SOURCE: Dusinberre, Juliet. “King John and Embarrassing Women.” Shakespeare Survey 42 (1990): 37-52.

[In the following essay, Dusinberre focuses on the subversive and dramatically energizing qualities of the feminine roles in King John.]

Compared with almost any other play of Shakespeare's, King John has had a poor press both in quantity of what is written about it and also in the faint praise accorded to it. This lack of interest has been reflected in its stage history. Arthur Colby Sprague wrote in 1945 that the play is ‘now almost unknown as an acting play’.¹ When it was put on in the Old Vic season of 1953-4 the editors of a commemorative volume (Roger Wood and Mary Clarke) record that ‘it only just maintained a 75 per cent attendance record’, and that ‘this was in spite of good reviews and first-rate acting’ (by a cast which included Fay Compton as Constance, Richard Burton as Falconbridge, and Michael Hordern as John). They conclude that this lukewarm reception ‘must be attributed to the play's own comparative unpopularity’. Wood and Clarke consider King John to be ‘purely medieval’, and add that ‘a play of such mixed fabric, where every man is for himself and no common purpose or theme emerges, presents many problems to the producer’.² In 1988 one might feel less confident in declaring that a drama in which every man is out for himself represents the medieval rather than the modern world. Perhaps Garrick's idea for a production which was ‘half old English and half modern’ both identifies and solves the problem.³ In the later twentieth century King John has not—at least until the advent of Deborah Warner's excellent 1988 production at The Other Place in Stratford-upon-Avon—shared notably in the revival of enthusiasm about Shakespeare's other history plays set in motion by John Barton's adaptations and productions. Standing alone where the other histories support each other in two tetralogies, King John remains to some extent odd man out. Or should one say, odd woman out? There are certainly enough odd women in it, or at least, men have often thought so.

In the early nineteenth century the play came into its own when in John Philip Kemble's production of 1804 Sarah Siddons (his sister) played Constance. Many actresses followed Mrs Siddons's lead in making Constance the first major part in the tragic repertoire. Leigh Hunt described Siddons's performance in The Examiner for 3 June 1810:

The Constance of Mrs. Siddons is an excellent study for young actresses, to whom it will shew the great though difficult distinction between rant and tragic vehemence. In an inferior performer, the loudness of Constance's grief would be mere noise; but tempered and broken as it is by the natural looks and gestures of Mrs. Siddons, by her varieties of tone and pauses full of meaning, it becomes as grand as it is petrifying.⁴

According to Leigh Hunt, the refinement of Mrs Siddons's rendering of the part tempered its potential for alienating the audience through its excesses, emotional and verbal. However, Constance's vehemence touched throughout the Romantic period a responsive chord in critics, and presumably in audiences, of the play. Hazlitt observes in Characters of Shakespeare's Plays (1817) that ‘the excess of maternal tenderness, rendered desperate by the fickleness of friends and the injustice of fortune, and made stronger in will, in proportion to the want of all other power, was never more finely expressed than in Constance’, and he quotes (without delineation) the lines: ‘To me and to the state of my great grief, let kings assemble’ (2.2.70).⁵ Constance becomes in this speech the locus for the conflict of power and powerlessness which shapes the whole play.

The play of King John thus became for the mid-nineteenth-century actress and audience the play of Constance and Arthur. Both Ellen Terry and her elder sister Kate appeared as Arthur with Charles and Ellen Kean when the play was produced in the 1850s under Kean's direction at the Princess's Theatre, London. Terry recalls vividly the stir she made in Arthur's scene with Hubert. She also remembers that

Another night I got into trouble for not catching Mrs. Kean, when, as Constance, in ‘King John’, she sank down on to the ground.

‘Here is my throne, bid kings come bow to it!’

I was, for my sins, looking at the audience, and Mrs. Kean went down with a run, and was naturally very angry with me!⁶

The anger is easy to understand. Dr Johnson noted in his edition of Shakespeare (1765) that in Constance despair creates power over, and independence from, those who have afflicted her:

III.i.70. Constance. To me and to the state of my great grief / Let kings assemble.] In Much Ado about Nothing, the father of Hero, depressed by her disgrace, declares himself so subdued by grief that a thread may lead him. How is it that grief in Leonato and Lady Constance produces effects directly opposite, and yet both agreeable to nature? Sorrow softens the mind while it is yet warmed by hope, but hardens it when it is congealed by despair. Distress, while there remains any prospect of relief, is weak and flexible, but when no succor remains, is fearless and stubborn; angry alike at those that injure and at those that do not help; careless to please where nothing can be gained and fearless to offend when there is nothing further to be dreaded. Such was this writer's knowledge of the passions.⁷

Dr Johnson identifies with acuity the psychological truth behind the theatrical reality of Constance's domination not only of the princes and potentates on the stage, but of the audience itself, who must salute her even as her world casts her aside. It requires, says Leigh Hunt, fine discrimination on the part of the actress for this dominion over the audience not to become aggression at the expense of true feeling. And the arbiter of true feeling? As Herschel Baker remarks in his introduction to the edition of the play in the Riverside Shakespeare: ‘Philip's comment on this appalling woman's rhetoric (which has endeared the role to many actresses) is one every reader will endorse: “You are as fond of grief as your own child”’.⁸ But will every audience, that motley multitude of potentially equally appalling women and equally appalled men, endorse that judgment?'⁹ Kenneth Muir points out that Shakespeare has amplified Constance's part (if one takes The Troublesome Raigne of King John as precursor to the play). The play-wright gives her ‘some 140 lines’, and Muir adds: ‘An impressive vehicle for great actresses, no doubt, although in my experience most audiences feel that the lady doth protest too much’.¹⁰

It is intriguing to consider why Shakespeare expanded Constance's part. He had, after all, no great actresses eager to cut their teeth on tragic rhetoric, and it could be argued that the advent of the great actress to the stage may have radically changed the balance of the play as first conceived. There is no knowing whether Shakespeare wanted in 1596 to train up a particular boy for the parts of tragic heroines. King John is usually dated within the same two-year period as Romeo and Juliet,¹¹ and it is possible that the boy actor who played Constance would also have acted Juliet.¹² By the time that there were women actresses, the two parts do seem to have gone in harness, for on 8 December 1816 Hazlitt saw Constance performed by Eliza O'Neill, an actress who had already achieved fame as Juliet.¹³ For a late twentieth-century audience the conjunction seems bizarre, not only because of the ages of the two women, but because Romeo and Juliet has remained at the centre of the Shakespearian repertoire while King John is still a curiosity. Perhaps the decline of the ‘star’ in the modern directors' theatre has operated against the play's popularity in the same way that its ostensible subject matter—the triumph of England over her Catholic enemies—when untempered by the romantic image of a charismatic central figure, as in Henry V, has seemed out of tune with the temper of our times. Whatever the case, the modern theatre is no longer as committed to establishing stars as it was in 1941 when Sybil Thorndike played Constance.

Nor is Constance the kind of woman character who might immediately appeal either to modern actresses or audiences, not because of her ranting but because she is, as Dr Johnson pointed out, the epitome of powerlessness. Dr Johnson concluded blandly that ‘the lady's grief is very affecting’.¹⁴ But Constance stands for aspects of patriarchal power which might affect women rather differently from the way in which Dr Johnson was affected. Her very impotence seems to cry out against her, and throughout the play alienation might seem more likely to accompany the sallies of the main women characters, Eleanor and Constance, than any great sympathy with their wrongs. They are, for the modern feminist, too palpably acquiescent in the values which have created these wrongs. Indeed some kind of male directorial embarrassment has often accompanied productions of King John, resulting in the cutting of the scolding between Eleanor and Constance. Sprague records a judgement in the Monthly Mirror for 1810, that it was a relief that the ‘Billingsgate scene’ between Eleanor and Constance had been cut. Sprague himself thinks the scene best understood in terms of ‘the formal defiances before battle, so frequent on the Elizabethan stage’, and declares that the homely interchanges between the women which appeal to a modern audience ‘would certainly have been embarrassing to spectators brought up on the neoclassical ideas of decorum’.¹⁵ Honigmann, the Arden editor, draws attention to other possibilities of imbalance in the play: ‘Often the principal actor played Faulconbridge, not John, which must also have distorted the play. The custom of casting girls to play Arthur seems quite as dangerous’ (p. lxxv). It is not immediately clear who or what was in danger, any more than it is immediately obvious who decides what a distortion is. And this is where King John is, conversely, a play of intense interest to feminists.¹⁶ Where does its central drive lie: where the great actress located it, in the figure of Constance? Where Hazlitt saw it, in the pathos of Arthur and the comedy of the Bastard? In the title role of John himself? Or, as some critics have claimed, in the identity of England, a nation emerging from papal domination? What is clear from reading the play—and Deborah Warner's 1988 production reinforced this impression—is that up till the end of Act 3 the dramatic action is dominated by the women characters, and this is a cause of extreme embarrassment to the men on stage, while it also provides a pretext for their own determination to create embarrassment for those women.

It is now considered somewhat old-fashioned to think of Shakespeare's plays as primarily ‘reading’ texts, or of the recipient of them as ‘the reader’. How does the audience, that collective body to whom the collective energy of the theatrical performance is addressed and who themselves constitute an essential part of that performance,¹⁷ in 1988 respond to the embarrassment of women which is so large a part of the first three acts of King John? The people in it often seem to challenge the audience to declare its presence, and the audience's implied reaction sometimes speaks as eloquently as anything that is actually said upon the stage. This is nowhere more evident than in the scenes which feature the play's embarrassing and embarrassed women.

The first few lines of the opening scene of King John show Shakespeare using a technique more familiar from the second scene of Hamlet, in which Claudius' smooth official discourse is punctured by a dissenting voice: ‘A little more than kin and less than kind’ (1.2.65). King John opens with the arrival of the French ambassador and the challenge to John to give up his throne in favour of Arthur:

KING John
Now say, Châtillon, what would France with us?
CHâTILLON
Thus, after greeting, speaks the King of France,
In my behaviour, to the majesty—
The borrowed majesty—of England here.
QUEEN Eleanor
A strange beginning: ‘borrowed majesty’?
KING John
Silence, good mother, hear the embassy.

(1.1.1-6)

Châtillon's strange beginning, couched in the formal language of diplomatic challenge, is not half so strange to the audience as Eleanor's intervention protesting against it and John's attempt to quell her protest. The conventional hostile interchange between the representatives of two centres of power is displaced by a new contender for power, the woman. She immediately forces the monarch into a subservient role, that of son, in which he has to plead with her, with the traditional courtesies of the dependent—‘Good mother’—to allow him to carry on with his business, not only as ruler but as independent adult. How is this to be staged? Does Châtillon totally ignore the interruption as his next speech implies? Or does the actor's mien express any of the astonishment which the audience feels at seeing a man so tied to his mother's apron-strings? Or does the French ambassador acknowledge the reality behind the interruption, which is that to address John is to address Eleanor, and that his next speech must be made to her as much as to John himself?¹⁸ The question is to some extent a feminist one, because the status of Eleanor's intervention has yet to be determined. Is this an example of subversion contained within the discourses of power, the thesis which Greenblatt argues so ably, which then allows authority to control and order apparent threats to that authority? In other words, does Eleanor's attempt to enter the discourse of power between the two states demonstrate the impotence of that attempt? Or is the intervention a real subversion of power, whatever that might mean?

One of the problems of analysing theatre in terms of discourses of power which contain their own antitheses is that according to this hypothesis subversion can never really subvert anything at all, and one is left wondering whether there can be a form of protest which truly does undermine authority structures. Surprisingly enough, Eleanor's interruption, which protests against Châtillon's slur on John's legitimacy as monarch, has the effect not of reinforcing his right to the throne, but, by giving the slur a primal place in everyone's thoughts, of undermining it. The question of legitimacy is summarily removed from the anodyne of diplomatic discourse into an arena which challenges that discourse, despite the fact that what is actually said ought logically to underline rather than undermine John's authority.

Eleanor does not speak again until after Châtillon's exit at line 30, when she breaks out into a flurry of pent up feeling:

QUEEN Eleanor
What now, my son? Have I not ever said
How that ambitious Constance would not cease
Till she had kindled France and all the world
Upon the right and party of her son?
This might have been prevented and made whole
With very easy arguments of love,
Which now the manage of two kingdoms must
With fearful-bloody issue arbitrate.
KING John
Our strong possession and our right for us.
QUEEN Eleanor (aside to King John)
Your strong possession much more than your right,
Or else it must go wrong with you and me:
So much my conscience whispers in your ear,
Which none but heaven and you and I shall hear.

(1.1.31-43)

Here Eleanor not only assumes authority within a man's universe, the right to declare that John has mismanaged his diplomacy and brought on his head a war which could have been avoided, but she also takes on herself the role of divine authority in becoming the secret voice of conscience, of a higher judgement on the actions not only of John but also of herself. Curiously, she seems to feel that the subversive instincts of the divine in challenging their joint power can be contained by her own recognition of that heavenly subversion. The problem is the audience. No one, says Eleanor, will hear this whisper of dissent. As Falstaff himself says in a different context: ‘Nothing confutes me but eyes, and nobody sees me’ (1 Henry IV, 5.4.125). But Eleanor's assertion draws the silent audience whose existence she denies into the action of the play, giving it divine authority to judge both her and her world. Ironically, she herself becomes the mouthpiece of the higher authority of heaven, whose presence she secretly recognizes—thus also perhaps secretly acknowledging the presence of the audience—at the very moment in which she disavows its power over herself and her son.

A glance at Shakespeare's adaptation of source material for these opening lines casts light on the realities of Eleanor's power in relation to John. Holinshed declares that at the death of Richard Coeur-de-lion, John travelled in France in order to procure the allegiance of his French subjects in those parts subdued by Richard, and that meanwhile Elinor performed the same office in England. Elinor, remarks Holinshed:

Being bent to prefer hir sonne John, left no stone unturned to establish him in the throne, comparing oftentimes the difference of government betweene a king that is a man, and a king that is but a child. For as John was 32 yeares old, so Arthur duke of Britaine was but a babe to speak of. In the end, winning all the nobilitie wholie unto hir will, and seeing the coast to be cleare on everie side, without any doubt of tempestuous weather likelie to arise, she signified the whole matter unto K. John, who foorthwith framed all his indevours to the accomplishment of his business.

Her motive, claims Holinshed, was not any dislike of Arthur himself but her rivalry with another woman, Constance, his mother: ‘For that she saw if he were king, how his mother Constance would looke to beare most rule within the realme of England, till hir sonne should come to lawfull age, to governe of himself.’¹⁹ This account would prompt the interpretation that Eleanor's determination to speak on John's behalf at the beginning of Shakespeare's play derives from the fact that she has done the major part of the work in getting him accepted as ruler in his own country. This reading is certainly reinforced if one compares that troublesome play The Troublesome Raigne of King John (1591), in which the opening speech is given not to John but to Elinor, who thus has control of the language of official political discourse:

Barons of England, and my noble Lords;
Though God and Fortune have bereft from us
Victorious Richard scourge of Infidels,
And clad this Land in stole of dismall hieu:
Yet give me leave to joy, and joy you all,
That from this wombe hath sprung a second hope,
A King that may in rule and vertue both
Succeede his brother in his Emperie.

John graciously acknowledges both his mother and his nobles and sends for the French Ambassador. Elinor's next speech presupposes the reason for the Embassy:

Dare lay my hand that Elinor can gesse
Whereto this weightie Embassade doth tend:
If of my Nephew Arthur and his claime,
Then say my Sonne I have not mist my aime.

When Châtillon enters, the diplomatic interchanges are entirely between him and John, with John adopting the language of disruption—‘I wonder what he means to leave for me’—which in Shakespeare's play is associated with Eleanor's utterances. Elinor herself then directly addresses Châtillon, commending herself to Arthur and charging him that he ‘leave his Armes / Whereto his head-strong Mother pricks him so’, thus bringing into the open the power-struggle between herself and Constance:

Her pride we know, and know her for a Dame
That will not sticke to bring him to his ende,
So she may bring her self to rule a Realme.(20)

If one assumes, as on the evidence of the opening alone one probably must, that The Troublesome Raigne precedes Shakespeare's King John,²¹ then Shakespeare's version infinitely complicates the source material. The focus of that complexity is the figure of Eleanor herself. In The Troublesome Raigne Elinor enjoys parity with or indeed supremacy over John; she speaks as the primal authority in the realm, and his remarks are pointed with the petty defiance of an underling. In this early play, however, the complexity of the relationship between mother and son is totally subsumed in the concentration—prompted by Holinshed's account—on the rivalry between the two women and on Elinor's fear of Constance's seizing of power through the person of her son Arthur. There is no hint in The Troublesome Raigne of the competition between Eleanor and John for the centre of the stage, which Shakespeare creates in the first scene and which he would have found only in the subtext of Holinshed's story, where Elinor harangues the English nobles on the ‘difference of government betweene a king that is a man, and a king that is but a child’.²² In Shakespeare's version John himself is forced into the role of mere child (‘good mother’) by his mother's manifestly unseemly assertion of power: that is, unseemly within the prevailing discourse, which belongs not to her, as in The Troublesome Raigne, but to her son (despite the fact that she has done all the work establishing that power). Must feminists then prefer The Troublesome Raigne? Well, maybe. And maybe not. For Shakespeare's Eleanor reaches out to the perceptions of the audience in a way which is entirely debarred from Elinor in the earlier play, who remains contained within the power structure of which she is a part. Shakespeare's Eleanor challenges that structure by creating first of all an alternative discourse even as she seems to underwrite her son's legitimate claims, but also by proposing an alternative judgement on that legitimacy, because she hears the whisper of heaven which her son is too dull to apprehend. In hearing it she speaks to an audience which registers both the illegitimacy of John's claim and the superior intelligence, moral and political, of his mother.

Eleanor's statements are an embarrassment to her son, but interestingly enough, they also embarrass the audience because it is given the role of divine judge by a character whose disregard of the potency of that Judge and scorn of His values is patent. Hamlet has only to open his mouth, only to appear, for him to be our man, dissociating himself, as we dissociate ourselves, from the political rhetoric of all the other characters on the stage. It is far from obvious that Eleanor is going to be our woman, despite the evident weakness of those whose authority she challenges. If she is, we must apparently align ourselves against heaven and conscience. How difficult that the person who defies those forces should be the only one capable of defining them. If there is no choice between the discourse of diplomacy with its patent hypocrisies, and the subversion of it, with its deliberate disregard of conscience and integrity, how is the audience to find its own space in language in which to relate to its knowledge of the play world and the people in it?

Having created the question, the scene immediately offers a possible answer in the person of a real bastard,²³ a man ready to shame his own mother in public. A surprising ally, indeed: remember the fate meted out to Joan of Arc for such perfidy to parental honour. Even Eleanor is shocked when Philip of Falconbridge doubts that he and his brother own the same father:

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

(1.1.64-5)

The Bastard protests that the suit against his legitimacy is his brother's, not his; but this hardly bears investigation, as in his next speech he exclaims:

Compare our faces and be judge yourself.
If old Sir Robert did beget us both
And were our father, and this son like him,
O old Sir Robert, father, on my knee
I give heaven thanks I was not like to thee.

(1.1.79-83)

Eleanor's aristocratic nose sniffs the air:

He hath a trick of Cœur-de-lion's face;
The accent of his tongue affecteth him.
Do you not read some tokens of my son
In the large composition of this man?

(1.1.85-8)

Blood will out, is the clear message, even if it means blushes all round. Eleanor and the Bastard are delighted with each other. He is to be her man, and she is to be his grandam. As the legitimate Robert and the court leave the stage the Bastard speeds them on their way with an irreverent riposte:

Brother, adieu. Good fortune come to thee,
For thou wast got i'th' way of honesty.

(1.1.180-1)

There is no mistaking the contemptuous tone with which the word ‘honesty’—meaning chastity within marriage—is uttered. Another blow to heaven. We have found our man, but he does not appear to be on the side of the angels any more than Eleanor is, and the long soliloquy in which he rejoices in his new fortunes: ‘Well, now can I make any Joan a lady’ (1.1.184), culminates in a doctrine of unashamed self-interest:

But this is worshipful society,
And fits the mounting spirit like myself;
For he is but a bastard to the time
That doth not smack of observation.

(1.1.205-8)

The practice of deceit ‘shall strew the footsteps of my rising’ (1.1.216). Meanwhile, he espies, with a swift transition worthy of The Faerie Queene, a damsel in distress:

What woman-post is this? Hath she no husband
That will take pains to blow a horn before her?

(1.1.218-19)

Disconcertingly late, he recognizes the author of his being: ‘O me, 'tis my mother!’ (1.1.220). This good lady is in a right royal state of rage:

LADY Falconbridge
Where is that slave thy brother? Where is he
That holds in chase mine honour up and down?
BASTARD
My brother Robert, old Sir Robert's son?
Colbrand the Giant, that same mighty man?
Is it Sir Robert's son that you seek so?
LADY Falconbridge
Sir Robert's son, ay, thou unreverent boy,
Sir Robert's son. Why scorn'st thou at Sir Robert?
He is Sir Roberts son, and so art thou.
BASTARD
James Gurney, wilt thou give us leave awhile?

(1.1.222-30)

The Bastard dismisses the company so as not to embarrass his mother. The audience is not so easily dismissed, and it remains as silent but enthralled witness to their interchanges. He begs Lady Falconbridge to admit that he is none of Sir Robert's:

We know his handiwork. Therefore, good mother,
To whom am I beholden for these limbs?
Sir Robert never holp to make this leg.

(1.1.238-40)

But his mother is by no means easily persuaded to give up her honour. It is only when she finds that he has already denied his Falconbridge inheritance that she comes clean, so to speak:

LADY Falconbridge
Hast thou denied thyself a Falconbridge?
BASTARD
As faithfully as I deny the devil.
LADY Falconbridge
King Richard Cœur-de-lion was thy father.
By long and vehement suit I was seduced
To make room for him in my husband's bed.
Heaven lay not my transgression to my charge!
Thou art the issue of my dear offence,
Which was so strongly urged past my defence.
BASTARD
Now by this light, were I to get again,
Madam, I would not wish a better father.
Some sins do bear their privilege on earth,
And so doth yours …
Ay, my mother,
With all my heart I thank thee for my father.
Who lives and dares but say thou didst not well
When I was got, I'll send his soul to hell.

(1.1.251-62, 269-72)

With a glare over his shoulder at the befuddled audience, the Bastard escorts his mother from the stage. Yet the moment which might have been the most embarrassing for everyone, when a woman is called to confess her infidelity in public—think of Hermione, think of Desdemona's shrinking from the word whore, think of dear Lucrece seizing up the dagger—is the first moment of genuine emotional force in the whole play. In invoking Heaven to her aid Lady Falconbridge calls more on the human than the divine, urging her child not to lay her sin to her charge. The Bastard proves his royalty in a championing of Una, truth, more startling than any offered by Spenser's Redcrosse Knight. And the audience, dazed by its own acquiescence in unconventionality, is forced to honour her—and does so freely—for an act which has created the son who exemplifies a new world. Without the woman's perfidy neither he nor it could have been born. If Eleanor dominates the action of the opening part of the scene, Lady Falconbridge, a real sinner in a society where everyone pretends to virtue, both embarrasses the world of the play and in a literal sense has created, in the person of the Bastard, its potential for action.

The part of Lady Falconbridge is such a small one and so little discussed that it seems worth pausing to consider it further. The Falconbridge story appears in The Troublesome Raigne, but in none of Shakespeare's historical sources.²⁴ The story of the Bastard of Orléans rejecting his legitimate kindred in favour of the nobility of the Duke of Orléans is told in Hall's The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Famelies of Lancastre and York (1548),²⁵ but the mother herself plays no part in the scene Hall describes. With Lady Falconbridge and the Bastard, Shakespeare completed the triad of mothers and sons in King John: Eleanor with the legitimate John whose claim to the throne is illegitimate, as she herself knows; Constance whose son Arthur's claim is the best in terms of lineage but who had been disinherited by Richard Cœur-de-lion on his death-bed;²⁶ and now the unknown Lady Falconbridge. This lady disappears from the play as swiftly as she entered it to acknowledge to her own son—whom the audience must be tempted to take to its heart as the true hero of the play—that he really is a bastard and she herself no better than she should be. Yet in that brief interchange a new language is born, and a new range of feeling is released. Here at last is a language of honesty, from a woman to a man, which is not related to chastity. Lady Falconbridge's short confession liberates warmth and love into the frigid world of this play:

Heauen lay not my transgression to my charge,
That art the issue of my deere offence
Which was so strongly vrgd past my defence.

(tln 269-71; 1.1.256-8)²⁷

The First Folio reading allows a felicitous ambiguity to accompany the placing of the word ‘Heauen’, which calls into the audience's consciousness Eleanor's previous use of the word: ‘So much my conscience whispers in your ear, / Which none but heaven and you and I shall hear’ (1.1.42-3). The heaven Eleanor invokes is distant and unavailing. In Lady Falconbridge's mouth the word is a strong asseveration, both oath and supplication, not to higher powers and arbiters of human behaviour, but to the son who stands as living witness to her sin, that he should not blame her for his being. But it is also simultaneously a plea to heaven itself to extenuate the fault, the issue of it being so proper. How wildly different those words sound when associated with Gloucester and his bastard son. Falconbridge's reply to this plea is both tender and courteous. This is no Hamlet berating his mother for not being able to control her own sexuality; how touchingly the Bastard alights on the salutation for a great lady whose world would have called her the word Desdemona could not utter: ‘Madam, I would not wish a better father’ (my italics). Charles Kemble's performance is recalled by Mrs Cowden Clarke: ‘In the scene with his mother … his manly tenderness, his filial coaxing way of speaking and putting his arm round her as he thanks her for having made Richard Coeur de Lion his father, was something to be grateful for having witnessed.’²⁸

It must be said that not all audiences or all societies were grateful for having witnessed this scene. In Cibber's adaptation of 1745 the whole of Shakespeare's first act was cut, with loss of this episode as well as of the entire character of Eleanor and the comedy of the Bastard's encounter with Austria.²⁹ Sprague records that the Monthly Mirror which took exception to the Billingsgate scene protested strongly against John Philip Kemble's restoration of the Falconbridge episode following its excision from Dr Valpy's adaptation, declaring that its ‘indecencies … render it almost infamous for a modest family to be present at the performance’ (February 1804). The Dramatic Magazine in January 1831 claimed that ‘the scene between Falconbridge and his mother would have been “hooted off the stage” had the author not been Shakespeare’. In the late nineteenth century Charles Flower expunged the interchanges between the Bastard and his mother from the Memorial Theatre Edition, declaring that the encounter was ‘unnecessary as well as disagreeable’.³⁰ Even more surprisingly, Odell, describing in 1920 Cibber's version of the play, refers himself to the ‘unpleasing matter of the washing of the Falconbridge family linen’.³¹ Ellen Terry remarked truly: ‘Has there ever been a dramatist, I wonder, whose parts admit of as many different interpretations as do Shakespeare's? There lies his immortality as an acting force. For times change, and parts have to be acted differently for different generations.’³² A late twentieth-century audience can feel, at the end of Act 1 of King John, suddenly at home in the Shakespearian world, having heard in Lady Falconbridge's speech and her son's response to it the register of real emotion. The emotion is, surprisingly enough, one which releases sexual energy, that energy which surrounds the figure of the Bastard until he becomes John's man in Act 4.

The part of Lady Falconbridge was probably doubled in Shakespeare's theatre—as it may have been in later productions—with that of Blanche.³³ The fearful frigidity of the political marriage with Louis, Blanche's attempts to wrest an expression of love from him, and her own naïve claims to love a man offered her in the name of diplomacy³⁴ form an amazing contrast with this earlier interchange. Blanche's agonies are as embarrassing to the audience as Octavia's are in Antony and Cleopatra, in which the audience is deeply ashamed of its own longing to escape from this virtuous Roman lady and boot it back to Egypt with Antony. Blanche is, in her own words, dismembered by the men on the stage:

The sun's o'er cast with blood; fair day, adieu!
Which is the side that I must go withal?
I am with both, each army hath a hand,
And in their rage, I having hold of both,
They whirl asunder and dismember me.

(3.1.252-6)

While the audience pities her they are also alienated from her suffering because she speaks a language which lies in the level of her own dreams. In that first scene the warmth which created the Bastard in the seduction of his mother by Richard Cœur-de-lion is recreated in her son's wooing her to confess and affirm the act which has made him what he is. Through this interchange the audience can discover its own centre of gravity, and for the next two acts this rests in the person of the Bastard, the one genuine being on stage. But where does that leave Constance and Arthur?

The answer must be that they are both located deep in the heart of that embarrassment which the play is so adept at arousing both on stage and in the auditorium. Act 2 opens with King Philip of France, Louis the Dauphin, and Limoges Duke of Austria all paying court to Arthur, whose responses sound as pathetically inopportune as Blanche's: ‘I give you welcome with a powerless hand, / But with a heart full of unstainèd love’ (2.1.15-16). The word ‘unstainèd’ strikes a peculiar note coming so soon after the discovery of that welcome stain on Lady Falconbridge's honour, and the audience is too new to its revelation of alternative values, Bastard as hero, seduction as salvation, to readjust to the concept of unstainèd love without a painful sense of incongruity. This discomfort is aggravated by an awareness of the blatant hypocrisies of the men who surround Arthur and of his powerlessness in an environment where power is everything and purity nothing at all. Constance's first speech of guititude to Austria distances the audience: the presage of disaster hangs on her lips even while she utters her gratitude:

CONSTANCE
O, take his mother's thanks, a widow's thanks, Till your strong hand shall help to give him strength
To make a more requital to your love.
AUSTRIA
The peace of heaven is theirs that lift their swords
In such a just and charitable war.

(2.1.32-6)

The word ‘heaven’ is again replete with irony. Then follows an extraordinary replay of the opening scene. Enter Châtillon, with bad news from England. King John is in arms at the behest of his mother: ‘With him along is come the Mother-Queen, / An Ate stirring him to blood and strife’ (2.1.62-3). The Ambassador had apparently noticed who held the reins in John's kingdom. The news is barely given before the English forces enter, complete with Eleanor, Blanche, and the Bastard. John's claim to France is brief and well rehearsed, and his mother does not interrupt him. Philip retorts with a long accusation of John's illegitimacy:

But thou from loving England art so far
That thou hast underwrought his lawful king,
Cut off the sequence of posterity,
Outfacèd infant state, and done a rape
Upon the maiden virtue of the crown.

(2.1.94-8)

It seems impossible to escape the seduction image,³⁵ and the child Arthur is brought forward as proof of the illegitimacy of John's claim:

Look here upon thy brother Geoffrey's face.
These eyes, these brows, were moulded out of his.

(2.1.99-100)

Philip calls on heaven to witness his right to guard Arthur, and at this point another voice enters the dialogue: ‘Who is it thou dost call usurper, France?’ The answer is not from France, but from another embattled female voice: ‘Let me make answer: thy usurping son’ (2.1.120-1). And off they go, Eleanor and Constance, into the biggest slanging match Shakespeare ever wrote for women. The smooth blank verse is as much in pieces as the dignity of the participants, and in there at the centre, urging on the two women, is the Bastard. The other men are left gawping:

AUSTRIA
What cracker is this same that deafs our ears
With this abundance of superfluous breath?—
King Philip, determine what we shall do straight.
[KING Philip]
Women and fools, break off your conference.—

(2.1.147-50)³⁶

Easier said than done, however, and where Austria and France had previously made Arthur the centre of their discourse, Eleanor and Constance now focus on the child. Arthur tries to silence Constance just as John had tried to silence Eleanor earlier in the play:

                                                                                Good my mother, peace.
I would that I were low laid in my grave.
I am not worth this coil that's made for me.

(2.1.163-5)

What is one to make of it? Male critic: appalling women, must be cut. Women in audience: cathartic moment, go it, Constance. But in Shakespeare's theatre the most remarkable thing about the scene is the brilliant way it is conceived for the talents not of women but of boys.

In this scene Shakespeare shows the boy actor in his element in a fine old scrap with another boy actor, and surely the truth about the casting of Arthur as a girl in later productions recognizes along the pulse the boy actor's presence in the encounters between Eleanor and Constance, which make Arthur into an archetypal ‘feminine’ figure³⁷ in the way that poor Blanche is to be later in the scene. It would be possible to argue that Shakespeare had two major sources of worry in his utilizing of the boy actor: one, that he would ruin the scene with overacting, and two, that he would be as dumb as a post. In King John Shakespeare gave the boy actors parts in which they might overact to their heart's content, stealing the stage from their betters, who are forced to stand around wondering how to quell them.³⁸ The problem must have been to reconcile Arthur to playing such a wet part, and Shakespeare gave the boy as a reward the finest dramatic scene in the play, with Hubert. For the boy who played Blanche, equally disconsolate under a thankless role, he dreamed up the real heroine of the whole piece, Lady Falconbridge, who upturns the entire world of conventional morality and gets away with it rather better than Anne Boleyn.³⁹ On the boys' side of total theatrical subversion he placed one man, another disrupter of official discourse, as he was also of official lineage, the Bastard himself: ‘Zounds! I was never so bethumped with words / Since I first called my brother's father Dad’ (2.1.467-8). The climax of 2.1 shows the Bastard rededicating himself to the ways of the world:

Since kings break faith upon commodity,
Gain, be my lord, for I will worship thee.

(2.1.598-9)

But this astonishing scene is followed by one as different in tone as Lady Falconbridge's speeches to her son are from Eleanor's to John. Constance, from the eye-scratching with Eleanor, is suddenly transformed into the great tragic figure of Mrs Siddons's performances:

Gone to be married? Gone to swear a peace?
False blood to false blood joined! Gone to be friends?
Shall Louis have Blanche, and Blanche those provinces?
It is not so, thou hast misspoke, misheard.
Be well advised, tell o'er thy tale again.
It cannot be, thou dost but say 'tis so.

(2.2.1-6)⁴⁰

Once again the audience is caught totally on the hop and experiences much the same emotions as Mrs Bennet on hearing that Elizabeth is to marry Darcy: ‘Oh, my dear Lizzy! pray apologise for my having disliked him so much before.’ The ranting boy is suddenly one of us, ‘A woman naturally born to fears’ (2.2.15), and even her child a source of irritation in his calm beholding of sufferings whose implications he is too inexperienced to understand: ‘I do beseech you, madam, be content’ (2.2.42). The word ‘madam’, so chill and so unchildlike, recalls the warmth with which the Bastard had used the same word to his mother. Constance, deprived of everything, is suddenly everything in the world of the play: ‘Here is my throne; bid kings come bow to it’ (2.2.74).

That power is by no means dissipated in Act 3, which shows Constance in the same relation to official discourse as Eleanor was in Act 1 and the Bastard in Act 2. Philip begins by blessing the wedding of Blanche and Louis:

The yearly course that brings this day about
Shall never see it but a holy day.
CONSTANCE (rising)
A wicked day, and not a holy day!

(3.1.7-9)

Her attack on Austria brings the audience (or at least, the women in the audience) totally to her side:

Thou little valiant, great in villainy;
Thou ever strong upon the stronger side …
Thou wear a lion's hide! Doff it, for shame,
And hang a calf's-skin on those recreant limbs.
AUSTRIA
O, that a man should speak those words to me!
BASTARD
And hang a calf's-skin on those recreant limbs.
AUSTRIA
Thou dar'st not say so, villain, for thy life.
BASTARD
And hang a calf's-skin on those recreant limbs.
KING John (to the Bastard)
We like not this. Thou dost forget thyself.

(3.1.42-3, 54-60)

There spoke our man, smoking out the pretended chivalry of the male world. And there spoke Eleanor's little John, desperately trying to assume a royalty which really belongs to his mother. And there spoke a woman who has at last plumbed the depths of what the male world has to offer her and found it a bottomless well of treacle: ‘Thou ever strong upon the stronger side’ (3.1.43). At this moment when the entire stage is energized, enter the representative of the Church of Rome to announce that the marriage is off. Eleanor is going to find a backer after all: has Heaven finally entered on her side? How embarrassing for that original Elizabethan Protestant audience, assembled for a play about the first English king on record as defying the authority of the Pope, that the Almighty (or should one say Shakespeare?) should choose for Constance's champion a representative of the Church of Rome. John, to add to the confusion, is now getting off a good deal about meddling priests:

Yet I alone, alone do me oppose
Against the Pope, and count his friends my foes.

(3.1.96-7)

The climax of what is dignified by the name of debate is Pandulph's speech: ‘All form is formless, order orderless, / Save what is opposite to England's love’ (3.1.179-80), and the rhetorical figure of polyptoton, the changing of forms, is wonderfully suited to the shifting conditions of the world Pandulph describes and which we as audience observe with increasing bafflement. The whole thing begins to sound more like Love's Labour's Lost than a momentous passage in British history; as Pandulph remarks:

It is religion that doth make vows kept;
But thou hast sworn against religion.

(3.1.205-6)

It is hardly surprising that later on in the act the Roman prelate should declare to Louis: ‘How green you are, and fresh in this old world’ (3.4.145). The play makes us all look green. At the end of Act 3 we assent almost languidly to Louis's closing words: ‘Strong reasons makes strange actions’ (3.4.182), and wonder how long our dramatist, Constance, Eleanor, Arthur, Blanche, the Bastard or anyone else can keep it up.

The greatest peculiarity of all is that they make no attempt to keep it up. With the great grief speech—‘Grief fills the room up of my absent child’ (3.4.93)—Constance's part is played. Eleanor is to be snuffed out in France—‘What, Mother dead?’ (4.2.127)—Arthur throws himself off the battlements, John is poisoned, and the Bastard becomes a yes-man. Some would say, discovers integrity; others, that England has emerged as hero. But what is really the case is that the play goes to pieces once the women leave the stage, or, once the boys leave it, and whether one thinks of a theatre peopled by boy actors, or by girls playing Arthur, that seems to include the scene between Arthur and Hubert. Nevertheless in that scene a kind of death-wish⁴¹ begins to pervade the play, and it never recovers the energy associated with the new world of the Bastard and the new generation: the boys. Or, in our terms, and certainly in Elizabethan terms, the women. For what did the Elizabethans have to comfort them once they allowed Gloriana to leave the great stage she had dominated so long? Shakespeare seems to lose interest in the official world once it is no longer challenged by the subversive discourses of that triad of mothers and once the Bastard has been annexed into official discourse. And if one says that the subversiveness was always contained within authority and was a part of its maintenance, then one must also say that the most subversive thing of all occurs when that subversion is removed, because without it the hollowness of male power structures can only bore, confuse, and embarrass the reluctant witnesses of them.

Notes

1. Arthur Colby Sprague, Shakespeare and the Actors: The Stage Business in His Plays (1660-1905) (Cambridge, Mass., 1945), p. 108. After the Restoration the play was not a favourite; it appears not to have been performed until 1737.

2. Roger Wood and Mary Clarke, Shakespeare at the Old Vic (London, 1954), p. 61. The production ran for only thirty-six performances.

3. Cecil Price, Theatre in the Age of Garrick (Oxford, 1973), p. 59.

4. Quoted in Gāmini Salgādo, Eyewitnesses of Shakespeare: First Hand Accounts of Performances, 1590-1890 (London, 1975), p. 107. In Shakespeare's Histories: Plays for the Stage (London, 1964), Arthur Colby Sprague quotes (from Campbell's biography) Mrs Siddons's own comments on Constance: ‘Whether the majestic, the passionate, the tender Constance, has ever yet been, or ever will be, personated to the entire satisfaction of sound judgment and fine taste, I believe to be doubtful; for I believe it to be nearly impossible’ (p. 20). Siddons's performance also seems to have inaugurated a tradition of artistic representation of Constance: Salgādo (p. 108) reproduces Thomas Rowlandson's sketch of the actress rehearsing with her father, Roger Kemble.

5. William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare's Plays (1817; reprinted London, 1906), p. 191.

6. Ellen Terry, The Story of my Life (1908; reprinted Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1982), p. 17.

7. W. K. Wimsatt, Jr, Samuel Johnson on Shakespeare (London, 1960), p. 85. David Bevington, Action is Eloquence: Shakespeare's Language of Gesture (Cambridge, Mass., 1984), observes that Constance's ‘binding and unbinding of her hair express her powerlessness at the hands of the King of France and Cardinal Pandulph. The only authority such women enjoy is that of prophecy’ (p. 85). However, Alan C. Dessen, Elizabethan Stage Conventions and Modern Interpreters (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 36-8, demonstrates that although the loosening of hair in Elizabethan drama usually signified, for the benefit of both the boy actor and his audience, female distraction, the convention was also used for mourning. Constance insists that the vehemence of her grief is evidence of her sanity (3.4.44-60) and defies male control, thus appropriating the scene to her purposes.

8. Edited by G. Blakemore Evans (Boston, Mass., 1974), p. 766.

9. Ann Jennalie Cook, The Privileged Playgoers of Shakespeare's London, 1576-1642 (Princeton, 1981), warns that ‘modern accounts of the audience suffer from the bias of the writer fully as much as did the contemporary accounts’ (p. 3). In discussing bias in past critics I make no claim to an ‘unbiassed’ position in the present, but only to a recognition of bias.

10. Kenneth Muir, The Sources of Shakespeare's Plays (London, 1977), p. 83. The quotation is an apt reminder that men and women may differ in their responses to characters on stage; in Hamlet the audience member who disliked the lady's vehemence was herself a lady.

11. The Textual Companion to the Oxford edition suggests the following order for the plays: (1) Richard II (1595), (2) Romeo and Juliet (1595), (3) King John (1596), with A Midsummer Night's Dream (1595) intervening between Romeo and King John. The Riverside edition (pp. 50-1) suggests another order: (1) King John (1594-6), (2) Richard II (1595), (3) Romeo and Juliet (1595-6). E. A. J. Honigmann in the new Arden edition (London, 1954, p. lviii) dates King John as early as 1590.

12. Scholars are now sceptical of the theory, developed by T. W. Baldwin in The Organisation and Personnel of the Shakespearean Company (Princeton, 1927), that Shakespeare used ‘lines’ of boy actors (pp. 416, 418): see Gerald Eades Bentley, The Profession of Player in Shakespeare's Time 1590-1642 (Princeton, 1984), pp. 119, 233. Baldwin does not in any case link Constance and Juliet. The part of Juliet is perhaps the more difficult of the two because of its length, and it may therefore have followed rather than preceded Constance in the boy actor's repertoire; on the other hand the role of Constance requires the sustaining of mature maternal feeling to a degree not demanded of the boy actor until Gertrude in Hamlet.

13. Salgādo, Eyewitnesses of Shakespeare, p. 107. Russell Jackson, ‘Shakespeare on the Stage from 1660 to 1900’, in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare Studies, ed. Stanley Wells (Cambridge, 1986), p. 201, notes that the twenty-one-year-old Macready, when he came to the stage, ‘noticed a new emphasis in the treatment of women's roles that foreshadows later, more sentimental treatment of Shakespeare's heroines:

    The noble pathos of Mrs Siddons's transcendent genius no longer served as the ground commentary and living exponent of Shakespeare's text, but in the native elegance, the feminine sweetness, the unaffected earnestness and gushing passion of Miss O'Neill the stage had received a worthy successor to her.’

    Under the guise of gushing passion perhaps Miss O'Neill did manage to make Constance and Juliet a more congruent pair for the tragic actress than might be imagined if one had bracketed Constance with Margaret in Richard III.

14. Wimsatt, Johnson on Shakespeare, p. 85.

15. Sprague, Shakespeare's Histories, p. 14.

16. Phyllis Rackin discusses the significance of Shakespeare's treatment of women in King John in ‘Anti-Historians: Women's Roles in Shakespeare's Histories’, Theatre Journal, 37 (1985), 329-44.

17. Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Oxford, 1988), is one of many critics who have emphasized that the theatre is ‘the product of collective intentions’ and that it ‘manifestly addresses its audience as collectivity’ (p. 5).

18. In Warner's production the actor playing Châtillon turned slightly after Eleanor's outburst so that his next speech was directed both to John, centre stage, and to Eleanor, who was placed stage right behind him. But although Eleanor's power thus received a modicum of official acknowledgement, her intrusion was not startlingly disruptive of the political status quo, because Eleanor herself was somewhat underplayed, while John, finely acted by Nicholas Woodeson, came over as a strong and complex figure whose authority, certainly at this point in the play, was capable of containing challenges to it.

19. Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, vol. 4 (London and New York, 1975), p. 26.

20. Bullough, Sources, vol. 4, pp. 73, 74.

21. MacD. P. Jackson, ‘The Transmission of Shakespeare's Text’, in Wells, The Cambridge Companion, observes that ‘E. A. J. Honigmann's theory that The Troublesome Reign of John King of England (1591) … derives from King John has not supplanted the traditional view that Shakespeare was indebted to an anonymous predecessor’ (p. 175).

22. Bullough, Sources, vol. 4, p. 26.

23. R. L. Smallwood, ‘Shakespeare's Use of History’, in Wells, The Cambridge Companion, observes: ‘The role of the Bastard in King John, altogether unhistorical, acts rather as the audience's window on the events of history’ (p. 155).

24. Honigmann, who argues that The Troublesome Raigne follows rather than precedes Shakespeare's King John, thought that Shakespeare invented the Falconbridge story, and lists the parallels in Shakespeare's other plays: see new Arden edition of King John, pp. xxii-xxv. A. R. Braunmuller discusses the Bastard's role in relation to the ‘factual’ and the ‘fictive’ in the play in ‘King John and Historiography’, ELH, 55 (1988), 309-65; pp. 312-16.

25. Bullough, Sources, vol. 4, pp. 54-5.

26. Marie Axton, The Queen's Two Bodies: Drama and the Elizabethan Succession (London, 1977), p. ix, points out that in the view of some Elizabethans, Arthur would have been disqualified for the English crown through his French connections.

27. In the First Folio (the first published edition of the play) there is no punctuation after ‘Heauen’ (tln 269). Most editors now follow Knight's emendation of adding an exclamation mark (or, as in Honigmann's new Arden edition, a comma) to direct and accentuate the oath. The Oxford editor, John Jowett, restores the Folio reading in removing the added punctuation mark after ‘Heaven’, but at the end of the line, where the Folio has only a comma, he places an exclamation mark, so that the first line quoted above becomes a separate clause. For the second line he adopts the f4 reading of ‘Thou’ instead of ‘That’, thus creating another new clause:

    Heaven lay not my transgression to my charge!
    Thou art the issue of my dear offence,
    Which was so strongly urged past my defence.

    (1.1.256-8)

    The first line becomes a simple invocation to the Almighty and the second a statement of the obvious; that the Bastard is the issue of his mother's offence. But these changes obscure the real subtlety of the lines.

28. Quoted in Sprague, Shakespeare and the Actors, p. 109. In Deborah Warner's 1988 production Lady Falconbridge was hoydenish, and the moment consequently comic rather than poignant.

29. George C. D. Odell, Shakespeare—From Betterton to Irving, 2 vols. (New York and London, 1920), vol. 1, p. 349.

30. Sprague, Shakespeare's Histories, p. 14.

31. Odell, Shakespeare—From Betterton to Irving, vol. 1, p. 349.

32. Terry, The Story of my Life, p. 67.

33. Bentley, The Profession of Player in Shakespeare's Time 1590-1642, pp. 228-33, 242, remarks on the ‘universal doubling’ in Shakespeare's theatre. William Ringler, Jr, ‘The Number of Actors in Shakespeare's Early Plays’, in Gerald Eades Bentley, ed., The Seventeenth-Century Stage (Chicago and London, 1968), p. 126, argues that ‘between 1594 and 1599, Shakespeare never wrote a play for more than 16 actors including mutes, [and] that the composition of his company during that period appears to have remained stable with 12 adults and 4 boys’. He believes that King John would have required in all fourteen actors (p. 126n). Eleanor, Constance, Lady Falconbridge, Blanche, Arthur, and Prince Henry would have been boys' parts. Since proposing the doubling of Lady Falconbridge and Blanche, I have found the same suggestion in the pioneer work of Julia Engelen, ‘Die Schauspielen-Ökonomie in Shakespeares Dramen’, Shakespeare Jahrbuch, 62 (Leipzig, 1926), 36-97; pp. 94-5. Engelen believes that Prince Henry would have been doubled with Prince Arthur. Her comprehensive survey of doubling in Shakespeare's plays was completed in a second article in the Shakespeare Jahrbuch, 63 (Leipzig, 1927), 75-158. However, Engelen's suggestion that King John could have been staged with a total of eleven actors, four of whom were boys, seems to me less convincing than Ringler's more moderate fourteen.

34. In Warner's 1988 production, Ralph Fiennes delivered Louis's stylized Petrarchan wooing speech with a chilling admixture of cynicism and affectation.

35. Ralph Berry, The Shakespearean Metaphor (London, 1978), pp. 26-36, discusses the relation between sexual and political legitimacy in the play.

36. Honigmann in the new Arden edition gives the last line of Austria's speech—which in the Folio reads ‘King Lewis’—to Philip, assuming ‘King’ as speech prefix: ‘Lewis, determine what we shall do straight.’ Lewis responds, as in the Folio: ‘Women and fools, break off your conference.’ Lewis's next line in the Folio, ‘King Iohn, this is the very summe of all’, reverts to Philip in Honigmann's edition; Jowett, in the Complete Oxford edition, gives both lines to Philip (see Honigmann's Arden edition, pp. xxiv-xxv, for a full discussion of this textual crux). Honigmann's reading is appealing in the present context because all three men are then enlisted in an attempt to silence the two women and the Bastard (here cast as a professional fool).

37. Honigmann, in his Arden edition, p. 171, points out that Arthur in Shakespeare's play is much more of a child than in either Holinshed or The Troublesome Raigne, where he is about sixteen. It was a pity that in Warner's production Arthur's voice had already broken, as the ‘feminine’ character of the part demands an unbroken voice. That Arthur is, in the modern theatre, an exacting part for the age of boy whose voice would still be unbroken is no doubt another reason why the part came to be played by a girl. When Ellen Terry played Arthur in 1858 she was eleven years old (Nina Auerbach, Ellen Terry, Player in Her Time (London, 1987), pp. 31, 42); English law requires in 1988 that a child performer must be at least twelve. The voices of Shakespeare's boy actors certainly broke much later than is now customary, so that boys playing demanding parts, such as Arthur's, could have seemed very young without necessarily being so. Nevertheless, the difficulty of finding in the modern period a boy with an unbroken voice skilled enough to act Arthur—or indeed any of Shakespeare's juvenile parts, which are more often than not travestied by child actors on the twentieth-century stage—demonstrates yet again the vast gap which separates children and youths in our culture from the highly trained boys of Shakespeare's theatre.

38. Steven R. Smith, ‘The London Apprentices as Seventeenth-Century Adolescents’, Past and Present, 61 (1973), 149-61, discusses the existence of a corporate sense of identity amongst adolescent apprentices in London in the early to mid-seventeenth century, reinforcing some of the conclusions about the challenging of authority by adolescents in the Renaissance period drawn by Natalie Zemon Davis in ‘The Reasons of Misrule: Youth Groups and Charivaris in Sixteenth-century France’, Past and Present, 50 (1971), 40-75. While neither writer deals with the boy actor, the work of both stimulates further enquiry into the relation between the boy apprentices and adult actors in Shakespeare's company.

39. Axton, The Queen's Two Bodies, pp. 108-11, discusses the importance of King John as a play about the succession of Elizabeth I, and there is probably more to be said on this subject.

40. In Warner's 1988 production this speech was delivered by Susan Engel in tones of laughing disbelief.

41. This seems to me to be true even though Prince Henry is present in the final scene to witness his father's death and receive the allegiance of his nobles. Henry remains a choric figure whose speeches comment on mortality:

    Even so must I run on, and even so stop.
    What surety of the world, what hope, what stay,
    When this was now a king and now is clay?

    (5.7.67-9)