SOURCE: Bonjour, Adrien. “Bastinado for the Bastard?” English Studies 45 (1964): 169-76.

[In the following essay, Bonjour defends his thesis that Lord Faulconbridge, the Bastard, should be viewed as the dramatic hero of King John.]

This is not the place to re-open the much debated question of the hero in King John, nor even to take up the cudgels in favour of my interpretation of the Bastard's rôle in the vast perspective of the play. I merely propose to examine some of the reasons which led Mr. Honigmann to reduce the Bastard's part to that of a mere commentator standing “outside the inner framework” of the tragedy, and hence to reject him as a possible hero even in the fifth act.¹ For convenience I shall first sum up the case against the Bastard by listing Mr. Honigmann's main arguments.

1) To make the Bastard's “subordinate position crystal clear, Shakespeare has him snubbed again and again.”

2) Nowhere in the play does his interference “make history”.

3) John's delegation of authority to him is not a sign of the Bastard's greatness. On the contrary, it was meant to be only a sign of John's dejection that he hands over to a servant, a bastard, and a boon companion.

4) The loss of John's army in the Wash is an act of criminal stupidity accredited to the Bastard by Shakespeare and dealt upon twice to belittle him.

In a word, this “hero” fails in a higher sphere, despite his triumphs as a bully. And his failure as general and statesman may not be passed over lightly.

An impressive indictment indeed. On the face of it the lesson of the Bastard's indignity well deserves to be drummed into the recalcitrant critics who uphold his claims to the status of a dramatic hero. But this conception of the Bastard's position, I suggest, deprives the final scenes of the play of much of their moral and dramatic significance. And the reason why it can (and ought to be) challenged is that once the charges hurled against the Bastard are carefully examined within their contextual background, they lose the greater part of their sting. The Bastard, on the contrary, firmly stands his ground unscathed, more than ever ready to outscold his enemies and, with strong arm, to cudgel them and make them take the hatch.

The question of the snubs, to begin with, is a case in point. The Bastard, Mr. Honigmann contends, is snubbed by his own mother in the first scene; and, sure enough, Lady Faulconbridge calls him “thou unreverend boy” (227) and “thou most untoward knave” (243). But the spectators, who have just been told the truth about the Bastard's father, can hardly take these remonstrances seriously since they know that she is deliberately playing the part of the virtuous and maliciously slandered woman to convince her son of his supposed legitimacy and so save her honour. But she soon throws off the mask, confesses the truth, pleads exceptional circumstances and rather movingly begs him not to lay her transgression to her charge. There is no longer any question of his being unreverend, and the audience must have been as delighted as she was relieved at the Bastard's good-humoured and proud answer, when he not only excuses her conduct but heartily thanks her for his father. Compare the present scene with the treatment of this episode in The Troublesome Reign and you will see what an unfathomable gap separates the Bastard from your real bully.

Likewise Eleanor's snub:

Out on thee, rude man! thou dost shame thy mother
And wound her honour with this diffidence

(1.1.64-5)

entirely loses its meaning as soon as the truth is revealed and her indignation turns to sympathy and admiration for the man who hath indeed a trick of Coeur-de-Lion's face. When the Bastard wittily confirms why he had rather lose his land and be the reputed son of Coeur-de-Lion than enjoy it as a Faulconbridge, Eleanor spontaneously exclaims: “I like thee well” and asks him to follow her to France. These and the last words she has for him in this lively scene, by far outweigh the first with which they stand in significant contrast:

The very spirit of Plantagenet!
I am thy grandam, Richard; call me so.

(1.1.167-8)

In short, the swift rise of the Bastard to a higher and more honourable status:

Kneel thou down Philip, but rise more great,
Arise Sir Richard, and Plantagenet

(1.1.161-2)

and the way in which he quickly wins the confidence of both the King and the Queen mother are already a prefiguration of his general evolution throughout the play.

So it stands with the other snubs in Mr. Honigmann's list. Take Austria's

What cracker is this same that deafs our ears
With this abundance of superfluous breath?

(2.1.147-8)

Detached from its context the passage may well suggest that the duke has found the right stick to flog the Bastard's back. But this is Austria's answer to the Bastard's threat: “But, ass, I'll take that burthen (i.e., the lion's hide conquered from Richard I) from your back, / Or lay on (‘blows’, i.e., thrash soundly) that shall make your shoulders crack.” Now if a single member of the audience had been so mistaken as to take Austria's words at their face value and think that those threats of the Bastard's were nothing but idle vaunts, the facts were soon at hand to put him right again. For, when in the midst of alarums and excursions pointing to a “wondrous hot” day, the Bastard appears with Austria's head as a trophy, the threats are shown to be anything but “superfluous breath”. The Bastard, it is clear, proves as good as his word. If we keep in mind what a wound to English pride the sight of the foreign duke strutting with Coeur-de-Lion's famous badge of courage on his back must have represented, there is no doubt that the scene in which the Bastard wins back the lion's robe was meant to endear him to the audience and prove that his mettle was worthy of his noble blood.

Or, again, take Salisbury's warning:

Stand by, or I shall gall you, Faulconbridge.

(4.3.94)

Suppose the Bastard had silently complied—this would indeed have been a real snub. But let us visualize the situation. The body of Arthur has just been discovered and, at the spectacle of the dead child, the incensed lords vent their indignation and swear to take revenge on his murderer who, as they have every reason to believe, is no other than Hubert, acting on the King's command. Thereupon Hubert makes his appearance. After a brief exchange of words, Salisbury draws his sword and in spite of Hubert's denegations keeps accusing him of the murder. The tension rises, and when Pembroke cries out: “Cut him to pieces”, we catch a glimpse of Salisbury's menacing figure stepping towards Hubert. At his juncture the Bastard interferes: “Keep the peace, I say.” Halting, and turning to the Bastard, Salisbury then threatens to gall him.

Thou wert better gall the divel, Salisbury:
If thou but frown on me, or stir thy foot,
Or teach thy hasty spleen to do me shame,
I'll strike thee dead. Put up thy sword betime—
Or I'll so maul you and your toasting-iron
That you shall think the divel is come from hell.

(4.3.95-100)

I have thought it worth quoting the Bastard's retort in full. For if Salisbury had felt he had met his match, nothing could have prevented him from accepting the challenge and giving his adversary the lie i ‘th’ throat as deep as to the lungs before crossing swords with him. Yet Salisbury it is who actually “stands by”. He is the one who has been snubbed, both in words and in action, and not the Bastard, who has proved more than a match for him.

Further confirmation is superfluous, and we may therefore strongly doubt that these so-called “snubs”, which invariably turn to the Bastard's advantage, were really meant by Shakespeare to stress his subordinate position.

Let us now pass to Mr. Honigmann's contention that nowhere in the play does the Bastard's interference “make history”. This seems to be much truer for the bulk of Shakespeare's “historical” sources, whatever they be, than for the play itself, which is probably the most unhistorical of them all.² In order to reach fairly valid conclusions on this point, a close examination of the Bastard's “interferences” in the play is necessary.

His first intervention takes place under the walls of Angiers, after the indecisive bout between the French and English armies. The spokesman of the city refuses to take sides with either France or England until one of the pair has proved the stronger. The Bastard then suggests that both sovereigns unite their forces against “the flinty ribs of this contemptuous city” before they resume their struggle for a decisive victory. The significant point is not so much the suggestion itself—which is sound tactics—as the tone in which it is uttered:

By heaven, these scroyles of Angiers flout you, kings,
And stand securely on their battlements,
As in a theatre, whence they gape and point
At your industrious scenes and acts of death.
Your royal presences be rul'd by me …

(2.1.373-7)

This is how he introduces his proposal. And when he has fully disclosed his scheme, he asks the sovereigns:

How like you this wild counsel, mighty states?
Smacks it not something of the policy?

If ever the Bastard's subordinate position was meant to be stressed by Shakespeare, as Honigmann supposes, this would have been the right moment to keep that upstart crow of a courtier in his place, who was bold enough to ask kings to be ruled by him—the cheek of it! Yet far from contemptuously waving aside such a “wild counsel”, King John eagerly accepts it:

Now, by the sky that hangs above our heads,
I like it well.

(2.1.397-8)

And, surprizingly enough, his royal majesty of France chimes in: “Let it be so”. There is no denying that the Bastard (alias Sir Richard Plantagenet) has already reached the position of one who can afford to advise kings without being asked, and without drawing upon himself the slightest rebuke. No doubt this intervention of his does not yet make history, but we are still at the earlier stages of the Bastard's rise and further steps are soon to bring him closer to the “upmost round” of the ladder.

For being brief, the next step is none the less important. We are given an eloquent picture of the Bastard at work, proving that he is quite as efficient in action as in words. Not only does he appear in the thick of the fight with Austria's head (which means a feat of arms unparallelled in the whole play),³ but he is further credited with the prowess of rescuing Queen Eleanor from enemy hands. This last point is particularly interesting, for it represents one of the clearest cases in which Shakespeare deliberately departed from his sources to heighten the stature of the Bastard. As Honigmann himself points out, Eleanor's rescue, as depicted in Holinshed, was “one of John's most determined exploits.”⁴ That Shakespeare transferred it to the Bastard is patent proof of the dramatist's intent to have him play a more prominent part. With his double exploit, the Bastard is now decidedly beginning to influence the course of history in Shakespeare's play. For he can rightly be considered as instrumental in bringing about the victory of the English forces. No wonder that he is charged with an important mission by the King and honoured at leave-taking with the same flattering title both by Eleanor (“Farewell, gentle cousin”) and by John (“Coz, farewell”). Can we maintain that Shakespeare really intends us to consider the Bastard as a mere servant and boon companion? Does not this brief episode rather suggest that by dint of his gallant action the Bastard has now fully acquired his lettres de noblesse and is cast for that still higher part that the future has in store for him? That of a man who, at a given point in the play will hold in his own hands the destiny of the kingdom. For he does hold it at a crucial moment in the course of historical events, as Shakespeare presents them.

But to be worthy of that supreme honour he has to qualify in the moral sphere too. And this is effected by his attitude when confronted with the issues surrounding Arthur's death, and with the moral choice that the ensuing crisis forces upon him.

When he reappears, his mission successfully carried out, mischief has been wrought in his absence, and John has forfeited all the advantages of that very victory to which the Bastard so greatly contributed. “That John may stand, then, Arthur needs must fall”—the legate's prophecy has come true. By ordering Arthur's death, John has become morally disqualified from wearing the crown that he so deeply feared to lose. And though the order has not been executed, by a just irony of fate (which is the King's nemesis) everything looks as if it had been, and the great reversal inexorably takes place:

There is no sure foundation set on blood,
No certain life achiev'd by others' death.

John's recognition comes too late. The lords and other discontented peers have picked strong matter of revolt and wrath out of the bloody fingers' ends of John. A mighty army has been drawn in France—and, having learned the copy of John's speed, the French have all arrived before the King has heard of any foreign preparation. As to John's mother, who should have heard of it, her ear is stopp'd with dust in her grave. The heavens themselves, with wondrous apparition of prodigious moons, do frown upon the land. Made giddy with these ill-tidings John urges the Bastard to rush to the revolted lords and win their loves again. As soon as the Bastard meets them, however, Arthur's body is discovered, and nothing can now prevent the incensed lords from swearing to take vengeance upon John and joining the French forces.

At this point in the crisis the Bastard, whose reaction is eagerly watched by the audience, reveals the true stamp of his nature, and his moral greatness more than fulfils our expectations. For he is contrasted with the peers, both in words and in action. Whereas the lords are “carried away by their own performance” and with high-blown rhetoric “indulge in self-justifying superlatives of horror,” the Bastard's condemnation of the deed is the more eloquent for being sober and pithy:

It is a dammed and a bloody work;
The graceless action of a heavy hand.

(4.3.57-8)

Whereas the lords, who cannot conceive of any other possibility than crime, equate appearance with full evidence, and act accordingly, the Bastard keeps his balance and is clear-headed enough to suspend final judgment (“If that it be the work of any hand”), and consequently refrains from any rash action. How right he is the audience know: they are moved by his spontaneous expression of his revulsion to Hubert, for what indeed looks like murder, and admire him for ultimately remaining loyal in such circumstances, not so much to his king as to his country. “This is the new, more thoughtful, less hot-headed but no less fortright man that the Bastard has grown to be, a far cry from the unthinking enthusiast he was in the first act.” As Mr. Matchett further emphasizes, “the Bastard's reaction is the appropriate one for any conscientious man: ‘I am amaz'd, methinks and lose my way / Among the thorns and dangers of this world’ (140-41). The moral life is never, for a perceptive man, a simple choice between black and white, but life in a maze. The ambiguity of the Bastard's ensuing soliloquy reflects the ambiguity of the issues themselves, and his conclusion the necessity to act in spite of it.”⁵

Indeed, that man who now expresses his perplexity in a way which raises him to the spiritual stature of an early Hamlet, emerges as the only one, among those who count, who is fit for a ruler. The king is out of the running and has all but yielded up the “circle” of his glory; the great nobles have turned traitors; the Bastard, with fighting spirit and with moral fibre strengthened by adversity, remains. The stage is set for him to take over.

To interpret John's delegation of authority to the Bastard purely negatively and maintain, as Honigmann does, that this “was meant to be only a sign of John's dejection that he hands over to a servant, a bastard, and a boon companion,” hardly does justice to the significance of the scene and to the careful way in which it is prepared. For one thing the King has reached the lowest possible point in leadership with his humiliating submission to the Pope's legate, in exchange for a promise to make the French lay down their arms. The Bastard, who knows nothing of the “inglorious league”, brings further bad news about the progress of the French army and the traitorous nobles, coupled with a renewed appeal for resistance à outrance: “Be stirring as the time, be fire with fire”—in a word, prove yourself indomitable and your subjects (or what is left of them) will then put on

The dauntless spirit of resolution.

(5.1.53)

But John is no more than the shadow of a king, and the inspiriting picture of the ruler that he should have been gives us the full measure of his fall. When the Bastard hears of his submission, his condemnation, however devastating, again closes with an appeal to arms:

Perchance the cardinal cannot make your peace;
Or if he do, let it at least be said
They saw we had a purpose of defence.

(5.1.74-6)

His insight is still growing, and this time, as the audience is soon to be shown, he proves a real prophet. Such is his ascendancy that the solution is now felt to be inescapable:

Have thou the ordering of this present time.

Who else, indeed, had proved worthy of the office? Who cannot feel that without the Bastard's intervention here, events might have run a different course?

But this is not all, and the time soon comes, as Mr. Matchett has shown, when the whole problem of the succession solely depends on the Bastard's decision. For Shakespeare puts him in a position in which he might easily claim the crown and fully “assume the role he has in fact been filling and for which the character he inherited from his father has proven so eminently fitted.”⁶ The temptation is there, for how else could we explain the Bastard's prayer to the heavens:

And tempt us not to bear above our power!

(5.7.38)

But the Bastard dismisses it, and when the events ultimately call for a decision, it is quickly reached, and the Bastard spontaneously kneels to Prince Henry, whom he thus recognizes as the legitimate king. Within the scope of Shakespeare's play, his decision makes history, inasmuch as it averts the kind of troubles that plagued the reign of John and brought the kingdom to the brink of ruin. For let us not forget that if we keep to Shakespeare's story, the Bastard is exactly in the same position upon John's death as John was upon Richard's death: both wield the power over the kingdom de facto and both have a younger nephew whose rights to the crown are more legitimate than their own. John's choice, as the play makes clear, finally entails national disaster and the decay of wrested pomp. By putting right above might the Bastard, on the contrary, paves the way for national unity and strength.

In the chronicle of wasted time as Shakespeare presents it in this drama, the Bastard's action is historical, and it is quite fitting that his closing message should have been remembered by so many thousand hearts of England's breed (bastards and else) fighting with their backs against the wall more than three centuries later. By what strange aberration should such a figure be considered as lying outside the inner framework of the play?

My last point must bring us to the Lincoln Washes and the treacherously moving Goodwin Sands. Honigmann's assertion that the loss of John's army is “an act of criminal stupidity accredited to the Bastard by Shakespeare and dwelt upon twice to belittle him” finds hardly any support in the text itself. For there is not the slightest hint that was the dramatist's purpose, and that the audience was meant to view the incident in so unfavourable a light with regard to the Bastard's leadership. On the contrary, as I read it, the episode serves a double purpose. Dramatically, it is the last of the series of blows struck by Fortune against John after he has reached the apex of his reign and ordered Arthur's death. Despite all these reversals which made of him the wretched “shrunken” being, the clod of confounded royalty he is now reduced to, despite the poison and the throes of death, he eagerly awaits the outcome of the war:

My heart hath one poor string to stay it by,
Which holds but till thy news be uttered.

(5.7.55-6)

But the string snaps and the news of the disaster in the Wash is the stroke of death. John had to drink the cup to the bitter end.

Psychologically, the episode, far from belittling the Bastard, serves to stress his indomitable spirit of resolution. For hardly has the King died when he vehemently appeals to the lords to fight with him and take the initiative against the enemy striking at “the weak door of our fainting land”:

Straight let us seek, or straight we shall be sought.

And here an interesting parallel with the attitude of the Dolphin should be stressed. Both show a similar kind of resolution in the face of adversity, and there is no doubt that towards the end of the play the Dolphin is presented in a relatively favourable light. This has something to do, I suspect, with the imminent outcome of the war. For it ends in a draw. And a draw can only be made palatable to a patriotic audience if the enemy is worthy and resolute. Even so, it is the Dolphin who makes the offers of peace, not the Bastard; and for these overtures to be decently acceptable they have to be honourable—and so they are, as Salisbury stresses (“As we with honour and respect may take”). In other words, the Dolphin had to be some sort of a match for the Bastard—hence the parallels in question.

The Bastard rejects John's “inglorious league” with the legate and carries on with the hostilities. So does the Dolphin who, in spite of the legate's entreaties, “flatly says he'll not lay down his arms.” The Bastard emphatically approves:

By all the blood that ever fury breath'd,
The youth says well.

(5.2.127-8)

Both valiant adversaries in turn take some advantage over each other: the French “fight coldly, and retire themselves”; the English “measure backward their own ground in faint retire.” And finally both sides suffer heavy losses as a result of an unforeseen natural calamity which is twice mentioned in either case. The great supply that has been so long and eagerly expected by the Dolphin is “cast away and sunk on Goodwin Sands”, whereas the best of the English power “Were in the Washes all unwarily / Devoured by the unexpected flood.” Characteristically enough, in both cases the attack of the treacherous floods took place at night. Rather than a suggestion of criminal stupidity on the part of the leaders, I read in both instances the unpredictable attack of natural forces unleashed by an inscrutable fate. For the important point lies not so much in the event itself as in the reaction of both leaders to these parallel strokes of fortune. It is certainly to their own credit that they both keep steady and express their resolution in a way which testifies to their daunting spirits.

Finally, it is certainly unfair to speak of “military failure” only when the Bastard is said by one of his adversaries to bear the brunt of the battle alone:

That misbegotten divel, Faulconbridge,
In spite of spite, alone upholds the day.

(5.4.4-5)

Not to mention, I repeat, that the Dolphin it is who eventually asks for an honourable peace. Even then the Bastard has the last word:

He will the rather do it [i.e., leave the war] when he sees
Ourselves well sinew'd to our defence.

(5.7.87-8)

But after all the Bastard can take care of himself alone. His way of winning friends among his audience needs not be stressed anew. As to his enemies, he not only outsnubs them but generously adds the benefit of a sound volée de bois vert, so that the least that can be said of them is that they make a rod for their own backs.

Notes

1. See his stimulating edition of King John in the New Arden Shakespeare (London, 1954 ed.), p. lxxi-lxxii. All quotations from this play are from Mr. Honigmann's text.

2. Honigmann, p. xxxi.

3. The Archduke has brought his own forces to fight side by side with King Philip against John. He is the only military chief who falls in the course of Anglo-French hostilities in the drama. Such an individual victory on the Bastard's part is enhanced by the several references to “brave Austria” as the man who overcame

   Richard, that robb'd the lion of his heart
   And fought the holy wars in Palestine.

4. Honigmann, p. 74.

5. William H. Matchett, ‘Richard's Divided Heritage in King John,’ Essays in Critism, XII (1962), 247.

6. Ibid., 250.