” (591)—the currency of commodity conflates heavenly bliss and possession of metal coins called “angels.”⁹ “And why do I rail on this commodity?” The answer provided marks the point where, in his own complicity, the Bastard taunts the audience, inviting them to share a “tickling” disillusionment about the commodification of politics. Here and elsewhere, the sarcastic descendant of the Vice can easily perforate closure. Serving as a liminal medium, his eccentric position—one not at all lost in the locus of historical narrative—can convey more knowledge about the playworld than its own representations are made to contain. Faulconbridge, through his irreverence, is instrumental in shaping an awareness that helps penetrate the surface of the Elizabethan discourse of order and degree.

In his hybrid figuration, the legacy of the Vice is unmistakably revitalized. The opening scene of King John shows Faulconbridge as a “rude man” (1.1.64) and “madcap” (84), an “unreverent boy” (227) with “country manners” (156). His use of language is thoroughly indecorous, marked by an inordinate amount of colloquialism (“‘a pops me out / At least from fair five hundred pound a year,” 68-69). His impertinence first emerges vis-à-vis Queen Eleanor, in his literal refusal to respond to what Hamlet in his advice to the players calls the “necessary question” of the scene, that is, her points and questions in dialogue. Thus, his ‘reply’ to the Queen's gracious offer is remarkably far from the purpose of her playing and meaning.

El. I am thy grandame, Richard,
call me so.
Bast. Madam, by chance, but not by
truth; what though?
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.
Near or far off, well won is still well shot,
And I am I, howe’er I was begot.

(168-75)

His response is such that “quite athwart / Goes all decorum” (Measure for Measure, 1.3.30-31). Like Mischief, the Vice in Mankind, who assumed the role of an impertinent “wynter-corn threscher,”¹⁰ the Bastard is at pains to underline the rusticity of his language and imagery. As a “good blunt fellow” (71), his idiom is as proverbial as—in confronting the court—completely devoid of discretion. Answering the queen, he reproduces a series of homely allusions and commonplaces that, resisting the representation of courtly meaning, come close to signifying a “wild of nothing […] / Express’d and not express’d” (The Merchant of Venice, 3.2.182-83). His answer to Queen Eleanor is, in both senses of the word, impertinent because, in its impudence, it refuses to acknowledge pertinent, that is, referential uses of dramatic dialogue. His words preclude the illusion of dramatic dialogue as a dramatic representation of actual exchange and communication. But, although his reply is, in the full senses of these words, scandalous and offensive, none of the courtly characters seems to mind. It is spoken, as it were, out of hearing, as if spatially remote from the locus of courtly manners and “worthiness.” No less strange is his persistence in thoroughly irrelevant sexual innuendo, as when in eight lines (140-47) he manages to convey six or seven obscene puns, among them “tail” for “tale,” “hour” for “whore,” “case” for “vagina.” If anything, these quibbles serve to sustain his distance from the language of dramatic verisimilitude and courtly decorum. Going hand in hand with his highly performative penchant for a self-displayed style of role-playing, these uses of language presuppose a verbal, social, and spatial apartness from the sites of authority customarily represented in the dominant discourse of Renaissance conduct.

Thus, the Bastard stands for a remarkable freedom to (re)moralize meanings in the play's thematic concern with sin, social mobility, and primogeniture. Unashamedly punning, he freely celebrates his own bastardy (“Now blessed be the hour, by night or day, / When I was got …” (1.1.165f). He is prepared to “thank” his mother “for my father:”

And they shall say, when Richard me begot,
If thou hadst said him nay, it had been sin.
Who says it was, he lies, I say ’twas not.

(274-76)

Downright denial of “sin” here is part of a complex figure of inversion. The difference between vice and virtue, strictly implemented in allegorical uses of language, is suspended: the meaning of “sin” (in relation to its contemporary referent) is de-moralized. The cultural semiotics of rupture is such that semantic stability, the preordained standards in signification, can effectively be upset, together with what authority might sanction stability in the representation of sexual and marital relations.

Hence, Bastard Faulconbridge serves as a theatrically effective vehicle of de-moralizing and remoralizing meanings in one word. His language is full of those “frivolous jestures, digressing … far unmeet for the matter,” which Marlowe's printer saw fit to omit. If, fortunately, these were not obliterated in the textual history of King John, the main reason is that these “graced deformities” were so written into the text of historiography as to affect its direction from within. Faulconbridge does not need to “speak more than is set down” for him—the play text itself provides space and idiom for continual impertinence. Almost unlimited in its heterogeneity, this text, through having absorbed a perfectly eccentric potential for performative practice, might very well claim to serve more than one purpose of playing.

Thus, the Bastard, up to a point, retains his capacity for playing with the difference, in dramaturgy, between presentation and representation. As his own show master, he can assimilate a platea type of space in which to exercise his remarkable skill for a display of more than one role. What he does may not exactly be classified as “some necessary question of the play,” but it is both an entertaining display of histrionic competence and an exquisite, meaningful making of images that participate in the staging of his own upward mobility and “conversion”:

Well, now can I make any Joan a lady.
“Good den, Sir Richard!”—“God-a-mercy, fellow!”
And if his name be George, I’ll call him Peter;
For new-made honour doth forget men's names;
’Tis too respective and too sociable
For your conversion. Now your traveller,
He and his toothpick at my worship's mess,
And when my knightly stomach is suffic’d,
Why then I suck my teeth, and catechize
My picked man of countries. “My dear sir,”
Thus, leaning on mine elbow, I begin,
“I shall beseech you”—that is question now;
And then comes answer like an Absey book:
“O sir,” says answer, “at your best command,
At your employment, at your service, sir.”
“No, sir,” says question, “I, sweet sir, at yours”;
And so, ere answer knows what question would,
Saving in dialogue of compliment,
And talking of the Alps and Apennines,
The Pyrenean and the river Po,
It draws toward supper in conclusion so.
But this is worshipful society,
And fits the mounting spirit like myself;

(1.1.184-206)

This, indeed, is excellent game when an actor/character goes out of his way to stage a one-man show, using as his dialogic agents Question and Answer to catechize, as in an “Absey book” on social difference, the elementary principles of upward mobility and haughty condescension. This, surely, is a satirical image and, hence, a representation of upstart behavior, no doubt inflecting the extraordinary late Elizabethan welter of classes and values. But, at the same time, this is not exactly a representation of character; although himself an upstart, there is no implication that this is, in any reliable sense of the word, in character with, or a characterization of, Philip Faulconbridge.

Even as he says, “now can I make any Joan a lady,” the purpose of playing behind this speech is more impertinent than this.

A foot of honour better than I was,
But many a many foot of land the worse.

(182-83)

With these quibbles (and they immediately precede this speech) the Bastard, as it were, plays himself out of the constraint of a purely self-referential application of meaning. Conflating the “foot” of his status or degree with the “foot” or simple measurement of material space, he can convey a sense of the limits of “honour” through its complicity with “land” and its capacity for commodification. Thereby, the play on the signifier signals an awareness of, and betrays a distance to, the purpose of his own playacting, the mimicry of a self-conceited upstart.

Thus, throughout the first part of this speech, Faulconbridge serves not so much as one represented but one who is doing the (re)presenting. The speaker does not so much map his own potential course of action but, more provocatively, mimics the abject arrogance of the nouveaux riches or, even, those that make up “worshipful society” (205). Again, the twist of the word “worshipful” displays a strongly performative gesture of impudence. There is an element of exuberance in what the performer behind the Bastard performs. One needs to imagine the irresistible gusto of a playacting that invites spectators step by step to attend to the taunting “Now” (190), the gesticulant “Thus” (194), the caustic “And then,” and the “conclusion so” (204). Note the dazzling quality of performed action, the affably maintained relish of superiority, a stance best expressed in the subtext of the French analogue suffisant, when his “knightly stomach is suffic’d” and “Thus, leaning on mine elbow, I begin …” The gloating here is that of the performer more than of the performed. All this adds up to a stunning theatricality that resides in the act of delivery, the self-supporting presentation, by which the speech is zestfully turned into a histrionic display of the first order. Thereby, the player, far from identifying with the displayed, can knowingly exhibit what competence, skill, and mastery go into the playing of this play in miniature.

In this remarkable interplay between “author's pen” and “actor's voice,” the circulation of authority in Shakespeare's playhouse comes full circle. The playwright, by appropriating the scenario of a zestful display of the player's skill, so adapts it to his larger theme and representation that, at the height of histrionic virtuosity, the focus remains on the “necessary question of the play.” The “Law of writ” is clearly in evidence; its controlling instance here is more sustained than, by comparison, in the performant function in Q1 Hamlet. But, while authorial authority effectively prevents these “frivolous jestures” from being “unmeet for the matter,” the playwright follows, rather than dictates, the player's craftsmanship. The script, far from seeking to displace the player's appeal, actually helps mediate the performer's own authority and competence. His calculated presence, therefore, is not administered by or, simply, superimposed on the writing; the player's act of presentation is just there—an enabling, formative condition of how playacting before us is inscribed into the text. Thus, while the “author's pen” throughout is in the “actor's voice,” that voice finally helps to find, and decides on, the form, genre, and scenario of what we have before us.

Even so, the presentational gestus remains strictly limited. Even before the text provides a cue for the performer to withdraw behind the character's persona, the remarkable élan in this playing with a difference peters out with the “dialogue of compliment.” Thereafter, the descendant of the Vice—so far, close enough to the “old Vice”—appears to maintain his credentials strenuously through a proverbial reference to travel and traffic. Faulconbridge hearkens back to the Vice's penchant for boundless movements, as when—one case among many—Hickscorner, in his nonsensical travelogue, listing no less than thirty places, claims to “have ben in many a countre.”¹¹ But except for the pungent use of the rhymed couplet (citing “the River Po, / […] in conclusion so”), the reference to a self-fashioning “mounting spirit” with a Renaissance sense of “myself” (1.1.206) remains a somewhat questionable, lame transition to the stirring verse of

For he is but a bastard to the time
That does not [smack] of observation—
And so am I, whether I smack or no;
And not alone in habit and device,
Exterior form, outward accoutrement,
But from the inward motion to deliver
Sweet, sweet, sweet poison for the age's tooth,
Which though I will not practice to deceive,
Yet to avoid deceit, I mean to learn;
For it shall strew the footsteps of my rising.

(1.1.207-16)

The use of “bastard” in this new context serves an inversionary function. If, as Faulconbridge's rise and service in the play attest, illegitimacy is at best an untrustworthy signifier, the question here is raised as to what—after “Legitimation, name, and all is gone”—in fact constitutes legitimacy or, in modern parlance, authenticity. The answer, despite its cynical overtones, points in a direction Bacon first attempted to formulate.

And with regard to authority, it shows a feeble mind to grant so much to authors and yet deny time his rights, who is the author of authors, nay, rather of all authority. For rightly is truth called the daughter of time, not of authority.¹²

Hence, Faulconbridge's resolution “to deliver / […] poison for the age's tooth” serves as a double-edged weapon. Its twofold function neatly divides between vicious time-serving (unprincipled, like the old Vice) and virtuous service to one's time, and place, and country. For the Bastard is prepared, with Bacon, not to “deny time his rights”; not to serve authority as perennially given but to follow a better criterion of “truth,” one that is the “daughter of time.” Nor will he himself “practice to deceive”; rather, he will “learn” to “avoid it,” even though, as a true child of the age, he will not desist to feed the appetite for “observation” or obsequious flattery.

Even in this pragmatic agenda for practical self-help in response to the fashion of the times, the Bastard does not quite slough off the “sweet poison” of vicious ambivalence. As “mounting spirit,” he is prepared to “smack of observation,” that is, to see through flattery and tolerate the motions of obsequious practice. Having affirmed a highly precarious identity, however, he is at once ready to juggle with what provocative ‘meaning’ his own status of “bastard” has so far projected. Now “a bastard to the time” is used disparagingly; the natural and the metaphorical uses of the word are played with. Similarly, the connotations of “smack” (to have a taste or trace of something) are promptly exploited with punning on “smoke” (the spellings were not yet distinguished). Paradoxically, though not perhaps fortuitously, this “mounting spirit” can, in one line, relish a licentious release of his first-person singular; as Honigmann reads: “And so am I, whether I smoke or no.”¹³

Again, the punning (“smack”/“smoke”), together with the ambiguous use of “observation” (where, in each case, vital awareness of the senses is invoked) establish a pattern of play and instability between signifier and signified. Representation is paltered with, meaning remains elusive or is encoded ambiguously, when the alternative to not being a “bastard to the time” can, in Braunmuller's edition, positively be rephrased as “a legitimate or successful participant in current affairs.”¹⁴ Here, if anywhere, is a half-hidden clue to how the new sources of authority—those which in Bacon's phrase, do not “deny time his rights”—are vulnerably exposed. When all is said and done, the distinction is at best relative between time-serving and service to one's time and place in a contingent world. At this point, the Bastard's vulnerability anticipates a great predicament in modern, even postmodern notions of political practice.

The Bastard's speech, read as a whole, reveals the full dynamic, but also the impromptu nature of the experiment, in the Shakespearean transmutation of the Vice. Up to a point, the figure constitutes a thoroughly performative force disrupting closure and decorum, an unprincipled agency of duplicity, neatly derived from a hybrid ancestry conflating allegory and farce. In this popular Renaissance adaptation, however, a new commingling of worthiness and Vice, a new hodge-podge of ideology and skepticism tends to supersede the older conflation with its binary order of vice and virtue. It is through a new, duplicitous perspective on legitimacy and authority that, as in the different uses of “bastard” itself, the “fond and frivolous jestures” of the irreverent juggler are domesticated in a seminal representation of the unruly self in “worshipful society.”

At this point, the new departure rehearses and yet leaves far behind the anti-allegorical potential of the Morality play. As can be seen in The Tide Tarrieth No Man (1576), the early modern loosening of fixture in the semiotics of allegory went hand in hand with new “contrarious” openings in the strategy of dramatic representation. In early modern narrative the largely immutable gap (an “abyss,”¹⁵ Walter Benjamin called it) in allegory between figurality and meaning gave way to a dynamic, often ironic, highly mobile, non-dualistic relationship between signifier and signified. As I have shown elsewhere, in Erasmus, Rabelais, Sidney, and Nashe, the gap between what was said and what was meant began to be filled by a dance-like movement between closure and rupture.¹⁶ Similarly, in medieval drama, the structure of allegorical personifications had remained fixed in its dualism as long as the principle of psychomachia was strong enough to marshal a moral universe in terms of a strictly controllable, consistent order of fixed values. But then the performative energy of the Vice by itself tended, at least partially, to transform and empty out from within the element of correspondence between these oppositions and their allegorical extensions. Shakespeare, already taking for granted the suspension of metaphysical dualism in allegorical drama, uses a thoroughly secularized, revitalized version of the Vice as a visceral kind of leavening by which to expand the gap between what was said and what was meant.

In King John, this gap, as never before, is projected into a strangely groping, troublesome representation of the world and the self. Part of our difficulties with the play lies in its movement by fits and starts, the absence in it of any easily discernible design. But this crisscrossed movement, and the Bastard's response to it, must appear deliberate as soon as we recognize, in Walter Cohen's pointed phrase, that “the logic of the plot is to undermine logic, to frustrate expectation, to reveal the uncertain relation between intention and outcome in a world that offers only fragments of an overarching religious consolation for the frequent futility of human endeavor.”¹⁷ If, throughout the play, the ‘meaning’ of events remains more or less puzzling, the uses of characterization respond in kind. As in the Angiers sequence, the marching to and fro of two kings and their armies almost paradigmatically establishes an order that brings forth Nothing. As elsewhere in the play, the purposive activities of characters, their grand schemes and strategies, are strangely thwarted, even pointless. As Emrys Jones notes, in “such sequences as this, activity itself seems to be mocked: The great ones, who posture on the stage of the world, and who think themselves free and self-determining agents, are incapable of achieving anything.”¹⁸

Once the world of the play comes to resemble a game marked by pointless fits and starts, the gap between what is said and what is done (and what is meant) becomes constitutive of a new type of (dis)order in both language use and emplotment. Here, the pervasive infiltration of contingency is crucial, in that it affects both resolution and motivation, action and events. Between them, the high Renaissance “mould of form” (Hamlet, 3.1.153), the mirror of proportion, “modesty,” and discretion, the image of what should be, are all lost sight of. As a ruthless alternative, the awareness of futility and contingency enters into an alliance with the compromising (though not, in itself, compromised) pragmatism of the first-person singular. In its opportunistic, ambivalent response to “commodity,” the emerging self-conscious “I” is fairly remote from the high Renaissance image of man and the idealizing postulate of a consortium of speaking and doing. As an illegitimate offspring and anomalous commentator on an unprincipled society, the Bastard is locked in between criticism and commodity, his own self serving as an unadulterated vessel of both contrariety and opportunity, one deeply torn between serving the times as well as his country and playing the game of “I am I” (1.1.174), as these times go.

Against this larger constellation, it should come as no surprise that the emergent first-person singular actually thrives in a context marked by reckless self-reliance, bodily energy, nonsensical speech, and a cultural semiotics of unsettling instability in relations of words, deeds, and meanings. Here, we cannot but recall Richard Gloucester's “I am myself alone” (3 Henry VI, 5.6.83), with its early linkage between socio-spatial distance and a downstage sense of theatricality (“as if the tragedy / Were play’d in jest by counterfeiting actors”—2.2.27-28). This linkage, I suggest, provides a seminal site wherever in the figure of the Vice-descendant theatricality and apartness come together. There is a paradox in this conjuncture between the platea-associated vehicle of evil sport and (traditional) game, on one hand, and the socio-spatial isolation as conducive to a (modern) sense of emergent selfhood, on the other. The contradiction in question, however, is of great consequence as a site on which, in Shakespeare's theater, a unique shaping power is at work in aid of a newly unstable perspective on a ‘forlorn’ relationship between the world and the self. Again, this power is best adumbrated where “deformity” (even in the shape of “commodity”) works, contradictorily, as both source and outcome of untold dramatic energies. Thus, “deformity” can “mock,” invert, and help

To disproportion me in every part,
Like to chaos, or an unlick’d bear-whelp
That carries no impression like the dam.

(3 Henry VI, 3.2.160-62)

There is a similar formlessness, an unshaped “bastard” fold in Faulconbridge's unstable makeup, similar to those bear whelps that, in Elizabethan lore, were believed to be born as formless lumps, only later to be licked into some shape. Although the Bastard is exceptional in that—unlike Richard Gloucester—he makes good, his point of departure is not totally unlike that of the latter in 3 Henry VI.

And I—like one lost in a thorny wood,
That rents the thorn, and is rent with the thorns,
Seeking a way, and straying from the way,
Not knowing how to find the open air
But toiling desperately to find it out—

(174-78)

Although, of course, the analogy between Faulconbridge and Gloucester has obvious limitations, both characters exemplify a strenuous need to perform, “toiling desperately” to play a role, “to find it out,” and, for better or worse, to take up arms against a thorny world. Both share a moment of “vast confusion,” as in the Bastard's anguished outcry,

I am amaz’d, methinks, and lose my way
Among the thorns and dangers of this world.

(4.3.140-41; 152)

The echo—losing one's way among thorns—may perhaps be fortuitous, but the sentiment points to a new, intense and mutually painful interaction between the self and the social, culminating in an aggressive endeavor that “rents the thorn” even while the intervening medium itself is “rent” by “thorny” circumstances that tear and split whatever identity or agency is at work here. It is some such disillusioned sense of being “lost” in a role-playing game of apartness that serves as an important matrix for exceptional uses of selfhood. The Bastard in King John, exemplifying these uses, harps on the first-person singular. As Honigmann has shown in his edition of the play, with Philip entering early in Act I, “the pronoun I is used fifty-eight times, fifty-one times by Faulconbridge” (6). There is a connection, it seems, between the Bastard's self-reliance and his insecurity in the wake of his release from lineage ties and bonds of family and fealty, from “Legitimation, name, and all.” Such release is especially strong where a lusty spirit—Richard and Edmund, no less than Faulconbridge—feels himself authorized to realign “Exterior form” and “inward motion” and—in doing so—suspend another chain of predesigned correspondences. Hence, the Bastard's impertinent “And so am I, whether I smack or no” points in a direction where the stubborn sense of an unrelenting, pushing self outrageously asks to be admitted to the ranks of “worshipful society.” It is as if “degree, priority, and place,” together with “proportion, season, form” (Troilus and Cressida, 1.3.85-86) and, of course, discretion and decorum need to be discarded before the new self with its “appetite […] seconded by will and power” (121-22) can take over.

Thus, in a virulent context of verbal, moral, sexual, and social disruption, the memory of the Vice spawns a reckless type of subjectivity:

And have is have, however men do catch.
Near or far off, well won is still well shot,
And I am I, how’er I was begot.

(King John, 1.1.173-75)

The complicity between age-old topsy-turvydom and threefold iteration of the first-person singular is remarkable. Unleashing the ties to the preordained meaning of his one-time iniquity, the descendant of the Vice turns his sardonic sense of sublunary relations to (another pun) the sexually charged praise for an accurate shot. As is the case with Edmund, the private “stealth of nature” and the social cast of contingency are lusty bedfellows, especially when it comes to populate the world with “rising spirits.” Somewhere between “outward accoutrement” and “inward motion,” but certainly along the complex cultural semiotics residing in the site of their male-gendered interaction, the early modern dramatic male-gendered self emerges—snatching, against “the plague of custom,” for himself status and privilege.

The reasons why Shakespeare, in marked contrast to his probable source play, The Troublesome Reign of King John, saw fit to introduce as catalyst into his play a figure as sourceless as the Bastard¹⁹ are worth pondering. To judge by his dramatic function, Faulconbridge, though positively moving toward taking the lead in the struggle for the early modern nation-state, cannot be subsumed under the discursive design of historiography. It seems that Shakespeare's mode of assimilating on “unworthy” scaffolds “the worthiness of the matter itself” called for a strong performative with which effectively to contain the elements of closure and homogeneity that patterned the discourse of history. The dramatist did so, even when, according to recent revisionist readings of Holinshed (those of, for instance, A. R. Braunmuller, Larry S. Champion, and above all, Annabel Patterson), the latter was, politically speaking, far from univocal.²⁰ Clearly, the Bastard, at least in the early parts of the play, is made to perform at the frontiers of historiographical representation. In Braunmuller's phrase, he “is both a reader of the text of history and part of that text.” As a “reader,” he is someone who, again from a distance, seeks to appropriate for himself, and make sense of, the “text of history.” As “outsider to many of the play's overt concerns—law, family, politics—he embodies the playwright's own practical need for an analytical consciousness and offers a focus for unifying disparate, uninterpreted events.”²¹

We do not need to dismiss the Bastard's structuring function in the play text to realize that this cannot be the exclusive raison d’etre behind his adaptation. While the unifying and the unified quality of the Bastard's function can be exaggerated, the important point is that Shakespeare's response to the problems of dramatizing the “worthiness of the matter itself” in Tudor historical discourse called for a theatrically effective, at least partially countervailing medium, for which the hybrid descendant of the Vice offered itself. There must have been an intriguing connection between the memory of the extra-dramatic function of the Vice as leader, director, and master of ceremonies on the “unworthy scaffold” and the need to dramatize, revise, and reauthorize in a post-Reformation context the text of a particularly remote chronicle history. It may well have been the need for the sheer power to enliven and perform things; the “terrific energy,” in Michael Goldman's words, of an actor/character who “both is and is not himself”;²² the conjuncture of a presentational and representational gestus; the inscribed penchant for both mobility and (in)stability; in a word, the principle of contrariety itself, which predestined a bastard figure like Faulconbridge—“an old-young, legal-illegal, royal-common, male-female oxymoron”²³—for this function.

The Bastard, of course, is not the only agent in the play who helps rewrite and reread a remote past in the light of Elizabethan concerns. Critics have drawn attention to the astonishing degree to which historical narrative is manipulated in order to underline a groundswell of analogies between the reign of John and that of Elizabeth I. But on top of the inevitable anachronism in the composition of the play, the Bastard serves as a vital medium in the conflation of past significance and performed meaning. As Emrys Jones persuasively argues, the Bastard—standing “with one foot in history, the other in myth”—appeals “to a deep layer of audience-memory”; through him, “Shakespeare makes his audience reach back into its past for an idea of someone larger than life yet lifesize.” Along these lines, the Bastard, acting “as a critic and commentator,” even serving as some “spectator-surrogate,” is “both inside and outside society, just as he is both inside and outside the play.”²⁴

Such anachronism, in conjunction with a stance of liminality, marks the Bastard's protean function in the play. Simultaneously, he can provoke and proscribe, instigate and decry, tempt and denounce, as he does in his speech on “Sweet, sweet, sweet poison” (itself an oxymoron) and “Mad world, mad kings, mad composition.” His double-dealing culminates in the “wild counsel” to unite with the enemy to destroy the object of rivalry, and then, “That done, dissever your united strengths” so as to attack each other (2.1.372-95). In other words, the Bastard—precisely because he erupts into the play as someone from without the text of historiography—can be used as an “artificial person”²⁵ who “himself,” but in the absence of a stable self, “shall unfold at large” the dramatized matter of chronicle history. Here, in conclusion, to quote again from Marlowe's prologue to 2 Tamburlaine, is to suggest the scope, but also the irresistible sweep in the Bastard and his performing gestus: spanning both the fond “conceits” of “rhyming mother wits” and the “tragic glass” of early modern selfhood and contingency, Faulconbridge can draw on an incommensurable font of contrariety and thereby reject the early Marlovian alternative, with its arrogant claim to “lead” spectators away from greatly gaped-at actors' voices and bodies. The Bastard can serve as a catalyst of diverse assimilations precisely because he is at the point of intersection where the language of representation and the medium of presentation (and theatrical self-assertion) interact and through this interaction mutually transform one another. As “the worthiness of the matter itself” and the agents of production and reception engage one another, the mingling of Vice and history is one way of sounding the use and abuse of distance between dramatic representations and the circumstantial world and validity of their transaction.

Notes

1. Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine the Great, ed. J. S. Cunningham, “The Revels Plays” (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1981). This is the text from which I continue to cite Marlowe's prologues and Richard Jones' preface. In what follows, my main text is, unless otherwise noted, The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997²).

2. In the present context, the question of the date of King John is important, in that it implicates The Troublesome Reign as, possibly, a text, independently adapted for performance, even a politically motivated “propaganda piece,” though “not exactly a bad quarto” (L. A. Beaurline). But in my approach I reject this all-too tempting scenario and follow the traditional dating, despite E. A. J. Honigmann's and Beaurline's not unpersuasive argument in favor of 1590/91. Cf. King John, ed. Honigmann, “The Arden Shakespeare” (London: Methuen, 1954), esp. xviii-xxv, liii-lviii; King John, ed. Beaurline, “New Cambridge Shakespeare” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 194-210; cit. 206). For a recent debate on the question—crucial in dating the play—whether or not The Troublesome Reign preceded King John, see Sidney Thomas, in Shakespeare Quarterly (37 [1986], 98-100) and the exchange between Honigmann, Paul Werstine, and Thomas, ibid., 38 (1987), 125-30, on the interpretation of “documentary links”—mainly, a stage direction—in establishing precedence. See also, Guy Hamel, “King John and The Troublesome Raigne. A Reexamination,” in King John. New Perspectives, ed. Deborah T. Curren-Aquino (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1989), esp. 41, 58, note 2; and Brian Boyd, “King John and The Troublesome Raigne: Sources, Structure, Sequence,” in Philological Quarterly 74 (1995): 37-56. In the question of sequence, A. R. Braunmuller's consideration that the better stylistic, metrical, critical, and historical circumstantial evidence is in favor of King John postdating The Troublesome Reign seems to me, if not ultimately the last word, the most persuasive answer we have. See The Life and Death of King John, ed. Braunmuller, “The Oxford Shakespeare” (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 15.

3. See Alan C. Dessen, Shakespeare and the Late Moral Plays (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986) 18-23; 137-38; 162-63, who lists “a wealth of allusions to the Vice” (21).

4. Second Interlude, 14-15; see Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford, Percy and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925-52), 6:323.

5. On the genealogy of the Bastard, see King John, ed. John Dover Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936), xxxix-xli; Honigmann, Arden edition, xxii-xxv; as well as other editors. Further, Richard Levin, “King John's Bastard,” The Upstart Crow 3 (Fall 1980): 22-41. What deserves to be underlined is the multivocal nature of the Bastard's presence in the play, as discussed by Michael Manheim, “The Four Voices of the Bastard?” (“King John”: New Perspectives, 126-35). In the present context, however, the most consequential division in his “purpose of playing” is between his presentational and representational cast—conveniently summed up by Alexander Leggatt as “an unmistakable amalgam of participant and commentator” (“Dramatic Perspective in King John,” English Studies in Canada 3 [1977]: 15-16). On the seminal dimension of the Bastard, see Emrys Jones, Scenic Form in Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), esp. 99-101,185-86, 239-42.

6. See James E. May, “Imagery in Disorderly Motion in King John: A Thematic Gloss,” Essays in Literature 10 (1983): 17-28.

7. Here, I use L. A. Beaurline's paraphrase, King John, 98 (line 574).

8. Christopher Z. Hobson, “Bastard Speech: The Rhetoric of ‘Commodity’ in King John,” Shakespeare Yearbook 2 (1991): 95-114.

9. See King John, ed. Braunmuller, Appendix C, 286-89.

10. The Macro Plays, ed. Mark Eccles, EETS, 262 (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), 155, l. 54.

11. Hyckescorner; cit. Specimens of the Pre-Shakespearean Drama, ed. J. M. Manly, 2 vols. (Boston: Anthenaeum Press, 1987), 1:396; cf. ll. 309-25.

12. Francis Bacon, The New Organon, ed. Fulton H. Anderson (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1960), 81.

13. King John, ed. Honigmann.

14. King John, ed. Braunmuller, 132.

15. Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhauser (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974), 1.1:342; in the German original, the “abyss between figurate being and meaning” (my translation) is, literally, an Abgrund.

16. Weimann, Authority and Representation in Early Modern Discourse, 133-59.

17. Cohen, Introduction to King John; cf. The Norton Shakespeare, Stephen Greenblatt, gen. ed. (New York: Norton, 1997), 1015.

18. Jones, The Origins of Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 249.

19. See, however, Jacqueline Trace, “Shakespeare's Bastard Faulconbridge: An Early Tudor Hero,” Shakespeare Studies 13 (1980): 59-69, where she says, “Shakespeare's Faulconbridge, originating in the figure of Philip of Cognac from Holinshed's Chronicle, developed from the dramatist's acquaintance with the Henrician Faulconbridge so closely associated with the antipapal policies of the Tudor princes” (68). But, then, the significance of these sources poses troublesome questions.

20. See Braunmuller, “King John and Historiography,” English Literary History 55 (1988): 309-22, who finds that both “Shakespeare and Holinshed wrote confusing texts because each believed that confusion was not sedition” (318). As no one else before, Annabel Patterson has shown “the surprising commitment of the Chronicles to the underprivileged, the demotic, the untitled”; Reading Holinshed's “Chronicles” (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), xv.

21. King John, ed. Braunmuller, 697-71.

22. Goldman, The Actor's Freedom: Toward a Theory of Drama (New York: Viking Press, 1975), 7, 11.

23. King John, ed. Braunmuller, 72.

24. Jones, Origins of Shakespeare, 249, 252, 247.

25. This recalls J. Leeds Barroll's Artificial Persons: The Formation of Character in the Tragedies of Shakespeare (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1974)—a phrase that appears especially felicitous in view of the hybrid construct that is the Bastard's character. In this direction, we do well to ponder on the warning contained in Steve Longstaffe's essay, “The Limits of Modernity in Shakespeare's King John,” Shakespeare and History, ed. Holger Klein and Rowland Wymer (London: Edwin Mellen Press, 1996), 91-118.

I wish to thank William West for extremely helpful comments and suggestions on this essay.