SOURCE: Saeger, James P. “Illegitimate Subjects: Performing Bastardy in King John.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 100, no. 1 (January 2001): 1-21.

[In the following essay, Saeger discusses the Bastard's illustration of the developing relationship between identity and political legitimacy in King John, arguing that in the course of the drama Faulconbridge endeavors to assert an authentic nature for himself and for England.]

Like the English history plays he wrote before and after it, Shakespeare's The Life and Death of King John dramatizes a relationship between personal identity and political legitimacy. Unlike his other history plays, however, King John does not combine its questions about the personal and political within a single character. Instead, Shakespeare divides the inquiry between John, the center of the play's public political struggle, and the Bastard Philip Faulconbridge, on whom Shakespeare concentrates his extended investigation into the nature of personal legitimacy and individual identity. The Bastard's antagonism to patriarchal authority (and its historically rationalized foundation) and his own lack of a historically authorizing legitimate genealogy are both key elements of the investigation that Shakespeare focuses on him.¹ Diverging significantly from his primary source, the anonymous The Troublesome Raigne of John, King of England,² Shakespeare re-envisions Philip's bastardy as a means of establishing an alternate and independent identity that draws upon historically emergent conceptions of the self and expresses itself as an exaggerated, highly theatricalized form of individuality.

Shakespeare's play asks practical and moral questions about legitimacy that Troublesome Raigne largely passes over. In the opening moments of the play, Shakespeare's King John follows the main outlines of its source by staging two parallel disputes over legitimacy: France contests John's right to the English crown on behalf of Arthur while Robert Faulconbridge contests his elder brother's right to their father's estate in favor of his own. But whereas the anonymous play unambiguously establishes John's right to the crown—Elinor announces that he “in rule and vertue both / Succeede[s] his brother” (I.7-8)³—Shakespeare's play strongly undermines John's legitimacy and emphasizes its basis, as Elinor notes to her son, in “Your strong possession much more than your right” (I.i.40).⁴King John also offers an alternative settlement to this dubious royal legitimacy: Philip Faulconbridge rejects John's self-serving Machiavellian path when he chooses bastardy over a legal (though fictitious) legitimacy. By relinquishing genealogically-inherited name and property, and the identity dependent upon both,⁵ Philip creates a self based instead upon action, performance, and physical presence. Less stable than a historically-rooted inherited name, this alternative form of self-definition requires constant reenactment. Thus, just as John must repeatedly assert his own legitimacy as king, Philip needs continually to reestablish his self-authorized identity. What the play ultimately offers Philip—unlike John, who is destined to lose both life and crown—is a new, more independent, autonomous, and authentic identity than the genealogical one he paradoxically rejects by accepting his status as King Richard's (reputed) bastard son.

I

Although Shakespeare's version of the Faulconbridge episode ultimately questions genealogical identity, it begins by strongly affirming it. When the two Faulconbridge brothers introduce themselves, they do so in the traditional terms of name, lineage, and family history. Philip describes himself as

Your faithful subject I, a gentleman,
Born in Northamptonshire, and eldest son,
As I suppose, to Robert Faulconbridge,
A soldier, by the honor-giving hand
Of Cordelion knighted in the field.

(I.i.50-54)

We immediately discover that Philip's doubt about his paternity (“As I suppose”) is more than proverbial when his younger brother Robert claims he is the bastard issue of their mother's adulterous affair with King Richard. King John responds to the allegation by invoking the strong presumption of English law that husbands were legally the fathers of children born in wedlock:

Sirrah, your brother is legitimate,
Your father's wife did after wedlock bear him;
And if she did play false, the fault was hers,
Whose fault lies on the hazards of all husbands
That marry wives. Tell me, how if my brother,
Who, as you say, took pains to get this son,
Had of your father claim'd this son for his?
In sooth, good friend, your father might have kept
This calf, bred from his cow, from all the world.

(I.i.116-24)⁶

John concludes ironically and gleefully that “My mother's son did get your father's heir; / Your father's heir must have your father's land” (I.i.128-29).

With this pronouncement, Shakespeare's John (unlike his counterpart in Troublesome Raigne) precisely follows the letter of English law: although the law did provide conditions under which the presumption of a husband's paternity could be rebutted, the grounds for such challenges were extremely limited. They could only be based on impotence or non-access, and, even then, as Sir Edward Coke describes in The First Part of the Institutes of the Lawes of England, there are restricted rules by which either grounds could be used:

By the Common Law, if the husband be within the foure Seas, that is, within the Jurisdiction of the King of England, if the wife hath Issue, no proofe is to be admitted to proove the child a Bastard, (for in that case, Filiatio non potest probari) unlesse the husband hath an apparant impossibilitie of procreation, as if the husband be but eight yeares old, or under the age of procreation, such Issue is Bastard, albeit hee be borne within marriage.⁷

Because in Shakespeare's version Robert's proof of bastardy is significantly stronger than it is in the earlier play, Shakespeare emphasizes and strengthens the legal irony. In Troublesome Raigne Philip's birth occurs “Sixe weeks before the account my Father made” (I.167); King John extends that time to fourteen weeks. By Robert's own description in Troublesome Raigne, his father accepted Philip as his son (“My Father in his life did count him so” [I.122]), whereas in King John Robert says his father disclaimed and disinherited Philip as he was dying:

Upon his death-bed he by will bequeathed
His lands to me, and took it on his death
That this, my mother's son, was none of his.

(I.i.109-11)

And finally, in Troublesome Raigne both Elinor and John categorically dismiss each of Robert's proofs of his brother's bastardy; their counterparts in King John validate the claim by remarking on Philip's striking resemblance to the dead Richard.

Troublesome Raigne, however, elides the conflict between legal and “true” paternity by emphatically reaffirming genealogical identity as essential and immutable. Once Troublesome Raigne's John has listened to the younger brother's charges, he announces that the case's resolution will be decided by “them that know, / His mother and himself” (I.211). Whether this decision marks a desire in John to dismiss the case or his belief that truth will naturally prevail is unclear; but Robert's objection (“My Lord, herein I chalenge you of wrong, / To give away my right, and put the doome / Unto themselves” [I.214-16]) underscores the outcome's presumed inevitability. When Lady Faulconbridge predictably responds with a denial, both court and audience believe the case to be all but decided. That decision seems confirmed when Philip also claims Robert Faulconbridge for father. But John (“for fashions sake”) requires that Philip be asked again.

Posed a second time, the question produces a remarkably different reaction: Philip falls into a trance. As the other characters look on in wonder (Elinor cries out, “Philip awake, the man is in a dreame” [I.240]) a private vision reveals Philip's father and confirms his royal heritage. A Latin declaration flows unbidden from his mouth, “Philippus atauis aedite Regibus / What saist thou Philip sprung of auncient Kings?” (I.241-42), and is then confirmed by the natural world:

Me thinkes I heare a hollow Eccho sound,
That Philip is the Sonne unto a King:
The whistling leaves upon the trembling tree
Whistle in consort I am Richards Sonne:
The bubling murmur of the waters fall,
Records Philippus Regius filius.

(I.246-51)

Despite this overwhelming revelation, Philip nonetheless decides at the end of this speech to maintain his Faulconbridge identity and the estate attendant upon it. Asking himself, “Goe loose thy land, and say thy selfe base borne?” he decisively responds, “No, keepe thy land, though Richard were thy Sire, / What ere thou thinkst, say thou are Fauconbridge” (I.266-68). But when pulled from his reverie by John's call for a response, he finds himself unable to claim the Faulconbridge name. He starts with “Please it your Majestie, Sir Robert—” but he cannot finish:

Philip, that Fauconbridge cleaves to thy jawes:
It will not out, I cannot for my life
Say I am Sonne unto a Fauconbridge.

(I.270-72)

Philip is physically and spiritually unable to deny his heritage; the inner voice reveals to him his true genealogy and forces him to claim his place within it. As a result, this play constructs Philip's identity primarily as a function of biological/genealogical heritage. It also instantiates genealogical placement as the fundamental—even essential—figure of self definition.

In contrast to this representation in Troublesome Raigne of genealogical connection as both essential and undeniable, Shakespeare provides his Philip with an even stronger legal claim on the Faulconbridge inheritance. This strengthened claim also constitutes an important textual expression of individual agency. After John denies Robert's suit and gives Philip full legal right over the Faulconbridge estate, Elinor offers Philip another option:

Whether hadst thou rather be a Faulconbridge
And like thy brother, to enjoy thy land;
Or the reputed son of Cordelion,
Lord of thy presence and no land beside?

(I.i.134-37)

Philip, of course, chooses the latter. In Troublesome Raigne Philip desires the secure, if false, position as Faulconbridge, but he is prevented physically and spiritually from making that choice; the play affords him no personal agency as it circumscribes his will within the demands of blood, paternity, and genealogy. Shakespeare goes to lengths, however, to release his own Philip from such limitations. Unlike his predecessor, Shakespeare's Philip can freely choose between identities—either a legal fiction of legitimacy or a putative royal bastardy—and displays a clearer potential for self-determination, individual autonomy, and personal agency. The choice between fathers also does more than simply construct Philip as an individuated and self-determining figure; the presence of the choice devalues the importance of genealogy in the formation of identity and reduces it merely to one among many ways of defining a self. Moreover, because paternity and genealogy are here represented as subject to choice, they lose their status as immutable and essential qualities. In the revisions of his source, Shakespeare thus self-consciously shifts the meaning of personal identity from something permanently given to something more freely definable.⁸

II

Identity fundamentally constructed upon patrilineal genealogy found strong resonance in the sixteenth-century English chronicle histories that provided the primary sources for Shakespeare's English history plays. As part of a larger body of Tudor historiography, for instance, Edward Halle's mid-sixteenth century chronicle The Vnion of the two noble and illustre famelies of Lancastre and York helped establish a historical genealogy for the Tudors—one supported by ancient and contemporary authority—that positioned them as the true royal dynasty of England. Tailoring a genealogical history for such purposes was not new to the sixteenth century or to Tudor historians who drew heavily, and self-consciously, on medieval formulations.⁹ But histories like Halle's did more than create a legitimating structure for the Tudors. As they privileged genealogical identification, they also authorized genealogy as the foundation for power and status and helped confirm it as the primary figure for social and political identity.¹⁰ As an analogue to the genealogical imperative in the history itself, the elaborate title-page woodcut to Halle's chronicle highlights two important features of genealogy as a form of socio-political authorization.¹¹ First, it privileges few and disenfranchises many: limiting the genealogy only to those figures necessary to complete the line, the organizing principle of patrilineal genealogy largely erases from the historical record women, younger sons, and bastards. As a primary mode of identity, genealogy inherently served to limit access to the form of selfhood it endorsed.

A second but no less important consequence of the emphasis on genealogical identification was that it contravened individuation of its historical figures at a time when conceptions of the individual subject were beginning to find expression in other cultural spaces. The title page to Halle's chronicle represents genealogical consanguinity as physical connection. The image literalizes the family symbol: rose bushes (presumably red and white) grow from the bodies of John, Duke of Lancaster, and Edmund, Duke of York. The image iconographically maps the official version of Tudor genealogy as the historical figures necessary to complete the lineage appear as blossoms of the rose bush. The figure culminates in the person of Henry VIII in whom the two plants seem naturally to graft themselves to each other. The bodies of all but the progenitors, Lancaster and York, are partially elided, depicted only from the waist up, as if the lower, perhaps implicitly generative, halves of their bodies were fully contiguous with their family tree. In its pictorial construction of a justificatory genealogy for Henry VIII, the image truncates the identities of all those who precede him. Represented as only partially formed bodies, these figures are consequently denied individual identity. Although the attempted authorization focuses specifically on the person of Henry VIII, the genealogical form the authorization takes limits its availability to him as an individual ruler. While slightly larger and more prominent than the rest, his image too is only partially formed, his authority iconographically dispersed into the genealogical tree that produced it. Thus, by its own representational form, the image itself suggests a tension between genealogical authorization and individual identity.

The full title of Halle's history marks similar consequences for the relation of identity to historical authority by demonizing individual agency as the primary cause of the wars between Lancaster and York. The title echoes the image's iconographic insistence that it will chronicle the achievements of two glorious patrilineal houses over those of individual historical figures. It reads,

The vnion of the two noble and illustre famelies of Lancastre & Yorke, beyng long in continuall discension for the croune of this noble realme, with al the actes done in both the tymes of the Princes, both of the one linage & of the other, beginnyng at the tyme of kyng Henry the fowerth, the first aucthor of the deuision, and so successiuely proceadi[n]g to [the] reigne of the high and prudent Prince kyng Henry the eyght, the indubitate flower and very heire of both the saied linages. Whereunto is added to every kyng a severall table. 1550.

Like the image, the title simultaneously emphasizes the union (of historical figures and their actions) and the person of Henry VIII himself. As personification of the union, Henry VIII is here a function of the genealogical and historical process that serves the history authorizing him, “the indubitate flower and very heire of both the saied linages.” In contrast, the only other king mentioned is Henry IV, the “first aucthor of this deuision.” Henry IV here becomes the sole individual agent in a history whose “authoring” of “division” throws England into a century of chaos. Individual identity and agency consequently appear within the title as ideologically opposed to the establishment of Tudor hegemony.¹² In both the visual and verbal representations on the title page to Halle's history, just as for the Bastard in Troublesome Raigne, genealogical identification becomes not simply the exclusive means of self-definition, but one that is also articulated against constructions of individual identity and agency. Shakespeare's version of King John, however, radically destabilizes this emphasis on traditional genealogical identification while it self-consciously proposes that genealogy, even if a viable form of identity, is neither the exclusive nor the essential means to define a self in late sixteenth-century England.

III

The choice allowed Philip in King John between Faulconbridge and Plantagenet fathers is perhaps the most striking feature of Shakespeare's revision of the character because it creates the possibility for an individuated, autonomous self. But Shakespeare's play does more than give Philip a single defining moment of agency; the play also creates a space that linguistically, ideologically, and dramatically can support that agency. From the moment the two Faulconbridge brothers are introduced in King John, Philip moves toward a self-definition that modifies the traditional terms of legitimate patrilineal identity. Unlike the Philip of Troublesome Raigne, who holds no prior suspicion about his paternity and unquestioningly reveres his parents, Shakespeare's Philip expresses a mocking skepticism, qualifying his assertions of paternity with “As I suppose” and “as I thinke.” As a substitute for this dubious lineage, Shakespeare's character emphasizes instead his physical self, upon which he claims superiority to his brother and disclaims likeness to Robert Faulconbridge, his supposed father:

But whe're I be as true begot or no,
That still I lay upon my mother's head,
But that I am as well begot, my liege
(Fair fall the bones that took the pains for me!)
Compare our faces, and be judge yourself.
If old Sir Robert did beget us both,
And were our father, and this son like him,
O old Sir Robert, father, on my knee
I give heaven thanks I was not like to thee.

(I.i.75-83)

Although physical resemblance is, of course, a common means of identifying children with parents in Shakespeare's plays as elsewhere, Philip perversely denies connection to his legally recognized father and implicitly favors connection to one as yet unknown. By presenting himself as “well begot” (proven by face and features) rather than as “true begot” (dependent upon the speculative status of legitimate paternity), Philip refashions the terms of paternal connection: he emphasizes his physical self and an anonymous father in the place of a self figured within a patrilineal genealogy. By denying traditional genealogical identification here, Philip ultimately exempts himself both from the specific dynastic struggles central to the play and from the dramatic and political world in which those struggles take place.

When John first asks Robert why he lays claim to the Faulconbridge estate, Robert eventually responds in traditional terms, with an account of his family history. But before Robert can begin, Philip interrupts him and again substitutes appearance and body for a genealogical narrative:

Because he hath a half-face, like my father.
With half that face would he have all my land!
A half-fac'd groat five hundred pound a year!

(I.i.92-94)

By interrupting, forestalling, and confusing Robert's narration of the true Faulconbridge family history, Philip figuratively performs what his conception and birth have done in fact to the Faulconbridge line.¹³ In doing so he also transforms the traditional markers of identity by replacing family name with physical likeness. The genealogical currency of blood becomes the physical currency of the “half-face,” which in turn becomes literal currency, a “half-fac'd groat,” as Philip linguistically transforms inherited land into money, “five hundred pound a year.” Philip distinguishes a new conception of the individual self—one defined in action and based on physical presence, money, and personal merit—from an older form of identity in which the self is inherited and based on name, land, and genealogy.¹⁴

Although Philip's definition of an autonomous self depends upon appearance and the body, his physical qualities also provide a foundation for a genealogically-defined self. Philip's face and features suggest to both Elinor and John that he is Richard's son, and they become the primary instigation for his belated adoption as a Plantagenet. Even before Philip's brother explains the bastardy charge, Elinor quietly says to her son,

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

(I.i.85-88)

John agrees, “Mine eye hath well examined his parts, / And finds them perfect Richard” (I.i.89-90). If an individual, autonomous version of identity and a traditional, genealogically-based one opposed each other on practical and ideological grounds, then for Philip's character the two should constitute mutually exclusive strategies of self-definition. But just as the title page to Halle's chronicle ambivalently rationalizes Henry VIII's authority both personally and historically, Philip's character pursues a version of the self that attempts to reconcile genealogy and individuality.

When Elinor gives Philip the choice between royal bastardy and the Faulconbridge name and estate, she too attempts to reconcile these competing modes of identity. She offers Philip the enigmatic position as “the reputed son of Coeur-de-Lion, / Lord of thy presence, and no land beside” (I.i.136-37). As “reputed son,” Philip's new identity would position him as both a part of and apart from the traditional social order: it would give him no legal status or patrilineal rights, but it would tentatively locate him genealogically. To be “Lord of thy presence and no land beside” would entail a similarly ambivalent position. While “Lord” seems to gesture toward a land-based aristocratic inheritance, the restriction of Elinor's offer to Philip's “presence”—suggesting merely Philip's person and/or the space he immediately occupies¹⁵—and “no land” undermines any traditionally defined foundation for such a title. In his response to Elinor, Philip continues to construct an individuated identity around his physical self and avoids embracing his new-found family. Returning to an equation of body, land, and money, he tells Elinor,

Madam, and if my brother had my shape
And I had his, Sir Robert's his like him, …
And, to his shape, were heir to all this land,
Would I might never stir from off this place,
I would give it every foot to have this face.

(I.i.138-39, 144-46)

While the possibility of royal blood emboldens Philip (a bloodline that silently confirms his claimed physical superiority), he does not explicitly accept King Richard's paternity but only the offer to follow Elinor:

Brother, take you my land, I'll take my chance.
Your face hath got five hundred pound a year,
Yet sell your face for five pence and 'tis dear.
Madam, I'll follow you unto the death.

(I.i.151-54)

Philip here continues the strategy of self-definition with which he began (one positioned in contradistinction to genealogical identification), but he also seeks to base a new identity upon his putative royal heritage as well. Even though he accepts his new name and lineage, he does so only with a measure of suspicion: to Elinor's command, “I am thy grandame, Richard, call me so” (I.i.169), he responds skeptically, “Madam, by chance but not by truth; what though?” (I.i.170). Finally, as the episode of his renaming concludes, Philip's ambivalence between these mutually contradictory versions of self—the physically-based one he constructs and the genealogically-based one bestowed upon him—produces a glimpse of yet another one that could be independent of both: “Nea'er or far off, well won is still well shot, / And I am I, how ere I was begot” (I.i.174-75).¹⁶ This doubtful and uncertain acceptance of his new identity thus simultaneously becomes a rejection in favor of one whose self-referentiality suggests a much more fully autonomous individuation.

IV

The Bastard begins the play with a self defined independently of family heritage and a name-based status system, but he quickly arrives at a more ambivalent approach to inherited name and status. Despite his residual suspicion of a name-dependent social order, the Bastard quickly accepts its terms in a highly theatricalized rehearsal of the roles he perceives his new position requires; in the soliloquy that follows his acceptance as a bastard Plantagenet he says,

Well, now can I make any Joan a Lady,
“Good den Sir Richard!” “God-a-mercy fellow!”
And if his name be George, I'll call him Peter;
For new made honor doth forget men's names.

(I.i.182-87)

The Bastard imagines a status that can confer an honor unbounded by courtesy. At the same time, however, the very powers he imagines for the role undermine it. Hereditary names and the honor implicit in them presume an historical continuity in which each new generation “remembers” the names and their history. By contrast, new-made honor like the Bastard's literally “forgets” the names it seeks to change while it devalues the honor that accrues to hereditary ones. Ironically, the First Folio's text of the play creates its own ambivalence about names: in the speech prefixes, the stage directions, and the speeches themselves, the character is variously named Philip, Richard, Bastard, Plantagenet, and Faulconbridge; he even refers to himself by a number of different names.¹⁷

The theatricality with which the Bastard engages his new position when he acts out these new roles for himself further undermines the traditional social order upon which his elevated status is based. As the theater emphasizes an actor's physical presence, a self created in action, and a fluidity of names, it mirrors the Bastard's original strategy of self-definition. But even though the conditions of a theatricalized self seem fundamentally to contradict those of a genealogically-based one, the Bastard nonetheless employs a theatrical mode to explore his new hereditary status:

And when my knightly stomach is suffic'd,
Why then I suck my teeth and catechize
My picked man of countries. ‘My dear sir,’
Thus, leaning on mine elbow I begin—
‘I shall beseech you’—that is Question now
And then comes Answer like an Absey book:
‘O sir,’ says answer, ‘at your best command,
At your employment; at your service, sir.’
‘No, sir,’ says question, ‘I, sweet sir, at yours.’

(I.i.196-99)

By employing a highly theatricalized mode without a direct reference to the theater itself, the play suggests that one's social role is not only metaphorically theatrical but constitutively so. This theatricality of self and social role further implies a fluidity of identity, name, and position that is antithetical to a stable, traditional social order.

The Bastard's negotiation of these competing modes of identity—one constructed through name and genealogy, the other through a theatricalized autonomy—yields in his character a suspicion of both. In this first soliloquy, the Bastard moves quickly from the role playing in the beginning of the speech to a more detached, even satiric, position at its end. Looking back on his rehearsal, he suggests that a theatrical identity not only suits newly made honor but is created by a social order that problematically allows upward mobility: “But this is worshipful society / And fits the mounting spirit like myself” (I.i.205-6). The Bastard places his pursuit of a stable identity in an ambivalent position: he identifies himself with mounting spirits but mocks them for their pretensions; he revels in the theatrical posturing he presents while scorning it; he prides himself on his newly acquired honor, then disparages a social order that can arbitrarily create such honor. Although the Bastard's identity is largely a self defined in action and thus infinitely mutable, it is also a self that requires authenticity. As this ambivalence continues throughout the play, the Bastard's negotiation of his identity draws upon emerging conceptions of the self during the period—conceptions that are paradoxically as suspicious of inauthentic theatricalized roles as they are dependent upon such theatricalization for their realization.¹⁸

Toward the end of his soliloquy, the Bastard turns his scorn from deceptively empty forms of personal identity to a deeper falseness he sees in his world. Collapsing his own illegitimacy into the world's moral degeneracy, he extends his theatrical metaphor with a pun on his birth, “For he is but a bastard to the time / That doth not smack of observation” (I.i.207-8). Since he is a literal bastard it makes little difference if he is also a figurative one, “And so am I, whether I smack or no” (I.i.209). In order to preserve an authentic self, however, he decides to learn deceit and betray his Machiavellian age. To do so, he will pursue honor and integrity as a consciously adopted theatrical role, but one whose surface truly reflects its hidden interior:¹⁹

And not alone in habit and device,
Exterior form, outward accoutrement,
But from the inward motion to deliver
Sweet, sweet, sweet poison for the ages tooth,
Which though I will not practice to deceive,
Yet, to avoid deceit, I mean to learn;
For it shall strew the footsteps of my rising.(20)

(I.i.210-16)

His individual, autonomous, authentic self will not simply be a role—something of mere theatrical surface and appearance; he hopes it will as well bear inner truth, consistency, and depth.

While the Bastard resolves early in the play to adopt a deceitful theatricality, he nonetheless also rejects its implicit fluidity in favor of a stable, even essential, personal truth and authenticity—“yet to avoid deceit, I mean to learn.” After the citizens of Angers refuse to choose between John and Arthur as their rightful king, the Bastard attacks them using a self-consciously anti-theatrical image not found in Troublesome Raigne:

By heaven, these scroyles of Angers flout you, kings,
And stand securely on their battlements
As in a theatre, whence they gape and point
At your industrious scenes and acts of death.

(II.i.373-76)

When King John and King Philip later come to a peaceful settlement, he vehemently objects to the fluid political morality upon which the truce is based: “Mad world, mad kings, mad composition!” (II.i.562). The Bastard's objections to the self-serving political machinations he sees, rather than the honor-bound conduct he expects, point him even more strongly toward the older, more traditional ideological position. The character suggests that since John “Hath willingly departed with a part” to “stop Arthur's title in the whole,” he has mortgaged royal and national pride by giving up English lands for an easy peace. And he reserves the same scorn for France, who joined the battle for honorable reasons only to give it up for dishonorable ones:

And France, whose armour conscience buckled on,
Whome zeal and charity brought to the field
As God's own soldier, rounded in the ear
With that same purpose-changer, that sly devil,
That broker that still breaks the pate of faith,
That daily break-vow, he that wins of all, …
That smooth-fac'd gentleman, tickling commodity.

(II.i.564-69, 573)

The Bastard maintains a like position throughout the play. When John submits his crown to Pandulph, Philip comments,

O inglorious league!
Shall we, upon the footing of our land,
Send fair-play orders and make compromise,
Insinuation, parley, and base truce
To arms invasive?

(V.i.65-69)

Shakespeare's Bastard (unlike his counterpart in Troublesome Raigne whose response to these events is comparatively muted) reacts with violent emotion to any possible diminishing of England's honor, glory, or sovereignty. Thus, despite the pursuit of an identity that would seem to preclude such honor and national pride—one constituted as theatrical independence expressed as mocking irreverence—he nonetheless becomes in the play the primary voice of English nationalism.

Because of these apparent contradictions in the figure of the Bastard, critics have long considered the character flawed by dramatic inconsistency. Those same contradictions and inconsistencies, however, should rather be read as an attempt to reconcile older conceptions of identity with newly emerging ones. The forms of identity associated with a fluid theatricality and an autonomy of agency had, by the late sixteenth century, taken on largely negative associations. Increasingly identified in the cultural imagination as the combined figure of merchant, Machiavel, and player—protean figures demonized for their dangerous ability to adopt and change their outward selves at will—the ideology that lay beneath the Bastard's pursuit of identity was bound up in a much larger process of historical change.²¹ Over the course of the play, the Bastard himself links together these three figures of social fluidity, but even as he draws upon them for his own construction of self, he condemns them for the social and political changes they represent. He continues his soliloquy,

And this same bias, this commodity,
This bawd, this broker, this all-changing word,
Clapp'd on the outward eye of fickle France,
Hath drawn him from his own determin'd aid,
From a resolv'd and honorable war
To a most base and vile-concluded peace.

(II.i.581-86)

In his support of ancient codes of honor, the Bastard here supports an ideology that, grounded in patrilineal genealogy, would bar him entrance. But after reviewing his moral objections, he finally decides at the end of the soliloquy once again to pursue the “illegitimate” path: “And why rail I on this Commodity? / But for because he hath not wooed me yet” (II.i.588-89). He ends his speech, “Since kings break faith upon commodity, / Gain, be my lord, for I will worship thee” (II.i.598-99). With the Bastard's claim to pursue “commodity,” the play makes explicit the ties between the fluid theatricality of his individual, autonomous identity and the forms of self associated with a rising market economy.²² Shakespeare's refashioning of the Bastard's character attempts to reconcile the personal and political honor of an older system of identity with a new form of individual identity that is less rigidly restrictive.

V

Further comparison between Troublesome Raigne and King John suggests a consistent effort in the later play's dramatic, personal, and ideological revision of the Bastard's character to employ older traditional forms of identification in order to validate newly emergent ones. From beginning to end, Troublesome Raigne presents an uncritical acceptance of genealogically-based identity and its ideological foundation. The Bastard in the earlier play, for instance, directly attributes his desire to kill the Duke of Austria (Lymoges) to an inner need for revenging his father's death. In response to Austria's initial boast of killing Richard, the Bastard experiences a physical, emotional, and spiritual reaction similar to the one in which he earlier discovered Richard to be his true father: “What words are these? how doo my sinews shake? / My Fathers foe clad in my Fathers spoyle” (I.556-57). The Bastard then turns to challenge Lymoges openly (“Scarce can I temper due obedience / Unto the presence of my Soveraigne, / From acting outrage on this trunke of hate” [I.570-72]) and even bases the proof of his paternity on his ability to meet the challenge (“Philip hath sworne, and if it be not done, / Let not the world repute me Richards Sonne” [I.578-79]). Staying true to his ancestry in this play, the Bastard confronts Lymoges during the first battle and continues the blood feud even after the truce.²³

Although Austria's killing of Richard is mentioned in Shakespeare's play and is an implicit element of the feud between the two characters, King John shifts the weight of the dramatic emphasis onto a more immediate and personal animosity. The specific dramatic instigation for the fight between the two is not the Bastard's realization that he is in the presence of his father's killer, but rather it is Austria's antagonism towards the Bastard's patron, Elinor. At the meeting before the gates of Angier, Elinor and Constance pick up the verbal sparring begun by John and Philip, and the rhetoric of the two women soon moves toward attacks on each other's chastity. In an attempt to bring the two women under control, Austria—with no authority over either but his gender—orders their silence (“Peace!” [II.i.134]). In direct response to this attempt to command the two women the Bastard sarcastically adds “Hear the crier!” (II.i.134). The feud between the Bastard and Austria begins dramatically, as a function of immediate stage action, rather than as an explicit defense of patrilineal honor; and it continues along the same lines. Coming from the marriage between Blanche and Louis, Constance denounces the match and the peace it creates at her son's expense. Interrupting her harangue, Austria once again forcefully interjects, “Lady Constance, peace” (III.i.112). In response, Constance reproves his forsworn promise to defend Arthur's claim: “Thou wear a lion's hide! Doff it for shame, / And hang a calve's skin on those recreant limbs” (III.i.128-29). When Austria defends his honor with a veiled threat, the Bastard once again chimes in with a sarcastic taunt:

AUSTRIA.
O that a man should speak those words to me!
BASTARD.
And hang a calve's-skin on those recreant limbs.
AUSTRIA.
Thou dar'st not say so, villain, for thy life!
BASTARD.
And hang a calve's-skin on those recreant limbs.

(III.i.130-33)

As the scene progresses, the Bastard repeats a version of this line several more times, each further insulting Austria. But unlike the royal sanction of the paternal blood-feud that appears in Troublesome Raigne, Shakespeare's John strongly checks the Bastard's impertinence, implicitly denying the importance of family honor: “We do not like this,” he says after the first interchange, “thou dost forget thyself” (III.i.134). When the Bastard finally does kill Austria, he makes no inflated exclamation of vengeance but instead reduces the fight's scope to encompass merely two individuals. Entering from the battle carrying Austria's head, the Bastard's brief lines describe only the heat and hellfire of battle and his own need for rest:

Now, by my life, this day grows wondrous hot;
Some aery devil hovers in the sky
And pours down mischief. Austria's head lie there,
While Philip breathes.

(III.ii.1-4)

Without the continual description of the conflict as retribution, like that present in Troublesome Raigne, it becomes more a function of immediate dramatic strife; and with his sarcastic and impertinent clowning, the Bastard combines a theatrical autonomy with a deep sense of personal honor that draws from, but does not entirely replicate, the earlier play's genealogical insistence.

A similar shift in characterization occurs in Shakespeare's play concerning the death of Arthur. Unlike its source, King John places the Bastard at the discovery of Arthur's body and has him denounce the act even though he is not immediately convinced of John's guilt (“It is a damned and a bloody work” [IV.iii.57-59]). Though he qualifies his condemnation, his objections mark his first separation from John. The Bastard in Troublesome Raigne displays no such independence. He is not present at the discovery of the body, and his only comment on the death reveals no sense of John's misdeeds. In an attempt to halt the nobles' rebellion toward the end of the earlier play, he tells them,

For Arthurs death, King John was innocent,
He desperat was the deathsman to himself,
Which you to make a colour to your crime
[I]njustly do impute to his default,
But where fell traytorisme hath residence,
There wants no words to set despight on worke.

(II.455-60)

This Bastard thus becomes a loyal mouthpiece for John in a manner fully consistent with his acceptance of a traditional genealogical identity. Just as he revenges his father's death, he reveres John's royalty:

I say tis shame, and worthy all reproofe,
To wrest such pettie wrongs in tearmes of right,
Against a King annoynted by the Lord.

(II.461-63)

In Troublesome Raigne the Bastard's personal, political, and ideological submission to John and his definition of self as Richard's bastard son are fully interdependent.

Shakespeare's play also structures an interdependence of identity and ideology in the character, but both have shifted. Just as Shakespeare's Bastard resists fully accepting a genealogical identity, he also resists unquestioned loyalty to John. In place of the unqualified royal subservience, Shakespeare gives the Bastard an unrestrained pride of England.²⁴ As he commands Hubert to take up Arthur's dead body, for instance, his speech concerns the fragile position not of John, but of England itself:

How easy doest thou take all England up
From forth this morsel of dead royalty!
The life, the right, and truth of all this realm
Is fled to heaven; and England now is left
To tug and scramble, and to part by th' teeth
The unowed interest of proud-swelling state.

(IV.iii.142-47)

And when he speaks to the traitorous nobles before the final battle (in a greatly expanded version of his predecessor's speech) he berates them for their rebellion against England rather than “against a King annoynted”: “And you degenerate, you ingrate revolts, / You bloody Neroes, ripping up the womb / Of your dear mother, England: blush for shame” (V.ii.151-53). What seemed an ambivalent individualism in the character of the Bastard has, by this point in the Shakespeare's play, turned into an unambiguous expression of national pride and honor. And it is, importantly, an image of England that directly parallels his own sense of self: one based in truth and authenticity and dependent above all upon a perception of autonomy and independence.

By the end of the play, Shakespeare's Bastard becomes the authorizing voice of the royal succession. His penultimate speech, timely, unsarcastic, and respectful sounds quite unlike the Bastard of the play's first scene. He addresses Henry IV,

And happily may your sweet self put on
The lineal state and glory of the land!
To whom with all submission, on my knee,
I do bequeath my faithful services
And true subjection everlastingly.

(V.vii.101-5)

Critics of the play have often been troubled by these lines: they seem dramatically, linguistically, and ideologically out of character.²⁵ But this incongruity is apparent only if these final lines are isolated from the ideological progression of the play and its negotiation of a self-definition for the Bastard. Considered in the light of the revisions to Troublesome Raigne, the apparent dramatic inconsistencies appear far more studied and cohesive. Shakespeare's play dramatizes a form of interrelated personal and national identity which simultaneously (and perhaps contradictorily) asserts an individual autonomy while drawing upon traditional genealogically-based forms of authorization. In the final speech of the play, the Bastard is the voice of English nationalism:

This England never did, nor never shall,
Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror,
But when it first did help to wound itself.
Now these her Princes are come home again,
Come the three corners of the world in arms,
And we shall shock them. Nought shall make us rue,
If England to itself, do rest but true.

(V.vii.112-18)

The nationalism he constructs here is strongly tied to the strategies of individual identity functioning at the outset of the play. The Bastard began the play with an attempt to fashion himself into an autonomous and authentic self and ends the play attempting to do the same for England.

Notes

1. Phyllis Rackin examines the character's antagonism to the historiographically understood patriarchal imperative of Shakespeare's history plays; see Stages of History: Shakespeare's English Chronicles (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1990), esp. pp. 52-66, 177-91. Alison Findlay argues in her comprehensive study of bastard characters that Philip's bastardy “is a virtuous condition which isolates him from ruinous self-interest and allows him … to relegitimise the polity” (Illegitimate Power: Bastards in Renaissance Drama [New York: Manchester Univ. Press, 1994], pp. 208-9). See also Eamon Grennan, David Kastan, and A. R. Braunmuller, who all identify the character's lack of a chronicle source as significant to the play's treatment of received historical material in particular and historiography in general (“Shakespeare's Satirical History: A Reading of King John,” Shakespeare Studies, 11 [1978], 21-37; “‘To Set a Form Upon that Indigest’: Shakespeare's Fictions of History,” Comparative Drama, 17 [1983], 1-16; “King John and Historiography,” English Literary History, 55 [1988], 309-22) and Jacqueline Trace's discussion of possible historical sources for the character (“Shakespeare's Bastard Faulconbridge: An Early Tudor Hero,” Shakespeare Studies, 13 [1980], 59-69). For earlier related debates about the character's dramatic, political, and moral significance, see Julia Van de Water, “The Bastard in King John,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 11 (1960), 137-46; James Calderwood, “Commodity and Honour in King John,” University of Toronto Quarterly, 29 (1960), 341-56; William Matchett, “Richard's Divided Heritage in King John,” Essays in Criticism, 12 (1962), 231-53; and Ronald Stroud, “The Bastard to the Time in King John,” Comparative Drama, 6 (1972), 154-66.

2. In his recent edition of the play, A. R. Braunmuller argues persuasively that Troublesome Raigne antedates Shakespeare's play (The Life and Death of King John [London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1989], pp. 2-15); for an argument that Shakespeare's play is itself the source for the anonymous play, see L. A. Beaurline, “Date, Sources, and the Troublesome Raigne,” King John, ed. L. A. Beaurline (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990), pp. 194-212.

3. All references to The Troublesome Raigne of John, King of England will be to Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, Vol. 4, ed. Geoffrey Bullough (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1962), pp. 72-151. For an alternative analysis of the differences between the two plays, see Edward Gieskes, “‘He is but a Bastard to the time: Status and Service in The Troublesome Raigne of John and Shakespeare's King John,” ELH, 65 (1998), 779-98.

4. All references to William Shakespeare's plays will be to The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974). For a discussion of John's legitimacy in the two plays, see Virginia M. Vaughan, “Between Tetralogies: King John as Transition,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 35 (1984), 414.

5. Bastards were termed filius nullius or filius populi—child of no one, child of everyone. Both linguistically negate any identity based on family connection. For contemporary legal definitions, see John Rastell, The expositions of the termes of the lawes of England (London, 1575), and Institutions, or, Principal grounds of the Lawes and Statutes of England (London, 1607). For the connection between property and identity, see Alan Macfarlane, The Origins of English Individualism: The Family, Property, and Social Transition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978), Stephen Greenblatt, “Psychoanalysis and Renaissance Culture,” Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts, ed. Patricia Parker and David Quint (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1986), pp. 210-24, and Rebecca Bushnell, A Culture of Teaching: Early Modern Humanism in Theory and Practice, (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1996), pp. 73-81.

6. The analogy of calf and cow was commonly used well before Shakespeare's time. R. H. Helmholz cites a fifteenth-century instance in “Bastardy Litigation in Medieval England,” Canon Law and the Law of England (London: Hambledon, 1987), p. 197.

7. Sir Edward Coke, The First Part of the Institutes of the Lawes of England (London, 1628; facsimile rpt. New York: Garland, 1979), p. 244a. As Helmholz has observed, the principle was deeply imbedded in English law: “The reluctance of English law to bastardize any child born to a married woman goes back at least to the 12th Century” (p. 196). Nicolas Harris Nicolas provides a detailed history of the law in A Treatise on the Law of Adulterine Bastardy (London, 1836), pp. 1-80; see also Wilfrid Hooper, The Law of Illegitimacy (London, 1911), pp. 7-19.

8. Virginia Vaughan has also argued that the Bastard articulates an individualized identity; see “King John: A Study in Subversion and Containment,” King John: New Perspectives, ed. Deborah T. Curren-Aquino (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 1989), p. 67.

9. Gabrielle Spiegel suggests that in medieval French historiography genealogy provided both an ideological impetus and a narrative framework to the writing of history (“Genealogy: Form and Function in Medieval Historical Narrative,” History and Theory, 22 [1983], 46-47); see also R. Howard Bloch, Etymologies and Genealogies: A Literary Anthropology of the French Middle Ages (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 64-91.

10. As Rackin argues, “having a history, in fact, was exactly equivalent to having a place in the status system” (Stages of History, p. 4). Keith Wrightson suggests most tracing of ancestry during the period generally “pivot[ed] on the individual who traced kin outwards from himself, rather than placing himself in a line of descent reckoned from a particular ancestor” (English Society, 1580-1680 [New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1982], pp. 46).

11. The title page border is that of the 1550 edition. Graham Pollard conjectures that it was “executed under Hall's personal supervision” (“The Bibliographical History of Hall's Chronicle,” Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 10 (1933), 17); R. B. McKerrow and F. S. Ferguson, in Title-page Borders Used in England and Scotland 1485-1640 (London: Bibliographical Society, 1932), ref. no. 75, also identify it as original to this edition.

12. Catherine Belsey argues that absolutist monarchy, by replacing a feudal model of genealogical power, helped to produce the new conception of the autonomous subject (Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama [New York: Methuen, 1985], pp. 108-9).

13. See Michael Neill's argument, which anticipates my own, that the Bastard's “subversive asides disrupt the very form and syntax of the verse itself” and that, from the character's perspective, “the authorized language of chivalric heroism is merely another version of the rhetoric of patriarchal reproof that first pronounced his own illegitimacy” (“‘In Everything Illegitimate’: Imagining the Bastard in Renaissance Drama,” Yearbook of English Studies, 23 [1993], 288).

14. Philip's discursive transformation of land into money mirrored the actual sale of inherited land, a more tangible threat to the traditional social order; Lawrence Stone notes that land sales in England reached their peak in 1610 (“Social Mobility in England, 1500-1700,” Past and Present, no. 33 [1966], 33). For analyses of the relationship between economic change and the rise of the individual, autonomous subject, see Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550-1750 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986), and MacFarlane, Origins of English Individualism.

15. The Oxford English Dictionary, s. v. “Presence,” 2a and 4a.

16. Cf. Edmund's similar conclusion about his own bastardy in King Lear: “[But,] I should have been that I am, had the maidenl'est star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing” (I.ii.131-33).

17. The Bastard first enters identified in the stage direction as simply “Philip” to his half brother's “Robert Faulconbridge,” and his speech tags are “Philip” or “Phil”; his speech prefix changes to “Bast” at the moment when he accepts Eleanor's offer. For the textual and cultural implications of non-regular speech tags, see Random Cloud (a.k.a. Randall McLeod), “‘The very names of the Persons’: Editing and the Invention of Dramtick Character,” Staging the Renaissance: Reinterpretations of Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama, ed. David Scott Kastan and Peter Stallybrass (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 88-96; I am indebted to an earlier unpublished version of Cloud's essay for the recognition of variant speech tags for the Bastard.

18. My sense of the Bastard's character has been importantly influenced by Robert Weimann's concept of coexistant but competing theatrical spaces on the Shakespearean stage, which he terms the locus and the platea. As the space of the represented fiction, the locus “privilege[s] the authority of what and who was represented” while adopting the forms of authorization “inscribed in Tudor histories and Shakespeare's narrative sources”; the platea is the space of self-conscious theatricality typified by the clown and which “invite[s] a rich spectrum of audience awareness” of the theatrical process (“Bifold Authority in Shakespeare's Theater,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 39 [1988], 403-4, 409-10). See also Weimann's initial theorization of these spaces in Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater: Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function, ed. Robert Schwartz (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1978) esp. Chap 6. For an exhaustive and perceptive examination of the period's suspicions about theatricality, see Jonas Barish, The Anti-Theatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1981), pp. 80-154.

19. The Bastard's rehearsal of identity here parallels the type of self-creation Stephen Greenblatt examines in Renaissance Self-Fashioning from More to Shakespeare (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1980), esp. Chap. 6.

20. Cf. Hamlet's familiar, and rhetorically similar, expression of interior and exterior: “'Tis not alone my inky cloak … / That can [denote] me truly. These indeed seem, / For they are actions that a man might play, / But I have that within that passes show …” (I.ii.77-85).

21. See Rackin's analysis of the relationship between theatricality and the figure of the Machiavel in Stages of History, Chap. 2, esp. pp. 71-82; see also Agnew and Belsey.

22. See both Agnew, esp. pp. 96-100, and Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1986), pp. 27-33.

23. The Bastard requests of both John and King Philip the right of vengeance (“Princes, I crave the Combat with the Duke / That braves it in dishonor of my Sire” [I.926-27]); he later kills Austria in the next battle and proclaims it a victory for his sire, “Thus hath K. Richards Sonne performde his vowes. / And offered Austrias bloud for sacrifice / Unto his fathers everliving soule” (I.1044-46).

24. Richard Helgerson argues that nationalism and individualism are “deeply implicated in one another” (Forms of Nationhood: the Elizabethan Writing of England [Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1992], p. 123).

25. Grennan argues, however, that the character's lack of continuity calls attention to one of Shakespeare's primary goals of the play, “a critical exposure of the nature of historia” (pp. 30-32).