SOURCE: Elliot, John R. “Shakespeare and the Double Image of King John.” Shakespeare Studies 1 (1965): 64-84.

[In the following essay, Elliot argues that Shakespeare's King John reveals the playwright's understanding of the Elizabethans ambiguous and complex interpretations of King John. Elliot shows that while the play's original audiences most likely would have sympathized with John as a nationalist and as a Protestant martyr, Shakespeare's John is also depicted as a usurper and potential murderer.]

I

The study of the sources of literary works is usually, and with good reason, confined to books which the author in question can be demonstrated to have known.¹ Unless we are fortunate enough to have a record of his library, the only direct knowledge we can have of an author's sources is through the palpable impression that they make upon his works: books that he ought to have known, ideas and opinions that he might have known, and dialogues that we wish he had known may furnish comparisons that help us to evaluate his work but cannot contribute to our understanding of either his intentions or his creative processes. There is one circumstance, however, in which the term “source” may usefully be applied to material not specifically to be found in the work itself, and this is when a work depends on the special knowledge of its readers or audience for its effect. If, for instance, a Fourth of July orator were to mount a platform in Philadelphia and proceed to deliver a eulogy on King George III, the effect of his speech upon his audience would not have been produced solely by the actual words that he had spoken. Here, as often, the irony depends on a discrepancy between what the audience expects and what it receives, and thus the audience's knowledge that George III was not an American patriot must certainly be considered an essential “source” of the speech's meaning, even in the unlikely case that the speaker himself was unaware of the fact. Furthermore, an historian of the year 2364 who was to read the speech without that knowledge would certainly be guilty of misreading the historical significance of what the speaker had said, if not the speaker's conscious intentions. When however, the historian had ascertained not only the difference between George III and George Washington but the fact that the orator himself must have known this difference, he would be entirely justified in concluding that the conscious intent behind the speech was ironic, if not subversive.

Such an exemplum helps to clarify the problem faced by the modern literary historian in interpreting the significance and intent of Shakespeare's English history plays. Shakespeare wrote for an audience at least as knowledgeable about the chief figures of English history as American audiences today are about George Washington. Consequently the knowledge which the audience brought with it to the theater must be considered as much a “source” of the plays' original significance—as large a factor in Shakespeare's calculations—as the material which he confronted in his specific historical and literary sources. In addition to asking how Shakespeare adapted this material, what he selected, what he omitted, and what he added, students of Shakespeare's “sources” ought also to ask to what extent the finished product corresponded or failed to correspond to the expectations of Shakespeare's audience. Indeed, the audience's prior familiarity with their subjects makes the English history plays a unique opportunity for modern scholars to reconstruct with some degree of accuracy what may have been Shakespeare's intentions and what his audience may have perceived these intentions to be.

In the Arden edition of King John, E. A. J. Honigmann remarks that “the reign of John was an open book to Shakespeare's first audience.”² The contents of this book, however, have been only partially indexed by cultural historians and Shakespearean scholars.³ In actuality there were two, quite distinct “books” of the reign of King John, existing side by side in Shakespeare's century, in one of which John was portrayed as a villainous failure, in the other as a national hero. The history of the contents of these two books and of Shakespeare's selection of material from them in King John helps to explain the significance of this much neglected play in the development of Shakespeare's political attitudes and provides some surprising new insights into Shakespeare's relationship to orthodox Tudor opinion.

II

In historical actuality, King John's career on the throne was a series of anti-climaxes, of partial victories and partial defeats.⁴ In character John seems to have been irascible enough to be impressive, clever enough to be admirable, and indecisive enough to be despicable. The chief issue of his reign as seen by historians prior to the seventeenth century was, of course, not Magna Carta but John's defiance of the Pope, the Interdict laid upon England, and the eventual surrender of the crown to the Papal legate, Pandulph. In the hands of the medieval chroniclers, many of whom, like Roger of Wendover, felt it their purpose to be the recording of anecdotes “for the imitation of succeeding times and admonition to the faithful,”⁵ John's reputation sank lower and lower in the three centuries following his death. The results of his defiance of the church were held up as a warning to future rulers of the fruits of impiety. Furthermore, he was accused of having usurped the throne from his nephew and chief rival, Arthur, and later of having murdered him, though the evidence is obscure on both points. Nevertheless, anecdote after anecdote piled up in the chronicles to illustrate John's personal and political vices. He is said to have reveled in cruel and unusual punishments such as slitting noses, plucking out eyes and teeth, and crushing bodies under lead weights. He extorted money, seized property, and raped the wives and daughters of his barons. He despised Christianity and even, according to Matthew Paris, concocted a scheme to make England subservient to the Moslem ruler of North Africa in return for the latter's protection against the Pope.

Given the didactic purposes of both medieval and Renaissance historians, however, it is hardly surprising that the sixteenth century, with its far-reaching political and religious changes, soon contrived for itself a very different interpretation of this monarch, and that it was this new and favorable image of John which came to dominate the mind of the average Englishman of Shakespeare's time.

The earliest attack on the Catholic chroniclers with specific regard to King John seems to have been made by William Tyndale in The Obedience of a Christian Man in 1528. “Consider the story of King John,” wrote Tyndale, “where I doubt not but they have put the best and fairest for themselves, and the worst of King John: for I suppose they make the chronicles themselves.”⁶ On at least one occasion (in 1533) Henry VIII compared his task to that of John,⁷ and his enemies did likewise: in 1535 a priest named John Hale was tried for treason for, among other things, praying that Henry's “death I beseech God may be like to the death of the most wicked John, sometime King of this realm, or rather to be called a great tyrant than a King”⁸—an obvious allusion to the legend that John was poisoned to death by a monk.

It is highly significant that these early favorable references should come from sources—Tyndale and Henry VIII—which inevitably gave to this new image of John an aura of official orthodoxy, both political and religious, for it was with this aura that the new image passed into popular and polemical Protestant literature. As early as 1529, for instance, a pamphlet by Simon Fish entitled A Sypplicacyon for the Beggars, addressed to the King, attacked the clergy on the grounds that they were about to do to Henry VIII as they had done “unto your nobill predecessour king John … suche a rightuous [sic] kinge.”⁹ This work was part of a politically-inspired pseudo-historical literature whose purpose was to show that the clergy, in violation of Christ's commandment, have “translated all rule, power, lordishippe, auctorite, obedience and dignite from your grace [i.e. Henry VIII] unto theim.”¹⁰ Other similar works, such as the anonymous Treatise proving by the King's Laws published in 1538, sought the legal roots of Henry's supremacy in the precedents set by his “most noble progenitors,” including King John.¹¹

Accordingly, chronicle accounts of John's conflict with the Pope were quickly revised in order to make them conform to the new official version. For example, Pynson's edition of Fabyan in 1516 had described John's “cruelnesse agayne holy churche,” and had lamented that even the Pope's interdict “myght not move the kyng frome his erroure.”¹² The 1533 edition, however, deleted the phrase “frome his erroure,” as did all subsequent editions. Another passage stating that John was “accursyd” for his “dysobedience to the churche,” together with some verses celebrating God's punishment of him, were unaccountably overlooked and left standing in 1533, but deleted in the edition of 1542.¹³

The new image of John as an heroic king and Protestant martyr soon made him one of the most popular of English historical figures. One testimony to this popularity is the fact that he became the hero of the first English history play, John Bale's King Johan, around 1536. Strictly speaking, of course, King Johan is not so much a history play as a political morality play, Bale having chosen a patriotic historical subject rather than a Biblical or homiletic one only because he did not want his work identified with “popetly playes,”¹⁴ i.e., religious moralities enforcing Romish doctrines. Indeed, to deviate from the new interpretation of John after Bale's work would have been tantamount to heresy, for Bale's tone suggests that his interpretation has become a part of Protestant dogma.

Bale attributes all the troubles of John's reign to foreign intervention—particularly by the Pope—in English affairs, comparing John to Moses withstanding the “Egyptyanes,” and Henry VIII to “Josue,” who “clerely brought us in to the lande of mylke and honye” (1100-1103). John had only righteous intentions, but they were undermined by the “usurped power” of the Pope and by the sedition of the Nobles:

Upon a good zele he attempted very farre
          For welthe of thys realme to provyde reformacyon
In the churche therof, but they ded hym debarre
          Of that good purpose … by excommunycacyon.

(1083-1089)

Of special interest to us is the fact that Bale repeats Tyndale's charge against the chroniclers. Nobility says to Clergy:

Yt is yowr fassyon soche kyngs to dyscommend
As yowr abuses reforme or reprehend.
You pristes are the cawse that chronycles doth defame
So many princes, and men of notable name,
For yow take upon yow to wryght them evermore;
And therfore Kyng Johan ys lyke to rewe yt sore,
Whan ye wryte his tyme, for vexyng of the Clargy.

(575-581)

In particular, Bale attacked Polydore Vergil, who, as we shall see, was primarily responsible for continuing the adverse medieval view of John into the sixteenth century. Polydore had already been attacked by the patriotic antiquary John Leland for his debunking of the Brut and Arthur legends,¹⁵ and now Bale took Polydore severely to task for his treatment of King John:

I assure ye, fryndes, lete men wryte what they wyll,
Kynge Johan was a man both valiaunt and godlye.
What though Polydorus reporteth hym very yll
At the suggestyons of the malicyouse clergye,
Thynke yow a Romane with the Romanes can not lye?
Yes; therefore, Leylande, out of thy slumbre awake,
And wytnesse a trewthe for thyne owne contrayes sake.(16)

(2145-2151)

Here we see clearly the religious and patriotic associations with which the image of King John was imbued in the sixteenth century. Bale's close friend, John Foxe, incorporated Bale's views of John's reign in his enormously popular Book of Martyrs (1563), and explained that John “was far from deserving that, for the which he hath been so ill reported of divers writers, who, being led more with affection to popery, than with true judgment and due consideration, depraved his doings more than the sincere truth of the history will bear.”¹⁷ Similarly, Richard Grafton, who copied many passages verbatim from Foxe, sought in his Chronicle at Large (1569) to rehabilitate John's reputation by simply omitting, as Bale had done, any references to John's usurpation of the throne or to his murder of Arthur. Like Foxe, Grafton justified this rewriting of history with the claim that he was only delivering “our Countrie men and the subjects, but specially the princes therof, … from slaunderous reportes of foreyne writers.”¹⁸

Bale and his followers, then, “corrected” history by bringing the light of the Reformation to illuminate what they considered to be the real issue of John's reign, and their influence helped to set the pattern for the popular conception of John throughout the century. As a result of Bale's work, and of that of Grafton and Foxe, John became firmly identified with a set of religious-political doctrines that were at the heart of official Tudor policy: hatred of the Pope, obedience to the King, resistance to foreign intervention, and intolerance of all forms of civil dissension. Indeed, John became the standard symbol for English Protestant writers of the patriot-martyr.

For example, the reign of King John was one of the principal exempla employed by the “Homily against disobedience and wylfull rebellion,” which was assigned to be read in all English churches after the northern rebellion of 1569, and which, as Alfred Hart has shown, was almost certainly known to Shakespeare.¹⁹ In order to prove his lesson that “rebellion is both the first and greatest, and the very roote of all other sinnes,”²⁰ the homilist cites the example of the revolt of the barons against King John. The barons were duped by the Pope because of their ignorance of “their dutie to their prince, the Byshop of Rome having no right.” In consequence, they alone were responsible for the lamentable events that followed: the expulsion of the king “out of the greatest part of Englande,” the surrender of the crown to a “false forraigne usurper,” the invasion of the Dauphin, who “kept the possessioun a great whyle,” and the ensuing “tyrannie, raveny, and spoyle of the most greedie Romish wolves,” together with the worship of “the babylonicall beast of Rome.”²¹ In all this, John is the innocent and heroic victim: there is no mention of his usurpation and murder of Arthur, of his oppression of his subjects, or of his later abject alliance with Rome against his own nobles.

One further example will serve to indicate how ingrained the image of John as a national hero had become in the Elizabethan historical consciousness. In 1599 the legal historian Richard Crompton published a treatise entitled The Mansion of Magnanimitie, wherein is shewed the most high and honorable acts of sundrie English Kings. The subject of the work was the praise of soldiers who had protected their country against foreign enemies, and it was dedicated to the Earl of Essex so that he might “thereby be encouraged to followe their steppes.”²² Crompton devotes parts of two chapters to King John, one on the evils of rebellion, the other on the treachery of nobles, and for his details closely follows the “Homily against disobedience,” even occasionally copying the phrasing of the latter work, though omitting its anti-Catholic bias. As we might expect, Crompton ignores John's political weaknesses and the barons' grievances, and finds in their revolt against their king only the familiar Tudor moral that civil war opens the gates of the country to foreign invaders, in this case the French, who “greatly indomaged the said king, and got the possession of diverse castels, townes, and other places, and so became strong within this realme” (sig.F4^v). When the Dauphin in turn plots to betray the barons after they have helped him to invade England, Crompton comments that this is a fitting reward for those who would rebel against their “high and honorable” sovereign.

Although Geoffrey Bullough has noted that “the reputation of King John had undergone some changes before the fifteen-nineties,”²³ the full extent to which John had become associated in the popular mind with orthodox Tudor political doctrines has not generally been recognized. The Mansion of Magnanimitie is only one of at least a score of didactic patriotic works of the 1580's and 1590's which display the heroic Tudor image of King John.²⁴ Nor is it true, as M. M. Reese has claimed, that “in official circles the beatification of John proceeded no farther than the express condemnation in the Homilies of the subjects who had revolted from him.”²⁵ As we have seen, the reinterpretation of John's reign had begun with Henry VIII himself and his earliest supporters, and in Shakespeare's time the rehabilitation of John's image was still being continued by such representatives of the Tudor establishment as Crompton.²⁶

III

In spite of the rehabilitating efforts of the Tudors, however, the image of King John that we find in Shakespeare's play is much closer to the older, medieval interpretation of that monarch, a tradition kept alive in Shakespeare's age by a small number of professional chroniclers who were less skeptical of the veracity of the medieval chroniclers than Bale and Tyndale had been. Ironically enough, the chief responsibility for perpetuating the medieval view of John into the sixteenth century belongs to the very man to whom Henry VIII had entrusted the historical justification of the Tudor accession—Polydore Vergil.

Polydore Vergil's Anglica Historia was written before the break with Rome, though it was published in the same year as the Acts of Succession and Supremacy, 1534. Polydore was well aware of the controversial nature of much of his material for the Historia, and he made several changes in his manuscript for political and religious reasons between the completion of a first draft around 1515 and the first printed edition.²⁷ Nevertheless, the hostile view which he had gathered from the monastic chroniclers of the reign of King John not only passed intact into his work but was even intensified there.²⁸ John's right to the throne, for instance, had seldom been seriously questioned, even by his enemies. Tradition held that Richard on his death-bed had declared John his heir, forgiving him for his past disloyalty and rescinding an earlier bequest of the throne to Arthur. Polydore, however, makes it clear from the start that he regards John as an unqualified usurper. John “snatched” the throne and barred the rightful owner, Arthur, from it (“Ioannes Ricardi frater … regnum arripit: excluso Arthuro cui regnum debebatur”).²⁹ According to Polydore, Arthur possessed the throne not only by lineal descent but by virtue of Richard's will (“Ricardi nepotem quem ille testamento haeredem fecerat”).³⁰ Though recounting all the other details of the second will made by Richard on his death-bed, Polydore omits entirely the bequest of the throne to John. Consequently, at John's coronation, Polydore writes, quite unhistorically, that many of the “right-minded” English nobles (“qui recte sapiebant”) were amazed that John should defraud Arthur, whom they considered an excellent young man (“optimum adolescentem”), of his grandfather's kingdom against the law of men and nature (“contra jus fasque” [p. 343]).

The rest of Polydore's account follows the familiar medieval pattern. John is indolent, cowardly, avaricious, and cruel, and he oppressed his people mercilessly. Concerning the means of Arthur's death, Polydore admits that his “sources differ,” but feels that the most reliable rumor is that he was put to death by John (“magis constans fama est, a Ioanne morte affectum” [p. 347]). Concerning the religious conflict, Polydore, an Italian Catholic, sides unequivocally with the Pope. He even introduces some new anecdotes to illustrate the “vices and tyranny of the man” (“hominis vitia ac tyrannidem” [p. 355]), as a result of which the Pope's council voted unanimously to deprive John of his kingdom as a man “who held religion in contempt, who scorned the papal warnings, nay even those of Christ, which were conducive to his safety and that of his people” (“qui ita religionem contemptui haberet, qui monita pontificia, imo Christi, quae ipsius populique conducerent saluti” [p. 355]).

Polydore was not writing religious propaganda, however, and John's submission to the Pope does not, as one might have expected, change Polydore's attitude towards him. John takes advantage of the Pope's support to exploit his subjects at home, and Polydore writes sympathetically of the barons' grievances, attributing to them the most patriotic of sentiments. It is only after John has granted their demands and again fails to keep his promises that the barons appeal to France for help “against an unjust tyrant who made a mockery of his princes and of his citizens” (“adversus iniquum tyrannum, qui ita suos principes, suos cives ludificatus esset” [p. 366]).

In short, Polydore Vergil treats John from the point of view of a continental Catholic who frequently shows traces of his affection for his adopted land. He sympathizes with Arthur's claim to the throne supported by France and the Pope, but he can also understand the English barons' exasperation at learning that John's tyranny over them is supported by Rome. In politics, Polydore displays a traditional view of the reciprocal duties and rights of the feudal system, including the right of the nobility or magistrates to curb abuses of power by the king—this in spite of the fact that his work is dedicated to Henry VIII, “Potentissime Rex” (p.[6]).

The fact that Polydore based his criticism of King John not totally, or even mainly, on sectarian religious grounds made it possible for his characterization of this monarch to interest Protestant writers like Stowe and Holinshed (though we should perhaps note that Stowe was occasionally suspected of being “insufficiently Protestant”³¹). In Stowe's Annals (1582), for instance, we again find the charge, invented by Polydore, that John usurped the throne. Stowe makes it clear that in his opinion “the succession of inheritance belonged not to John,” but that “John … after the death of his brother Richard, took on him the kingdom disinheriting his nephews Arthur and Elianor the true heirs.”³² This is of some importance, since the issue of John's usurpation is a major one in Shakespeare, though it does not appear in any other Elizabethan treatment of King John.³³

The most important stage in the transmission of the adverse medieval view of John from Polydore Vergil to the later Elizabethans, however, was Holinshed's Chronicle, where the older estimate is to be found strangely mixed together with the more popular image. M. M. Reese has recently asserted that “Holinshed, who was usually content to accept whatever he read in the medieval chronicles, rejected their version of a king who, in his view, ‘had a princely heart in him and wanted but faithful subjects.’”³⁴ Holinshed does indeed show numerous traces of the nationalistic and Protestant fervor which shaped the popular interpretation of John's reign, but he also tempers his account and the morals to be drawn from it with a full knowledge of the older chroniclers, especially Polydore Vergil (there are more marginal citations of Polydore in Holinshed's account than to any other historian, with the exception of Matthew Paris). Although Holinshed occasionally suspects that much of his information about John consists of the “Coniectures of such writers as were evill affected towards the kings cause,”³⁵ he decides not to make over the reign of King John in the Tudor image but to “content our selves with this unfreendlie description of his time” (339).

The result is a more carefully qualified statement of familiar Tudor political lessons than is to be found in popular and homiletic literature. Like Bale and his followers, Holinshed points out the dangers of foreign, especially Papal, intervention into England's affairs. Philip is an ambitious “fraudulent league-breaker” and Arthur is “wilfull” and “presumptuous” in demanding John's kingdom (284). Holinshed even shares Foxe's delight in punning on the Pope's name, calling him “Nocent” instead of “Innocent” (316).³⁶ Unlike Polydore, Holinshed does not suppress Roger of Hovenden's account of Richard's death-bed will making John his heir. Thus for Holinshed John is a lawful king, and so he paints the familiar picture of the evils of “domesticall or homebred broils, the fruits of variance,” and laments John's lack of “faithfull subiects” (337-339). Holinshed shows the barons as being “negligent and slothfull in aiding him,” and he reports approvingly the sermon of a divine who preached “a doctrine most necessarie in that dangerous time [that] the people were by Godes lawes bound in dutie to obeie their lawfull prince, and not through any wicked persuasion of busie heads and lewd discoursers, to be carried away to forget their loiall allegiance, and so to fall into the damnable sinke of rebellion” (300).

Nevertheless, Holinshed does not hesitate to follow Polydore in placing much of the blame for John's catastrophes on the character and conduct of the King himself. John's treatment of Arthur was a deed of “heat and furie … reprochful to a prince” (286). John made “warre with his subjects pursses at home, emptieng them by taxes and tallages, to fill his coffers, which alienated the minds of a great number of them from his love and obedience” (279-280). Though Holinshed gives a tinge of heroism to John's defiance of the Pope, he feels that John's initial oppression of the clergy was a rash and unnecessary act “which he might have prevented and withstood, if he had beene so qualified with discretion as to have seene what was convenient and what inconvenient for his roiall estate” (289). Similarly, despite the fact that he has entitled one section of his work “The sawcie speech of proud Pandulph the popes lewd legat” (306), Holinshed also repeats Matthew Paris's judgment that John's loss of his baggage train in the Wash was a “punishment appointed by God, that the spoile which had beene gotten and taken out of churches, abbeies, and other religious houses, should perish, and be lost” (335).

According to Holinshed, then, the story of John's reign is the story of the wrong man at the wrong time. John would not have made a good king under the best of circumstances: he was a man who “wanted discretion …, as one not able to bridle his affections … and thereby missed now and then to compasse that which otherwise he might verie well have brought to passe” (339). But his natural shortcomings were also aggravated by circumstances beyond his control: the “manie molestations, anguishes & vexations [which he] procured against himselfe” might have been “withstood if fortune had beene favourable” (337). Holinshed's summary statement takes both of these factors into account:

All which presupposed plagues concurring, what happinesse could the king arrogate to himselfe by his imperiall title, which was through his owne default so imbezelled, that a small remanent became his in right, when by open hostilitie and accursed papasie the greater portion was pluckt out of his hands.

(337)

Thus in Holinshed material was found from both the old and new interpretations of King John by the two playwrights who were to dramatize his reign—Shakespeare and the anonymous author of The Troublesome Reign of King John. In all likelihood Shakespeare based his play on the dramatic model provided by The Troublesome Reign. The order of incidents in the two plays is strikingly similar, though verbal correspondences are few. E. A. J. Honigmann has argued, I think unconvincingly, that an early version of King John preceded The Troublesome Reign, and that the latter is a corrupt, probably pirated version of Shakespeare's work. It is not necessary, however, to posit the chronological priority of King John in order to argue the artistic independence of Shakespeare's work: in following the older play as a dramatic model, Shakespeare thoroughly changed its emphases in a way that reveals a sensitivity to and knowledge of the ambiguities and complexities of sixteenth-century interpretations of King John. The significance of Shakespeare's selection from this material can best be seen through a fresh comparison of these two plays.

IV

Shakespeare wastes no time in informing his audience that the play before them will not dramatize the familiar image of King John that they have learned from the “Homily against disobedience” and its polemical progeny. His John is first presented to us as a usurper who has schemed to supplant the legitimate owner of the throne and must now maintain his position against King Philip of France, who has championed Arthur's cause. In charging John with usurpation and in considering John's claim to the throne as the first of the “issues” of his reign, Shakespeare is deliberately following the older, less popular tradition of Polydore Vergil and Stowe, as we have seen. Furthermore, Shakespeare's interest in John's usurpation goes considerably beyond even that of his predecessors. In Polydore the subject had merited only a couple of pages, in Stowe a mere two or three sentences. In King John, however, John's illegality is the central dramatic problem of the first act and of much of the second, and is kept before the audience throughout the play.

King John opens with a challenge to John's legitimacy and authority. Chatillon, the French ambassador, brings an insulting greeting to “the majesty, the borrow'd majesty, of England” (I.i.4).³⁷ Such a slur is, of course, to be expected from John's foreign rival, but John tacitly admits the truth of the charge by refusing to defend himself. When Eleanor retorts to Chatillon that it is “a strange beginning: ‘borrow'd majesty!’,” John cuts her off with the words, “Silence, good mother, hear the embassy” (I.i.5-6). Similarly, when Chatillon proceeds to claim all of John's lands for Arthur, John advances no counter-claim whatever, but merely inquires “what follows if we disallow of this?” (I.i.16). Finally, when in private conversation John attempts to encourage his mother by citing his “strong possession and our right,” Eleanor reminds him to trust “your strong possession much more than your right, / Or else it must go wrong with you and me” (I.i.39-41).

In stressing John's illegitimacy in this opening scene, Shakespeare diverges widely from The Troublesome Reign. That play opens not with Chatillon's challenge but with a speech by Eleanor conferring the crown upon John in rightful succession to his brother, Richard, followed by a noble speech of acceptance by John—“a warlike Christian and your Countryman,”³⁸ as the Prologue had called him. When Chatillon does present his demands, instead of remaining cynically silent, John is incredulous that a King should be requested to give up his rightful possessions. In TR, even the French refrain from accusing John of usurpation and they implausibly pay him the tribute that “sooner would he scorne Europaes power, / Than loose the smallest title he enjoyes, / For questionless he is an Englishman” (I.ii.449-451). Correspondingly, Philip offers no justification of Arthur's “right,” and his tone implies pure opportunism: “Now gin we broach the title of thy claime Yong Arthur in the Albion Territories” (I.ii.422-423).

Shakespeare, however, never lets the fact that John is an Englishman obscure his illegality. In his first speech to Arthur, Philip refers bluntly to “the usurpation of thy unnatural uncle, English John” (II.i.9-10), and later in the same scene he eloquently defends Arthur's right to the throne according to both natural and divine law:

That Geoffrey was thy elder brother born,
And this his son; England was Geoffrey's right,
And this is Geoffrey's; in the name of God
How comes it then that thou art call'd a king,
When living blood doth in these temples beat,
Which owe the crown that thou o'ermasterest?

(II.i.104-109)

Similarly, Shakespeare dramatizes a dispute over King Richard's will, which according to Holinshed disinherited Arthur and named John as heir. In TR, which also includes such a dispute, Queen Eleanor has the last word in the debate, claiming “justice” on her side, but in Shakespeare it is Constance, Arthur's mother, who ends the argument by belittling the document, calling it a “wicked will … a canker'd grandam's will!” (TR,I.ii.545;John II.i.193-194).

Thus Act I and the first half of Act II in Shakespeare's play have as their main subject the illegality of John's rule. The rest of this portion of the play is taken up by the “subplot” involving the Bastard, Faulconbridge, and this subplot, as is usual in Shakespeare's plays, reinforces the theme of the main plot.

Like King John, the Bastard has no legal status. The physical fact of his parentage, all too apparent in his face, and the will of Lord Faulconbridge assigning his lands to his younger son, Robert, both prove Philip's illegitimacy. (There is no mention of this will in TR.) Questions of legality are, however, of no more interest to the Bastard than they are to King John. In TR the Bastard is quick to oppose his brother's challenge to his legitimacy because he considers it a “shamefull slaunder of my parents” and a “dishonor of myself” (I.i.89-90), but Shakespeare's Bastard is almost indifferent to the matter. Whether he is “as true begot” as his brother he does not care, but “that I am as well begot, my liege … compare our faces and judge yourself” (I.i.75-79). He is, then, interested only in his natural endowments, not in social distinctions, and even after he has shown himself to be pleased at discovering his royal blood he repeats the sentiment that “I am I, howe'er I was begot” (I.i.175). Thus, whereas the TR Bastard stays behind at the end of the scene to force his mother to “resolve me of my sire” and to cure his “grose attaint” (I.i.334,329), Shakespeare's Bastard remains to assure his mother that, whoever he may have been, “with all my heart I thank thee for my father!” (I.i.270).

Furthermore, just as King John had relied on his “strong possession much more than [his] right,” so the Bastard finds himself unhindered by his lack of legal status. Applying the same standard that he had applied to himself, John decides (I.i.120-129) that the Bastard has a de facto claim upon the Faulconbridge lands, regardless of his origins (Tillyard unaccountably calls this the administration of “excellent justice to the brothers Faulconbridge”³⁹). Even so, the Bastard prefers to rely on his own innate merits and accepts Eleanor's offer to be the “reputed” son of Richard, “Lord of thy presence and no land beside” (I.i.137)—a phrase repeated by John when he demands that the citizens of Angiers recognize the true King of England

In us, that are our own great deputy,
And bear possession of our person here,
Lord of our presence, Angiers, and of you.

(II.i.365-367)

King John then, fairly revels in the illegitimate and the unconventional, and most of what Shakespeare has invented in the first two Acts serves to reinforce this theme. The Bastard satirizes “worshipful society,” of which he is now a member, for being “too respective and too sociable” (I.i.184-216), too irrationally hierarchical and obsequious, and he vows to practice its pretensions only to “strew the footsteps of my rising.” In parallel fashion, John too is aloof to traditional, proper society, a fact which Shakespeare emphasizes through the imagery describing the lawlessness and impetuosity of his followers to France:

With them a bastard of the king's deceas'd,
And all th'unsettled humours of the land;
Rash, inconsiderate, fiery voluntaries,
With ladies' faces and fierce dragons' spleens,
Have sold their fortunes at their native homes,
Bearing their birthrights proudly on their backs,
To make a hazard of new fortunes here.

(II.i.65-71)

(Here Shakespeare is expanding on a single phrase in TR, describing the Bastard as being “a hardy wilde head, tough and venturous;” the rest of John's followers are called by TR simply “many other men of high resolve” [I.ii.491-492].)

We can, therefore, hardly agree with Tillyard that in King John Shakespeare became “weary of the theme of the succession of the crown.”⁴⁰ One suspects that Tillyard's interpretation is based on the fact that John is not made to pay the consequences for his “rape upon the maiden virtue of the crown” (II.i.97-98)—in other words, that Shakespeare does not seem to be repeating the lesson of the Henry VI plays and Richard III. Instead, he seems now to be dramatizing the fact that, as the Bastard jocularly comments to his mother, “some sins do bear their privilege on earth” (I.i.261)—a remark which, recognizing the elaborate parallel drawn between the two characters, the audience could not help but apply to John's sins as well.

Indeed, the emphasis on John's illegality is not for the purpose of condemning him as king, any more than the parallel plot concerning the Bastard is intended to condemn illegitimacy. In Polydore Vergil and Stowe, of course, this had been true. Shakespeare, however, though refusing to mitigate the shadiness of John's behavior, capitalizes as well on the patriotic image of John created by the Tudors in order to encourage the audience to sympathize with his hero. One consequence of this peculiar blending of the two traditions is the fact that none of John's political difficulties results from his usurpation of the throne. Rather, it is the selfish designs of those who claim legitimate ends that threaten John's success. Furthermore, we may note that the Bastard's sarcastic remarks on the “mad world” and its “mad kings” (II.i.561)—which are often taken as criticisms of political immorality—are never directed against John's usurpation. Rather, they begin only after Hubert has suggested the politic marriage between Blanche and Lewis. J. Dover Wilson has found the Bastard's resentment at Lewis's wooing of Blanche unintelligible without reference to TR, where it is explained by the fact that the Bastard has been wooing Blanche for himself.⁴¹ Wilson, however, fails to consider the Bastard's role in Shakespeare's scene, which is that of a detached observer of political “commodity.” A personal interest in one of the issues would obscure this function, and this is the reason why Shakespeare omits jealousy as a motive. In TR the Bastard had indeed objected to the truce only because it took Blanche away from him, and his tone was angry:

If Lewes get her, well, I say no more:
But let the frolicke Frenchman take no scorne,
If Philip front him with an English horne.

(I.v.797-799)

Shakespeare's Bastard, however, is a realistically-minded satirist impatient with pretension, and it is altogether in character for him to criticize Hubert's speech not simply for suggesting Blanche's betrothal but for its obvious insincerity and pretentiousness:

Zounds! I was never so bethump'd with words
Since I first call'd my brother's father dad.

(II.i.466-467)

It is precisely this hypocrisy that both John and the Bastard are refreshingly free of, but which consistently characterizes those who base their claims not on ability but on legality.

Thus in King John the theme of usurpation leads Shakespeare not into the type of political morality play that he had created in Richard III but into an analytical study of political pragmatism and of the realities of the political world. The speeches of John and Philip before Angiers (II.i.206-266), for example, present a contrast between practical expediency and hypocritical righteousness. John offers the citizens protection against the “iron indignation” and “merciless proceeding” of invasion, and cites the accomplishment of his “painfull” and “expedient march” in saving the city from the French. That is, he concentrates on the here and now, on the inevitable and necessary facts of the present situation. Philip, on the other hand, offers an unctuous, inflated plea for the “downtrodden equity” of Arthur, whose protection he has “most divinely vow'd”—a vow, however, that he is soon to break for his own personal advantage. Philip's speech reveals him to be a man much like Machiavelli's description of Alexander VI, as it was translated by an anonymous Elizabethan:

There was never anie man woulde affirme a thinge with more substantiall reasons, or sweare it with more solempne religion, or perfoorme it with soe sleight regarde, yet did he reape commoditie with his crafte.⁴²

It is even possible that the Bastard's later humorous diatribe against “Commodity” echoes this passage, though the echo is probably coincidental.⁴³ What is clear, however, is that Shakespeare is developing an interest in the same political phenomena that the real Machiavelli treated, as opposed to the Elizabethan stage-Machiavellism that had infused Richard III. Philip is not a malignant spirit masquerading as beneficent and delighting in the destruction of others, he is merely shrewd, self-seeking, and unprincipled. Thus, just as Machiavelli goes on in the same passage to note that a Prince “should seeme with greate reverence to extoll and imbrase Pittie, Fayth Honestie Courtesie & Religion, and speciallie the laste,” so Shakespeare's Philip is careful to interlace his address with pious words and phrases—“divinely,” “religiously,” “zeal,” “clouds of heaven”—and to deal liberally in “Amens.”

In fact, piety in King John is almost always tainted by hypocrisy. Honigmann has noted the frequent use of the word “zeal” in the play, which connoted to Elizabethans the hypocritical religious fervor of the Puritans, and he points out “the hypocrisy of France, beneath whose hot zeal cold calculation presides.”⁴⁴ Furthermore, in King John it is always the enemy who resort to the pious clichés which in Richard III had been the sole property of the saint-like Richmond. Austria, that contemptible coward who is insulted off the stage by the Bastard, almost paraphrases Richmond's battle oration when he announces before Angiers that

The peace of heaven is theirs that lift their swords
In such a just and charitable war.

(II.i.35-36)

The very vagueness of the sentiment is proof of its inapplicability to the present situation. John has already pointed out that it is Austria and France who have “beat His peace to heaven” (II.i.88) and that their “charity,” as King Philip later admits, is undertaken only for their “own vantage” (II.i.550).

It is not surprising, then, that the exhortations of Philip and Austria, eloquent as they are, have little effect on the pragmatic Hubert, representing the citizens of Angiers, who decides that “he that proves the king, / To him will we prove loyal” (II.i.270-271). By “prove” Hubert means a physical, not a legal, test, as is shown by his subsequent comment on the strength of the armies:

Both are alike, and both alike we like.
One must prove greatest: while they weigh so even,
We hold our town for neither, yet for both.

(II.i.331-333)

As the scene continues, Shakespeare makes even more explicit the conflict between abstract legal fictions and pragmatic political reality. The two kings again present their claims: Philip that he represents the true king, Arthur, who has the “right;” John that he needs no “deputy” since he stands in physical possession of the crown and bears “possession of our person here.” To this Hubert replies:

A greater power than we denies all this;
And till it be undoubted, we do lock
Our former scruple in our strong-barr'd gates:
Kings of our fear, until our fears, resolv'd
Be by some certain king purg'd and depos'd.

(II.i.368-372)

The Folio assigns this entire speech to Philip, and though modern editors are undoubtedly correct in giving the last four lines to Hubert, the Folio is possibly correct in giving the first line to Philip.⁴⁵ The word “we” is capitalized in the Folio, possibly indicating the “royal ‘we’,” just as the word “us” had been capitalized in John's preceding speech. With this emendation, Hubert's reply is a characteristically prudent, and humorous, one to Philip's typically pompous boast of divine protection. If, on the other hand, we follow the usual modern reading, we have Hubert himself piously referring the quarrel to God and then ironically awaiting concrete proof of superior power.

The world of King John, then, is not the black and white one of Richard III. The difference in the relationship between abstract right and actual merit in the two plays is further illustrated by a device carried over from Richard III but used for different effect in King John—the female lamentation. Constance, like Queen Elizabeth in the earlier play, pitifully bewails the fate of her innocent son, identifies him with divine favor, and calls for revenge on his enemies:

His grandam's wrongs, and not his mother's shames,
Draws those heaven-moving pearls from his poor eyes,
Which heaven shall take in nature of a fee;
Ay, with these crystal beads heaven shall be brib'd
To do him justice and revenge on you.

(II.i.168-172)

The unctuous banality of these and other lines by Constance, however, is totally unlike the grim, ritualistic curses of Richard III, nor is it to be found in TR. Though perhaps wishing to remind us of the similarity between Arthur and the murdered princes, Shakespeare makes Constance a self-pitying, possessive, hysterical “bedlam” (II.i.183), who takes a masochistic pride in the magnitude of her grief, thus betraying her selfish motive in championing the claim of her son:

I will instruct my sorrows to be proud,
For grief is proud an't makes his owner stoop.
To me and to the state of my great grief
Let kings assemble; for my grief's so great
That no supporter but the huge firm earth
Can hold it up: here I and sorrows sit;
Here is my throne, bid kings come bow to it.

Irving Ribner has written that “the lamentations of Constance … are Shakespeare's dramatic means of swaying the sympathies of his audience away from King John in the third act, and when this has been accomplished Constance drops out of the play.”⁴⁶ This, however, is the act in which John reaches his greatest heights—his defiance of Pandulph and his scattering of “a whole armado of convicted sail” (III.iv.2)—and so Constance's laments can hardly be expected to have the effect of smearing John's character in the opinion of the audience. Furthermore, her last series of lamentations, in III.iv, are directed not against John but against Philip's “shame” (“Lo, now! Now see the issue of your peace!” [III.iv.21]) and against Pandulph's hypocritical reassurances (“Thou art not holy to belie me so” [III.iv.44]). In this way Shakespeare shifts any scorn felt by the audience from John to Philip and Pandulph.

Constance's proud lamentations, then, hardly have the same effect of raising political issues to moral ones that Queen Elizabeth's did in Richard III. Rather, they look forward to Richard II's melodramatic self-pity (“You may my glories and my state depose, / But not my griefs; still am I king of those” [IV.i.192-193]), both being equally excessive and ineffectual in a world dominated by political realism. As Philip exasperately comments, “You are as fond of grief as of your child” (III.iii.92). We may note, furthermore, that although in public Constance calls to heaven for aid, in private she acknowledges that Arthur is the victim not of evil but merely of fortune.

Nature and Fortune join'd to make thee great:
Of Nature's gifts thou mayst with lilies boast
And with the half-blown rose. But Fortune, O,
She is corrupted, chang'd and won from thee;
Sh' adulterates hourly with thine uncle John.

(II.ii.52-56)

Indeed, Constance has betrayed a mistrust of heavenly justice all along, as when she declared that “with these crystal beads heaven shall be bribed / To do him justice and revenge.” She realizes that although evil is subject to punishment by the hand of God, fortune is unpredictable, amoral, and “treads down fair respect of sovereignty” (II.ii.58) as often as it holds it up.

Thus when we come soon afterwards to the scene in which John reluctantly requests Hubert to remove Arthur—that “very serpent in my way” (III.ii.71)—we are prepared to sympathize with John's own struggle with misfortune, however reprehensible the act is by moral standards. Having regarded John throughout the play as acting in the best interests of England, and by the only standards possible in a world so beset with “thorns and dangers” (the phrase is the Bastard's), we are virtually forced by Shakespeare to recognize the political necessity of the act:

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

(III.iii.131-140)

This accurate, though characteristically cynical, analysis of the situation is by Pandulph; it is entirely lacking in TR and is a measure of the political complexity which Shakespeare has added to the story by his manipulation of the rival traditions. Thus, while the “murder” of Arthur—had it occurred—would have been a private sin upon John's head, which “must be answer'd, either here or hence” (IV.ii.89), it is only the adverse political effect of Arthur's death which leads to the revolt of the barons. Pembroke had asked for Arthur's freedom, not out of mercy but out of policy:

That the time's enemies may not have this
To grace occasions, let it be our suit
That you have bid us ask his liberty;
Which for our goods we do no further ask
Than whereupon our weal, on you depending,
Counts it your weal he have his liberty.

(IV.ii.61-66)

Likewise, the decision of the nobles to desert John after they are informed of Arthur's death is based on their realization that “This will break out / To all our sorrows, and ere long, I doubt” (IV.ii.101-102).

Shakespeare, then, has taken advantage of the Tudor image of King John to influence his audience to sympathize with a hero who is both a usurper and a potential murderer—both of which are aspects of John's character that Shakespeare has retained from the medieval tradition. His purpose in so doing seems to be to emphasize the tragic ambiguity of John's situation. Either alternative spells doom for John. As long as Arthur lives, John cannot enjoy “one quiet breath of rest,” and so “Arthur needs must fall” (III.iii.134,139). At the same time, Arthur's death can provide only “Bloody safety and untrue” (III.iii.148). The inevitable fatality of this impasse is only emphasized the more by the cruel irony that John is in fact not responsible for Arthur's death. In fact, John's personal responsibility is of only minimal importance in influencing either Arthur's death or the reactions to it. The Bastard decides to return to John before he can be certain that John was innocent of the deed (indeed, he never finds out for sure) and despite the fact that he realizes that in Arthur “the life, the right and truth of all this realm / Is fled to heaven” (IV.iii.144-145). Likewise, the barons continue their flight to the Dauphin even though they have been assured by Hubert that “'Tis not an hour since I left him [Arthur] well” (IV.iii.104). In jumping to the conclusion that John must have murdered Arthur, the barons are vainly attempting to place a simple moral interpretation on a complicated political conflict.

Having made sure that his audience will neither praise nor blame John for superficial reasons, however, Shakespeare can now continue to use the hostile medieval tradition to show John's faults as a king, basing his criticism on the same pragmatic standards by which he has established John's worthiness. For instance, John lacks the essential accomplishment of a king, the subordination of his passions to calm, deliberative reason. He is consistently characterized, even in his triumphs, as being motivated by fiery, rash emotions:

France, I am burn'd up with inflaming wrath;
A rage whose heat hath this condition,
That nothing can allay, nothing but blood,
The blood, and dearest-valued blood, of France.

(III.i.266-269)

Shakespeare thus follows Holinshed in criticizing John's “want of discretion,” as when Eleanor tells John that Constance's opposition “might have been prevented and made whole, / With very easy arguments of love” (I.i.35-36). It will be noted that Eleanor's emphasis is not on the Christian doctrine of charity per se, but on its practical results, though fortunately the two coincide in this case, as indeed Shakespeare is to discover that they frequently do. Henry V is a wiser king than John because he knows that “when lenity and cruelty play for a kingdom, the gentler gamester is the soonest winner” (H5,III.vi.118-120).

In King John, then, Shakespeare has drawn material from the two conflicting Elizabethan images of his subject in such a way as to produce a fresh and thought-provoking treatment of a familiar subject. To an audience prepared to sympathize with John as an early nationalistic patriot-martyr Shakespeare presents a John who is also a usurper and a potential murderer. The unconventionality of such a juxtaposition of details may easily be seen by comparing it to Shakespeare's treatment of similar political situations in the earlier play Richard III. Like Richard, John is an evident usurper, and though not so hypocritical as Richard, is not above maintaining his position by fraud and deceit. Unlike Richard, however, in King John the acknowledged usurper ironically stands for the best interests of England, and the barons who revolt from him are traitors to their country, not redeemers of it. Ironically too, John's rival for the throne, though identified like Richmond with both legal right and divine favor, is in reality merely a tool in the hands of foreign powers whose pious arguments conceal their selfish ambitions. Finally, like Richard, John even goes so far as to hire a murderer to assassinate his nephew, but instead of losing his kingdom because of the heinousness of the deed, John retains the loyalty of his chief supporter and dies a martyr's death in attempting to expel the Pope and the French from his land.

It is perhaps time, then, to revise the usual estimate of Shakespeare as a writer who used the form of the history play principally to glorify his nation's past and to preach from the stage the clichés of orthodox Tudor political doctrine. In King John, at least, Shakespeare chose deliberately to dramatize the most controversial material to be found in his sources, and revealed to his audience a mind sensitive to the complexities of politics, the ironies of history, and the ambiguities of human nature.

Notes

1. A much abridged version of this article was read before the Renaissance Comparative Literature Group of the Modern Language Asociation in Chicago, Dec. 28, 1963.

2. King John, The Arden Shakespeare (London, 1954), p. xxv.

3. For accounts of King John's reputation in the sixteenth century see Ruth Wallerstein, King John in Fact and Fiction (Philadelphia, 1917); Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (New York, 1962) IV, 3-6; and Honigmann, Arden John, pp. xxvi-xxvii.

4. The most recent account of the historical King John is W. L. Warren, King John (New York, 1961); see also Wallerstein, op. cit., and Charles Petit-Dutaillis, Le Roi Jean et Shakespeare (Paris, 1944).

5. Roger of Wendover, Chronica sive Flores Historiarum, ed. H. O. Coxe (London, 1841-4), I, 1-2 (my translation).

6. William Tyndale, Doctrinal Treatises, ed. Henry Walter (London, 1858), p. 338; quoted in Irving Ribner, The English History Play in the Age of Shakespeare (Princeton, 1957), p. 39.

7. Letters and Papers Foreign and Domestic of the Reign of Henry VIII, ed. James Gairdner (London, 1882), VI, 109. I am indebted to Dr. Barry Adams for calling my attention to this reference.

8. Ibid., VIII, 230.

9. Simon Fish, A Supplicacyon for the Beggars, ed. Edward Arber (London, 1880), p. 6.

10. Ibid., p. 6.

11. A Treatise proving by the King's Laws … (London, 1538), sig. A₃.

12. Robert Fabyan, Concordance of Histories, ed. Henry Ellis (London, 1811), p. 317.

13. Fabyan, pp. 322-3.

14. John Bale, King Johan, ed. J. H. P. Pafford, Malone Society Reprints (London, 1931), p. 417. All quotations are from this edition. I have regularized spelling and punctuation.

15. John Leland, Assertio Inclytissimi Arthurii (London, 1544); for an account of the dispute over the Arthur legend see Edwin Greenlaw, Studies in Spenser's Historical Allegory (Baltimore, 1932).

16. Pafford (pp. xv-xvi) finds evidence that these lines were written between 1546 and 1552, i.e., during a revision of the play and after Leland's attack on Polydore. Thus they probably constitute a request for him to take up the gauntlet again, this time specifically on behalf of King John. The “slumbre” probably refers to the insanity with which Leland was afflicted in his later years.

17. John Foxe, Acts and Monuments (London, 1563), p. 71.

18. Richard Grafton, A Chronicle at Large, and Meere History of the Affayres of Englande (1569), ed. H. Ellis (London, 1809), I,xv.

19. Alfred Hart, Shakespeare and the Homilies (Melbourne, 1934), p. 122.

20. “An homilie against disobedience and wylfull rebellion” (London, 1571), sig. A₂.

21. “Homilie against disobedience,” sigs. J₂^v-J₃.

22. R. Crompton, The Mansion of Magnanimitie (London, 1599), sig. A₃^v.

23. Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (New York, 1962), IV, 3.

24. A partial list of these works may be found in Honigmann, Arden John, pp. xxvi-xxvii.

25. M. M. Reese, The Cease of Majesty (London, 1961), p. 265.

26. Crompton was a lawyer, a member of Gray's Inn, and a judge, who early retired to private life in order to compose treatises on Elizabethan jurisprudence. His most notable work was “L' Authoritie et Jurisdiction des Courts de la Maiestie de la Roygne” (1594), which upheld the authority of the Star Chamber.

27. F. A. Gasquet, “Some Materials For A New Edition of Polydore Vergil's ‘History’,” Trans. Roy. Hist. Soc., New Series, XVI (1902), 1-17; Denys Hay, “The Manuscript of Polydore Vergil's Anglica Historia,” Eng. Hist. Rev., LIV (1939), 240-251.

28. A few, but only a very few, of the details concerning John's excesses were omitted from the second and third editions of the Historia in 1546 and 1555, presumably out of deference to the new Tudor opinion of King John; see Denys Hay, Polydore Vergil, Renaissance Historian and Man of Letters (Oxford, 1952), pp. 123, 190.

29. Polydorus Vergilius, Anglica Historia, ed. J. Thysius (Leyden, 1651), p. 341. This edition is based on the second, revised edition (Basle, 1546), and is the most recent and accessible complete edition of the Anglica Historia. All quotations are from this edition, but have been checked against the Folger Library copy of the 1534 edition.

30. Anglica Historia, p. 341. The actual designation of Arthur as heir is described in the account of Richard's reign, p. 319, without mention of John's possible claim to the throne.

31. C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Oxford, 1954), p. 298.

32. John Stowe, Annales, or, A Generall Chronicle of England (1580), ed. and continued by Edmund Howes (London, 1631), pp. 150, 160. The reference to “Elianor” is puzzling. Arthur's sister is said by Grafton to have been named “Brecca.” Stowe's mistake may have come from a misreading of the passage in Grafton, which also relates that John had a daughter named “Elianor” (Grafton, op. cit., I, 232).

33. Honigmann, therefore, appears to be wrong in his assertion that “John's ‘usurpation’ is Shakespeare's fiction, for his ‘right’ is not seriously questioned in the chronicles” (Arden John, p. xxvii). On Shakespeare's sources for the issue of John's usurpation, see John R. Elliott, Jr., “Polydore Vergil and the Reputation of King John in the Sixteenth Century,” ELN [English Language Notes], II (1964), 90-92.

34. Reese, Cease of Majesty, pp. 264-265.

35. Raphael Holinshed, Chronicles (London, 1807), II, 319. Further references indicated in the text are to this edition and volume.

36. Foxe had printed some Latin verses, said to be contemporary, along with an English translation, beginning: “Non est Innocentius, imo nocens vere, …” (“Nocent, not innocent, he is …”). Acts and Monuments (1576), pp. 257-258.

37. All references to Shakespeare's King John are to the revised Arden edition, ed. E. A. J. Honigmann (London, 1954).

38. All references to The Troublesome Reign of King John are to the text printed by Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, IV, 72-151. I shall follow the customary practice of abbreviating the title of The Troublesome Reign to “TR.”

39. E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's History Plays (London, 1956), p. 223.

40. Tillyard, p. 221.

41. King John, ed. J. Dover Wilson (Cambridge, 1936), p. xxi.

42. Machiavelli's “The Prince”: An Elizabethan Translation, ed. Hardin Craig (Chapel Hill, 1944), pp. 76-7 (my italics). The translation probably dates from c. 1584.

43. The similarity of Shakespeare's later history plays to Machiavelli's Prince, or at least to the kind of secular, analytic approach to politics which that work represents, has been suggested by Irving Ribner, “Bolingbroke, A True Machiavellian,” MLQ, [Modern Language Quarterly] IX (1948), 177-183; and J. F. Danby, Shakespeare's Doctrine of Nature (London, 1949), ch. 3. Ribner compares in detail Bolingbroke's rise to the throne in Richard II with Machiavelli's analysis of the rise to power of a new prince. Danby finds some general qualities of Machiavelli's Prince in the Bastard, Bolingbroke, and Prince Hal.

    There is no concrete evidence that Shakespeare read Machiavelli's works, but that he was familiar in some form with Machiavelli's actual ideas (as opposed to the distortions attributed to him by Gentillet) is quite possible. For the genuine interest in and knowledge of Machiavelli's works in Elizabethan England see Napoleone Orsini, “Le traduzioni elisabettiane inedite di Machiavelli,” in Studii Sul Rinoscimento Italiano in Inghilterra (Florence, 1937).

44. Arden John, II.i.19n.; II.i.53n.; II.i.477-9n.

45. See J. Dover Wilson, New Cambridge King John, p. 122, n. 368.

46. King John, ed. Irving Ribner, The Pelican Shakespeare (Baltimore, 1962), p. 20. Ribner follows most modern editors in putting the Folio “Actus Secundus” (Honigmann's II.ii) at the beginning of Act III.