SOURCE: Pearlman, E. “King John.” In William Shakespeare: The History Plays, pp. 65-72. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1992.

[In the following essay, Pearlman investigates the weaknesses of King John, focusing on the play's plot, characters, and language.]

King John is certainly the weakest of Shakespeare's history plays, and it may be the least accomplished of all his works. The complaints about it are grievous: the plot is clumsy, the characters both undeveloped and inconsistent, and the language only intermittently interesting. The play does not seem to have engaged Shakespeare's deepest imagination.

The opening scene is by far the most economical and successful. King John of England, whose claim to the throne depends more on “strong possession” (1.1.39) than on legal right, is challenged by King Philip of France. When the previous king, Richard Coeur-de-Lion, willed the throne to his younger brother John, he passed over Arthur, the son of his second brother Geoffrey. By the strict rules of primogeniture, Arthur should be the heir, but John is the heir by device. (Although primogeniture was fully institutionalized in Shakespeare's time, it was not universally accepted in the early period in which King John is set.) Philip of France along with the Duke of Austria (also called Limoges) have undertaken, for reasons that are not made exactly clear, to restore Arthur to the throne of England. John not only rejects the challenge to his throne but resolves instead to invade the French kingdom. Although King John mutters in an aside to one of his nobles that “Our abbeys and our priories shall pay / This expeditious charge” (48-49), church-state relations are only intermittently considered. A disproportionate part of the first act is devoted not to matters of rule but to the adjudication of a family argument about succession. Claiming that his elder brother is illegitimate, and in truth the son of that same King Richard from whom both John and Arthur claim their throne, Robert Faulconbridge has appealed to the King to dispossess his older brother Philip of his father's lands. The private dispute therefore echoes the public; in both cases, the question is one of legitimate descent from King Richard.

The first scene and the first half of the play are dominated by the energetic figure of the Bastard Philip Faulconbridge. The Bastard virtually reincarnates Richard, the exemplar of chivalric romance whom Shakespeare occasionally attempts to elevate into a major presence in the play. Philip resembles his father strongly in build, in feature, in speech, and in his formidable presence on the field of battle. His new grandmother Elinor testifies that the Bastard has “a trick of Coeur-de-lion's face” as well as his “large composition.” According to John he is “perfect Richard” (90). The Bastard is adopted into the family in an abbreviated courtly ceremony: “Kneel thou down Philip, but rise more great / Arise Sir Richard, and Plantagenet” (161-62).

The Bastard is appealing in the first two acts of the play (he devolves into cliché as the play proceeds) because his brash and idiosyncratic speech stands out against the otherwise lackluster thump of iambs. His response to being granted permission to call Elinor of Aquitaine “grandam” is one of the play's best moments:

Madam, by chance but not by truth; what though?
Something about, a little from the right,
In at the window, or else o'er the hatch:
Who dares not stir by day must walk by night,
And have is have, however men do catch.
Near or far off, well won is still well shot,
And I am I, how'er I was begot.

(169-75)

Each line of the Bastard's sixain of catch phrases and proverbs has as its implicit subject the sexual fact of his own begetting. His phrases have the ring of fidelity to the real spoken language; it is not difficult to imagine some Slender whispering about a person whose bastardy was a subject of rumor that “he's a little from the right,” or his friend Shallow replying with a knowing wink that the father probably came “in at the window.” Shakespeare does not take the opportunity to develop the character of Philip Faulconbridge, whose alienation and individualism might pose a danger to society and who might have been transformed into a character like Richard of Gloucester or even into that exemplary bastard Edmund in King Lear. Unlike Edmund, who becomes more complex as the play proceeds, the Bastard has his finest moments at the beginning of the play and becomes more and more neutral and faceless as he is progressively integrated into the royal family. Shakespeare also overlooks the opportunity to explore in any depth the Bastard's potentially interesting relationship to his “cousin” John (3.339).

Ordinarily in Shakespeare's plays, the attempt of a character to rise in class is punished or shamed (Malvolio, Christopher Sly, Macbeth, Wolsey, and Edmund himself are instances). The Bastard's rise is surprisingly painless, but even so Shakespeare allows him a sharp soliloquy in which he satirizes those who, like himself, suddenly attain higher status. Philip, whose conversation (unique in this low-hormone drama) is infiltrated with sexual innuendoes, realizes that his new status carries social authority: “Well, now can I make any Joan a lady” (1.1.184). “Joan” is a generic name for a countrywoman, but the Bastard glancingly alludes to the proverbial wisdom that “in the dark, Joan is as good as my lady.” He then invents an encounter between a new knight and a yeoman. His vigorous theatrical imagination allows him to play both parts: “‘Good den, Sir Richard!’—‘God-a-mercy, fellow’—/ And if his name be George, I'll call him Peter” (185-86). He takes on the favorite target of provincial and insecure Elizabethan moralists—the gentleman who affects the manners of the Continent on his return to England. “Now your traveller,” he says,

He and his toothpick at my worship's mess,
And when my knightly stomach is sufficed,
Why then I suck my teeth and catechize
My pickèd man of countries: “My dear sir,”—
Thus, leaning on mine elbow, I begin—
“I shall beseech you.”

(189-95)

The Bastard intends to enjoy what he calls with mixed feeling “worshipful society” (205) because it suits his “mounting spirit.” But he will only flatter the great in order to “strew the footsteps of my rising” (216). At this point in the play, he is a satirist who finds in his heart the “inward motion to deliver / Sweet, sweet, sweet poison for the age's tooth” (212-13). This second attempt to find a consistent voice for the Bastard is soon abandoned.

The Bastard is also present throughout the next major event of the play—a scene of monumental inconclusiveness, consisting of little more than threats and counterthreats, declamations, and aristocractic posturing. The forces supporting young Arthur, led by Philip and the Austrian Archduke, squat before the walls of Angiers. In a rhetorical style that imitates Tamburlaine and anticipates Pistol, Philip announces that his plan is to “lay before this town our royal bones, / Wade to the market-place in Frenchmen's blood, / But we will make it subject to this boy.” The French are surprised to discover that the English forces have hastily arrived at the same city. Both John and Philip set forth their case in swollen language. Much of the verbal excitement depends on the fact that the Austrian Duke sports a lionskin—a trophy that celebrates his killing of Coeur-de-Lion. The Bastard confronts his father's destroyer in the excited tones of the hero of revenge plays. A furious volley of taunts and curses between the two mothers (Elinor, the mother of John, and Constance, the widow of Richard's brother Geoffrey and the mother of young Arthur) decorates the action but comes to no resolution. The two armies are still to be imagined laying seige to Angiers; each side solicits the city, which is represented by an anonymous citizen (who may also be the same as the character named Hubert, prominent in subsequent scenes), to surrender. The Citizen, who is indifferent to genealogical or geopolitical issues, holds to the position that the city will happily yield as soon as the two sides can decide who is the legitimate king. The rival kings lead their forces to battle, but the combat, although destructive, is indecisive, and once again the city refuses to yield. Even the most discerning judges cannot determine which side has won the day: “Blood hath bought blood, and blows have answered blows, / Strength matched with strength, and power confronted power. / Both are alike, and both alike we like” (2.1.229-31). The battle is at a stalemate and the Citizen is more interested in the balance of his clauses and the artistry of his puns than in matters of war and peace.

At this point the Bastard intervenes and cynically suggests that instead of fighting between themselves, the two armies first aim their cannons at Angiers and only afterwards agree among themselves who will take possession of the city. The kings accept this ingenious suggestion, but as they prepare to level the city, the Citizen intervenes with an alternative but equally odd solution. He proposes a marriage between King John's niece Blanch of Castile and the French Dauphin. The advantages of this arrangement are not entirely clear, but nevertheless, the Citizen assures the kings that once it is negotiated, “With swifter spleen than powder can inforce / The mouth of passage shall we fling wide ope, / And give you entrance” (448-50).

The match is made when the Dauphin overwhelms Blanch with a volley of Petrarchan conceits inconsistent with the tone of any other episode in the play. Lewis discovers that the woman whom it is expedient to marry is “a wonder or a wondrous miracle” (2.1.497). Love breaks out, the match is made, and to pacify Constance the titles of Duke of Britain and Earl of Richmond are conferred on Arthur. The Bastard's reflection on the turn of events may be the play's most famous moment: “Mad world! Mad kings! Mad composition [i.e., treaty]!” (561). The Bastard attributes the sudden alteration in purpose to that “sly devil, / That broker, … That daily break-vow, … / That smooth-faced gentleman, tickling commodity” (2.1.567-69, 573). The word “commodity” is variously glossed as gain or self-interest. When the Bastard proceeds to harangue against this abstraction, he once again establishes himself as a critic of public morality. The world has become corrupted, and, as the Bastard argues in a sustained metaphor, “Commodity” is like the “bias” or the offcenter weight in a ball that causes it to take an irregular course. It is therefore “the bias of the world” (574) that causes even kings to run askew:

                                        this vile drawing bias,
This sway of motion, this commodity,
Makes it take head from all indifferency,
From all direction, purpose, course, intent:
And this same bias, this commodity,
This bawd, this broker, this all-changing word,
Clapped on the outward eye of fickle France,
Hath drawn him from his own determined aid,
From a resolved and honorable war,
To a most base and vile-concluded peace.

(2.1.577-86)

The Bastard then shifts from the satirical to the confessional mode: “And why rail I on this commodity? / But for because he hath not wooed me yet” (587-88). He decides to model his behavior on that of the kings: “Since kings break faith upon commodity, / Gain, be my lord, for I will worship thee” (597-98). The Bastard makes a verbal concession to self-interest, but in fact he does not honor his own conviction and becomes more loyal and dedicated to the cause of John as the play proceeds. The sentiments that he utters, if acted on, would have transformed him into a self-interested villain. Some commentators have supposed that the Bastard's assault on commodity represents a Shakespearean revulsion against a nascent individualism associated with the advent of capitalism, but the lines are not sufficiently focused to carry so portentous a message.

The next scene belongs to Constance and is almost entirely devoted to her lamentation over the neglect of her son Arthur. Her grief is melodramatic rather than meaningful and occasionally verges on self-parody:

Death, death. O amiable, lovely death!
Thou oderiferous stench! Sound rottenness!
Arise forth from the couch of lasting night,
Thou hate and terror to prosperity,
And I will kiss thy detestable bones,
And put my eyeballs in thy vaulty brows,
And ring these fingers with thy household worms,
And stop this gap of breath with fulsome dust,
And be a carrion monster like thyself.

(3.4.25-33)

Constance is only interrupted when the play skitters in an entirely new direction. With no more warning than Philip's utterly graceless notice that “Here comes the holy legate of the Pope” (3.1.135), Pandulph announces that inasmuch as John has not appointed the Pope's nominee as Archbishop of Canterbury, the King shall stand “cursed and excommunicate; / And blessed shall he be that doth revolt / From his allegiance to an heretic” (3.1.173-75). King John responds predictably when he condemns the “juggling witchcraft” of the “Italian priest” (153). Pandulph succeeds in cracking the alliance between France and England and in a moment the two kingdoms are once again at war.

The play now takes still another tack and focuses on young Arthur, who has been captured by the English forces. King John intimates to Hubert, the prince's jailor, that it would be convenient if Arthur were dead. The oddest and most awkward scene (4.1) in the play now follows. Hubert has apparently received a writ from the King (the mechanism is unclear) instructing him to put out Arthur's eyeballs with “hot irons” (4.1.39). While reluctant executioners stand ready, Arthur pleads for his sight. The threat of mutilation is prolonged for an unspeakable length of time so that Arthur can state his case in language that is excessively ingenious for both character and occasion:

The iron of itself, though heat red-hot,
Approaching near these eyes, would drink my tears
And quench this fiery indignation
Even in the matter of mine innocence,
Nay, after that, consume away in rust,
But for containing fire to harm mine eye.

(61-66)

A sentimentalist at heart, Hubert is persuaded by Arthur's argument and resolves to hide the prince and report that he is dead.

John declines as a forceful leader in the scene that follows. For reasons that Shakespeare elides, John has found it necessary to be crowned a second time. Pembroke and Salisbury, who represent the nobility, object vociferously. John's explanation shortchanges both his inquisitors and the audience: “Some reasons of this double coronation / I have possessed you with and think them strong” (4.2.40-41). Pembroke then asks John to set Arthur free. At just that moment, Hubert enters with the report that Arthur is dead; the lords take umbrage and exit in a huff. A messenger arrives to say that the French have taken up arms and that both Elinor (John's mother) and Constance have died (the latter “in a frenzy” [122]). John attempts to put the blame for Arthur's death on Hubert; in response, Hubert reveals that Arthur is not dead (which he believes to be true), and John, momentarily cheered, sends him to find the peers and regain their loyalty. But in another scene of failed pathos, poor Arthur, whose motivation is undigested, leaps from the wall of the castle in which he is imprisoned and dies; his last words (“Heaven take my soul, and England keep my bones” [4.3.10]) are as pedestrian as anything ever ascribed to Shakespeare. The disaffected peers and Hubert discover the body almost simultaneously. Even the Bastard is dismayed by the confusion, but he has evolved into a character who speaks more like the everyman of the moralities than the vigorous figure of the first two acts: “I am amaz'd, methinks, and lose my way / Among the thorns and dangers of this world” (140).

In the last act, the character of King John becomes progressively more indecipherable. Now he is discovered surrendering his crown to Pandulph, the emissary of the Pope, and receiving it back from him again (to signify the Pope's “sovereign greatness and authority” [5.1.4]). John surrenders the leadership of the armies to the Bastard—“Have thou the ordering of the present time” (177)—but his action is so unmarked that the transition of authority may be overlooked.

The action becomes increasingly fragmented and unmotivated as the play draws to a close. Salisbury defects to the French side. The emotional storm of doing so—“an earthquake of nobility” (5.2.42) it is called—produces an “honorable dew / That silverly doth progress on [his] cheeks” (45-46). Pandulph attempts to calm the storm that he has raised by explaining to the French king that John has now reconciled himself to Rome. Not surprisingly, the Dauphin rejects his suggestion and continues to prosecute the war. The English forces are led by the Bastard, whose drums, he proclaims, will “rattle the welkin's ear / And mock the deep-mouthed thunder” while “bare-ribbed death / [Will] feast upon whole thousands of French” (177-78). As the battle is about to begin, new information comes crowding to the fore and the action is huddled and compressed. The resupply of the French troops fails when ships are wrecked on Goodwin Sands. King John is discovered dying of a fever. When the English defectors learn from a dying French peer that the Dauphin intends their death, they reverse themselves once again and return to the English fold. Almost simultaneously, the Bastard discovers that half his power has been drowned in the Lincoln Washes. John dies, but the fever in his “burn'd bosom” (5.7.39) is not matched by any corresponding psychological suffering or insight. All problems are solved when Prince Henry, whose existence until this moment was unknown, becomes rex ex machina. The play ends as the French unexpectedly propose a peace and the Bastard and Salisbury submit to the new king. The Bastard's final thought, that “This England never did, nor never shall, / Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror / But when it first did help to wound itself” (112-14) seems more than ordinarily perfunctory.