SOURCE: Vaughan, Virginia Mason. “Between Tetralogies: King John as Transition.” Shakespeare Quarterly 35, no. 4 (winter 1984): 402-20.

[In the following essay, Vaughan maintains that King John operates as a bridge between the two historical tetralogies, contending that the play “demonstrates Shakespeare's experimentation with more sophisticated dramaturgical techniques to convey political complexities, techniques he perfected in the Henriad.”]

Modern scholars, not surprisingly, are fascinated by Shakespeare's second tetralogy.¹ Separately the plays offer wide variety—from Richard II's formal deposition, to Falstaff's witty fabrications, to Henry V's patriotic rhetoric. Together they suggest Shakespeare's conceptualization of the political process. For some time now we have perceived threads binding all four plays into a unity so carefully crafted that we call it “the Henriad” and grant it epic qualities that we seldom attribute to other Shakespearean dramas.² The first tetralogy has also gained critical recognition of late, partly as a reaction to the Royal Shakespeare Company's Henry VI productions in 1978³ and partly in response to two fine studies: David Riggs's Shakespeare's Heroical Histories and Edward I. Berry's Patterns of Decay.⁴ And more recently, all eight plays have been lumped together into one grand design. Robert Rentoul Reed, Jr. claims that by the time Shakespeare started Richard II he had envisioned the eight history plays as “a kind of epic better unified than the Iliad.”⁵ Somewhere between the two tetralogies, however, lies Shakespeare's King John, neglected because it does not fall within the broad scope of a series, and scorned as unpopular and untheatrical.⁶

King John has not always been ignored in the theatre. As Eugene M. Waith has shown, performances from the late eighteenth century through much of the nineteenth were extremely popular. As interpreted by actors such as Mrs. Cibber, John Philip Kemble, and Mrs. Siddons, the play was “a carefully contrived sequence of intensely emotional scenes, revealing the mainsprings of the action in the characters of the principal personages.”⁷ Perhaps such a concept is tiresome to modern audiences. Tastes come and go. The mere fact that a play is not fashionable today does not necessarily mean, however, that it is bad or that it will never again be popular.

It is true that King John stands alone, lacking the contextual significance which informs 2 Henry VI or 2 Henry IV. King John's audience has not been primed with earlier background—a saga of Richard the Lionhearted, for example. And its finale is final. There is no triumphant reign of Henry III to show God's providential design for England.

King John begins in medias res. It presents an isolated series of episodes that are linked to the reign of one king. And these episodes are important, not for their interconnectedness with other events, nor for their consequences to Britain's future, but for their own sake. In King John we miss a sense of history as continuing process. What we gain, however, is an intense focus on the political present—the here and now of decision-making.

Because of this focus, King John provides an important transition between the first and second tetralogies. Edward Berry describes it as Shakespeare's first political play: “Unlike the earlier histories, which exploit political relationships as a means of defining stages in a historical process, King John exploits history as a means of posing and resolving dramatically a specific political problem.”⁸ In King John Shakespeare begins to probe the underlying causes of political behavior. He reveals political society as a “network of personal relationships.”⁹ These relationships—which so fascinated eighteenth- and nineteenth-century audiences—explore political behavior in a more sophisticated way than do the interactions depicted in the Henry VI plays. Instead of presenting his age's received ideas, Shakespeare begins to examine characters more closely and to provoke more varied and complex responses in his audience. Sigurd Burckhardt argues that King John shows Shakespeare becoming “modern.” For the first time the playwright rejects the traditional Elizabethan notions of order and degree.¹⁰ But more than a simple matter of acceptance or rejection, King John shows the dramatist newly aware that political questions are seldom as easy to answer as the traditional hierarchical model suggests. In this sense, King John represents an important transition between the two tetralogies. In particular—and here is the focus of the present essay—King John demonstrates Shakespeare's experimentation with more sophisticated dramaturgical techniques to convey political complexities, techniques he perfected in the Henriad.

I will assume throughout a connection between vehicle and tenor, techniques and themes. When a dramatist wishes to convey the received ideas of his milieu without questioning them, he is likely to use presentational tactics.¹¹Henry VI makes this apparent. But once he becomes interested in the vagaries of human character, he finds himself dealing with inconsistencies and ambivalences that cannot be so easily conveyed. The form becomes more representational, more an embodiment of the way people actually speak and act. And the audience's impressions become more varied too. King John is not as representational as the Henriad, but it does show movement away from the set speeches, formal dialogue, emblematic scenes, and didacticism so prominent in the Henry VI plays.

I

When Shakespeare began writing history plays, his treatment of events and character was far more sophisticated than that of any other dramatist, with the possible exception of Christopher Marlowe. The Henry VI plays seem incredibly good after a review of Edward I, The Troublesome Raigne of King John, Jack Straw, and The Famous Victories. As Henry Ansgar Kelly asserts in his study of divine providence, “Shakespeare's great contribution was to unsynthesize the syntheses of his contemporaries and to unmoralize their moralizations. … Shakespeare was primarily a dramatist and not a historian.”¹² Even so, in the Henry VI plays, Shakespeare's structure is episodic, his tactics for the most part presentational, and his themes fairly simplistic. As a result, the audience seldom becomes engaged with the characters on stage. Its attention is drawn instead to the abstract political message.

The first tetralogy is as much homiletic as dramatic. A typical example of its method is the Messenger's speech in the opening scene of 1 Henry VI:

Amongst the soldiers this is muttered—
That here you maintain several factions:
And whilst a field should be dispatch'd and fought,
You are disputing of your generals;
One would have lingering wars, with little cost;
Another would fly swift, but wanteth wings;
A third thinks, without expense at all,
By guileful fair words peace may be obtain'd.
Awake, awake, English nobility!
Let not sloth dim your honours new-begot,
Cropp'd are the flower-de-luces in your arms;
Of England's coat one half is cut away.

(I.i.70-82)¹³

This is a judgment on England's peers. Rather than trusting the action to prod the audience into this sentiment, however, the dramatist announces the message. When the moral comes from a nameless character who immediately disappears, it almost seems as if delivered from on high. Our attention is drawn from the quarreling nobles on stage to the concept of civil dissension.

The messenger is not an isolated moralizing voice, for throughout the Henry VI plays Shakespeare interrupts the action with choral figures who declaim on civil war. In Henry VI, Part One, Exeter fills this role. He predicts that conflict between Gloucester and York will bring disorder to the realm. The play's moral thus becomes quite clear: the quarrels of the English nobility fatally undermine Talbot's efforts in France and lose what Henry V had won.

Another presentational tactic is the use of an emblematic scene to state, almost allegorically, the play's central idea. In Part 1 the Temple Garden scene shows the detrimental effect of factions that seem to arise from nowhere and harden into hate. A less overtly allegorical incident, but one with similar impact, occurs in Act IV, scenes v-vii. The rhymed couplets, first in the debate between Talbot and his son and then in the father's mourning, distance the audience from the characters. Instead of being allowed to share the father's and son's emotions, the audience is confronted with heroic valor—the conflict between Talbot's paternal feelings and his son's desire for honor. We are told, not shown. As Berry notes of 1 Henry VI, “The play's overt didacticism … insures attention to its points of emphasis.”¹⁴ The expository soliloquies, explanatory asides, and stylized language repeat and reinforce those emphases.

Talbot too is emblematic. His encounter with the Countess of Auvergne exemplifies French scorn and treachery, English intelligence and determination. Talbot is the model of English chivalry. Salisbury's and Talbot's deaths thus underscore the ideal of English knighthood; both die as “mirrors of all martial men.” Opposed to such courage is Joan of Arc's trickery; her refusal to die gracefully shows the insubstantiality of her heroism. Depicted only from the perspective of English nationalism, Joan and Talbot bear none of the ambiguity we see in Shakespeare's later heroic characters.

Henry VI, Part Two is more carefully constructed than its predecessor, but the moralizing voices continue. Throughout, the dramatist tells the audience what it should perceive. Duke Humphrey's dead body is described, for example, in a lengthy, gory passage (III.ii.159-77), the result of which is both to create horror through language and simultaneously to show it. And in IV.i.70-102 the Lieutenant who executes Suffolk stops to summarize the entire play. Such speeches may have had more appeal for an audience bred in a rhetorical tradition. Nevertheless, they are pure exposition. The Lieutenant's speech is typical in the way it disengages the audience from the immediate event of Suffolk's death and focuses on the large issue—the factionalism that breeds civil war.

In the most emblematic scene of 2 Henry VI, Jack Cade is killed. His foe, Alexander Iden, represents the pastoral ideal of life away from court factions. Yet this brief glimpse of what English life should be is followed immediately by Clifford's Senecan declamations and York's Marlovian determination to pursue the crown. These passages do not end the play, however. Though the final scene does celebrate the Yorkist victory at St. Albans, it looks ahead to the next episode in Shakespeare's saga, the Parliament that begins 3 Henry VI. Thus, while Shakespeare might have ended on a rhetorical climax, he chose instead an open ending, a continuation of the episodic structure.

Henry VI, Part Three is the most chaotic of the plays, the form mirroring the inevitable results of civil dissension. It exhibits the butchery of civil war through emblematic tableau. In the famous molehill scene Henry watches a son discover that he has killed his father, a father discover that he has killed his son. This is the kind of tragedy that is peculiar to civil war, that families are divided and innocent countrymen suffer most. As the surviving father laments, these wars are “unnatural,” begetting “butcherly” stratagems. The tableau reaches its climax as the son, father, and King join in a stichomythic chorus. This interrupts the action's flow and forces the audience to consider the idea of civil war, to abstract the theme from the action.

No one doubts that Richard III is more sophisticated than the Henry VI plays. But it too uses presentational techniques, particularly in the moralizing framework of prophecies fulfilled and curses remembered. Richard punishes participants in the previous carnage: Henry VI, Prince Edward, Clarence, Elizabeth Woodville and her rapacious relatives, and, to a certain degree, Margaret of Anjou. Richard is brilliantly depicted in soliloquies and asides that reveal his character and intentions. Yet he is not an ordinary politician; he is nemesis, an embodiment of evil that destroys itself. The ghosts' psychomachia in Act V is another emblematic scene, reducing the conflict at Bosworth to a simplistic clash between good and evil. Richmond is a deus ex machina who ends England's civil carnage and proudly proclaims the concluding moral.

In emphasizing such presentational techniques and moralizing voices, I do not mean to underrate the Henry VI plays. In his first tetralogy Shakespeare successfully imposed dramatic form on a broad panorama of chronicle material. There is great artistry in the plays' construction. But the Henry VI plays are not political per se; they do not analyze political behavior. Not until Richard III do any characters use political tactics; the war becomes a matter of whose army wins and then maintains victory. In each play Shakespeare provides passages extraneous to the action, passages which moralize against civil dissension and envision the ideal of a unified England led by a virtuous and forceful monarch.

The message may not be so different in Shakespeare's later history plays, but with King John the playwright begins to question that ideal and the actions performed in its behalf. King John confronts political behavior from more than one perspective, as the outgrowth of characters in conflict, each with legitimate claims and goals; it acknowledges the complexity of political life and demonstrates that in any conflict both sides have rights and wrongs.

II

King John conveys Shakespeare's growing political sophistication by changes in dramatic technique. Increasingly, Shakespeare experiments with representational tactics. In the clashes between John and Arthur, the Bastard and his brother, Constance and Elinor, Pandulph and John, Lewis and John, the barons and John, and finally, Pandulph and Lewis, each side has some legitimacy. The scenes are arranged so as to give the audience divided loyalties: politics becomes embedded in personal relationships rather than abstract ideas. True, civil war is still a major concern, but the moral—that England must be true to itself—is openly stated only in the play's last lines. Until then, through a series of debate-like scenes,¹⁵ the play probes rather than pronounces. What does it mean to be “true”? Should a nation be true to an untrue king? Is there a higher authority than the king's, moral or religious? In King John the issues of sovereignty and legitimacy cloud any facile moralizing on the evils of civil war and hence represent a deeper exploration of political realities.

Though the issue is by no means settled, for the purposes of this essay I assume that The Troublesome Raigne of King John is Shakespeare's source.¹⁶ If so, Shakespeare's change in techniques is even more striking. The Troublesome Raigne is blatantly anti-Catholic, not just in the Abbey-looting scene and in John's poisoning but in its frequent references to the “popish usurping clergy.” Its characters, like the choral figures in Henry VI, frequently discuss the action's significance, pointing out the moral to the audience. The Bastard preaches the doctrine of non-resistance: “subjects may not take in hand revenge, / And rob the heavens of their proper power, / Where sitteth he to whome revenge belongs” (xi. 118-20). Finally, John's dying words predict the future glory of England:

But if my dying heart deceave me not,
From out these loynes shall spring a Kingly braunch
Whose armes shall reach unto the gates of Rome,
And with his feete treade downe the strumpets pride,
That sits upon the chair of Babylon.

(xv.103-7)¹⁷

The Troublesome Raigne loudly proclaims what the popular audience wanted to hear: one good Englishman is worth a dozen Frenchmen or Spaniards, and God meant England to be an independent Protestant state.

Shakespeare uses The Troublesome Raigne's plot, but his methods are quite different. In King John patriotic fervor is continually muted by doubt and skepticism. E. A. J. Honigmann notes John's “nicely-argued disquisitions on moral concepts, often illustrating the conflict of two value-systems in a finely-pointed dualism.”¹⁸ Or, as Eamon Grennan describes the play, “Shakespeare is constantly catching his audience in a noose of equal and opposite sympathies.”¹⁹ While some characters do use presentational speeches, their pronouncements are mixed with deflating irony which mocks stylized addresses and political propaganda. The audience is forced to see the action from several perspectives at once, not simply from within the framework of Tudor myth and English patriotism. In other words, the tensions so often noted in the Henriad begin to appear in King John.²⁰ These tensions reflect the sorts of values that conflict in the Henriad—idealism vs. realism, ceremony vs. policy—but they are clustered around two concepts of special prominence in King John: “majesty” and “commodity.”²¹

“Majesty” as defined by the OED represents the dignity or greatness of a sovereign—his external magnificence and his sovereign power. John claims to be the true majesty of England. So does Arthur. Thus throughout the play, majesty is associated with legitimacy and moral right. As the play progresses, we realize that the assertion of majesty does not assure its presence. Legitimacy becomes a major issue. John's title to the throne is questioned, but Arthur is also accused of being illegitimate. In an ironic reversal, Faulconbridge actually chooses illegitimacy and rejoices in it. The Angiers citizens' dilemma is ours, for until we know who the proper majesty of England is, we cannot offer allegiance. After King Philip arranges his son's marriage to Blanche—an act of pure expediency which betrays Arthur's cause—he assures Constance that she will not rue this day: “Have I not pawn'd to you my majesty?” Constance replies, “You have beguil'd me with a counterfeit / Resembling majesty, which being touch'd and tried, / Proves valueless” (III.i.98-101).²² When Pandulph convinces Philip to make war on England despite the marriage, Constance cries, “O fair return of banish'd majesty!” Elinor's immediate response, “O foul revolt of French inconstancy!” (III.i.321-22), takes an opposite view of the same event, and the audience is hard put to choose between them. Such clashes occur throughout King John, manipulating the audience into a multifaceted response to the political and personal situations presented onstage. “Majesty” is bandied back and forth until it becomes a “bare-picked bone” for “dogged war” to “tug and scamble” at (IV.iii.147-50). And only at the play's finale, when the Bastard urges Prince Henry to put on “the lineal state and glory of the land,” does hope emerge that genuine majesty will rule England.

Opposed to the monarch's claims to royal splendor and moral legitimacy is “commodity.” The Bastard's famous lines underscore the practical necessities that force both John and Philip to turn and turn again. “Commodity” (again, according to OED) has a cluster of associated meanings: profit, convenience, expediency, advantage, interest, opportunity, occasion. The events of King John vividly demonstrate that commodity usually determines political decisions.

III

The opening scene clarifies the dialectic between these opposing values and illustrates Shakespeare's modified tactics. In a few speeches, King John's characters rush through the formal political business. Far more than the author of The Troublesome Raigne, Shakespeare casts doubt on John's claim to legitimate inheritance. The play opens with Chatillion's address to England's “borrow'd majesty.” When John proclaims “Our strong possession and our right for us,” Elinor cautions:

Your strong possession much more than your right,
Or else it must go wrong with you and me:
So much my conscience whispers in your ear,
Which none but heaven, and you, and I, shall hear.

(I.i.39-43)

Here the play's dualities are spelled out. It is a matter of convenience—commodity—for John to keep the throne, regardless of his “right.” His true majesty remains in doubt throughout the play.

After dismissing Chatillion and resolving for France, John confronts a mirror image from the private world. Shakespeare makes The Troublesome Raigne's bastard, a typical stage ruffian, into a remarkable character. Lily B. Campbell suggests that Faulconbridge “acts as chorus to the play.” John Middleton Murry goes so far as to assert that the Bastard “is manifestly Shakespeare's ideal of an Englishman.”²³ To a certain extent both are right: the Bastard is involved in the action and yet sufficiently disengaged to comment on it. Alexander Leggatt argues that this use of a character who is an “amalgam of participant and commentator” is new for Shakespeare;²⁴ it will reach perfection with Hal, who can keep himself inside the tavern world but never be part of it. This dual function may also be the logical result of Faulconbridge's illegitimate status, for while he can claim some heritage from Richard Coeur de Lion, the circumstances of his birth insure that he remains on the outside, never a candidate for the throne. This is another departure for Shakespeare. As David Riggs observes, “In Henry VI the problem of authenticity can finally be resolved by reference to ancestry and nurture”;²⁵ ancestry becomes more dubious in King John, where the Bastard's role clearly complicates the issues of nobility, ancestry, and legitimacy.

King John's opening scene demonstrates this complexity immediately. Elinor notes young Faulconbridge's resemblance to Richard Coeur de Lion, and she proposes that he relinquish his lands and follow her. By seizing this opportunity, the Bastard might be accused of following commodity, yet he is also acknowledging his natural father and thereby confirming the values of “majesty.” Thus the initial dichotomies of the play—legitimacy vs. possession, majesty vs. commodity—are already confused in both the public and the private spheres. The Bastard sees a distinction between being “well begot” and being “true begot” (ll. 77-78); he chooses the former and concludes, “And I am I, how'ere I was begot” (l. 175). John might say the same thing about his crown.

Although the Bastard's soliloquies and asides often direct the audience's response, his tone differs from the moralizing voices I have noted in the Henry VI plays. Except for his concluding peroration on the need for English unity, the Bastard eschews patriotic speeches. His asides are cynical, not sententious; instead, he punctures the other characters' sententiousness. In his first soliloquy—which somewhat resembles Hal's famous “I know you all” lines—the Bastard proclaims his purpose:

For he is but a bastard to the time
That doth not smack of observation;
And so am I, whether I smoke or no.
And not alone in habit and device,
Exterior form, outward acoutrement,
But from the inward motion to deliver
Sweet, sweet, sweet poison for the age's tooth:
Which, though I will not practice to deceive,
Yet, to avoid deceit, I mean to learn.

(I.i.207-16)

The Bastard has the wit and magnetism of Richard III without the diabolism. He does not tell the audience what to think, but with humor he directs it toward a critical view of the pageantry on stage.

IV

While Shakespeare's audience may have delighted in the Bastard much as we do, it was probably surprised by the rest of the play. Shakespeare's John is not the John of sixteenth-century propaganda. He is not the warlike Christian who temporarily defied Rome in John Bale's King Johan, Foxe's Booke of Martyrs, the Homilie Against Disobedience, and The Troublesome Raigne. Shakespeare makes very little of John's excommunication or his death. John does briefly declare himself “supreme head” and insist that “No Italian priest / Shall tithe or toll in our dominions” (III.i.153-55). But that is as far as he goes. His failure in this play stems not from defiance of the Pope but from his role in planning an innocent child's murder. Arthur's death alienates the nobles, which in turn assures Lewis' success. The religious issue is muted throughout. Shakespeare was more interested in the concept of legitimacy, which he further explored in the Henriad.

King John's plot may be from The Troublesome Raigne, but Shakespeare condensed his material to emphasize repeated reversals of expectations. Frequent turns of events surprise the audience as well as the characters on stage. The result is an alternation between inflated claims of legitimacy and actions which undercut those claims. This pattern—long noted in 2 Henry IV and Henry V—lends unity to King John. It allows Shakespeare to play with political pretensions; it allows him to juxtapose characters who think they are in control of “the times” with events which drastically undercut their assurance. This is not to say that there are no reversals of expectations in the Henry VI plays. As the fortunes of war ebb and flow, York, Margaret, even Richard are subject to reversals. But few characters in Henry VI are themselves torn apart by conflicting allegiances. Such reversals as we find, moreover, are different from the occasional lapse of an ally or a betrayal by a friend; here they create a shaping pattern.

The play's central issue demonstrates this pattern. Throughout we expect to discover England's rightful monarch. John has the crown; Arthur—or rather his mother Constance—claims it. Even after Arthur's death, the issue is dubious, for the Bastard's mournful speech implies that Arthur was the rightful king. But now, though the prince is dead, Lewis—on behalf of his wife Blanche—disputes John's title. Not until the last lines is the issue resolved; by then John has conveniently died, Lewis has retired to France, and Henry III combines possession with legitimacy.

A careful examination of the play's central episode, the battle of Angiers, illustrates how reversals form a deliberate dramatic pattern. Although Shakespeare was limited by his chronicle sources, he manipulated those sources for the best effect. In this scene he crams a series of political events into an extended episode. And despite the heavy stylized speeches, Shakespeare forces “the audience to experience the complex life of the dramatized world and its inhabitants.”²⁶ His treatment is not as sophisticated as it will be in the Henriad, but the audience is caught in a web of personal relationships that embody politics' divided loyalties.

The Angiers scenes begin in Act II, scene i, before the city's gates. King Philip's opening lines suggest Arthur's legitimacy: because of his “posterity”—lineal inheritance—he is the rightful king and John an “unnatural” usurper. (Later, Elinor calls Arthur a bastard, disputing his legitimacy.) Austria supports Arthur's claim, and in a patriotic purple passage he describes England as

                                        that pale, that white-fac'd shore,
Whose foot spurns back the ocean's roaring tides
And coops from other lands her islanders …
… that England hedg'd in with the main,
That water-walled bulwark, still secure
And confident from foreign purposes.

(II.i.23-28)

The similarity to John of Gaunt's deathbed peroration is obvious. But while such sentiments may have been pleasing to Shakespeare's audience, it is important to remember who utters them—Austria, who is here identified as Richard Coeur de Lion's killer. By the play's end, Austria's assurances have proven false, for Lewis' army has conquered nearly half the country. Moreover, as the siege of Angiers progresses, Austria himself is undercut. No John of Gaunt, he is a pompous and affected braggart, deflated by the Bastard's cynicism. Even those who glorify England earn ambivalent reactions.

These scenes portray a sequence of unexpected entrances; each drastically alters the course of events. No sooner does Constance mention Chatillion than he arrives; when he finishes speaking, John appears. John counters his claim to Arthur's, arguing for his “just and lineal entrance” into Angiers (l. 85). They exchange charges of usurper until Arthur protests that he is “not worth this coil that's made for me” (l. 165). Insults flung so rapidly between Constance and Elinor create a divided perspective that reaches a climax in the Citizen of Angiers' frustrated announcement:

                                                            he that proves the king,
To him will we prove loyal: till that time
Have we ramm'd up our gates against the world.

(ll. 270-72)

Because Shakespeare has cast so many doubts on each side's legitimacy, the Citizen's confused and divided reaction becomes our own. When John insists that the crown—now in his possession—proves him the king, the Citizen responds:

Till you compound whose right is worthiest,
We for the worthiest hold the right from both.

(ll. 280-81)

Here any notion of lineal inheritance is abandoned; might will make right. But, in the continuing pattern of this play, expectations of a resolution are thwarted. When both English and French heralds claim the victory, Angiers' Citizen proclaims:

Blood hath bought blood and blows have answer'd blows;
Strength match'd with strength, and power confronted power:
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.

(ll. 328-33)

The battle has done nothing but underscore the absurd ways in which “legitimacy” and “majesty” are determined.

The Bastard further stresses this absurdity by laughing at “majesty” when “the rich blood of kings is set on fire.” He suggests that England and France join forces against Angiers. This smacks “something of the policy.” In an aside to the audience, he delights in the forces' positions: Austria and France will shoot at each other.

Relief comes with the proposal that Lewis marry Blanche, a peaceful resolution to the problem. The Citizen describes this political alliance in exaggerated Petrarchan love rhetoric, but the Bastard's cynical remarks remind us of its political implications. (In The Troublesome Raigne the Bastard's irony is motivated by his own desire for Blanche. By removing this romantic element, Shakespeare stresses the Bastard's role as disinterested commentator, stunned by the hypocrisy he sees before him.) Of course, political marriages are not unusual in Shakespeare's history plays. Elizabeth of York's alliance with Henry Tudor joyfully concludes the first tetralogy, and Catherine Valois is gallantly wooed at the end of Henry V. Here, however, the match occurs in mid-play. And since the peace it is intended to foster never arrives, the audience's expectations are again thwarted.

During the marriage ceremony, the Bastard delivers his famous commodity speech. Its conclusion marks the speaker's ambivalence, his double role as commentator and participant. After observing the “mad composition” he has just seen, he reflects that commodity has not wooed him yet. He resolves to join the company before him: “Gain be my lord, for I will worship thee.” This expectation, too, is later disappointed, for the Bastard proves loyal when all others fail.

The human cost of this marriage is next conveyed in Constance's grief. While her tears are highly rhetorical, her scene nevertheless provides another perspective on what we have just seen. In her passion, we see commodity embodied in human relationships. This is not an allegorical tableau like the molehill scene, meant to drive home a point about civil war. Here the message is represented by a central character who shows us what she feels. Constance cries that Fortune is “corrupted.” Won away from Arthur, “she adulterates hourly with thine uncle John.” To Constance this day is wicked. To Philip it is glorious and holy. Who is right? Like the Citizen of Angiers, we cannot tell.

With Pandulph's entry, the tide turns once more. Philip, caught in the middle now, is torn between his loyalty to the Church and the oath he has just sworn. His complaint seems to permeate the play: “I am perplex'd, and know not what to say” (l. 21). Before him kneel Constance and Blanche, each an innocent victim of political fortunes, each begging him to choose her side. What we see on stage represents the kinds of divided allegiances that Shakespeare portrays in King John; the form and the idea beautifully coalesce. And then, when Philip does decide, the indecision shifts to Blanche. Caught in the middle, probably standing center stage between the French and English contingents, she cries:

Which is the side that I must go withal?
I am with both: each army hath a hand:
And in their rage, I having hold of both
They whirl asunder and dismember me. …
Whoever wins, on that side shall I lose;
Assured loss before the match be play'd.

(III.i.327-36)

Grennan describes this moment: “As she faces the dreadful implications of her position she becomes an eloquent emblem of impasse.”²⁷ But even as an emblem, Blanche speaks from her own private dilemma; she does not expound an abstract idea.

Impasse is not peculiar to Blanche. Hubert is in a similar position, divided between his affection for Arthur and his loyalty to John. The Bastard is torn too, choosing John's cause only after Hubert's assurance that the boy has not been murdered. Even John is betwixt and between:

The colour of the king doth come and go
Between his purpose and his conscience,
Like heralds 'twixt two dreadful battles set:
His passion is so ripe, it needs must break.

(IV.ii.76-79)

As the stage characters undergo such sharp splits in their desires and allegiances, the audience too is torn. Both the action and the dialogue expose several sides of the political dilemma.

V

This pattern continues in a more hurried manner through the rest of the play. Abandoned strategies come back to haunt characters when they least expect it. When John decides he needs Arthur alive, he finds the boy is dead. Urging Lewis to undertake a holy war against England, Pandulph argues commodity—Blanche's claim to the English throne—not right, as his chief suasion. After John has reconciled himself to the papacy, Pandulph assumes he can stop the war he so easily started; much to the Cardinal's chagrin, Lewis resolves to pursue the war anyway. Now the Dauphin, not John, defies the Pope.

The audience—particularly if used to stories of John, the warlike Christian—may expect John to die fighting for his kingdom. Instead, John sickens with fever, weakly relinquishes his authority to the Bastard, and finally succumbs to poison administered by a Monk. As John dies, the Bastard announces that his army has been “Devoured by the unexpected flood” (V.vii.64). We expect the British nobles to continue their fight; their cause, Arthur's death, has not altered. But after they learn of Lewis' plan to execute them—a reversal of expectations revealed by the dying Melun—they change sides and return to “our great King John.” Finally, despite his proud boasts that he would pursue the conquest of England, Lewis meekly signs a peace, announced only as an afterthought in the closing lines (V.vii.81-85). For all the talk of war deciding the fate of great nations, the battles in King John decide nothing. John loses French territory but only by giving it away at Blanche's wedding. He loses his crown by yielding to the Pope, but only with the assurance that he will get it back again. And despite the Bastard's closing moral, the English nobles return to the fold not because they are true but because they discover that Lewis is untrue.

VI

King John shows the pretensions to majesty—the monarch's glory and greatness, his just right to govern, and his moral obligation to govern well—being undercut at every turn by tickling commodity. There is patriotism in the play, but it is questioning and thoughtful. No righteous hero miraculously appears to deliver England from John's incompetent and unjust reign. There is no Richmond here. The play concludes with new hope, but it is only tentatively placed in Prince Henry, an untested boy.

Sigurd Burckhardt finds the conclusion disappointing: “I strongly suspect that Shakespeare himself knew that he was not bringing the thing off—not because he was bored with a theatrical chore and wanted to finish it quickly and anyhow, but because he saw no way to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.”²⁸ Certainly the final scene is abrupt, and the speeches at the close revert to presentational tactics. Prince Henry's couplet, “what surety of the world, what hope, what stay, / When this was a king, and now is clay,” smacks of the moralizing voices we hear in Henry VI. So does the Bastard's final speech, which pleads for English unity. Faulconbridge reverts from being the participant of Acts IV and V into being a commentator, but here he abandons commodity for loyalty and patriotism.²⁹ In the attempt to reach some sort of closure, Shakespeare withdraws from the tensions and reversals which animate the play and reimposes the standard formula of chronicle history. Perhaps this is a “reinvention of the conventions of resolution.”³⁰ If so, the attempt is not quite successful. Most audiences must leave the theatre with an inadequate sense of resolution, confused and lost “Among the thorns and dangers of this world.” The ending does solve the problem of succession, but the solution is imposed from above, not within. It cannot satisfy.

By the time Shakespeare wrote the Henriad he had better control of his material. The seeds of resolution are planted from the beginning of 1 Henry IV, and the triumph of Henry V seems right and inevitable. Shakespeare does not completely abandon moralizing voices in the Henriad, but when he does use such passages, they illustrate character. They do not oversimplify the issues at hand, because their juxtaposition with events or counter-passages highlights the situation's ambiguities. For example, Carlisle's speech in Richard II comes after a display of Bolingbroke's competent leadership and before the deposition, an episode that emphasizes the ambivalence inherent in the very notion of deposing an anointed sovereign. The chorus in Henry V appeals to the audience's patriotic expectations, yet it is undermined by scenes that contradict its affirmations. In the Henriad, Shakespeare exploits the history play's conventions to mock expectations and heighten tensions. As a result, the audience shares different perspectives on the action and views political issues in a framework of greater complexity.

I do not argue here that King John is a great play. I do believe, however, that it is much better than is commonly supposed. Perhaps our preoccupation with tetralogies has diminished our concern for the plays as individual artifacts. We should not expect each history play to fit the same formula. Richard II and 1 Henry IV, though part of the same tetralogy, are as different as Titus Andronicus and Antony and Cleopatra. It is convenient to classify the former as history plays, the latter as tragedies. When we speak of genres, however, we should bend our definitions to suit the plays, not distort the plays to suit our definitions. We must not ignore the tragic dimensions of Richard II or the romance-like finale of Antony and Cleopatra. Within the genre, each of Shakespeare's history plays has its peculiar style, its special approach to history.

Among Shakespeare's histories, King John lacks the continuity of a sequence. But its central concerns are the same as the Henriad's—the conflict between our idealized longings for the perfect ruler in the perfect commonwealth and the grim realities of power, guile, and treachery in a fallen world. Shakespeare's expansion of the Bastard's role, his exploitations of divided loyalties within various characters, and his experimentation with representational tactics make King John a considerable achievement. It should not be dismissed or ignored. Even if the play's most exciting character is a bastard, the play itself is quite legitimate.

Notes

1. This paper was first written for the seminar “Critical Methodology in the Interpretation of Shakespeare's English History Plays” at the Shakespeare Association of America meeting in Minneapolis, April 1982. I wish to thank the seminar participants—especially Paul Gaudet and Barbara Hodgdon—for their advice and criticism. I also thank Alden Vaughan for his subsequent critiques of the manuscript.

2. To name just a few recent studies of the Henriad: James L. Calderwood, Metradrama in Shakespeare's Henriad: Richard II to Henry V (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1979); Virginia M. Carr, “Once More into the Henriad; a ‘Two-Eyed’ View,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 77 (1978), 530-45; Herbert R. Coursen, The Leasing Out of England: Shakespeare's Second Henriad (Washington: Univ. Press of America, 1982); Alvin B. Kernan, “The Henriad; Shakespeare's Major History Plays,” Modern Shakespearean Criticism, ed. Alvin B. Kernan (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1970), pp. 245-75; Joseph A. Porter, The Drama of Speech Acts: Shakespeare's Lancastrian Tetralogy (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1979). Of course, countless articles have been published on individual plays; judging from the debates at the 1982 Shakespeare Association convention, Norman Rabkin's “Rabbits, Ducks, and Henry V,” Shakespeare Quarterly, [SQ] 28 (1977), 279-96, seems to have been the most influential.

3. For discussions of these productions, see Homer D. Swander, “The Rediscovery of Henry VI,” SQ, 29 (1978), 146-63 and J. C. Trewin, “Shakespeare in Britain,” SQ, 29 (1978), 212-22.

4. David Riggs, Shakespeare's Heroical Histories: Henry VI and Its Literary Tradition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1971), and Edward I. Berry, Patterns of Decay: Shakespeare's Early Histories (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1975).

5. Robert Rentoul Reed, Jr., Crime and God's Judgment in Shakespeare (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1984), p. 14.

6. E. M. W. Tillyard underrates King John because it lacks Henry VI's emphasis upon the doctrine of correspondences. See Shakespeare's History Plays (London: Chatto and Windus, 1944), pp. 218-20. In his more recent study, Robert Ornstein dismisses King John because he finds Shakespeare's treatment of political issues superficial; bored with his task of revamping The Troublesome Raigne of King John, Shakespeare made a half-hearted effort. See A Kingdom for a Stage: The Achievement of Shakespeare's History Plays (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1972), pp. 96-101. There have been several good articles on King John in the last ten years. But so far the play has not enjoyed book-length treatment, and except for a few aficionados, it is generally ignored by professional Shakespeareans.

7. Eugene M. Waith, “King John and the Drama of History,” SQ, 29 (1978), 192-211, 199.

8. Berry, p. 113.

9. L. C. Knights, “Shakespeare's Politics,” Proceedings of the British Academy, 43 (1957), 126.

10. Sigurd Burckhardt, Shakespearean Meanings (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1968), p. 117.

11. My distinction between presentational and representational tactics is based on Barbara A. Mowat's The Dramaturgy of Shakespeare's Romances (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1976), pp. 35-68.

12. Henry Ansgar Kelly, Divine Providence in the England of Shakespeare's Histories (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 304-6.

13. Citations for the Henry VI plays are from the New Arden editions (London: Methuen, 1964).

14. Berry, p. 14.

15. See Douglas C. Wixson, “Calm Words Folded Up in Smoke: Propaganda and Spectator Response in Shakespeare's King John,” Shakespeare Studies, 14 (1981), 111-27. Wixson describes the play's debate-like structure.

16. For more extensive discussion of The Troublesome Raigne and its relation to King John, see Virginia M. Carr, The Drama of Propaganda: a Study of the Troublesome Raigne of King John (Salzburg: Institut für Sprache und Literatur, 1974).

17. The Troublesome Raigne of John, King of England, ed. John W. Sider (New York: Garland Publications, Inc., 1979).

18. E. A. J. Honigmann, ed., King John (London: Methuen, 1954), p. lx.

19. Eamon Grennan, “Shakespeare's Satirical History: A Reading of King John,” Shakespeare Studies, 11 (1978), 34.

20. For discussions of ambiguity and ambivalence in the Henriad, see Norman Rabkin, “Rabbits, Ducks and Henry V”; A. P. Rossiter, Angel With Horns (London: Longmans and Co., 1961); Alvin B. Kernan, “The Henriad: Shakespeare's Major History Plays”; and Virginia M. Carr, “Once More into the Henriad: a Two-Eyed View.”

21. James L. Calderwood opposes “commodity” with “honor,” which he defines as loyalty to the good of England. While such honor is clearly a value in King John, the conception of “majesty” subsumes not only loyalty but the entire question of sovereignty and legitimacy. As such, I think it more adequately describes the polar values which inform the play. See “Commodity and Honour in King John,” University of Toronto Quarterly, 29 (1959-60), 341-56.

22. Citations from King John are from the New Arden edition (London: Metheun, 1964). I have regularized the numbering for passages from Act III.

23. Lily B. Campbell, Shakespeare's ‘Histories’: Mirrors of Elizabethan Policy (San Marino: Huntington Library Press, 1947; repr. 1958), p. 166, and John Middleton Murry, Selected Criticism, 1916-1957 (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1960), p. 154.

24. Alexander Leggatt, “Dramatic Perspective in King John,” English Studies in Canada, 3 (1977), 16.

25. Riggs, p. 142.

26. Grennan, p. 33.

27. Grennan, p. 26.

28. Burckhardt, p. 134.

29. Leggatt, p. 15.

30. I have unblushingly borrowed this phrase from Barbara Hodgdon.