[In the following essay, Grennan contends that Shakespeare's idiosyncratic King John reflects a pivotal change in the historiographic method of the dramatist's earlier chronicle history plays and his source material.]

Among Shakespeare's Histories, King John is the odd man out.¹ Common scholarly practice places it between the first and second tetralogies, after Richard III, that is, and before Richard II, but it seems more sui generis than a close relative of either of these groups.² It is in many ways a strange play, lacking the coherent framework of the Yorkist sequence without possessing the rich human and dramatic substance of the Lancastrian. Among all of its author's works it must be one of the least popular, least known, and least produced. Apologizing in advance for brashness, I might add that the reason for its unenviable status is that it is also one of his least understood. This is not to say that perceptive and worthwhile critical work has not been done on King John. It most certainly has, and such excellent treatments as those of John F. Danby, Sigurd Burckhardt, Adrien Bonjour, John R. Elliott, Jr., William Matchett, and Michael Manheim all afford genuine illumination.³ None of them, however, casts enough light to dispel my persistent sense of the play's strangeness, its oddity. The present essay is an attempt to do just this.

M. M. Reese, among others, has justifiably described King John as a bridge “between his earlier histories and the maturer thought of the Lancastrian plays.”⁴ While I agree with the connection, the relationship strikes me in a less benevolent image. As I see it, King John is a dramatic broom with which Shakespeare sweeps away many of the no longer convincing or functional props of the historico-dramatic world of his Yorkist plays. In King John he renews his sense of what history means and prepares himself as dramatist and historian for the deeper, more demanding tasks of his second tetralogy.

Two questions present themselves at the outset. Although in the final analysis both are unanswerable, speculation about them may be instructive. Why, after successfully completing his Yorkist plays, did Shakespeare choose to treat of the much more remote subject of King John at all? And, having made such a choice, why did he decide to treat his subject in a manner so much at odds with his major source? To these questions the critics have offered a variety of answers. Perhaps the dramatist's supposed Catholic sympathies led him to adapt a contemporary, presumably popular version of the tribulations of this Catholic monarch.⁵ Perhaps it is an allegory of contemporary politics, or an excellent example of the theme of the “weak king” which had preoccupied Shakespeare in his Henry VI plays.⁶ Possibly the theme became for him an abstract exemplum of the relationship between politics and morality. (See, for example, Adrien Bonjour's essay.) The striking difference in treatment has likewise been accounted for in many ways. Does it represent the author's attempt to transcend his historical sources and construct an emotionally satisfying, dramatically ambiguous piece of theatre?⁷ Is it possible, as Bonjour argues (p. 323), that Shakespeare could make “no dramatic sense of this distempered world. He just stands back and admires the fine confusion”? Each of these positions may add to our understanding of the play. For my present purpose, however, the questions I have posed may best be approached by way of the nature of the first tetralogy itself. For I would argue that King John emerges out of this group of plays in a distinct if idiosyncratic way. Like the personage who may be its central character, King John is an illegitimate offspring of orthodoxy, its quirks hinting at the shortcomings of the parent stock and its energies adumbrating a future that is more extravagant and harder to organize than the conventional world offered in the first tetralogy.

The four plays that comprise the Yorkist tetralogy represent as a group their author's commitment, however threatened or tenuous this becomes on occasion, to the historiographical orthodoxies of his own time. Fundamentally rhetorical in nature, they accord well with contemporary ideals of humanist history-writing. Such ideals are briefly summed up by Leonard Dean: “The instructional value of history should be increased … by the rhetorical manipulation of material in order to emphasize those elements which have the greatest moral or political significance.”⁸ It has been said, even more strongly, that “The humanist historian did not see himself as a collector of facts but as an artist who organized the facts into a coherent and attractive form.”⁹ For such “rhetorical history writing” I use the word employed by the humanists themselves—historia.¹⁰ Taken as a unit, the four plays of Shakespeare's Yorkist tetralogy compose a coherent humanist historia.

From 1 Henry VI to Richard III, by means of a series of carefully orchestrated dramatic events in which character and occasion are tailored to reveal determined historical meanings, the dramatist charts an exemplary course through the civil chaos of the Wars of the Roses, bringing his narrative to its proper apocalypse at the bloody close of the reign of Richard III. It is not until the final play of the sequence, however, that the grand if mainly concealed design of the whole historical scheme is made fully manifest. Both the style and content of Richard III render the mysterious workings of Providence, the logic and economy of the Divine Historian, visible and certain. With the marriage of Richmond and Elizabeth, the blessed union of the red rose and the white, the four plays achieve an end in sight from the beginning for anyone who looked at English history through the spectacles of Tudor orthodoxy.¹¹

Taken as a single group, therefore, the architecture of the four plays is stable, solid, and in its own historical terms convincing. Although Richard III crowns the whole edifice, however, fulfilling its reasonable design, it does so in a manner so self-conscious that it shakes the scheme of assumptions on which it, along with its predecessors, stands. Yet it is this very self-consciousness, both in his protagonist and his dramatic design, that allows the playwright to bring his tetralogy to its proper conclusion. For in language, action, and character Richard III is a dramatic enactment of the concept and style of history on which it depends. The play is not just another exemplum of humanist historiography: it is about humanist historiography. In it, for the last time, Shakespeare allows full orthodox play to this mode of historical perception. The oddities of his next history play, King John, appear more understandable in the light of such claims. For King John is not about, nor an exemplum of the humanist concept of history that informs its predecessors. Rather may it be understood as a critical comment upon them and upon the historiographical assumptions they as a group embody.

By the time The Troublesome Raigne of King John (hereafter referred to as TR) was composed and published (1591), both the reign and the character of the king had become fixed historical entities, the interpretation of which invariably revealed more about the interpreter than the subject. By then the image of the king had been pushed back and forth across a spectrum of common understanding, the poles of which were the medieval catholic view transmitted by Polydore Vergil's Anglica historia and John Bale's Reformationist Kynge Johan.¹² Between sectarian extremes of villainy and virtue the unfortunate monarch was dispossessed of any real identity, and both he and his reign became figments of the historical imagination. In Polydore a wicked usurper, in Foxe's Actes and Monuments as well as in the widely disseminated “Homily against Disobedience” the hapless victim of such wickedness, the figure of John had been progressively fashioned into an historical exemplum whose meaning depended on no original ‘truth’ but on the partisan point of view of each historian. His story, in other words, is an apt illustration of the very nature of historia itself. As a conventional Protestant version of the story, therefore, TR is an exemplary historia. In it, “History is arbitrarily rearranged to suit the main topics” (Bullough, p. 8). Its anonymous author joins the ranks of conventional humanist historians, using his chosen facts to illustrate his predetermined political and moral themes, which were, as Geoffrey Bullough points out, “the treacherous ambitions of France, the Pope's enmity, the falling off of the barons … and the consequent shameful invasion of England” (p. 8). TR is, in other words, a fairly simple member of that historico-dramatic category to which belong, in a more complex way, the plays of Shakespeare's first tetralogy. One of the hypotheses on which this essay is based is that for this very reason Shakespeare chose to recast TR and that the unusual nature of King John stems in part from the nature of this connection.

As an indication of how Shakespeare coped with his source, no single sequence is more revealing than that of the siege of Angiers. Not in the chronicles, the scene is the invention of the earlier dramatist. The same situation prevails in both plays, John and Arthur's champion, Philip, being denied entrance to the town until they have settled their competing claims to the English crown. In TR the Citizen puts the town's case in the following logical way:

We answer as before: till you have prooved one right, we acknowledge none right, he that tries himselfe our Soveraigne, to him will we remaine firme subjects, and for him, and in his right we hold our Towne as desirous to know the truth as loath to subscribe before we knowe: More than this we cannot say, and more than this we dare not doo.

(Bullough, p. 89, ll. 643-48)

John and Philip then exchange brief defiance and, having lasted forty-two lines, this part of the sequence ends. Shakespeare more than doubles the length of this particular segment. In doing so he alters its style and intensifies its central meaning. Since much of its meaning concerns a struggle over “right”—which is not only at the heart of all historical conflicts (resgesta) but also gives life and direction to the accounts of these conflicts (res scripta)—this event, small as it is, is representative of the nature of historia itself, the schemes of which emerge from decisive choices made between such “rights.” In TR, the nice balance between claimants is reflected in the easy rhetorical balances of the Citizen's speech. The calm fluency of his periods, however, suggests that a reasonable solution to the problem is available. Although an impasse has been reached, the style implies it is only a stage in a predictable process.

In the parallel scene in King John, however, Shakespeare compels us to recognize an equilibrium so fastidious that it makes all objective decision impossible. From the start our attention is drawn to this stalemate for its own sake, as John and Philip are forced to share a single sentence:

JOHN.
You men of Angiers and my loving subjects—
PHILIP.
You loving men of Angiers, Arthur's subjects,
Our trumpet call'd you to this gentle parle—
JOHN.
For our advantage—therefore hear us first.

(II.i.203-6)¹³

In developing the scene, Shakespeare deliberately underlines such static balances. The kings swap defiance in two long, elaborately rhetorical speeches in which even the metaphors balance one another, with John promising “To save unscratch'd your city's threat'ned cheeks,” and Philip countering with “'Tis not the rounder of your old-fac'd walls / Can hide you from our messengers of war” (ll. 225, 259-60). Both staging and language freeze the events into the rigid postures of oratorical debate. Visually the scene forms an isosceles triangle, its apex the citizens on their walls, the rivals its equidistant base extremities. Linguistically, Shakespeare's Citizen exaggerates to a very fine point the rhetorical balancing tricks of his prototype in TR, salting his speech with verbal forms that leave in no doubt the utterly immobile nature of this equilibrium, as “he that proves the King, / To him will we prove loyal,” or “Till you compound whose right is worthiest, / We for the worthiest hold the right from both” (ll. 270-71, 281-82).¹⁴ In the grip of such impasse both players and audience face an insoluble conundrum in political commitment. Since it is one of the functions of historia to provide reasonable (i.e., partisan) solutions to such puzzles, the composition of the present scene may be understood as a questioning of the form itself.

It is difficult not to see something faintly comic in the way this impasse is presented. In significant extensions of his source, Shakespeare's subsequent development of this scene makes its comic dimension more explicit. More expansive and lyrical in their descriptions of the two “victories,” his Heralds, unlike their originals, transform the brutal truths of battle into almost ludicrously pretty pictures of “the dancing banners of the French,” and the “lusty English, all with purpled hands … like a jolly troop of huntsmen” (ll. 308, 321-22). The rhetorical stalemate of the Citizen's reply reduces historical “meaning” to absurdity:

Blood hath bought blood, and blows have answer'd blows;
Strength match'd with strength, and power confronted power:
Both are alike, and both alike we like.

(ll. 329-31)

This comic trend reaches a dazzling climax in the Bastard's “wild counsel.” In TR the Bastard is given seven lines in which to introduce his policy of a league between the warring factions against the recalcitrant town, which “once wonne then strive about the claime” (p. 91, l. 728). The Citizen immediately presents a counter-plan and the Bastard's scheme is abandoned without discussion. Shakespeare, however, goes to great lengths to draw our attention to the ridiculous aspect of the whole scheme. The Bastard is given a hectic twenty-four lines in which to portray the razing of the cherished prize, and this is crowned by the inane enthusiasm of John's agreement: “France, shall we knit our pow'rs, / And lay this Angiers even with the ground, / Then after fight who shall be king of it?” (ll. 398-400). Not content even with this, however, Shakespeare inflates the scene to its final savage irony as, to the delight of the Bastard, the allies Austria and France decide to shoot from north and south, “in each other's mouth” (l. 414). Even without the Bastard's expressive glee it is unlikely the audience will miss the general ironic, even satiric, drift of the whole sequence. The Bastard's seven lines have been transformed into a sequence six times that length, the increasingly ridiculous postures and statements of which culminate appropriately in an image of self-destruction.

In its entirety, then, Shakespeare's emphatic translation of his source in this scene may serve as an emblem of historical conflict without historical meaning. And this meaninglessness, embalmed in the most elaborate rhetoric imaginable, calls into question the activity of the historian himself, who marshalls his facts into reasonable designs in order to communicate “objective” truths that are really only partisan commitments in disguise. The first tetralogy had been the work of an author who, in however sceptical a way, had shared such aims and achieved such ends. This single sequence from King John demonstrates that its author is not only no longer compelled by the same aims or interested in achieving the same ends but is engaged in a radical critique of the ends and means of this historical form itself.

Shakespeare's treatment of Blanch confirms this assertion by showing how, in terms of a single character, the fact of historical stalemate is kept consistently before us, although this time it is in a mood that is tragically rather than comically ridiculous. In TR, when a fresh conflict flares up between her kin and her new husband, this unhappy pawn of unscrupulous princes can do no more than complain to her departing Lewis:

And will your Grace upon your wedding day
Forsake your Bride and follow dreadful drums:
Nay, good my Lord, stay you at home with me.

(p. 99, ll. 1038-40)

In place of this colourless juxtaposition, Shakespeare gives Blanch a tense, exacting rhetoric of her own. As she faces the dreadful implications of her position she becomes an eloquent emblem of impasse, expressive of much more than the historically acceptable irony of her prototype in TR:

I am with both. Each army hath a hand
And in their rage, I having hold of both,
They whirl asunder and dismember me.
.....Whoever wins, on that side shall I lose;
Assured loss before the match be played.

(III.i.328-36)

In such a portrayal Shakespeare moves beyond the historical ends he had accomplished with superficially similar occasions in his first tetralogy. In Blanch's utterance he transcends the logical exactitude of Queen Margaret's vision of her son as the Providential scourge of his kin (R3, IV.iv.40ff.) and moves beyond the emblematic summaries in 3 Henry VI of “the son that killed his father” and “the father that killed his son” (II.v.). The speech points instead towards such human dilemmas as the “neutering” of the hapless York in Richard II (II.iii.159) and the tragic oppositions in Romeo and Juliet and the later tragedies, finding a last touching echo in the plight of the bewildered Octavia in Antony and Cleopatra (III.vi.76-78). The point of such an impasse at which Blanch finds herself, it is clear, is human rather than historical. Such a treatment insists that the plight of human beings in historical situations may not be used simply to elucidate some historical meaning.¹⁵

As a critique of the procedures of historia Shakespeare's handling of the character of Blanch also leads us to a crucial aspect of the whole problem—the treatment of character in conventional historia and in King John. Character in dramatic historia is not attended to for its own sake but in order to illustrate the historian's prevailing intentions. Understood thematically rather than dramatically, apparent inconsistencies or defects in the characterization of such figures are not to be judged as such, since they are in this way carrying out the aims of their creator. Numerous examples of this procedure appear in Shakespeare's early tetralogy, of which Joan and Talbot, Suffolk, York, and Margaret are only the most obvious. The most complete and dramatically coherent character in these plays, in fact, is Richard III, who is a creatively consistent amalgamation of inconsistencies.

So far as character is concerned, TR is, as in other respects, exemplary. Its characters are being continually altered to fit predetermined thematic grooves. Thus the boy Arthur can be the mouthpiece for a shrewd analysis of John's character (p. 84), for a strong moral attack on assassination (p. 109), or for a pathetic appeal to the audience's sympathy (p. 120). His rhetoric in each case is peculiar to its special moment, its thematic point holding the author's attention and not any attempt to build out of such speeches a dramatically coherent character. This is no less true of John himself, who can be brought from the righteous tone of victory (p. 101, l. 1089) to the hobgoblin excesses of “Frowne friends, faile faith, the divell goe withall, / The brat shall dye that terrifies me thus” (p. 117, ll. 1653-54), or from the frightened Faustean echoes of his religious fear (p. 147, ll. 1046ff.) to the homiletic piety of his last line, “And in the faith of Jesu John doth dye” (p. 148, l. 1090). Character here, as in many other instances, is the pawn of historical intention.¹⁶

In King John Shakespeare's characterizations can work directly against the historical mode, or they can be so overtly conventional that they reveal the true nature of that mode. Arthur in prison, for example, has the charm and naivete of a real (Shakespearean) child. His would-be executioner, too, is a credibly developed character, not the puppet of an historical end beyond himself. Conscious in a convincingly human way of his victim's plight, Hubert expresses his change of heart in a language that is deliberately simple, brief, and to the point:

Well, see to live: I will not touch thine eye
For all the treasure that thine uncle owes.
Yet am I sworn and I did purpose, boy,
With this same very iron to burn them out.

(IV.i.121-24)

As dramatic characterization this bears no resemblance to its origin in TR, where the conversion is accomplished in a ponderous thirteen-line affirmation of the historically respectable concept of Providential interference: “That great Commaunder counterchecks my charge, / He stayes my hand, he maketh soft my heart” (p. 111, ll. 1437-38). In one case language is employed to reveal character; in the other, character is employed to express an orthodox historical idea.¹⁷ In TR Hubert is expressly a chosen man—“I would the King had made choyce of some other executioner” (p. 108, ll. 1317-18), reminiscent of Clarence's murderers in Richard III—“What we will do, we do upon command” (I.iv.193). Shakespeare's Hubert, on the other hand, as even the small example of his language just quoted can show, is a man of choices, free to make such choices according to values that reside within himself and his own humanity.¹⁸

A similar case may be made for other characters. In TR Pandulph is little more than a vehicle for the play's anti-Rome stance. Whether he is speaking the bare prose of a Papal decree (p. 98, ll. 968ff.) or the bad verse of a stage Catholic (pp. 127, ll. 285ff., 137, ll. 655ff.), the Cardinal is the pawn both of the princes and the historical dramatist. His only real power over John is given to him at the latter's death, and even then it is simply the power to confirm the King's faith in significantly ecumenical terms: “Thou dydest the servant of our Saviour Christ” (p. 149, l. 1127). In King John, however, Pandulph is the central figure in the ominous, absurd game of political machination. The princes are his pawns, not he theirs, and his clear-eyed Machiavellian cynicism must, in this world, be taken as a genuine perception of political truth. The accuracy of his forecasts as well as the felicity of his language—“A sceptre snatch'd with an unruly hand / Must be as boisterously maintain'd as gain'd” (III.iv.135-36)—belong not to a Vatican grotesque but to a man who has looked upon and learned from the cruel inevitabilities of realpolitik. It is impossible to press him into the service of the kind of historical point illustrated by Pandulph in TR or even by as great an historical “character” as Shakespeare's own Richard Crookback.

John himself is a much more credibly developed character in Shakespeare's play. From the start his own knowledge (and ours) of the fragility of his right (I.i.40) adds an ironic dimension to such grandly royal utterances as his historical description of himself as “God's wrathful agent.” Riddled with such complications, his character rather than his right is at issue, the point, therefore, being dramatic rather than historical. Morally speaking, Macbeth is given no more telling language than John's grieved outburst, “Hostility and civil tumult reigns / Between my conscience and my cousin's death” (IV.ii.247-48). At the end of the play we can see plainly the differences between Shakespeare's characterizing intent and that of the source. Instead of directing our attention to the piously historical points that John is earning the wages of sin and that his death is proof of Papal perfidy and a perennially possible Catholic conspiracy, Shakespeare first shows us a man weakened by fever before he is melodramatically poisoned, then alters his source and has the poisoning narrated in a few simple non-sectarian lines, and finally gives the king an eloquence before death that has no point to make except the pathos of his human passing:

My heart hath one poor string to stay it by,
Which holds but till thy news be uttered,
And then all this thou seest is but a clod
And module of confounded royalty.

(V.vii.55-58)

Characters such as these are a direct critique of the historical mode of characterization. In Constance and the Bastard, Shakespeare offers two characters so overtly historical that they are actual embodiments of the human (and therefore dramatic) limitations of this mode. Constance vacillates between rhetorical styles that, for all their emotional impact, bear no coherent relationship to one another, ranging on the oratorical scale from a sonnet-like lyricism (III.i.51-54) to a strident colloquialism (II.i.161-62) or an almost Jacobean luxuriating in the terrible beauty that is death: e.g. “odoriferous stench! sound rottenness!” (III.iv.25-35). Such arbitrary treatment displays her essentially literary nature. An excellent example of a character in the tradition of Mirror tragedy, itself a species of historia, she is significantly without the moral dimension or even the explanatory scheme of Fortune conventionally granted such characters.¹⁹ Even her death “in a frenzy” (IV.ii.122) seems to have no point to make other than the dramatic historian's power over her.²⁰

The Bastard carries this aspect of Shakespeare's commentary upon the nature of historia to a brilliant culmination, for he is both a direct critique of historical character (in his human believability) and an indirect comment upon it by being in the end an historical character himself. For most of the play the Bastard is the agent of parody, a mode antithetical to conventional historia.²¹ His own discovery is a perverted romance motif that demands the dishonouring of his mother and the playful tarnishing of the heroic memory of his father, Cordelion.²² In his mouth even the venerable battlecry of the English declines into a sorry memory of itself: “Saint George, that swing'd the dragon, and e'er since / Sits on's horseback at mine hostess' door, / Teach us some fence!” (II.i.288-90). His language is constantly deflating the heroic bubble, whether in the loud pomposity of the Ajax-like Austria or the Citizen's astonishing fustian (II.i.135-40, 455-67). To him the ceremonial high style in which a conventional historia like Shakespeare's first tetralogy laid claim to its world is mere rhetorical excess, a source not of profound meanings but of laughter.

Nothing in the historical world is safe from his mockery. He reduces serious claims over right and title to a comic skirmish about money; deflates the notion of Providence by being turned into a felix culpa, his mother's “dear offense” (I.i.257); and reverses the normal moral order in his account of his own bastardizing (ll. 274-75). He holds up to scorn Lewis' conventional rhetoric of love (II.i.496ff.) and, having received his knighthood (I.i.162 ff.), proceeds in a single speech to parody social pretensions, courtesy books, the rhetorical set-piece (such as the Marlovian oration corresponding to this one in TR, p. 79), and the carefully wrought surfaces of the political world, the “sweet, sweet, sweet poison for the age's tooth.” His speech on commodity is a full-length satirical portrait of this world, amounting to a devastating critique of the optimistic pretensions of humanistic historia itself (II.i.574 ff.). For the political nature he perceives is real, not the easily contained cartoons of it represented by such figures as Barabbas, Richard III, Winchester, or York (in H6). As Machiavellian, the Bastard is related not only to the man who wrote The Prince but also to the author of La Mandragola. More than a version of the political world, his is a vision of the world.

In the course of the play the Bastard's character undergoes a remarkable change, however, causing an equally remarkable shift in the drama's centre of gravity.²³ Obvious for the first time in the Bastard's response to Arthur's death (IV.iii.57 ff.), it is the fact that dominates the final act of the play and has led some critics to see the Bastard as the true hero of King John.²⁴ In my opinion, however, his transformation may be accounted for within the framework of the assumptions of this essay. For, by becoming the mouthpiece of official patriotism and bearing eloquent witness to that which had been the object of his mockery, the Bastard is turned into the voice of historia itself. He perfectly exemplifies, therefore, the way the dramatic historian is free to treat character. By calling our attention to this procedure in so blatant and inevitably problematic a way (since the Bastard's original character is so vivid), Shakespeare makes us question it and so sustains the critique he appears to have abandoned. Like a conventional historian, the Bastard is entrusted with “the ordering of this present time” (V.i.77). At his insistence we must acknowledge the true nature of his role: the king's “royalty doth speak in” him, and he knows “the scope / And warrant limited unto my tongue” (V.ii.118 ff.). The explosive personality of the earlier part of the play has stiffened into an official posture, a conventional patriotism.

In an odd little sequence of his own invention, Shakespeare seems to offer some explanation, however faint, for this enigmatic metamorphosis. Onto a supposedly dark stage the Bastard and Hubert enter “severally.” That Hubert cannot tell the Bastard by his voice is peculiar enough. The strangeness is compounded, however, when Hubert's “Who art thou?” evokes only “Who thou wilt” and an allusion to the Bastard's public identity: “I come one way of the Plantagenets” (V.vi.1-11). After recognition, it is to the other's voice that Hubert refers: “pardon me / That any accent breaking from thy tongue / Should scape the true acquaintance of mine ear” (ll. 13-15). Although this courtesy evokes a touch of the old, bluff Bastard, it is clear that for the rest he has shed his individuality and become the public, symbolic voice of orthodoxy. As such he is an excellent example of the historian's habit of transfiguring historical personality into the puppet of patriotic meanings.²⁵

Such an interpretation of the Bastard's character may appear unnecessarily ingenious. But if it is incorrect, Shakespeare must be convicted of gross inconsistency, and, having taken such successful creative pains with his character in the early part of the play, it taxes credulity to imagine the dramatist is not in firm control in the final section. The advantage of the present reading is that it gives some coherent dramatic point to the change, a point that accords satisfactorily with what is being offered as the subject of the play—a critical exposure of the nature of historia.²⁶

At bottom, the nature of humanist historia is linguistic. As D. R. Kelley has remarked, “In their intoxication with words … humanists established a new logos upon the assumption that language reproduced, if it did not actually create, the configurations of reality.”²⁷ For historia, rhetoric is structural principle and projector of local significance. That King John is a critique of historia is best seen in its language. Instead of being an ordering power, it is the agent of dissolution, constantly battering external coherence into verbal obfuscation. This world is a world of words, but whereas in historia this fact generates reliable meaning, in King John the fact itself is held up to ridicule.

Where the language of TR is more or less straightforward exposition, that of King John is a display of stylistic acrobatics more extravagant than those of Love's Labour's Lost. Any page is proof of this assertion, so I will give only a few brief examples. Shakespeare turns the plainspoken Citizen of his source, for example (Bullough, p. 92), into a textbook rhetorician expert in the use of allegorical shorthand (“If lusty love should go in quest of beauty / … If zealous love should go in search of virtue” [II.i.426-28]) and a master of subtle syllogisms (“Such as she is, in beauty, virtue, birth, / Is the young Dolphin every way complete: / If not complete of, say he is not she, / And she again wants nothing, to name want, / If want it be not that she is not he” (II. 432-36). As the Bastard is quick to point out, a natural result of such verbal gymnastics is to draw attention to the wordy display for its own sake and thus remove it from the human realities it purports to express. And just as certain actions in the play result in a ridiculous equilibrium immobilizing all meaningful energy, so the play's rhetoric, ideally the vehicle of some objective significance, becomes a painted shell around an ontological vacuum. The neutralizing power of language itself becomes the focus of our attention.

One of the most striking linguistic features of the play is the continual trampling of objective meaning in a stampede of paradox and oxymoron. A conventional rhetorical perversion like Austria's depressing platitude, “The peace of heaven is theirs that lift their swords / In such a just and charitable war” (II.i.35-36), is intensified in Constance's “War! War! No peace! Peace is to me a war!” (III.i.113) and brought to a bewildering climax in Pandulph's expert placation of Philip's wavering scruples:

For that which thou hast sworn to do amiss
Is not amiss when it is truly done;
And being not done, where doing tends to ill,
The truth is then most done, not doing it.

(III.i.270-73)

Objective right stands no chance in this verbal labyrinth. Providential justice is likewise annihilated by Constance's rhetorical testament to it:

That he is not only plagued for her sin,
But God hath made her sin and her the plague
On this removed issue, plagued for her,
And with her plague, her sin; his injury
Her injury, the beadle to her sin—
All punish'd in the person of this child,
And all for her. A plague upon her!

(II.i.184-90)

Carrying the honorable vehicle of historical significance to such grotesque lengths reduces the whole mode to a comically accurate caricature of its serious self.

This fact is especially important since the rhetorical nature of King John as a whole is explicit to the point of exhibitionism. Much of it reads like illustrations to a Renaissance handbook of rhetoric. Anaxesis, or progression, may be seen in the barons' elaborate lamentations over Arthur's corpse (IV.iii.41-56); hyperbole is everywhere, but never more excessively than in the Bastard's orgy of fanciful comparisons to the “guilty” Hubert (IV.iii.121 ff.). The Citizen's advocacy of marriage from which I have already quoted is composed with the strictness and economy of syllogismus, anadiplosis, and gradation; and even the unlikely Austria is infected with this disease of language, coining in his remark to the betrothed couple a lumbering antanaclasis (II.ii.534-35).²⁸

Confronted by such self-consciousness the reader is continually reminded how each event is the calculated contrivance of the poet-historian, with the difference between this and conventional historia being that in this case the “meaning” lies in the erasure of meaning. And, as may be seen in the stark contrast between the Bastard's vaunting description of the king as “warlike John” (V.ii.148 ff.) and the feverish, heartsick human being who appears a few lines later (V.iii), the relationship between the rhetoric and the facts to which the rhetoric is supposed to give expression is a potent metaphor for the whole relationship between historia and the historical material on which it is supposed to bestow significance. In both cases meaning is fabrication, not revelation.

Many of the elements of King John so far mentioned have the effect of manipulating the audience in odd and often uncomfortable ways. By causing this to happen, Shakespeare forces his audience to experience and thereby enact in themselves the issues and meanings of his play. In this respect King John is a blueprint for what was to be Shakespeare's way of charging his plays with an energy commensurate with their subjects. For the later histories, as well as the tragedies that follow them, do not tell the audience anything. Instead they force the audience to experience the complex life of the dramatized world and its inhabitants. No longer permitted the luxury of being spectators at a pageant played before them, the audience must, because of how the playwright puzzles their response, become active participants. They are engaged in the life of the play in an immediate, dynamic way, and the issues of the drama are enacted beyond the restraining limits of the stage. In King John, I would argue, Shakespeare discovers one of the most important sources of his dramatic power: he discovers how to invent his audience.

In the early histories, in spite of the elaborate bustle of stage business and the occasional confusion as to our immediate position in the flux of civil war, we are never in doubt as to where our final sympathies must lie. For all its complications this formal historia has a conventionally reassuring scheme. Its author is a skillful guide through the dreadful vicissitudes of civil war and can point us to the edifying monuments along the way. More simple than this but still of the same kind, the relationship between TR and its audience is representative of the historical mode as a whole. The Prologue sets out their proper response:

Vouchsafe to welcome …
A warlike Christian and your Countreyman.
For Christs true faith indur'd he many a storme,
And set himselfe against the Man of Rome,
Untill base treason (by a damned wight)
Did all his former triumphs put to flight.

(p. 72)

Essentially the play's action does not interfere with this positive estimate, John's anti-Papal rhetoric and his morally simple view of himself as a “tragick Tyrant sterne and pitiles” (p. 118) ensuring its continuance.

Instead of such confident placing, Shakespeare is constantly catching his audience in a noose of equal and opposite sympathies, from the very start, when Elinor deflates John's claim to the crown (I.i.40), to the end, when French Lewis' defiance of Pandulph and Papal power must evoke a Protestant, English cheer. In their most immediate responses, then, the audience experiences not only the tendency of historia to shape things according to extraneous considerations but also the way such a tendency invariably twists history to the desires of the historian. Finally, the audience learns by its own experience how such a consistency of partisan response is in the final analysis, if one wishes to be true to the “events” themselves, practically impossible. In other words, Shakespeare makes his spectators experience the nature of historia and its defects, however unconsciously they may be doing so. This critical experience, an experience which must call into doubt the whole historical enterprise, is, I would argue, in a very real way the subject of King John.

Shakespeare's approach to history could scarcely be the same after King John. It is a critical assault upon the very foundations of his earlier idea of history, as embodied in his Yorkist tetralogy. As a caustic epilogue to his early histories, King John prepares Shakespeare for his second major attempt to cope with history and its meanings. It leads him away from the idea of history as historia to a larger, more humanly various, and unstructurable concept of history as, in Tolstoy's phrase, “the life of peoples and of humanity.”²⁹ The dramatic strategies forged in King John in part lead to the astonishing success of those plays in which we as audience are vitally implicated in the issues of the stage world and can come to few or no historical conclusions regarding the substance and final meaning of that world. Composed as a critique of humanist historia, King John allows Shakespeare to advance to dramatic-historical achievements unrivalled for their human truth and theatrical effectiveness. The nature of King John, as I have here tried to reveal it, is not only interesting and important in its own right but may also shed some light forward on the greater plays of Shakespeare's future.

Notes

1. Henry VIII presents special difficulties, but these may be explained by its proximity to the late romances.

2. The dating has aroused some controversy, as has the relationship between King John and The Troublesome Raigne of King John. E. A. J. Honigmann, in his introduction to the Arden edition of KJ (London: Methuen, 1954), has argued that Shakespeare's play was written first. In Shakespeare's Life and Art (London: J. Nisbet, 1939), Peter Alexander made a similar claim. The standard view of the case is that of John Dover Wilson, however, who, in his Cambridge edition of the play (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1936), gave it its strongest, most convincing statement: “Shakespeare based his King John upon The Troublesome Reign; he followed his original as closely as his greatly superior dramatic and poetic powers allowed; and he made use of no other source whatsoever” (p. xxxiv).

3. Danby, Shakespeare's Doctrine of Nature: A Study of King Lear (London: Faber and Faber, 1949), pp. 67-79; Burckhardt, “King John: ‘The Ordering of this Present Time’” in Shakespearean Meanings (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1968), pp. 116-43; Bonjour, “The Road to Swinstead Abbey: A Study of the Sense and Structure of King John,” ELH, 18 (1951), 253-74; Elliott, “Shakespeare and the Double Image of King John,” Shakespeare Studies, 1 (1965), 64-84; Matchett, “Richard's Divided Heritage in King John,” Essays in Criticism, 12 (1962), 231-53; Manheim, The Weak King Dilemma in the Shakespearean History Play (Syracuse: Syracuse Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 116-60.

4. The Cease of Majesty: A Study of Shakespeare's History Plays (New York: St. Martin's, 1961), p. 263.

5. J. H. De Groot, The Shakespeares and the Old Faith (New York: King's Crown Press, 1946).

6. Honigmann, Arden Introduction, p. xxvii; Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, IV (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1962), 1-3; Manheim, The Weak King.

7. J. R. Price, “King John and Problematic Art,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 21 (1970), 25-28; Elliott, op. cit.

8. Tudor Theories of History Writing, University of Michigan Contributions in Modern Philology, I (April, 1947), p. 4.

9. Donald J. Wilcox, The Development of Florentine Humanist Historiography in the 15th Century (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1969), p. 105. As derivatives from historia, I use the italicized historical and historian, in order to separate these words from their ordinary usage.

10. The coincidence of historia and rhetoric is a commonplace of Renaissance historiography. Cicero had observed that history was the business of the rhetorician (munus oratoris), and Lorenzo Valla followed him in his humanist claim that “The mother of history is the oratorical art.” Donald R. Kelley, Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship: Language, Law, and History in the French Renaissance (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 19, 22. See also Hanna Gray, “History and Rhetoric in Quattrocento Humanism,” Diss. Harvard, 1957, p. 263 et passim.

11. This is clear at the very start of Edward Hall's Chronicle (1548) “What profite, what comfort, what joy succeded in the realme of England by the union of the fornamed two noble families, you shall apparently perceive by the sequele of this rude and unlearned history. And because there can be no union or agrement but in respect of a division, it is consequent to reson that I manifest to you not onely the originall cause and fountain of the same, but also declare the calamities, trobles and miseries whiche happened and chaunced duryng the tyme of the said contencious discencion” (ed. H. Ellis [London: 1809]), p. 2.

12. See especially Elliott, and John Elson, “Studies in the King John Plays,” in Joseph Quincy Adams Memorial Studies (Washington: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1948), pp. 183-97.

13. My text is The Riverside Shakespeare, gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974). The editor of King John is Herschel Baker.

14. Following a slip in the Folio text, some editors identify the Citizen with Hubert. I see no reason to do this and am much more inclined to Greg's opinion that it is a result of doubling. See The Shakespeare First Folio (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), p. 253.

15. TR [Troublesome Reign of King John] has many examples of such unresolvable stalemate (e.g., pp. 116, 118, 138, 140). Each of these cases, however, is used to demonstrate something beyond itself, something that makes historical sense, whether this is John's burgeoning tyranny, his patriotism, or his “tragic” end. The apparent noose in each case turns into a rational line, bringing the play reasonably forward in accordance with its chosen historical bias.

16. See, e.g., Prince Henry, Pandulph, the speeches in which the Barons justify their revolt, and the Bastard's speech in reply.

17. Donald Wilcox has observed that “humanist historians in general are too much interested in the conceptual elements of history to give much thought to its tangible dimension. Even the most specific events remain little more than illustrations of either causal principles or moral categories” (p. 175).

18. Burckhardt has an excellent discussion of this scene (pp. 120-23). The question of free will, in a way too complex and distracting to be gone into here, is surely at the heart of the whole problem of historia.

19. See, e.g., Elinor of Gloucester in 2 Henry VI, or even Constance's prototype in TR.

20. He alters her chronology to fit his theme. See notes in Riverside (p. 788).

21. There is no shortage of parody, of course, in Richard III, with Richard figuring as a parody of Providence. This is orthodox parody, however, the orthodoxy that claims evil as a parody of good, and Richard in the end is trapped within the design he parodies.

22. In 1 Henry VI Cordelion was associated with the heroes Henry V and Talbot; here he is committed to the mock-heroic company of Basilisco and Colbrand the Giant.

23. Critical explanations range from Shakespeare's “boredom with his artistic task” (Robert Ornstein, A Kingdom For A Stage: The Achievement of Shakespeare's History Plays, [Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1971], p. 31) to seeing the change as the fact that crystallizes “the moral lesson of the play” (Bonjour, p. 271). See Julia Van de Water's “The Bastard in King John,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 11 (1960), 137-46.

24. Danby, for example, sees him as a first sketch for Henry V; see also William Matchett, in his Introduction to the Signet edition of the play, and Herschel Baker, in his Introduction to my text.

25. Manheim (pp. 156-57) accepts the Bastard's change as self-created and so sees him (after Danby) as a predecessor of Henry V. As I see it, however, Shakespeare is making another point here, and the point about the king as “image-maker” (his own historian, so to speak) is not made until Henry V emerges out of the exploration of history that is conducted from Richard II through 2 Henry IV. And that is the subject for another essay.

26. I find acceptable Burckhardt's idea (p. 135) that the Bastard's change arises from his inability to find another language to match his new role. The argument I am presenting is an attempt to find wider meanings within this very failure.

27. Kelley, p. 24.

28. For the technical terminology see Sister Miriam Joseph, Shakespeare's Use of the Arts of Language (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1947), pp. 330-31.

29. War and Peace, Epilogue, Part II (Modern Library ed., trans. Constance Garnett, p. 1101).