SOURCE: Simmons, J. L. “Shakespeare's King John and Its Source: Coherence, Pattern, and Vision.” Tulane Studies in English 17 (1969): 53-72.

[In the following essay, Simmons compares King John with its source play The Troublesome Reign of John, King of England, noting that Shakespeare's drama corrects the moral confusion of its predecessor while confirming its theme of “the evils of usurpation and rebellion.”]

The source of King John, despite the recent attempt by E. A. J. Honigmann to reverse the priority, is generally agreed to be the anonymous Troublesome Raigne of King John [hereafter cited as TR] published in 1591 in two parts.¹ Shakespeare follows the earlier play almost scene by scene in its very skillful conflation of various crises in Holinshed's account of the reign. Except for a few details, one need posit no other direct source for the play. Although recent scholarship has clarified that King John must be considered in relation to more general sources (the sixteenth-century reputation of this troublesome king), a critical comparison of TR and King John has not been fully exploited in resolving what one commentator describes as “the problem of King John,” the widely divergent opinions regarding its unity, structure and, most importantly of late, its reflection of Tudor political and historical thought.² This unique relationship between play and source almost begs that we question what thematic and artistic considerations motivated Shakespeare to take a recent, respectable dramatic work and, in Pembroke's words concerning John's second coronation, “strive to do better than well.”

Perhaps a residual fear of intentionalism has impeded a profounder use of sources in Shakespearean criticism generally. But for the Renaissance playwright, not vexed by originality in story and subject-matter, the fact of choice insists on purpose; coherent and patterned changes of that source argue intent. “Shakespeare's sources are worth studying,” asserts Hardin Craig, “because they have significance, value, meaning; Shakespeare chose them for that reason.”³ It is, however, self-evident that such significance, value, and meaning differ from that of the vision generated by those sources and distilled in Shakespeare's finished work: the source is not the play. TR, specifically, is in many ways remarkable; of the known contemporary dramatists, only Shakespeare and Marlowe show the structural powers for handling such sprawling events from the chronicles. Of course Shakespeare's hand in the earlier play is still a possibility, as is Tillyard's guess that TR represents a “bad” quarto not of the extant King John but of an earlier version by Shakespeare.⁴ But whatever its origins and in spite of its relative impressiveness, TR is flawed by dramatic and moral incoherence, a flaw far more serious than the mediocre verse. The source is worth studying in this case not only for its significance but for its limitations. A critical examination of the relatively unencumbered relationship between King John and its source will reveal Shakespeare's achieving an entirely original coherence and pattern. Because Shakespeare resolves all the structural and thematic incoherencies of his material, it is not tenable to think of him as engaged in “hack work” or as forced by the nature of the conflict simply to stand back and admire “the fine confusion,” unable to make any “dramatic sense.”⁵

There is confusion in the source play. The author, surely not inadvertently, incorporated into TR conflicting material and attitudes from two contradictory readings of the history of John and his troubles, two strains which refused to cohere. Although some credit must be given to the author's attempted historical comprehensiveness, the result is qualified by a dramatic failure. A detailed tracing of these two historical points of view can be found elsewhere,⁶ but enough of the background must be given in order to indicate the plight of the anonymous dramatist and the success of Shakespeare.

The medieval chronicles were unanimous in depicting John as a despicable king who through his own willful failures brought England to the point of ruin. He alienated not only the clergy and the Pope but his own nobles and subjects. Holinshed points to this tradition:

Verelie, whosoever shall consider the course of the historie written of this prince, he shall find, that he hath beene little beholden to the writers of that time in which he lived; for scarselie can they afoord him a good word, except when the trueth inforceth them to come out with it as it were against their willes.⁷

The reason for their hostility was, of course, that John “was no great freend to the clergie.” After Henry VIII successfully defied the Pope, the attitude changed drastically. Bale's Kynge Johan represents the extreme form of a new perspective: John has become the Moses of the Reformation's promised land, the virtuous proto-Protestant who almost succeeded in breaking the tyranny of Rome. His responsibilities for the revolt of his barons and for the death of Arthur, as well as all defects of his moral character, are expunged as “suggestyons of the malicyouse clergye.”

This Anglican propagandizing was, however, infiltrated by the “Roman” view from the very start. Polydore Vergil's history of England, published in 1534, included the traditional picture of John's reign and even added the new damning charge of John's having usurped the throne from his nephew Arthur after the death of Richard I.⁸ Although Holinshed does not include this latest accusation, he gives most of the information accumulated in both hostile and friendly traditions. He does not attempt to reconcile the two points of view but nevertheless inclines toward a generous, Protestant evaluation:

Certeinlie it should seeme the man had a princelie heart in him, and wanted nothing but faithful subjects to have assisted him in revenging such wrongs as were doone and offered by the French king and others.

(p. 49)

This generosity is not unreasonable since so many details could not be definitely established as factual. For example, Holinshed can give the episode of Hubert de Burgh's attempt to blind Arthur as merely “reported.” He can offer several versions of Arthur's actual death as possibilities, and the uncertainty carries an honest weight of extenuation:

Some have written, that as he assaied to have escaped out of prison, and prooving to clime over the wals of the castell, he fell into the river of Saine, and so was drowned. Other[s] write, that through verie greefe and languor he pined awaie, and died of naturall sicknesse. But some affirme, that king John secretlie caused him to be murthered and made awaie, so as it is not throughlie agreed upon, in what sort he finished his daies: but verelie king John was had in great suspicion, whether worthilie or not, the lord knoweth. …

(p. 33)

Holinshed's refusal to judge without God's omnipotence has, through TR, an important effect on King John. Questions of innocence and guilt, of right and wrong, are helplessly posed by the chronicler; and that honest and simple presentation generates a more profound vision than any “interpretation,” necessarily biased, could have done.

The author of TR, unlike Shakespeare, did not have the imaginative power to encompass the two extreme possibilities of Holinshed's material.⁹ But his was no simple failure. One could almost be certain that two authors were involved in the play if there were not legions of second-rate writers to prove that the prejudices of an age can restrict a promising vision. Although the author happily indulges in Protestant biases and hysterics, he has taken for the play's central action the most heinous episode which the Roman tradition charged against John. If the critic is tempted to scorn the anti-Roman depiction of the French, Pandulph, and the clergy, he should remember that the author, still under the authority of his source, could have presented John in a far better light. Arthur, for example, while “but a babe to speak of” in Holinshed, is quite old enough to fight and make demands on his own, to be “presumptuous” and “commanding” to his uncle. In TR, however, Arthur is the epitome of helpless innocence. Furthermore, in Holinshed John gives Hubert instructions for the blinding “through persuasion of his councellors,” whereas in the play John acts in secret defiance of his. The author very deliberately contrives a situation of moral complexity found only in the best plays of the period. He makes Arthur's death the dramatic turning point in the structure, whereas the event in Holinshed results in only a very minor crisis. Nor does the playwright shun the moral effect of his hero's criminal intention. Only after John's repentance can his ideal re-emerge, still untarnished, the ideal of a throne and Church free from papal control and clerical abuse. He can then be entirely affirmed once more by his vision of

                                                                                                                        a Kingly braunch
Whose armes shall reach unto the gates of Rome,
And with his feete treade downe the Strumpets pride,
That sits upon the chaire of Babylon.

(II.1084-87)

The failure of TR is that the plot does not bear out the moral significance which the author places on John's defiance of the Pope. Although this defiance comes at the dramatic peak of the scenes in France, the subsequent political events make the “Protestant cause” irrelevant to the two genuine moral conflicts—the one between the king's and the rebel forces and the one within John himself. Unlike Shakespeare, the author cannot use this irony because he cannot see it. John, after a real moral struggle, finally yields to Pandulph when the messenger reports that the barons and the French have joined forces. As in Shakespeare, Pandulph then cannot effect the peace which was the papal bargaining condition. It is true that the author allows John clear sight at this turn:

Accursed John, the divell owes thee shame,
Resisting Rome, or yeelding to the Pope, alls one.
The divell take the Pope, the Peeres, and Fraunce:
Shame be my share for yeelding to the Priest.

(II.704-707)

But after John's repentance, the author tries to impose a significance that the facts have not supported:

My tongue doth falter: Philip, I tell thee man,
Since John did yeeld unto the Priest of Rome,
Nor he nor his have prospred on the earth:
Curst are his blessings, and his curse is blisse.

(II.1074-77)

John's yielding has in fact nothing to do with the outcome one way or the other. Dramaturgically it is a false issue, underlined by Pandulph's busy part as peacemaker in the happy close. Thus the moral value which has been placed upon the papal conflict, as well as upon the supporting anti-papist antics, is extraneous and jarring; it ruins the play not because one should be broadminded about Roman Catholics but because it is irrelevant to the genuinely dramatic moral vision.

Shakespeare refused to let John's defiance of the Pope represent an absolute spiritual value. The excision of the anti-papist grossness has been, through the years, the most noted and praised aspect of King John; but praise is usually directed toward Shakespeare the man, not toward the play, for his refusing to cater to less admirable popular tastes in the audience. We do not know if this alteration of the source reveals Shakespeare to be a tolerant Protestant, a Roman Catholic, or a wooer of Southampton; the only certainty is that it shows Shakespeare's superior dramatic powers and his more comprehensive vision. The structure and moral effect of TR clearly became incoherent as a result of the author's use of the Protestant cause as an absolute appeal, and Shakespeare carefully avoided it.

This omission, when taken in conjunction with Shakespeare's most important addition to his source, seems at first to remove us altogether from the Tudor and Protestant view of King John. For Shakespeare adds the issue of John's usurpation which Polydore Vergil had evidently originated, and makes of it, in fact, the central element in the conflicts of John's reign. One may doubt, however, whether Shakespeare had to depend upon knowledge of Vergil's charge: even if Holinshed and TR (and all the chroniclers except Vergil and Stowe) accept the legality of that will which made John the legitimate successor to Richard, they cannot avoid the fact that Arthur had the genealogical precedence. Such a precedence might well have been sufficient for one recently immersed in the tragic lineages of York and Lancaster, for one contemporaneously treating Richard's suicidal act of disinheriting Bolingbroke. There is ample evidence that a will barring lineal descent must fail as an absolute appeal; because disinheritance necessarily breaks those charters of time which uphold order, the law in such a case would be unnaturally turned against itself. As if to insist that such a will as Eleanor and John refer to (in both plays) can never be legally valid, Shakespeare allows King John to undermine the basis of his own right to the throne by denying that the elder Faulconbridge had the legal power to disinherit a son—even though the man knew that son to be none of his own begetting. The argument of legality, of a disinheriting will, is not in the parallel scene in TR.

Even though Shakespeare takes the potentially proto-Protestant and heroic king and turns him into a usurper, King John remains securely within the Tudor tradition, but comprehensively so, without partisan hysterics. The Pope's influence is still inimical to England's welfare; but because the facts make no correlative for a spiritual issue, the conflict remains strictly political. Since John is denied this false spiritual affirmation, he has left only the fact of the crown to support him, a considerable support but not an absolute one. Shakespeare goes still further and develops in Arthur's claim, in those who support it, and in the barons' motivation for revolt a positive appeal which directly exposes John's political and moral limitations. Neither side receives an absolute sanction; each side fails by the standard of that ideal to which each makes a claim.

The ideal demands a regal figure who is king both de facto and de jure. The fact of his wearing the crown is of course assumed, but the right to the crown must come from a power beyond imperfect society with its temporary flux of factions and single men. This divine sanction, interrelating the earthly and the heavenly cities, is in usual circumstances granted by those charters of time, hereditary rights, which impose stability and order upon the mutable world. When this kingly ideal is not operative, it still is in the background as a norm, as a standard of judgment. Of course the ideal is usually not operative, for drama deals with conflict and the ideal ends all conflict. Nevertheless, as Arthur Sewell observes, “even where disorder most threatens, we have a sure expectation that it will not triumph, and the order that will shortly be established always presides over our attitudes and hopes.”¹⁰ The progression of English history is toward a realization of the ideal and is therefore, as Alfred Harbage points out, a comedy.¹¹

When the reality of kingship has lost its ideal nature because of man's sins and weaknesses, the resulting conflict is one in which Right has been confused and both sides can claim a limited right.¹² The result is a dialectic between two sides both of which assert a positive value. John, as only a de facto king, cannot be absolute. Although order demands the support of such a king, there is still the questioning of what is of limited value. Opponents to this king gain qualified approval because they seize upon the limitation and appeal to the ultimate sanction which the king lacks. They in turn, however, are flawed by the act of rebellion. The justification and reality of the ideal are shown by the return to peace and unity at the conclusion, a resolution possible only because Henry III can without further disruption reconcile the duality of fact and right, reality and ideal: he is both the son of the usurper and next in line of true descent. King John becomes a microcosm of the sequence of plays dealing with the aftermath of Richard II's deposition; but there the confusion of Right cannot be restored within the generation. Until Richmond comes along, representing a providential even more than a genealogical resolution, there is no one like Henry III with an unchallenged claim de facto and de jure.

Shakespeare establishes John immediately as a usurper. He omits the opening speech in TR in which Eleanor laments Richard's death and implies direct continuance of the crown to her next son. Instead of using the French challenge to elicit a naive response from the audience, Shakespeare emphasizes John's “borrowed majesty” and allows Eleanor to confirm the French charge:

K. John.
Our strong possession and our right for us.
EL.
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.

(I.i.39-43)

The English position is thus undercut: the fact of kingship has been severed from the right of it. We are in another moral world altogether from that in TR, where the initial conflict between England and France is patriotically translated into right versus wrong. John's decision that “Our abbeys and our priories shall pay / This expedition's charge” for the war in France is removed from the end of a scene in TR, where it is given five emphatic lines, and de-emphasized into a parenthetical observation (I.i.48-49) while “the strangest controversy” between the Bastard and his brother engages the attention. Shakespeare very skillfully does not provoke in his audience a simplistic response which would overthrow the moral balance. Of course the fact that the usurpation is being charged by France, as well as the appeal of John's regal figure and “Englishness,” will assure that the usurper's “strong possession” maintains its positive value.

This drastic re-alignment of the forces naturally changes the conflict in the French scenes. In TR, without the Bastard's piercing soliloquy on “Commodity,” the peace between France and England through the marriage of the Dauphin and Blanche gains the author's approval. John at least understands what price he must pay:

                                                  my brother got these lands
With much effusion of our English bloud:
And shall I give it all away at once?

(I.832-834)

But his mother, who is not an intriguer as in Shakespeare, has the final word: she argues that peace and stability are well worth the territorial loss (I.768-771, 835-836). The arrival of Pandulph with the papal intervention which will destroy the truce provokes John's lengthy invective against Rome; the proto-Protestant receives complete moral affirmation. This issue also simplifies and rejects King Philip in a single line: “I must obey the Pope.” John is without qualification England's hero; King Philip, a moral strawman.

In Shakespeare, with the same material, we have a situation of profound moral complexity; indeed, recent critics have decided that no orthodoxy can possibly encompass it and that Shakespeare, in the spirit of modern skepticism, is investigating political “realities.”¹³ Philip, Lewes, and Austria are fighting for Arthur's clear lineal right to the throne. Lewes' “English” tribute to Coeur-de-lion jars all nationalistic expectations. They claim their absolute authority

From that supernal judge that stirs good thoughts
In any breast of strong authority,
To look into the blots and stains of right.

(II.i.112-114)

This claim is duplicated in John's view of himself as “God's wrathful agent” (II.i.87), backed up by his de facto possession of the crown and an otherwise peaceful England. “Doth not the crown of England prove the King?” he asks the citizens of Angiers; and the question, which despite John's point of view is not rhetorical, resounds ironically. Thus the indecisive battle which the two forces wage before Angiers has a dramatic cogency absent in TR: though each is fighting for “God and our right,” the trial by combat, which traditionally could prove God and right, must fail. God gives His sanction to neither side. If John is a usurper, the true heir is hopelessly involved in foreign intervention and the inevitability of dissension. Shakespeare has forced his audience into the position of the citizens who cannot decide between the two parties and who, in the Bastard's simile, “stand securely on their battlements / As in a theatre. …”

The impasse is broken by the Citizen's suggestion of marriage between Lewes and Blanche. But instead of accepting peace as a value worth the compromise, Shakespeare allows the truce to expose the moral vulnerability of both sides. In other words, up to now our interest has been engaged by the “rights” of each; now emphasis shifts to the “wrongs.” Even so, Shakespeare gives to both sides a voice of moral awareness which prevents either from collapsing into sheer hypocrisy. King Philip can no longer lay claim to his absolute, but he maintains, if only wistfully, a concern for principle:

Brother of England, how may we content
This widow lady? In her right we came,
Which we, God knows, have turn'd another way,
To our own vantage.

(II.i.547-550)

As for the other side, Shakespeare does not give to John the moral awareness, unlike the author of TR. Instead, the Bastard is developed as the moral voice of England. This is a role which the character had, very roughly, in TR; but the role of Shakespeare's Bastard becomes more profound as the moral situation is more complex and King John is rejected as the center of vision. Before the truce, the Bastard has thrived in a moral atmosphere of good versus evil, England versus France. He wins our approval while at the same time we can see that matters are not so simple. The Bastard's recognition that both sides are finally governed by “Commodity” removes him from the simplistic world he has inhabited and directs us to the next stage of the thematic development.

The following scenes develop the issue already at the heart of the conflict, the failure of absolutes in a world where right and wrong have been confused. “Since kings break faith upon Commodity,” since all guidelines fail except the relativity of self-interest, what happens to truth and justice? The railing of Constance fits the thematic pattern: while we do not forget that her ambition for Arthur is ambition for herself or that her son's right to the throne is unnaturally linked with France and the killer of Coeur-de-lion, she becomes the expression, justifiably hysterical, of right impracticable and impotent, of justice impossible to attain on earth. Since she is affected so directly by the world's imperfection, she sees imperfection as total corruption. Her vision becomes nihilistic:

                                                  When law can do no right,
Let it be lawful that law bar no wrong.

(III.i.185-186)

The arrival of Pandulph complicates the situation further. Already the conflict is morally too ambiguous for the issue suddenly to become right versus wrong, England versus papistry. Upon Pandulph's order for Stephen Langton's bishopric, John indignantly evokes the absolute and divine right of kings even though the moral environment in the play is so complex and uncertain precisely because of his inability to offer that absolute and divine right:

What earthy name to interrogatories
Can task the free breath of a sacred king?
Thou canst not, Cardinal, devise a name
So slight, unworthy, and ridiculous,
To charge me to an answer, as the Pope.
Tell him this tale; and from the mouth of England
Add thus much more, that no Italian priest
Shall tithe or toll in our dominions;
But as we, under Heaven, are supreme head,
So under Him that great supremacy,
Where we do reign, we will alone uphold,
Without the assistance of a mortal hand.
So tell the Pope, all reverence set apart
To him and his usurp'd authority.

(III.i.147-160)

The word usurped and its cognates have been declaimed eight times before, all in relation to John's “usurp'd authority.” Even the most avid Protestant would have difficulty ignoring the irony of the king's position and his claim.

The moral implications are equally keen in King Philip's situation. Instead of the simple acquiescence to Pandulph's demand that Philip makes in TR, Shakespeare's French king recognizes a genuine moral dilemma. Having taken an oath with John and being called upon to break that oath, Philip desperately seeks advice from the one man who, according to France's light, should be able to give it:

Good reverend father, make my person yours,
And tell me how you would bestow yourself.
This royal hand and mine are newly knit,
And the conjunction of our inward souls
Married in league, coupled and link'd together
With all religious strength of sacred vows.
The latest breath that gave the sound of words
Was deep-sworn faith, peace, amity, true love
Between our kingdoms and our royal selves;
.....And shall these hands, so lately purg'd of blood,
So newly join'd in love, so strong in both,
Unyoke this seizure and this kind regreet?
Play fast and loose with faith? So jest with heaven,
Make such unconstant children of ourselves,
As now again to snatch our palm from palm,
Unswear faith sworn, and on the marriage-bed
Of smiling Peace to march a bloody host,
And make a riot on the gentle brow
Of true Sincerity? O, holy sir,
My reverend father, let it not be so!
Out of your grace devise, ordain, impose
Some gentle order; and then we shall be blest
To do your pleasure and continue friends.

(III.i.224 ff.)

Exposition cannot possibly capture this dazzling irony: if we agree that the peace, described by Philip with passionate sincerity, should not be broken, we remember that the truce itself was made by his playing fast and loose with faith; an oath was made with John only by breaking the one with Arthur. Pandulph, even so, is unsympathetic to Philip's situation. For the papal legate, the matter is good versus evil, Rome versus England:

All form is formless, order orderless,
Save what is opposite to England's love.

(III.i.253-254)

Pandulph's argument, releasing Philip from his oath, may have reminded the audience of the hated doctrine of equivocation and the subtleties of Jesuitical casuistry, but Dr. Johnson was correct in insisting that the logic is flawless, granting “the propositions, that the ‘voice of the church is the voice of heaven,’ and that ‘the Pope utters the voice of the church.’”¹⁴ “It is religion that doth make vows kept,” Pandulph says. Both sides can agree with this premise; but since the next logical step for England is Erastian, the king over religion (“we, under Heaven, are supreme head,” John proclaims), the absoluteness of the crown “doth make vows kept.” When that crown's integrity fails, where is the appeal? If Pandulph and his church offered the stability which they claim, one might well argue for Shakespeare's Roman Catholicism, since dramatically if not personally the situation cries for such a rock. Pandulph and the Roman Church, however, prove themselves worshippers of commodity like the other earthly forces: their claim to infallibility and absoluteness is as weak as John's, and their power depends as much upon policy and compromise.

The final section of the play, proceeding from the death of Arthur, presents an ironic resolution to this thematic search for a moral landmark “among the thorns and dangers of this world.” For this resolution Shakespeare focuses on the one character who has, in his soliloquy on “Commodity,” seen the fundamental basis of the dilemma. The Bastard rises above boisterous, satirical irony to tragic apprehensions. The earlier conflict had involved a unified England, no matter what her imperfections. The Bastard loses his inspirited detachment when the new conflict suddenly finds England turned against herself.

As in previous peaks in King John, a comparison with TR reveals the entirely new moral conflict which Shakespeare develops out of the event of Arthur's death. A comparison between the two plays on this point, moreover, when made in relation to Holinshed, demonstrates fairly conclusively the priority of TR and King John's derivation from it. Since I have not seen such an argument made for the traditional opinion that TR is the source, some amplification is in order. Such amplification, however, will primarily determine the nature of what Shakespeare has achieved.

As already noted, the centrality of Arthur's fate gives to TR a dimension which would have been impossible with a complete Protestant whitewash, and the author took some pains to achieve this complexity. He makes Arthur's death, which took place in 1203, the immediate occasion for the barons' revolt of 1216. John's submission to the papal legate, which occurred in 1213, is also linked causally by the author to this conflation of crises.¹⁵ As a motivation for rebellion, Arthur has no place in Holinshed: upon the rumor of his death, the people of Normandie and the other English provinces in France worked “all the mischeefe they could devise,” but the death had the desired effect of ending France's disputes in behalf of Arthur's claim. TR, therefore, makes a crux out of an event in John's career which could be taken to reveal his greatest capacity for evil but which was not at all decisive politically. The discontented barons, however, have other motives:

This hatefull murder, Lewes his true discent,
The holy charge that wee receivde from Rome,
Are weightie reasons, if you like my reede,
To make us all persever in this deede.

(II.88-91)

The author has provided the rebels with the combined motivations of all of John's various enemies throughout the years of his troublesome reign. “The holy charge” was given to English subjects as well as to King Philip after 1208, and John was forced to yield in 1213. The barons supported the claim of Lewes after the signing of Magna Carta (1215) when John showed no intention of abiding by the agreement and the barons had to look to France for help. TR's barons, like the historical ones both before and after Magna Carta, also consider John's tyranny as a cause of their action; and though the author goes into no details of their complaints (John's excessive taxation and demands for military support, his refusal to uphold the charter) it is clear in the play that they consider their rights violated.

Such compression is masterly. The plural motivation, an intermixture of good and bad, strikes one indeed as Shakespearean. But Shakespeare deliberately cuts away all except the nobles' genuine indignation over Arthur's death as motivation for their rebellion, a simplicity he could not have derived directly from Holinshed. In the chronicle Arthur's death was not an English concern at all, and only TR's conflation could make it so. Therefore, in what is the structural crux for both plays, TR is recognizably close to Holinshed, but King John's relationship to the chronicle is hardly comprehensible without the intervening accentuation of Arthur's death in conjunction with more purely historical and political motivations.

Clearly, as Bullough observes, Shakespeare “wished to show [the nobles] in a terrible dilemma, as good men rebelling against an erring monarch for a righteous reason, yet in so doing putting themselves in the wrong.”¹⁶ It is necessary to insist on this point since Tillyard, often more eager than Shakespeare to accept the Elizabethan orthodoxy, can speak of “the levity of their reasoning” when they are deciding to rebel.¹⁷ More recently, James L. Calderwood has developed the thesis that the Bastard alone rises above commodity and practices true honor, a thesis that necessitates denigration of the barons' motives.¹⁸ In a behind-the-scene analysis and with a rather naive approach to Shakespearean dramatic time-schemes, Calderwood takes Salisbury's reference to a letter (IV.iii.14) as proof that the nobleman is in league with France and Pandulph even before Arthur's death. The barons in their indignation over the supposed murder are “cloaking Commodity in the vestments of Honour.”¹⁹ Similarly, John R. Elliott thinks that “only the adverse political effect of Arthur's death … leads to the revolt of the barons.” But the thrust of the drama plainly shows that the barons are the cause of that adverse effect, and it ceases the moment they are reconciled to John.²⁰ It is surely a questionable procedure to ignore that which is explicitly developed at great length in favor of off-stage speculation and subtle, naturalistic psychology. Neither King John generally nor the barons specifically invite such an approach.

The author of TR permits little or no sympathy for the nobles. By giving them a papist loyalty, even by so simple a detail as having them travel to St. Edmundsbury disguised “in Palmers weede” (II.98), TR keeps the focus on John as the proto-Protestant. In this way, the author lends support to Holinshed's conclusion that the king “wanted nothing but faithful subjects.” Shakespeare not only gives his nobles a single, sympathetic motive for rebellion; he develops in them, particularly in Salisbury, a moral vision that reflects the thematic confusion of right and wrong:²¹

But such is the infection of the time,
That, for the health and physic of our right,
We cannot deal but with the very hand
Of stern injustice and confused wrong.
.....                                        O nation, that thou couldst remove!
That Neptune's arms, who clippeth thee about,
Would bear thee from the knowledge of thyself,
And grapple thee unto a pagan shore,
Where these two Christian armies might combine
The blood of malice in a vein of league,
And not to spend it so unneighbourly!

(V.ii.20 ff.)

The concluding image is remarkable in both its poetic and historical aptness: Salisbury yearns for a conflict in which the morality is without ambivalence—a Christian crusade against the pagans, such as the absolute King Richard had led.

After dramatizing a cynical, disillusioned world in which self-interest determines all political behavior and absolutes vanish like a mirage, Shakespeare gives us English noblemen motivated by the simplest moral feeling of revulsion from evil. There is no commodity in their action; they have nothing to gain. They soon discover, in fact, that they have everything to lose, for Lewes plans to put them to death after the conquest of England is effected. This ironic discovery provides the unexpected resolution to the play's moral perplexities. Shakespeare has examined the springs of political action and discovered that while self-interest is the cause of evil and general confusion, it is also, rightly understood, the mainstay of the whole framework. As Pope was to express this means of stability, “Thus God and Nature link'd the gen'ral frame, / And bade Self-love and Social be the same.” This eighteenth-century view, though optimistically strained as a compensation for Hobbes, comes from a much older world picture, more vital and more realistic. Hooker and Elyot can be taken as its spokesmen:

For we see the whole world and each part thereof so compacted, that as long as each thing performeth only that work which is natural unto it, it thereby preserveth both other things and also itself.²²

… and in things subject to nature nothing of himself only may be nourished; but when he ha[th] destroved that wherewith he doth participate by the order of his creation, he himself of necessity must then perish, whereof ensueth universal dissolution.²³

Even though the nobles follow a moral light that we recognize as genuine and sincere, it is finally only the individual's light and leads toward “dissolution.” They are simply not qualified to judge and seek revenge. Vengeance belongs to God not only because He alone can punish a king but because He alone can determine, especially in this ambiguous case, the degree of guilt. The nobles desert, overthrow all order, and would have destroyed themselves had they insisted on destroying their country—all through their singularity as self-created judges. The individualism that makes villains of Richard III, Edmund, and Iago tends to become just as deadly in the nobles with all their good intentions. Critics generally consider that King John concludes by offering in opposition to commodity the Bastard's selfless patriotism. But commodity and honor are not “two antagonistic ethical principles.”²⁴ Shakespeare extends the narrow frame of cynical self-interest to show that the individual's true interest, the highest commodity, demands the unity and integrity of the commonwealth.

King John's central experience, his dilemma in the disposal of Arthur, has prepared us for this resolution. The most commodious action, thinks John, will be the child's murder. So Pandulph neatly projects this “necessity” to Lewes:

                                                                                                                        … it cannot be
That, whiles warm life plays in that infant's veins,
The misplac'd John should entertain an hour,
One minute, nay, one quiet breath of rest.
A sceptre snatch'd with an unruly hand
Must be as boisterously maintain'd as gain'd;
And he that stands upon a slipp'ry place
Makes nice of no vile hold to stay him up.
That John may stand, then Arthur needs must fall:
So be it; for it cannot be but so.

(III.iv.131-140)

But the short-term profits are delusive and self-defeating. Immoral cause and effect insist upon moral cause and effect:

For he that steeps his safety in true blood
Shall find but bloody safety and untrue.
This act so evilly borne shall cool the hearts
Of all his people and freeze up their zeal,
That none so small advantage shall step forth
To check his reign, but they will cherish it.

(III.iv.147-152)

John's repentance upon seeing his nobles' reaction to Arthur's supposed death is thus juxtaposed with his recognition that the action has not been politically wise:

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

(IV.ii.103-105)

Both John and the nobles learn that right action is finally in one's own self-interest. On the political level, “Nought shall make us rue, / If England to itself do rest but true.” The nobles should have followed the Bastard's loyalty—a loyalty which, appropriately, represents commodity, since the Bastard's new patrimony and identity are entirely dependent on the king, no doubt a symbolic dependency. Likewise, John's self-destruction was set in motion by his initial assault upon the integrity of the crown and completed by the final violation of “the life, the right, and truth of all this realm.” But even though John disintegrates, the idea of kingship, awkwardly incongruous, remains for both the Bastard and, finally, the nobles.

In line with the thematic development, the problem of the play's hero, or lack of hero, can be solved. John is prominent at the beginning, the Bastard at the end, and efforts to bolster the weaker end of either character are not convincing. Adrien Bonjour's view, that the pattern is “decline of a hero—rise of a hero,” is a little more satisfactory;²⁵ but the play really shows no such geometrical lines. Julia Van de Water goes so far as to insist that nothing connects the Bastard of the first three acts with the Bastard of the last two and that in both sections he “is entirely outside the structure of the play.”²⁶ But she is incorrect on both counts. In the first three acts the Bastard does stand chorally outside the central conflict. He satirizes the English courtier and the world of “Commodity” while his energetic actions proceed in the background on an entirely simplistic moral level—England against France, Rome, and the clergy. In the last two acts this same simplistic action moves him into the center of the plot; his willingness to fight for the king—no matter what—saves England from defeat. The Bastard of the last two acts still knows that the reality of the situation offers nothing as a moral absolute. With the death of Arthur,

The life, the right, and truth of all this realm
Is fled to heaven; and England now is left
To tug and scamble and to part by th' teeth
The unow'd interest of proud-swelling state.
Now for the bare-pick'd bone of majesty
Doth dogged war bristle his angry crest.

(IV.iii.144-149)

This profound disillusionment is a heightening of the satiric disillusionment in the “Commodity” soliloquy, but the reality which he perceives can no longer be the final appeal. Now England's survival is at stake. While she was unified, the Bastard might cynically observe, even revel in, the absurdities of imperfection. Upon the withdrawal of the nobles, he must make an affirmative choice between an imperfect England and no England at all. The disillusionment becomes the measure of the Bastard's greatness at the same time that it must become, morally speaking, an irrelevancy.²⁷

There is not, then, a rise of a hero so much as a sudden change of situation; likewise, John's fall comes in the very moment he loses the unity of his country, the only moral justification and support he could ever claim. What we do have is a development of the king-subject relationship, a relationship which connects John and the Bastard as dual protagonists as much as love creates dual protagonists in Antony and Cleopatra and Romeo and Juliet. The Bastard has no identity apart from his connection with John and the gradual embodiment of the ideal subject. It was surely a very serious critical mistake to speak of him as “an early Henry V” who replaces the king in the last act and “proves to be himself the natural ruler that John had ceased to be.”²⁸ The Bastard is not the essence of the true king but of the loyal subject with a vision of the true king. When John gives to him “the ordering of this present time” (V.i.77), the Bastard offers in his embassy to Lewes and in his military actions a vision of the king that John, to be sure, does not embody; but it is an image to which the Bastard stands in absolute and unshaken loyalty. He never pretends himself to be that image.

The relation between the Bastard's imaginative vision and John's reality is similar to that between Cleopatra's vision, in the final scene, and Antony's reality. Since the Bastard, much more than Antony and Cleopatra, is without illusions, he can be capable of that vision which, while untrue to actuality, is not delusive; for the vision transcends reality by asserting absolutes. Shakespeare's emphasis in the play has been on this actuality, exposing “the bare-pick'd bone,” and he does not, with the growing affirmation, turn away from the facts now. After the Bastard's imaginative representation of the king, the appearance of John, weak with fever, is a powerful irony; but the irony does not negate the appeal to what is a higher reality and loyalty. In the light of the Bastard's vision, John as a man becomes an irrelevancy, and his quick removal is artistically and thematically just. The ideal of kingship, however, is so strong, so victorious, that the Bastard can give a final and sincere tribute to John with little intrusive, questioning irony. But this happy conclusion is possible only because that ideal is finally capable of full realization—as Cleopatra's vision is not. When the Bastard transfers his loyalty to Henry III, the gap between the real and the ideal closes; all irony is dispelled.

The final result of King John is an entirely orthodox confirmation of the necessity for obedience and the evils of usurpation and rebellion, the basic commonplaces set forth by E. M. W. Tillyard and Lily B. Campbell. The recent critical tendency to belittle these commonplaces ignores the true complexity of the play in favor of something called the “realities” of political pragmatism. But these “realities” have no complexity in themselves except in their relationship to the norm they so violate. John R. Elliott tips his hand when he speaks of “the clichés of orthodox Tudor political doctrine.”²⁹ In his behalf, however, one can say that critical commentary can easily turn these commonplaces into clichés. It is apparent, for example, that the moral conflict of King John will not be contained by Tillyard's dismissing the rebels' motives as “levity of reasoning.” Nor can the problem which comes from John's usurpation be dissolved by Miss Campbell's citation that “the Crowne once possessed, cleareth and purifies all manner of defaults or imperfections.”³⁰ Neither scholar manages to deal with the imaginative impact of the play.

The dramatic worth of King John lies in its testing of the view it confirms. Order has been shattered in the play, as Sigurd Burckhardt insists; but the orthodox sentiments of the conclusion are not merely for the lack of better, not Shakespeare's imposition of order out of a rage for order.³¹ Action, one might say history, is confirmation: King John, not Henry III, is the exception; the years of that troublesome reign are unnatural ones for England. TR shows that, while Shakespeare has excised the simplistic morality, he has done so for the purpose of ultimate clarification, not just for the pleasure an audience derives from “moral stimulus.”³² Shakespeare's changes of the source purposefully increase the complexity and realism which make the confirmation the more valid and reveal the profundity of the commonplace.

Notes

1. King John, Arden Shakespeare, 4th edition (London, 1954), pp. xi ff. For reviews of Honigmann's judgment, see T. M. Parrott, JEGP [Journal of English and Germanic Philology], LV (1956), 297-305; and Robert A. Law, “On the Date of King John,” SP [Studies in Philology], LIV (1957), 119-127. I have cited the text of The Troublesome Raigne of King John (hereafter referred to as TR) from Geoffrey Bullough, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (London-New York, 1962), IV; the text of King John from William Allan Neilson and Charles Jarvis Hill, eds., The Complete Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare (Cambridge, Mass., 1942).

2. F. M. Salter, “The Problem of King John,” Trans. Royal Society of Canada, XLIII (1949), 115-136. The most recent and significant account of King John's reputation in the sixteenth century is by John R. Elliott, “Shakespeare and the Double Image of King John,” Shakespeare Studies, I (1965), 64-84. In his final section (pp. 72-81) Elliott treats TR and King John, but he does not really pursue “a fresh comparison” beyond the initial issue of John's and the Bastard's illegitimacy. The most thorough comparison of TR and King John, one exactly opposed to my findings, is in Virgil K. Whitaker, Shakespeare's Use of Learning (San Marino, Calif., 1953), pp. 123-142: he considers that Shakespeare, working with TR, did not develop “his own interpretation of events” (p. 124). The finest discussion of King John is in M. M. Reese, The Cease of Majesty (London, 1961), pp. 260-286. Reese makes frequent reference to TR in regard to the papal issue, John's usurpation, and general characterization. My emphasis, however, is on the structural and thematic coherence of the two plays. Also, as will be seen, I regard the affirmative nature of the conclusion as an integral, inescapable part of King John; I would therefore disagree that the play is, finally, “cynical and disillusioned” (p. 280).

3. “Motivation in Shakespeare's Choice of Materials,” Shakespeare Survey, IV (1951), 33. For the rationale of the critical method employed in this paper, see also Charles Tyler Prouty, “Some Observations on Shakespeare's Sources,” Shakespeare Jahrbuch, XCVI (1960), 64-77.

4. Shakespeare's History Plays (London, 1944), pp. 216-217.

5. E. K. Chambers, Shakespeare: A Survey (London, 1925), p. 100. John Palmer, Political Characters of Shakespeare (London, 1945), p. 323.

6. See John R. Elliott, op. cit.

7. Bullough, IV, 49. Subsequent page references, given in the text, are to Bullough's edition.

8. See John R. Elliott, Jr., “Polydore Vergil and the Reputation of King John in the Sixteenth Century,” ELN [English Language Notes], II (1964), 90-92.

9. I am aware that the author of TR probably consulted sources other than Holinshed (see John Elson, “Studies in the King John Plays,” in J. Q. Adams Memorial Studies [Washington, D.C., 1948]). Certainly the Protestant bias is in the line of Bale and Foxe. The fact remains, however, that the author has imposed this bias onto Holinshed, and matters of detail which he might have added from other sources do not affect the argument which follows.

10. Character and Society in Shakespeare (London, 1951), p. 74.

11. As They Liked It (New York, 1947), pp. 158-159.

12. See A. P. Rossiter, “Ambivalence: The Dialectic of the Histories,” in Angel with Horns (London, 1961), p. 45.

13. See, for example, Elliott, “The Double Image,” pp. 72-81. Elliott insists on isolating political from moral effects, as in his central thesis that John's unsurpation condemns him as a man but not as a king: “… none of John's political difficulties results from his usurpation of the throne. Rather, it is the selfish designs of those who claim legitimate ends that threaten John's success” (p. 75). The antecedent crux, however, is that John's private sin of usurpation has publicly overthrown legitimacy, thereby confusing Right. See also Sigurd Burckhardt, “King John: The Ordering of this Present Time,” ELH, XXXIII (1966), 133-153: Burckhardt feels that orthodoxy is shown at best to be “a makeshift structure” (p. 152).

14. Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. Arthur Sherbo (New Haven, Conn., 1968), p. 419.

15. See Bullough, IV, 9-10.

16. IV, 21.

17. Tillyard, p. 223.

18. “Commodity and Honour in King John,” Univ. of Toronto Quarterly, XXIX (1960), 341-356.

19. Calderwood, p. 346. See also William H. Matchett, “Richard's Divided Heritage in King John,” Essays in Criticism, XII (1962), 231-253.

20. Elliott, “The Double Image,” pp. 79-80. See M. M. Reese, p. 276 n. 1: “Shakespeare takes great pains to show that the rebels have a very serious case.”

21. Honigmann (p. lx) notes “that the word ‘right’ occurs more times in John (28 times) than in any other play of Shakespeare (3 H 6 is next: 21 times).”

22. Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity I.ix. (Everyman's Library edition, I, 185.)

23. The Book Named the Governor I.i. (E. L. edition, p. 2.)

24. Calderwood, p. 341.

25. “The Road to Swinstead Abbey: A Study of the Sense and Structure of King John,” ELH, XVIII (1951), 270.

26. “The Bastard in King John,” SQ, XI (1960), 137-146.

27. See J. Middleton Murry, Shakespeare (London, 1936), p. 159: “The Bastard is a cynic, and not a cynic at all. He is a realist and idealist at once, yet he is not divided.”

28. John Dover Wilson, ed., King John (Cambridge, 1936), p. lxi; Bonjour, p. 272. See also Tillyard, pp. 226-229. Only Mrs. Van de Water (pp. 143-144) objects strongly to this view: “Actually, in the last two acts the Bastard comes much closer to epitomizing the loyal follower than he does the regal leader.”

29. Elliott, “The Double Image,” p. 81.

30. Lily B. Campbell, Shakespeare's “Histories”: Mirrors of Elizabethan Policy (San Marino, Calif., 1947), p. 137. The quotation is from William Camden's Annales.

31. See note 13.

32. See Harbage, especially Chapter I, “Moral Stimulus.”