SOURCE: Jones, Robert C. “Truth in King John.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 25, no. 2 (spring 1985): 397-417.

[In the following essay, Jones concentrates on the thematic significance of truth and legitimacy in King John, particularly as these concepts are represented in the figure of Lord Faulconbridge, the Bastard.]

Truth is a special concern of Shakespeare's histories in more than one regard. On the one hand, these plays present “true” stories in a way that the comedies, romances, and most of the tragedies do not. Shakespeare shapes his historical events and characters for dramatic purposes, of course, but he does not make fundamental changes in his story of the sort that give King Lear its crushing conclusion. If that point seems too obvious to need mentioning, it nonetheless has special significance for King John, as I hope to show. At the same time that they profess to give us true events, however, the very nature of history as these plays understand and dramatize it means that the full “truth” cannot be determined so surely in them as it can be in the purer fictions, where no disputed facts lie behind or around the action, and all that need be known can be told. What, for example, really happened when Mortimer met Glendower on Severn's sedgy bank? The other plays have their mysteries and intangibles (“all the story of the night told over”), but such questions as this one are not of much significance in them.

King John, standing alone between the two tetralogies, focuses this generic concern with truth in a particularly interesting way. If it has proved a problem play for many readers, it surely shows its own awareness of some basic problems it confronts but does not resolve—problems that emerge through the gap between two meanings of “truth” in the opening scene, and that remain on prominent display until the bitter end. The jaunty Bastard Faulconbridge, whose fictive presence in the very midst of this play's true events makes him unique in the histories, is the center piece in that display, since he partly articulates the problem of truth and partly embodies it.¹ It is with him, therefore, that this essay will be largely concerned.

I

After the brief opening sequence has expeditiously introduced the play's main conflict between John and Arthur's supporters over the right to the throne—or the possession of it, where right is in doubt—the Faulconbridge brothers are ushered into court and the case of the elder's legitimacy is set before John as judge. Robert, the younger, exhibits his incapacity to thrive in this play's tough world not only by his spindly shape and the difficulty he has getting a word in edge-wise, but by the simple faith on which he stands when he finally does find his voice: “But truth is truth” (I.i.105). For one thing, that tame tautology is oblivious to the two very different meanings of truth (or true) that are already becoming crucial to our understanding of the situation. Robert means truth as fact—what is, is. When the Bastard shortly thereafter acknowledges Elinor as his grandmother “by chance but not by truth” (I.i.169), however, the word takes on a different—and in this case opposite—meaning of “right” or “honesty.” As Cordelion's illegitimate son, he is actually (truly) Elinor's grandson, but is not rightly (truly) so. The French ambassador had introduced this alternative meaning of “true” into the play's opening lines when he spoke of Arthur's “right and true” claim to the throne, using the adjectives as synonyms. Poor Robert's apparent “truism” is ambiguous, then, in a way he scarcely comprehends, and proves doubly hopeless when John points out that in this case neither sort of truth would serve in the eyes of the law. Though Robert would seem to have both the facts and the right of the matter on his side, the law ignores both: since Lady Faulconbridge was married when she bore the brash Bastard, he is legally legitimate, willy-nilly.

Such a tepid triumph is too meager for the Bastard's large spirit, however. He opts instead for the more glorious illegitimacy that he can claim as Cordelion's son, is dubbed Sir Richard to seal his “true” heritage, and sets out for France with his Plantagenet uncle and grandam, “a foot of honor better than … [he] was, / But many a many foot of land the worse” (lines 182-83). His cavalier, cocksure manner as he does so wins the approval of his audience both onstage (“I like thee well” (line 148)) and off. From his first entrance, he not only steals the spotlight from characters who might have a more “legitimate” claim to it, but helps to direct our view of the others and their actions as well. He dominates partly through sheer theatrical bravura, of course, but the points I would emphasize here about his prominence concern his special relationship with the truth as we perceive it in the play.

First, his hold on both kinds of truth strengthens his theatrical hold on our view of the play. His outspoken insistence on describing things just as they are breaks the decorum and bares the truth in public scenes from this opening one on. And when he is given the theatrical advantage of a soliloquy to engage our viewpoint—a privilege that is almost exclusively his in this play—he solidifies his position as our candid expositor of the actual state of affairs. His solitary reflection on his new prospects in the first scene, for example, instead of simply soaring on the bright hopes just opened to him, mocks the customary ways of “new-made honor” as we are bound to know them and (in others, at least) despise them. Sir Richard wears his “mounting spirit” lightly, humorously, and alertly here, recalling disarmingly that he is “but a bastard to the time” whatever his “exterior form,” and resolving to know deceit that he may avoid but not practise it (lines 184-216). This “good blunt fellow” (line 71) earns our trust early on, then, as a guide to the “actual” truth in the play.

At the same time, and despite his acknowledgement that he did not come into this world “by truth,” the Bastard shows a fundamental awareness of and allegiance to the “right and true,” appealing to a solid sense of right-mindedness that is readily distinguishable from mere law. He “wins” the dispute with his brother in our eyes, after all, by not accepting the patently false legal victory John offers him, and by affirming instead what we see to be true in both senses: that Robert is actually (and rightly) the son of old Faulconbridge, and that the Bastard himself is “perfect Richard.” And then he carries us with him (whatever our customary attitude toward adultery might be) when he assures his mother of the essential rightness of the union that produced him:

Come, lady, I will show thee to my kin,
And they shall say, when Richard me begot,
If thou hadst said him nay, it had been sin.
Who says it was, he lies; I say 'twas not.

(lines 273-76)

In its context, where the flimsy elder Sir Robert had been so hopelessly outmatched by the heroic Cordelion, where we are bound to approve the Bastard's good-natured effort to make his mother feel right about the truth he has coaxed from her, and where we owe the vital Bastard's very presence to Lady Faulconbridge's “transgression,” we can assent wholeheartedly to this transformation of a conventional sin into an actual good. That transformation, after all, confirms the judgment we have already made in Richard's favor when he opted for illegitimacy and forfeited his Faulconbridge estate. His very willingness to do so promises that even though he came into his Plantagenet heritage “something about, a little from the right, / In at the window, or else o'er the hatch,” the honest Bastard will prove more “right and true” than those who make such strenuous claims for their own “legitimacy”: “well won is still well shot, / And I am I, howe'er I was begot” (lines 170-75). If this is “but a bastard to the time,” then perhaps the time is out of joint; and indeed we can already infer that right and fact, those two branches of truth, are divided in John's England. “Your strong possession much more than your right, / Or else it must go wrong with you and me” (I.i.40-41)—so Elinor had whispered in John's ear, and in our hearing, just before the Bastard's entrance.²

There is, however, another dimension to the Bastard's relationship with the truth, another sense in which this attractive character's presence on the historical scene could be considered “illegitimate.” He is distinguished from other major figures in King John not only by his moral candor and heroic stature, but by his fictive status. This aspect of the Bastard's character, though not forced on our consciousness in obtrusive ways, nonetheless limits his possible actions in this play's “true” story (as we shall see), and also affects our ultimate understanding of his evident superiority to the “real” characters in that story. If he is exemplary by contrast with the others, his heroics remain a fictive ideal against which the failings of the actual world can be measured. In this respect, the Bastard serves as a live (though imaginary) embodiment of a figure familiar in Shakespeare's other histories—the idealized dead hero whose absence is lamented in the shrunken and fallen present. 1 Henry VI, for example, opens with the funeral of Henry V, and “arms avail not, now that Henry's dead” (I.i.47); and memories of the Black Prince still glow in elderly heads that shake with dismay at the ways of Richard II's “new world.” So it might be in King John, but here the dead Cordelion's heroic image can be seen live in the person of the Bastard:³

ELINOR:
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?
KING John:
Mine eye hath well examinèd his parts,
And finds them perfect Richard.

(I.i.85-90)

This “perfect” reincarnation of an idealized hero exposes the imperfections of the world around him in two complementary ways, then: as a commentator on them, and as an exemplary contrast to them. As the problem of truth grows more tortuous in the course of the play, the Bastard's exemplary role takes on more weight and more somber implications. Though he directs our attention throughout to both the actual and the right, as those two “truths” drift more hopelessly apart he will become less the sardonic commentator on things as they are and more the impassioned spokesman for what ought to be. That this fictive character embraces both kinds of truth in ways that the “real” world in which he performs does not is this play's fundamental and disturbing paradox.

II

Through the first sequences of the action in France in Act II, as the two sides in the main conflict square off to “prove” who is king of England, the Bastard is more commentator than hero, though his exchanges with Austria already cast him in the latter role. This personal encounter, which pits the bold young avenger against the purported slayer of his legendary father, provides a refreshingly simple counterpoint to the troublesome issue being tested between the two armies. In the one instance, we can commit ourselves entirely to Richard and hoot with him at the pompous poltroon he opposes. But no such easy alignment is afforded us in the larger public dispute. Like the citizens of Angiers, who “stand securely on their battlements / As in a theater” (lines 374-75) and suspend judgment on the rivals' respective claims, we cannot grant either side in the struggle over the crown the absolute right each asserts. Legal right seems clearly on Arthur's side, but the possible distance between such legitimacy and actual right (or truth) has been illustrated in the Faulconbridge case, and the fact that only foreign forces support this “powerless” boy (line 15) against a crowned English king who leads a brave “choice of dauntless spirits” (line 72) must tell in John's favor. Who, then, is the true king? The question remains open: “He that proves the king, / To him will we prove loyal” (lines 270-72).

The Bastard's major function here is to provide a solid voice for the actual state of affairs where rhetorical claims of “right” on both sides tend to float free from it:

KING John:
Doth not the crown of England prove the king?
And if not that, I bring you witnesses,
Twice fifteen thousand hearts of England's breed—
BASTARD:
Bastards, and else.

.....

KING Philip:
As many and as well-born bloods as those—
BASTARD:
Some bastards, too.
KING Philip:
Stand in his face to contradict his claim.

(lines 273-80)

This sort of plain truth, which the Bastard interjects amidst the airy orations on the battlefield, gratifies our sense of reality where truth-as-right remains problematic. Instead of simply lending his lionhearted presence in support of John's cause (as his Troublesome Raigne counterpart does), Shakespeare's Richard maintains something of an observer's detachment and calls the shots as we see them.

Not that he holds back from the fighting itself, of course—but his hardy Plantagenet relish for battle, which favors solid blows over fine speeches (“Cry ‘havoc!’, kings; back to the stainèd field” (II.i.357)), is also grounded in a firm sense of the actual mortal cost exacted by such a royal dispute:

O now doth death line his dead chaps with steel!
The swords of soldiers are his teeth, his fangs;
And now he feasts, mousing the flesh of men
In undetermined differences of kings.

(lines 352-55)

The grim truth of this kind of commentary naturally darkens our view of the battle scenes. And nowhere do we share with the Bastard a more detached or dimmer view of the proceedings at Angiers than when the opposed kings, leaving the differences that supposedly warranted such havoc completely “undetermined,” accept the Citizen's proposal of a mutually advantageous truce—a proposal that triumphs over Richard's own “wild” suggestion that the kings temporarily join forces to crush the upstart town and then continue their fight over the sovereignty of it. The Bastard proves himself no politician by the characteristically candid way he exposes his “policy” to the daylight, naming it for what it actually is:

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

(lines 395-96)

More circumspect than this, the Citizen (whose viewpoint ceases to match ours when he forsakes his detached post as judging spectator and enters the fray to save his town and his skin) easily outmaneuvers Richard by offering the kings a glossy cover for the pragmatic marriage bargain he contrives:

That daughter there of Spain, the Lady Blanch,
Is near to England. Look upon the years
Of Lewis the Dauphin and that lovely maid.
If lusty love should go in quest of beauty,
Where should he find it fairer than in Blanch?
If zealous love should go in search of virtue,
Where should he find it purer than in Blanch?
.....O, two such silver currents when they join
Do glorify the banks that bound them in.

(lines 423-42)

“Here's a large mouth, indeed,” observes the Bastard, bluntly describing what we see and hear once again (line 457). And when the interested parties continue to poeticize their crass bargain in the Citizen's Petrarchan clichés:

                                                                      and in her eye I find
A wonder or a wondrous miracle,
The shadow of myself formed in her eye,
Which, being but the shadow of your son,
Becomes a sun, and makes your son a shadow

(lines 496-500)

the Bastard's sardonic exclamations speak to both our comic and our moral understanding of the deceptive “shadows” that such language casts over the plain truth. The soliloquy with which Richard caps this scene addresses both kinds of truth that the kings and the Citizen have just forsaken:

Mad world! Mad kings! Mad composition!
John, to stop Arthur's title in the whole,
Hath willingly departed with a part,
And France, whose armor conscience buckled on,
Whom 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,
Of kings, of beggars, old men, young men, maids,
Who, having no external thing to lose
But the word ‘maid,’ cheats the poor maid of that,
That smooth-faced gentleman, tickling commodity,
Commodity, the bias of the world.

(lines 561-74)

So much for whatever right either side had claimed heretofore. And the actuality which both would nonetheless still hide in the shadows of high-sounding terms is laid bare in the Bastard's vivid personification of “that smooth-faced gentleman, tickling commodity.” The Bastard's own credit with us as a touchstone of things-as-they-are is maintained by his frank acknowledgement that the cause of his erstwhile enemy France, just abandoned at commodity's urging, had been a noble one, and by his willingness to turn his scathing irony against himself—perhaps doing himself rather less than justice, if we think back to his easy release of many a foot of land:

And why rail I on this commodity?
But for because he hath not wooed me yet.

(lines 587-88)

His final and bitter resolution to follow the royal example (“Gain, be my lord, for I will worship thee!”) may mislead us to suppose for the moment that he is forsaking truth-as-right.⁴ He ends Act II, nonetheless, as the exclusive and outspoken expositor of truth-as-fact, and we are bound to share the accurate view he offers of the play's “mad world” at this point.

III

Having dominated our view of things thus far, the Bastard keeps a comparatively low profile through the third act. When he speaks, it is with the same down-to-earth voice that punctured others' lofty rhetoric in Act II, but his comments are few, and most of them are aimed directly at Austria in fulfillment of his heroic role as Cordelion's avenging son. Even more pointedly than in the preceding act, the neat hero-vs.-poltroon opposition of this personal conflict contrasts with the vexed world of public affairs.

Constance reminds us how completely the latter has divided truth from right by her incredulous response to the news of France's defection. “It cannot be,” she exclaims, because it is so wrong: “I have a king's oath to the contrary” (III.i.6-10). As we know, it is both perfectly true and woefully wrong, or, in Salisbury's terms, as “true” as France is “false” (lines 27-28). The kings who have brought things to this pass would seem to need no further instruction in the fickle ways of “that daily break-vow,” Commodity. But France does in fact have more to learn along these lines when that ultimate master of policy, the papal legate Pandulph, arrives on the scene.

Actually, Pandulph gives two separate lessons to France and the Dauphin, to the father first and then to the son, in the two branches of truth that are the play's concern. In both, he shows himself to be at the cynically sophisticated extreme of a scale whose opposite end can be represented by Robert Faulconbridge's simple and inadequate faith that “truth is truth.” First the “holy legate” persuades France to defect from his prior defection by utterly confusing any comprehensible conception of right. France initially balks at the idea of breaking the “deep-sworn faith, peace, amity, true love” (line 231) with which he had just broken his previous deep-sworn faith with Constance, but Pandulph runs this already limp conception of truth through the wringer of his casuistry:

What since thou swor'st is sworn against thyself
And may not be performèd by thyself,
For that which thou hast sworn to do amiss
Is not amiss when it is truly done;
And being not done, where doing tends to ill,
The truth is then most done not doing it.

(lines 268-73)

When both the truth and France are properly confused, Pandulph brings his long series of rhetorical twists and turns to an end with the sharp, clear threat of a papal curse. All recognizable sight of truth is lost, and the case is won.

Shortly thereafter, when the renewed battle has resulted in an apparent victory for John and disaster for the French, Pandulph gives the distraught Lewis a lucid lecture on the true facts of life in “this old world” (III.iv.145). According to the hard law of realpolitik, as Pandulph explains it, John must now do away with Arthur:

A sceptre snatched with an unruly hand
Must be as boisterously maintained as gained,
And he that stands upon a slippery 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.

(lines 135-40)

But the very act that aims at security will cause such disaffection among John's people that they will seek out occasions to turn against him. As Pandulph spells out the inevitable course of events, he plays on the word “true” in what sounds like a moral maxim out of homiletic history:

For he that steeps his safety in true blood
Shall find but bloody safety and untrue.

(lines 147-48)

Pandulph no doubt relishes the irony that tinges such moralizing terms in the cynical context he provides for them here, since his lesson has nothing whatsoever to do with the true in the sense of the right. But he is so confident—perhaps overconfident, finally—of his grasp on the truth of things-as-they-are that he can speak with what he calls “a prophetic spirit” (line 126). What inspires Pandulph's prophecy, of course, is not monkish fervor nor “presages, and tongues of heaven” (he explains and mocks those in this same passage (lines 153-59)), but a purely cynical political science. According to him, the true state of things—even of the immediate future—can be seen and therefore controlled: ‘“Tis wonderful / What may be wrought out of their discontent” (lines 178-79).

At the same time that we see the hypocrisy of his holy mission uncovered here, we must credit the essential accuracy of Pandulph's vision. We know he speaks true in one sense if not the other, because we have just seen John take the step that Pandulph says was inevitable. In the preceding scene, and in one of the play's marvelous dramatic moments, John had insinuated his way toward the deadly command that marks the turning point in his career from the bold (if not clearly “true”) warrior of the first two acts to the desperate weakling of the finale:

KING John:
Good Hubert! Hubert, Hubert, throw thine eye
On yon young boy. I'll tell thee what, my friend,
He is a very serpent in my way,
And wheresoe'er this foot of mine doth tread
He lies before me. Dost thou understand me?
Thou art his keeper.
HUBERT:
And I'll keep him so
That he shall not offend your majesty.
KING John:
Death.
HUBERT:
My Lord?
KING John:
A grave.
HUBERT:
He shall not live.
KING John:
Enough.

(III.iii.59-66)

In the momentary elation of having crossed that Rubicon, John indulges in some playful irony of his own with the word “true” as he bids the doomed Arthur farewell:

                                                            For England, cousin, go.
Hubert shall be your man, attend on you
With all true duty.

(lines 71-73)

When the time comes, the ambiguities of the truth about Arthur's death and Hubert's part therein will proliferate beyond John's (or anyone's) control. But the conscious irony he intends here in “true” signifies his own awareness of the absolute divorce he has now effected between the actual and the right.

John's command that Arthur be murdered follows directly after the short scene in which the Bastard avenges Cordelion by killing the loutish Austria in battle. The awfulness of what John does—more appalling (and more true?) because it is not out-and-out villainy of Richard III's gleeful sort, but a descent into evil under the apparent compulsion of political necessity as Pandulph understands it—needs no such gallant heroics to show it up for what it is.⁵ But the sharp contrast again, and more forcefully than ever, distinguishes the Bastard's personal Romance here from the political world that has already disenchanted him. The severing of Austria's head brings all Romance to an end. The Bastard is sent off on a political errand that suits his jaunty irreverence (shaking “the bags / Of hoarding abbots” and setting free their “imprisoned angels” (III.iii.7-9)), and in his absence the world of the play goes its sordid Pandulphian way. When he returns, it will offer him no more Austrias to hunt down, no more “true” causes for a lion-hearted hero to pursue.

IV

Everyone in the play can see that the actual state of affairs in England is worsening when the Bastard reports back to John in IV.ii. The people are “strangely fantasied, / Possessed with rumors, full of idle dreams, / Not knowing what they fear, but full of fear” (lines 144-46), and the nobles, disgruntled over John's superfluous second coronation which “makes sound opinion sick and truth suspected” (line 26), are even more deeply disturbed by Arthur's imprisonment and supposed death. But what is the actual truth now, and what would constitute a “true” response to it, or a “sound opinion”? The problem of truth in both senses takes on a new dimension here. If the gap between fact and right had already widened to abysmal proportions with John's murderous order and Pandulph's machiavellian plan, at least both sides of the abyss were mostly visible. Right may have been a complicated matter in the dispute over the throne, but the Bastard's commentary on the events of Acts I and II, ranging as it did from sardonic amusement to moral outrage, depended on a fundamentally confident sense of what was and what should be, and was able to judge a given action accordingly.

The ground for any such confidence disappears when Arthur, seen by no one but us, leaps to his death from his prison wall and thereby foils John's belated plan to spare him and appease “the angry lords” (IV.ii.268). Lacking our privileged view of Arthur's fall, the lords who arrive on the scene and the Bastard who follows them can only speculate on what actually happened and base their options for right action on their consequent assumptions about the facts.

Even knowing what we know, what is the truth about John's or Hubert's guilt or innocence in Arthur's death? They did not, of course, actually kill him, but … ? Freer, perhaps, in their relative ignorance to reach absolute conclusions than we are, the lords quickly judge it a murder and then put the tough question to the Bastard: “Sir Richard, what think you?” (IV.iii.41). The difficulty of finding a true answer is further pointed up when Hubert rushes in with his untimely report that “Arthur doth live” (line 75). When the lords threaten to punish him on the spot as “a murderer,” Hubert protests his innocence in terms that recall the equally “innocent” Robert Faulconbridge, who thought truth was truth:

                                                                                                    Do not prove me so.
Yet I am none. Whose tongue soe'er speaks false,
Not truly speaks; who speaks not truly, lies.

(lines 90-92)

Hubert himself has just disproved the simple logic of that defense by speaking falsely (Arthur does not live) without lying (he thought he spoke the truth). And his claim of innocence (false in its reasoning, true—but how true?—in fact) only emphasizes the difficulty of speaking truly as things now stand.

Of the options open, the one taken by the lords probably seems to us the more false, or faulty. We know they are over-hasty and over-certain in their judgment of John, and we can scarcely consider Lewis a much happier choice for the English throne. But Shakespeare makes our own judgment more problematic here than does the author of The Troublesome Raigne. In that play we are forewarned of Lewis's treacherous “French” plan to dispose of the nobles once they have served his nefarious purpose. In King John, however, we are left as ignorant as the lords themselves on this point, and forced to participate with them to this extent in the difficulty of judging truly.⁶ Certainly they have ample reason for their disaffection from John, however shaky their facts may be in the matter of Arthur's death. And if Salisbury approximates Pandulph's casuistry as he later rationalizes his decision, he does not do so willingly or happily:

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 confusèd wrong.

(V.ii.20-23)

I see no need to doubt the sincerity of his futile wish for a better world in which truer courses of action would be clear and sure:⁷

                                        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 unneighborly!

(lines 33-39)

That vision might be associated with the Bastard and his more heroic stance in two ways. The image of the English as brave crusaders assaulting the pagan foe “in stronds afar remote” inevitably recalls Cordelion, whose spirit survives here in his Bastard son alone. But Salisbury's vision is also an unrealizable fantasy, made to seem all the more impossible over against the unhappy reality of this infected time by its wish that Neptune might serve both as conveyer and opiate, somehow bearing England away from the painful knowledge of its actual self. In turning back to the Bastard, I will argue that he, too, holds before us the contrast between wishful fiction and painful reality in ways that keep the problem of truth both actively present and finally unresolved through the play's concluding sequences.

V

We no doubt prefer (given our larger awareness) the Bastard's new-found circumspection to the lord's quick condemnation of both John and Hubert when Arthur's body is discovered. Circumspection, however, provides no guarantee of truth, as Richard's anguished reflection on this new turn of events acknowledges:

I am amazed, methinks, and lose my way
Among the thorns and dangers of this world.
.....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 scamble and to part by th' teeth
The unowed interest of proud swelling state.

(IV.iii.140-47)

The soliloquy that ended Act II had expressed the Bastard's clear recognition of the evident truth that right was overswayed by commodity, and suggested in the process his sense of detachment (despite his momentary disgusted profession of allegiance to Gain) from such a “mad world.” Now truth itself “is fled” along with right, and the Bastard can no longer detach himself as an angry observer, no longer find even his own “way” with any assurance. The decision he makes here must be, as his account of the “vast confusion” hovering over the decaying state indicates, an existential one, choosing a way despite his own awareness that whatever truth (validity, right) he invests it with is not actually determinable in it:⁸

                                                                                                    I'll to the king.
A thousand businesses are brief in hand,
And heaven itself doth frown upon the land.

(lines 157-59)

From this point on, the Bastard's effort is largely a creative one. If truth and right are nowhere to be found, he will invent them where they should be in the crowned person of the king and will act (in both senses now) as though they were actually there. He first tries to instill into the drooping John himself the lion-heartedness proper to royalty:

Be great in act, as you have been in thought.
Let not the world see fear and sad distrust
Govern the motion of a kingly eye.
Be stirring as the time; be fire with fire.
.....Away, and glister like the god of war
When he intendeth to become the field.
Show boldness and aspiring confidence.

(V.i.45-56)

When the best response John can muster is to turn “the ordering of this present time” (V.i.77) over to the Bastard himself, Richard attempts that Herculean task by acting and speaking for a John he now knows to be a fiction of his own making:

                                        Now hear our English king,
For thus his royalty doth speak in me.
.....                    Know the gallant monarch is in arms,
And like an eagle o'er his aery towers,
To souse annoyance that comes near his nest.

(V.ii.128-50)

And when these brave words meet defiance from Lewis and the rebel lords, the Bastard actually dismisses John (whose “heart is sick,” not lionish (V.iii.4)) from the field and carries on in his stead:

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

(V.iv.4-5)

In spite of spite—and in spite of the awareness Richard shares with us that the “right” he alone upholds has no firm foundation in reality. But there is another awareness we must have at some level about this situation. For all his gallant heroics, the Bastard cannot provide a Romance's conclusion for this true story. He cannot change history by repulsing the French and saving the kingdom for the majestic “John” he has determined to create. The presentation does not overtly prod our awareness of this impossibility, but of course a fictive victory of this sort would do so by jarring our sense of the truth, our understanding of what is and is not dramatically acceptable in the play's own historical terms. Instead, essential truth prevails as it must here. Heroics fail through no personal fault of the Bastard's when half his forces are “taken by the tide” and “devourèd” in the Lincoln Washes (V.vi.39-41). And his brave effort at creating a “truer” John ends when he speaks the cruel truth about impending defeat in that wretched king's dying ear (V.vii.59-64).

Appropriately, in the “vast confusion” that attends the play's final scenes, the truth Richard feels compelled to acknowledge here is false after all. More has taken place than he could know, and the wily Pandulph waits in the wings with a non-heroic compromise solution in hand. Shakespeare's play does not, however, offer a simple ironic contrast here between the failure of Romance and the effectiveness of Pandulph's “realistic” machiavellianism. Reality proves too difficult for even the latter to grasp securely. As the Bastard opts desperately for a “right” he must invent in the second half of the play, his place as acute observer of the actual state of affairs might seem to be usurped by Pandulph, so that they would divide the two meanings of truth between them. Surely Pandulph's claim to supremacy over his own brand of hard truth was advanced by his accurate analysis and prediction in the matter of Arthur's death. But just as the Bastard loses his way “among the thorns and dangers of this world” when he cannot find truth of either sort in John's England, so Pandulph's policy is confounded by realities beyond its ken or control. When Lewis foils the legate's overconfident attempt to “hush again this storm of war” (V.i.20), it could be argued that Pandulph fails his own creed rather than the reverse. His norms of political calculation should have foreseen that Lewis would refuse to obey any order to cease and desist, since the Dauphin now holds “the best cards for the game / To win this easy match played for a crown” (V.ii.105-106). In fact, however, neither Pandulph nor his rebellious protégé can see all the cards—can take into account, for example, the winds and tides amidst which ignorant armies clash by night in the play's final act. The course of realpolitik, placing its faith in hard facts and cold calculation, proves as faulty as the course of lion-hearted “right” with which the Bastard tries to surmount reality. Truth, however conceived, is no man's several here, and (in violation of the other half of Jonson's maxim) it lies open to none.⁹

So how are we to see the hopeful conclusion attached to this unpromising situation? With full understanding, I would say, of the “thorns and dangers” that any such hope must confront. The light of what we have seen cannot give much brightness to the prospect that young Prince Henry, who appears suddenly in the final scene, is going “to set a form upon that indigest” which his father has “left so shapeless and so rude” (I.vii.26-27). For one thing, this boy sounds all too much like the kind but ineffectual Arthur, whom we are not likely to have forgotten so conveniently as the repentant nobles apparently have:

I have a kind soul that would give you thanks,
And knows not how to do it but with tears.

(lines 108-109)

And for those in the audience who had recently watched the sad story of the Wars of the Roses on the same stage, this prince must have sounded all too much like that later Henry who also came to the throne too young and too weak. The barest historical knowledge would, in any case, immediately perceive the hopes pinned here on Henry III to be false.

The positive thrust of the conclusion, of course, is provided not so much by Henry as by the Bastard, and if we participate in Richard's final inspiring vision, the awareness with which we should do so has already been suggested. Several factors here at the end continue to weigh against any impulse to soar too complacently on the concluding image of England-the-Invincible. For one thing, the Bastard's own zeal for further heroics has been countered by Salisbury's sobering news that matters are being settled according “to the disposing of the cardinal,” Pandulph (line 92)—not much to cheer about there. Richard then pledges allegiance “with all submission” to young Prince Henry (line 103). He has been praised by some critics for magnanimously refraining from seizing the troubled throne himself, and surely that is to his credit. But just as surely this noble behavior's ignoble alternative is impossible for a character whose fictive status would then blatantly violate our basic understanding of the play's genre. Whatever reassurance we find in the Bastard's actions cannot stand on the ground of historical truth. Shakespeare's dramatic development of his fictive hero's role in these true events gives this further dimension to the play's perspective on the problems that cluster in the way of any actual union between the right and the true.¹⁰

When we come, then, to the final speech and its final assertion—“Nought shall make us rue / If England to itself do rest but true”—the qualification of the “if” must be compounded by the inherent difficulties that the play has exposed in the “true.”¹¹ We have seen a world in which the actual state of affairs has so confused the right that the latter can be upheld only as a patent fiction, its “rightness” recognizable by its very departure from unbearable and unmanageable reality. Moreover, that fictive better way is chosen in the play by a character who is himself a fiction, and whose lionhearted presence therefore instills a heroic but imaginary spirit into the otherwise bleak world of King John. By emphasizing the fictive nature of the one bright ray in this historical drama, I do not mean to make the play or its conclusion sound too darkly ironic. King John does not speak at the end with Pandulph's cynical and chilling voice—which has itself been over-matched by the truth it presumed to know and control—but with the Bastard's stirring appeal to an image of itself that the English audience is bound to approve. If that image rings true (or right), however, it must do so here as an embodied ideal to be emulated, and one that stands out in vital contrast with the true (or actual) course of English history as Shakespeare's play has made us understand it.

Notes

1. Falstaff is, of course, the other great fictive presence in the history plays, and as irreverant commentators on the true events they observe, the Bastard and Falstaff share some important traits. But if Falstaff often takes the center of Shakespeare's stage, he is never allowed a central place in England's affairs, as the Bastard is here. This crucial difference can be measured by trying to imagine Henry IV saying to Falstaff at Shrewsbury, as John says to the Bastard in V.i, “Have thou the ordering of this present time” (line 77). I should note that the source question is irrelevant to my argument here. My concern is with Shakespeare's use of this “imaginary” character, whether he invented the Bastard himself or refashioned him (as I suppose) from The Troublesome Raigne of King John. Citations are from Irving Ribner's edition of King John in The Complete Pelican Shakespeare, ed. Alfred Harbage (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1969).

2. My account of the Bastard may seem to ignore the several “flaws” in his character pointed out by those who would deny him the full title of Hero in John's play. The case against the Bastard is argued most strenuously by Julia C. Van de Water, “The Bastard in King John,” SQ [Shakespeare Quarterly] 11, 2(1960): 137-46. Ronald Stroud defends him with equal vigor in “The Bastard to the Time in King John,” CompD 6, 2 (1972): 154-66. Limited space precludes detailed argument here, but it is fair to say, I believe, that those who question the Bastard's character do so primarily through objective ethical scrutiny, whereas those who stress theatrical effect—such as Arthur C. Sprague, Shakespeare's Histories: Plays for the Stage (London: Society for Theatre Research, 1964), and Emrys Jones, The Origins of Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977)—note his “special relationship with the audience” in positive terms (Jones, p. 247). I side with the latter, without supposing that the Bastard has a considered ethics that is altogether adequate to the problems with which the play will confront him (and us). Two recent studies of theatrical perspective that differ in some important respects from mine are by Alexander Leggatt, “Dramatic Perspective in King John,” ESC [English Studies in Canada] 3 (1977): 1-17, and Larry S. Champion, Perspective in Shakespeare's English Histories (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1980).

3. The Bastard's heroic heritage from Cordelion is noted by John F. Danby, Shakespeare's Doctrine of Nature (London: Faber and Faber, 1949), p. 77; William H. Matchett, “Richard's Divided Heritage in King John,” EIC [Essays in Criticism] 12, 3 (1962): 231-53; Robert B. Pierce, Shakespeare's History Plays: the Family and the State (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1971), p. 139; and Jones, Origins, p. 247.

4. These lines prove to be an exclamation of disgust, not a prediction. The Bastard's one subsequent assertion that “gold and silver becks” him on suggests, in its context, his eagerness to “shake” revenue for John out of “the bags / Of hoarding abbots” (III.iii.6-13), and he continues to be the king's (or England's) loyal subject rather than commodity's.

5. Michael Manheim also notes this telling contrast between John's “terribly human” evil and Richard's more theatrical brand in The Weak King Dilemma in the Shakespearean History Play (Syracuse: Syracuse Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 133-35. Comments on the tough realism of human and political dilemmas in King John provide one consistent note in the varying critical views of the play, as does the sense that the play marks a turning point in this regard between the two tetralogies. Sigurd Burckhardt, “King John: the Ordering of this Present Time,” ELH 33, 2 (1966):133-53, and Eamon Grennan, “Shakespeare's Satirical History: a Reading of King John,” ShakS 11 (1978):21-37, see the play as a conscious attack on the assumptions supporting any simple moral or didactic presentation of history in Shakespeare's time.

6. When the dying Melun finally reveals Lewis's actual plan to the lords (and to us), he answers their suspicions by calling on both meanings of truth: “Why should I then be false, since it is true / That I must die here and live hence by truth?”(V.iv.28-29).

7. The nobles' motives have been rigorously questioned by James L. Calderwood, who finds the lords to be hypocritical creatures of Commodity: “Commodity and Honour in King John,” UTQ [University of Toronto Quarterly] 29 (April, 1960):341-56. I am not sure which view of them, Calderwood's or mine, darkens the prospects for truth in the world of this play more, but accepting his reading would not alter my essential thesis here.

8. Though I use the term “existential” here for want of a better one to describe the Bastard's conscious choice of a course for which he knows no ultimate sanction exists, I do not mean to make him more of a philosopher than he is. Other readers place lines of reasoning in the Bastard's head here to make him a conventional Tudor homilist (E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's History Plays (New York: Macmillan, 1946), pp. 225-26) or a political New Man (Manheim, The Weak King Dilemma, pp. 152-59). The Bastard does not explain his reasoning here, and I don't think he can—which is the point.

9. Discoveries, lines 139-41, in Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947), 8. Pandulph, of course, regains apparent control offstage after Lewis's unforeseen disaster, but our last dramatic view of both these political opportunists shows them in postures of frustration as their plans go awry.

10. I realize that the problem of the Bastard's fictive status—or rather of its effect on our awareness here—is a delicate one, but it cannot be solved by ignoring it as completely as some readers do when they credit the Bastard for declining the crown (see Ribner, Pelican Shakespeare, p. 601; Calderwood, “Commodity and Honour,” p. 356). William Matchett argues that our historical knowledge does not prevent Shakespeare from using dramatic structure to surprise us at the end with Prince Henry's sudden appearance as heir to the throne, and I can agree with him to that extent. But for Matchett, “the question is, will … [the Bastard], like John, usurp the throne” when the opportunity presents itself in Act V (“Divided Heritage,” pp. 251-53). Once that question is actually posed for us, consciousness of the Bastard's inability as a fictive character to do any such thing must follow, and must therefore modify our understanding of the exemplary behavior for which Matchett and others praise him. Surprisingly little attention has been paid to this issue in studies of the play. On the general question of the history play's fictive limits and possibilities, see Herbert Lindenberger, Historical Drama: the Relation of Literature and Reality (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1975).

11. Gunnar Boklund, whose thesis differs from mine in other respects, agrees that “the peroration with which the Bastard ends the play forms a somewhat questionable conclusion: it expresses a hope, which the deeds we have witnessed must make us view with some sobriety”: “The Troublesome Ending of King John,” SN [Studia Neophilogica: A Journal of Germanic and Romance Languages and Literature] 40, 1(1968):175-84.