SOURCE: May, James E. “Imagery of Disorderly Motion in King John: A Thematic Gloss.” Essays in Literature 10, no. 1 (spring 1983): 17-28.

[In the following essay, May posits that the image patterns used in King John evoke disorderly motion, expressing uncertainties in the play's characterizations and conflicts.]

The political problems of Shakespeare's King John E. M. W. Tillyard has detailed as, “in the ascending order of importance, the succession, the ethics of rebellion, and the kingly character.”¹ M. M. Reese's definition of Shakespeare's concerns largely concurs: “John's flawed title, followed by his palpable wickedness, brings into question a subject's relationship with a man so evidently bad; and the answer, given in Faulconbridge's carefully weighed allegiance, says again that rebellion is the worst of evil. … The duty of obedience to a de facto king, however bad, could not be more explicitly stated.”² Like Tillyard, Reese sees Shakespeare reworking the problem of Richard II: “In King John the ethics of rebellion are re-examined in circumstances much more favourable to the rebels.” The Bastard perceives that “by giving further offense to God, rebellion would only add one sin to another and make the punishment more terrible”;³ reacting in horror before the dead Arthur, the nobles do not see this. At St. Edmundsbury, Faulconbridge adds to Salisbury's already growing uncertainty when he “reduces all the complex issues of the reign to the single one of patriotic duty.”⁴ Finally, with the nobles returned to their dying king, Faulconbridge closes the play with an “invocation to an England impregnable in unity,” which emphasizes the themes of rebellion and civil disorder. This summary of Reese's interpretation spares the reader a dispersed discussion of the play's thematic thrust in the following discussion of a number of image patterns in the play, which largely substantiates and partly modifies this orthodox definition of Shakespeare's political concerns in the play.

J. L. Simmons's admirable study of the play, which supports Reese's general position, has demonstrated Shakespeare's removal of “the structural and thematic incoherency” in his source-play.⁵ Outside the bounds of his structural study are changes that Shakespeare made in the language of the play. These changes have only been superficially noted. Shakespeare added a number of chains of imagery dealing with motion, specifically those of blood and humors, rivers, footsteps, and of haste and slowness. These image patterns reinforce the general identification of rebellion and order as Shakespeare's primary concerns. Of the most prominent of these images, the over-flowing river, Professor Tillyard says: “standing for any kind of unbridled excess, it does finally narrow itself to the excess of sedition and with a powerful, culminating effect.”⁶

This essay examines this sequence of river imagery and shows its relation to a larger chain of several more neglected sequences, indicating their contribution to a large theme of orderly motion which encompasses the generally accepted political themes of the play. There are other image patterns in the play which create unity and dramatic heightening. The fire imagery has been related to John's temperament and the fever that destroys him, as well as to the scene where Hubert threatens to blind Arthur. This image pattern, if it can be called a pattern despite its lack of significant variation, does not develop any thematic concerns, merely lending a unity of atmosphere or tone to the play.⁷ E. A. J. Honigmann, in the introduction of his Arden edition of the play, indicated several other recurrent images and words, those of bodily outrage, eye versus hand, and over versus under, as giving thematic unity to the play. For Honigmann, these patterns point to a theme of “right versus might,” a conclusion which he bolsters with references to Shakespeare's deviations from Holinshed.⁸ Right versus might, however, is not generally accepted as Shakespeare's primary concern here, as we have seen. Simmons has conclusively shown that Shakespeare is at pains to undercut our reliance on moral absolutes in reading the play. France fights for Arthur's clear lineal right, and we, like the citizens of Angiers, watch a world where right and wrong have been confused. The images of right versus might are used not so much to state a theme as to show the ambiguity of the conflicts in the play. The imagery which I will discuss, all of Shakespeare's invention and handled by him with significant variation, points not to right versus might but to orderly and disorderly movement as the chief concerns of King John.

The great concern for order lent Shakespeare and all Elizabethan writers a synthesizing and unifying vision. So, it is unfortunate that political concerns have been treated as discrete themes.⁹ For instance, Tillyard, who has written so much on the Elizabethans' unified world-view, faulted the play because the theme of rebellion, so prominent in the last two acts, “does not arise naturally out of the peculiar virtues of the first three acts. … Nor does it knit the last acts with the great scenes early in the play: it is simply not in our minds as we watch the armies before Angiers.”¹⁰ I should like to redefine the issue of rebellion by placing it with other themes, like those of succession, kingly character, and war, under a larger topic of orderly motion. The image pattern, as I will soon show, insists that rebellion is a continuation of earlier concerns in the play. Distinctions between topics like rebellion and succession, although necessary for pedagogy and description, have had a stifling effect, leading readers to look for and consider these topics as discrete components. If we can admit a vision in the plays which sees the correspondence of macrocosm, geocosm, body-politic, and microcosm, surely we should not be reluctant to view the various actions by human agents in terms of orderly movement generally. If for Shakespeare there was a notion “that the created universe was itself a state of music, that it was one perpetual dance,”¹¹ then surely he saw human order not merely in terms of social rank but of motion as well.

Tillyard, in arguing the absence of the Respublica theme in King John, passed over the following description of the commoners on their hearing of Arthur's death as being read “more for itself, for its sheer descriptive poetry”:

And when they talk of him, they shake their heads,
And whisper one another in the ear;
And he that speaks doth gripe the hearer's wrist,
Whilst he that hears makes fearful action
With wrinkled brows, with nods, with rolling eyes.
I saw a smith stand with his hammer, thus,
The whilst his iron did on the anvil cool.(12)

(IV.ii.188-94)

Tillyard felt that we do not think of these men as members of the body-politic.¹³ His failure to relate this passage to a larger poetic pattern of disorderly movement comes as no surprise. He found a lack of “earnestness and width of political interest in King John” because Shakespeare did not place the action in a context of larger patterns of order: “one sign of this diminished earnestness is that there is much less of the cosmic lore which had been abundant in the tetralogy, while the chief example of it is given a new, ironic, turn.”¹⁴ His chief example is the “old feeble and day-wearied sun” which Melune observes after John has left the field sick (V.iv.35). He also noted Lewis's ensuing reference to the sun: “the sun of heaven, methought, was loath to set” (V.v.1). But he failed to mention the reference to the sun's blessing at the nuptial festivities, an allusion to the orderly motion of the body-politic: “the glorious sun / Stays in his course and plays the alchymist, / Turning with splendor of his precious eye / The meagre cloddy earth to glittering gold” (III.i.77-80). When war shatters the wedding peace, two parodies of this image occur: Blanch's lament that “the sun's o'ercast with blood” (III.i.326) and the Bastard's remark on the heat which replaces the solemnizing sun with the devil, who “pours down mischief” (III.ii.1-2). Other important omissions by Tillyard are the observation of five moons of which “the fifth did whirl” (IV.ii.182-84) and, perhaps the core image for all imagery of disorder, the Bastard's description of Commodity as a “sway of motion” which makes the world, “Made to run even upon even ground,” “take head from all indifferency / From all direction, purpose, course, intent” (II.i.574 ff.). So, there are many images, especially of motion swayed from course and direction, which do provide a cosmic context for the political actions in the play.

The image of the dance, the perfect image of order in the body-politic, occurs. The most significant dance image Blanch employs is her appeal to Lewis to stay from war. The effect of this image is heightened earlier by the verbal and visual images of Lewis and Blanch and of John and Philip linking hands.¹⁵ First Blanch asks Lewis “Shall braying trumpets and loud churlish drums, / Clamors of hell, be measures to our pomp?” (III.i.303-04). Then, horror-struck by the declaration of war, Blanch imagines herself, “with both, each army hath a hand, / And in their rage, I having hold of both, / They whirl asunder and dismember me” (III.i.328-30).

The largest symbolic pattern indicating disorderly motion is as evident in the action of the characters as it is in their speeches. Unlike Blanch's whirling asunder metaphor, these images are not tropes but are presented in the actual movements of the characters. They provide a unifying backdrop for, and a visual representation of, the imagery of motion in the speeches. Movements in the body politic throughout the play are made in great haste. Honigmann has related this haste to Fortune whose winds influence the speed of traffic across the channel, but it is also part of the overall concern for order.¹⁶

John is always urging haste. He says, “we must speed / For France, for France” (I.i.178-79); he bids Philip send a “speedy messenger” to Constance and, when they are only off to a wedding, urges, “go we, as well as haste will suffer us” (II.i.554-59); he sends Faulconbridge with “haste before” to England (III.iii.6); and he exits from the scene shouting “On toward Callice, ho!” (III.iii.74).¹⁷ This aspect of John's personality has been singled out apart from the context it deserves: the haste of the other characters. Faulconbridge, a true Plantagenet, also urges haste: he bids John “Be stirring as the time” (V.i.48); he commands the army “Speed then to take advantage of the field” (II.i.297); and he enters the final scene exclaiming “O, I am scalded with my violent motion / And spleen of speed to see your Majesty” (V.vii.49-50). Nor are the Plantagenets alone in their haste.¹⁸

These impetuous actions are related to, and paralleled by, hasty movement within the microcosms of individual characters. This association is facilitated by the use of heat imagery to describe both actions and emotional states: “hot rash haste” (II.i.49) and “I am burned up with inflaming wrath” (III.i.340). The most important passage where speed within the body is discussed is John's conversation with Hubert over Arthur's fate. Here John says that were it a drowsy, somber night he could communicate his thoughts to Hubert: “if that surly spirit, melancholy, / Had bak'd thy blood and made it heavy, thick / Which else runs tickling up and down the veins” (III.iii.42-44). The ordering of the body, its humors, is defined in terms of the tempo of movement. Elsewhere thoughts are even expressed in terms of moving humors when Hubert says “Within this bosom never ent'red yet / The dreadful motion of a murderous thought” (IV.ii.254-55).

Like rashness, slowness both within and without man is also symbolic of disorder. As we have seen, John needs drowsy melancholy to speak his request to Hubert just as Hubert needs it to perform the deed. Constance refuses to go with Salisbury, for she says “grief is proud and makes his owner stoop” (III.i.69). Besieged with troubles and, perhaps, fear, John is asked by the Bastard “wherefore do you droop? why look you sad?” and he is advised to “Govern the motion of a kingly eye” (V.i.44-47). John dying is a “faint swan” who sings “His soul and body to their lasting rest” (V.vii.24). His lack of movement has been emphasized by his being borne on a stretcher earlier and in this scene. The Bastard's hasty entrance also emphasizes John's clod-like stillness, as does Prince Henry's remark after John's death: “Even so must I run on, and even so stop” (V.vii.67). Worth noting, too, is the Bastard's reference to the body-politic, identifying it with the king, as a “fainting land” (V.vii.78).

The images presenting civil and personal disorder in the tempo of activities combine with the actual haste of the human agents to create a poetic universe which unifies the diverse actions in the play and underscores their radical similarity. These images, which also heighten the dramatic tension, only rarely offer insights into conflicts and motivations. Shakespeare has made more thematic use of the images of movements without bounds or direction; with these he comments upon the political movements of his characters as they apply these images to themselves and others. Those images of misdirected movement drawn from the cosmos have already been discussed. All these images of ill-directed and overflowing movements have many antithetical images of order and bounds which serve to increase their complexity. The interlinking of these image groups is facilitated by their being mainly, aside from those of footsteps, images of fluids. The use of fluids as a symbolic system allows images representing order in the body (rheum and blood) to be related to those representing order in the land (water of rivers and oceans).

One of the most conspicuous of the non-fluid images, the footstep and footpath group, refers to both the theme of rebellion and that of usurpation, and, thus, it unifies them, reducing them to comparable disorders. The image first occurs when the Bastard says “I mean to learn [deceit]; / For it shall strew the footsteps of my rising” (I.i.215-16). Here, as often happens, the first use of the image is rather simple in its reference. Pandulph then uses it as he lectures Lewis. Pandulph says that he himself “Shall blow each dust, each straw, each little rub, / Out of the path that shall directly lead / Thy foot to England's throne” (III.iv.128-30). Here we see Pandulph's characteristic representation as the proud wind, an unbounded excess, with which war is blown up. The next image in this group occurs when Pembroke advises John to free Arthur whom John's “fears, which (as they say) attend / The steps of wrong,” have imprisoned (IV.ii.56-57). The previous use of the image, insofar as it provides a context for this configuration, insists upon the usurpatory direction of John's path, and aligns John's motivations with those of Lewis.

The dramatic effect of these recurrent images tends to snowball, for they derive considerable force from their earlier use to depict usurpation and ambition. With Arthur's death Salisbury refuses to “attend the foot / That leaves the print of blood where e'er it walks” (IV.iii.25-26). Next, the Bastard, also reacting to Arthur's death, discovers “I … lose my way / Among the thorns and dangers of this world” (IV.ii.140-41). Here, the metaphor insists upon the real uncertainty of the Bastard's condition and urges the reader to pay attention to the path that he chooses, unlike those who use the metaphor before him. Then Salisbury comments on his uncertain position in the French camp with “we step after a stranger” (V.ii.27), and again the image focuses our attention on the movements which determine the meanings of the plot. When Salisbury resolves with the other rebels to return to the English king, by using a variation of the same image, “we will untread the steps of damned flight” (V.v.52), he recalls the facts of his flight and brings the complications of the plot to bear on his decisions.

In all these cases, political actions of different kinds are defined in terms of following a path. The imagery, by its recurrence at critical moments of choice, heightens the dramatic tension. But it also brings with it a context of other, previous choices with which the reader may judge the choice made. Because the metaphor is usually related to misdirected movement in the play, and because the metaphor of the path is also a religious commonplace outside the play, each passage where it occurs presents the audience with an opportunity to pick the exemplum and to reflect on his own difficulties in the world outside the play. In this way, the commonplaceness of the metaphor gives to the reader a text on which to make his own sermon.¹⁹

There are numerous images of boundaries which restrict excess and are the antithesis of overflowing. One such is Faulconbridge's exclamation “happy he whose cloak and center can / Hold out this tempest” (IV.iii.155-56), a remark that recalls the walls of Angiers. Angiers, which the armies would beat “till unfenced desolation,” becomes the primary symbol in the play of boundaries. Much has already been said by others about its walls as a metaphor,²⁰ but as an image restricting the passage of blood no one has as yet spoken. Unlike the author of TR, Shakespeare repeatedly describes the battling armies outside of Angiers in terms of blood: the warmen are “well-born bloods” (II.i.255, 278), who come to “spout” blood against the city and create a sea of blood through which the French will “stalk in blood” to the “harbour” of the gates (II.i.255-66). Wolfgang Clemen noted the frequent recurrence of the blood imagery, defining it as premonitory to John's boiling blood in Act Five;²¹ he treated its dramatic use, however, and did not relate it to any thematic pattern.

Shakespeare seems to have used this imagery to gloss the speeches of his protagonists. There is a kind of dramatic irony when John tells Angiers that it is he who prevents “bloody power to rush upon your peace” (II.i.221), for John's use of the metaphor is clearly inconsistent with its other uses where it is the city's walls which protect it. The thematic reference of the blood imagery is dependent on the correspondence between the land and the body. In disorder, a flood of humors flows out of the body of England. John makes this analogy when he remarks of England: “in the body of this fleshly land, / This kingdom … civil tumult reigns” (IV.ii.245-47). This image pattern implies that disorder exists in the body-politic, regardless of whether the outpouring represents troops sent to France or those rebellious at home (I.i.66; V.i.12-13). But the blood imagery also suggests a relationship between the disorders of the king and those of the land. Before John announces Arthur's death, observing the color of the king to change, Salisbury says “His passion is so ripe, it needs must break,” and Pembroke replies “And when it breaks, I fear will issue thence / The foul corruption of a sweet child's death” (IV.ii.79-81). In this instance, all the humor imagery is related to the humor of the king, implicating John in many of the motions described in terms of humors flowing out on the land. It is John's failure to control his humors which is causing the disturbances; he himself implies this when he complains to Hubert of servants “that take their king's humors for a warrant / To break within the bloody house of life” (IV.ii.209-10).

Now let us consider the sequence of river images, which, more than any other sequence in the play, is varied significantly to develop the political themes of the play. The image first occurs when John uses it to reiterate his initial command that France “permit / Our just and lineal entrance to our own” (II.i.84-85). After the undetermined, initial battle, John asks:

Say, shall the current of our right roam on?
Whose passage, vex'd with thy impediment,
Shall leave his native channel and o'erswell
With course disturb'd even thy confining shores,
Unless thou let his silverwater keep
A peaceful progress to the ocean.

(II.i.335-40)

Philip's reply, “England, thou hast not sav'd one drop of blood / In this hot trial more than we of France,” caps the river image with one of blood. The effect of this juxtaposition can only be to undercut John's silvery current and the right it represents, and to suggest the cloudy confusion of right and wrong throughout the discussion of rightful succession in Act Two. Also, John's image supports the image of Angiers holding out the sea of blood—John's river has already overflowed its banks.

The next river image occurs in Hubert's marriage proposal. Here, unlike its earlier use, it has a straightforward intention, the water implying union not blood, the banks implying kings and not Angiers:

O, two such silver currents when they join
Do glorify the banks that bound them in;
And two such shores to two such streams made one,
Two such controlling bounds shall you be, kings.

(II.i.441-44)

This image, analogous to Spenser's marriage of the Thames and Medway, is an apt symbol of love and union. Peace, too, is symbolized in the union; the waters of England and France which spilled over on the land will run in union through proper bounds. The image may have another effect, however, a premonitory one. The earlier use of the metaphor and the profusion of blood imagery may provide an ironic and prophetic context for a union so expressed.

The image next occurs in Constance's simile describing Salisbury's tears. After Salisbury tells her of Arthur's undoing by the marriage of Blanch and Lewis, she responds: “Why holds thine eye that lamentable rheum / Like a proud river peering o'er his bounds” (III.i.23-24). Constance's rehandling of the image suggests that England and France, their merged rivers, overflow on the shores of the noble Salisbury, who represents a kind of righteousness in the play. That this reworking of Hubert's image is conscious is suggested by her use of the marriage of fluids image later in the scene. There she says to King Philip: “You came in arms to spill mine enemies' blood / But now in arms you strengthen it with yours” (III.i.102-03). These parodies of the marriage images insist on Constance's viewpoint, urging the reader to make comparisons and to analyze. Constance's use of the image suggests a dual truth: the marriage from her perspective of absolute, single-standard justice, though it is good for the two nations, is wrong, for it prevents Arthur from receiving what Simmons calls his “impractical and impotent” right.²² Thus, she turns John's current of right and Hubert's of union back into one of rheum and blood.

Shakespeare is using the river image to reflect and create ambiguity concerning the question of succession, a use of metaphor that Clemen does not find until the tragedies. Clemen defines this sophisticated use of imagery as implanting “certain expectations in the minds of the audience”: “it puts riddles, as it were, and hence arises a dramatic tension which is not without influence on the imagination and attitude of the audience.”²³ The river imagery here, by its reappearance in a new configuration at related and parallel scenes, has this structural significance. Also, as we have seen, every stage of Salisbury's rebellion is accompanied with a new variation of the footstep image. Clemen's failure to find such imagery in the history plays may be due to a bias concerning Shakespeare's sophistication and intention at the time. Clemen writes that this “more veiled, unobtrusive and indirect manner of expression offered by imagery corresponded to the characteristic art which Shakespeare used on many levels in the tragedies, whereas, in early plays, it had been his aim to make everything as clear as possible.”²⁴ That ambiguity existed in the early plays, ambiguity of conflict and character which would lend complexity to his imagery, we are now more apt to assume. Simmons demonstrates how Shakespeare handled the issue of right succession in Act Two with fine ambiguity, leaving neither side in the right. Jonathan Price claims that, “as he re-worked each scene of John's story, we see that Shakespeare has deliberately moved in the direction of provocative ambiguity.”²⁵ Price proceeds to tell us that the proper way to study the history plays is with a view to explaining how they draw so many varied interpretations, how Shakespeare produced such “fascinating artifice.”

Let us now consider how the river images develop the theme of rebellion in the final acts. In addition to an earlier, bloody handling of the image to suggest union,²⁶ Salisbury uses the image when, speaking for the nobles, he expresses their return to their proper motions:

We will untread the steps of damned flight,
And like a bated and retired flood,
Leaving our rankness and irregular course,
Stoop low within those bounds we have o'erlook'd,
And calmly run on in obedience
Even to our ocean, to our great King John.

(V.iv.52-57)

The key to Salisbury's image lies in the conventional use of swollen floods to represent pride.²⁷ Rebellion, like all forms of resistance to bounds, would represent proud motion so that, as Simmons notes, the seditious nobles have been guilty of pride: “They are simply not qualified to judge and seek revenge. Vengeance belongs to God … because He alone can determine, especially in this ambiguous case, the degree of guilt.”²⁸ Thus, Tillyard excuses the “gross inconsistency” of comparing John to the ocean and of calling him a great king, for they are swearing allegiance “to the anointed King of England, not to the bad King John.”²⁹

The earlier use of the image, twice, to describe Salisbury's and Hubert's reaction to Arthur's fate, operates as a context here, complicating the image. Although like swollen rivers they did rebel, the reader recalls the swollen rivers of blood and rheum which mitigate their rebellion. What Tillyard and others have not mentioned about the logic of the image is that, since John is identified with the ocean, the bounds the nobles stoop within must be the laws of the land. Hubert had emphasized the role of the kings as banks, if only ironically, in his use of the metaphor in the wedding proposal (II.i.441-45); so, John's departure from that role is a kind of censure of the king, recalling the behavior which drives the nobles to rebel. Finally, when the image is introduced following the footsteps image, even greater mitigating circumstances are recalled. This knitting together of the various patterns of imagery connoting disorderly motion is characteristic of Shakespeare's poetic artistry in the play.

The final river image occurs when John, wrapped in his death-struggle, berates the nobles: “none of you will … let my kingdom's rivers take their course / Through my burn'd bosom” (V.vii.36-39). Again, it seems that the previous occurrence of the image provides a context or detail for its next configuration. John's use of the image is bitterly ironic; posited as the ocean in the last variation of the image, he represents himself here as an ocean whose rivers have ceased to flow to him. We know from the last occurrence of the image that the nobles are no longer impeding this movement. Two interpretations come to mind. Shakespeare may have wanted us to see John dying of a poison which his kingdom, a kingdom he has viciously sought to maintain, cannot cure him of. Here the incident suggests a sermon on the vanity of earthly power when faced with death. Or Shakespeare may be implying that the people have ceased to give their obedience to John, that he dies without a nation, that he is not the King of England to whom the nobles have returned. After all, it is Prince Henry with whom they are grouped on the stage.

There is one last water image to be considered in this analysis of unbounded motion. It may well explain what Shakespeare was doing when he moved Faulconbridge's admission of his having lost his powers in the washes from an unemphasized position in TR to the final position of the scene (Act V, scene iv). It has been urged by Honigmann that Shakespeare has the Bastard admit the loss twice to show his limitation as a kingly figure and to reduce his importance in the final scene when Prince Henry enters the play.³⁰ Shakespeare does seem to emphasize the event, but there is no need to denigrate the ideal servant who has demonstrated the rightness of loyalty and who speaks the concluding chorus of the play. In view of all the use of flood imagery, it should be surprising if this event were not given some symbolic reference.

An earlier reference to the sea graces Austria's encomium to England: “whose foot spurns back the ocean's roaring tide” (II.i.24). In the healthy state, England spurns the tides, but under John's foul reign, as the Bastard tells the dying king:

… the best part of my pow'r,
As I upon advantage did remove,
Were in the Washes all unwarily
Devoured by the unexpected flood.

(V.vii.61-64)

It simply will not do to attribute the loss to the stupidity of the shrewdest person in the play or to the lack of martial skill of that “devil Faulconbridge” (V.iv.4). That the actual ocean is capable of being used metaphorically I take from a remark of Chatillion's, that the invading volunteers “float upon the swelling tide” (II.i.74). Here the tide is associated with Fortune who blows the winds at sea and has swollen them up—high on her wheel—in rushing the English to France.

Therefore, I would suggest that the ocean's destruction of the Bastard's forces in the washes is symbolic of, among other things, Fortune's destruction of John, or simply of John's fall. The proper context for reading the Bastard's report are the lines that immediately precede it. The Bastard rushes into the Abbey to hear John state his condition:

The tackle of my heart is crack'd and burn'd
And all the shrouds wherewith my life should sail
Are turned to one thread, one little hair.

(V.vii.52-54)

John uses the ship on the sea of life allegory to depict his dying, which is the primary metaphor in the earlier history plays for stating the destruction of princes and political plans.³¹ Earlier John had depicted his fortune in terms of the tides. When, after the nobles desert him, the Messenger brings the bad news about the invasion and John's mother's death, John silences him. Then, the Bastard, entering to hear this, rebukes John, and the king justifies himself by saying: “Bear with me, cousin, for I was amaz'd / Under the tide; but now I breathe again / Aloft the flood, and can give audience” (IV.ii.137-39).

Thus, it seems that the force of the Bastard's report to John that “the Washes all unwarily / Devoured” his power suggests John's final failure to get aloft the flood. After all, John, on hearing the news, dies and is no longer able to “give audience.” Shakespeare has handled the report with dramatic finesse, heightening its emphasis. When John says that “My heart hath one poor string to stay it by, / Which holds but till thy news be uttered” (V.vii.55-56), he seems to be setting up this report of failure as his last word, his judgment. Only in this way would John be allowed, if only symbolically, the last word before his death.

Of course, more can be made of the image. The symbol of troops lost in the washes, like the river images, is ambiguous and complex in Clemen's terms, being part of a larger chain of images that run below the surface meaning of the play. The image can also be read as an indictment of John for injuring England, insofar as the troops represent the life-blood of the nation. Implicit in the Bastard's account when it is read in the context of Salisbury's allegory is that John is the ocean. Therefore, the image suggests that John has caused the loss of England's power. This reading also suggests that the Bastard's report is the final word on John. According to the logic of the earlier water imagery, the king should be the banks or boundaries which spurn back the tides, a function John has ceased to perform.

In King John, the imagery of unbounded movements, hasty and undirected motions, bind together the various political actions, such as rebelling and usurping, and, in this manner, unify the play's thematic concerns. The images of water and humors are the more revealing, both of Shakespeare's concerns in handling the historical materials and of his artistry as a poet. But the patterns depicting motion, like the footstep imagery, are also thematically conceived and linked with the other patterns into an over-arching complex. These images arise out of a larger number of images depicting slow and hasty motion, which tend to be more dramatic, more prone to unify the tone of the play, but less prone to reveal insights into speeches and incidents. Thus, in King John, considering just those integrated sequences of images depicting disorderly motion, we find that Shakespeare, through his imagery, has begun to express ambiguous and equivocal conflicts and characters and to produce a dramatic and intellectual ambivalence in his audience.

Notes

1. E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's History Plays (1944; rpt. London: Chatto & Windus, 1956), p. 221.

2. M. M. Reese, The Cease of Majesty (London: Edward Arnold, 1961), p. 264.

3. Reese, pp. 272, 277.

4. Reese, pp. 277-78.

5. J. L. Simmons, “Shakespeare's King John and its Source: Coherence, Pattern, and Vision,” Tulane Studies in English, 17 (1969), 53-72. Like Simmons, I will assume that the play The Troublesome Raigne of King John, and not Holinshed, was Shakespeare's primary source. Hereafter references to The Troublesome Raigne will be cited as TR. In his Arden edition of King John, E. A. J. Honigmann makes an imaginative case for dating King John 1590-91. But, since my study does not depend on a particular chronology, I have assumed the conventional dating, 1593-96, for the play. The conclusion of this paper, that Shakespeare's imagery is more mature than has been admitted, pertains to this discussion of chronology; it might, for instance, be used to argue for the later date. For an introduction to the dating controversy, see Honigmann's fourth edition (London: Methuen, 1965), pp. xliii-lviii, and Robert A. Law's defense of the orthodox view, “On the Date of King John,” Studies in Philology, 54 (1957), 119-27.

6. Tillyard, pp. 221-22.

7. E. C. Pettet, “Hot Irons and Fever: A Note on Some of the Imagery of King John,” Essays in Criticism, 4 (1954), 141 ff.; and Robert Stevick, “‘Repentant Ashes’: The Matrix of ‘Shakespearean’ Poetic Language,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 13 (1962), 366-70.

8. King John, Arden Shakespeare, 4th ed. (London: Methuen, 1965), pp. lx-lxv. Hereafter cited as Honigmann.

9. Irving Ribner, The English History Play in the Age of Shakespeare (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1957) for a definition of the history which employs a list of generic topics (pp. 25, 33 ff.).

10. Tillyard, p. 232.

11. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture (1943; rpt. New York: Vintage Books, 1961), p. 101.

12. G. B. Evans, ed., The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974). References to all quotations are from this edition and will hereafter be cited in the text.

13. Tillyard, p. 233.

14. Tillyard, p. 218.

15. The unclasping of hands is made the symbol of discord when Pandulph tells Philip to “let go the hand of that arch-heretic” (III.i.191). Philip then lends inward significance to the gesture (226 ff.).

16. Honigmann, p. lxv.

17. See other such images at IV.I.ll, ii. 176, and ii.268-69.

18. See the references to the haste of Lewis (IV.ii.112), Lady Faulconbridge (I.i.218-23), and the city of Angiers, provided the marriage occurs (II.i.448-49).

19. For a discussion of verbal elaboration as an incitement to the Elizabethan reader to generate his own meanings, see Marion Trousdale, “A Possible Renaissance View of Form,” ELH, 40 (1973), 179-206.

20. Honigmann, p. lxii.

21. Wolfgang Clemen, The Development of Shakespeare's Imagery (1951; rpt. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1971), p. 86.

22. Simmons, p. 62.

23. Clemen, p. 223.

24. Clemen, p. 223.

25. J. L. Simmons, “King John and Problematic Art,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 21 (1970), 26. For Simmons's argument that neither John's nor Arthur's side receives an absolute sanction, see “Shakespeare's King John and its Source,” 58-59. Recently, Larry S. Champion has analyzed how Shakespeare's dramatic design forces the spectator to assume an ambivalence toward the major issues (“Confound their Skill in Covetousness”: The Ambivalent Perspective of Shakespeare's King John,” Tennessee Studies in Literature 24 [1979], 36-55), and Eamon Grennan has argued that, calling into question the truisms of the first tetralogy, Shakespeare has his characters trample objective meaning with “stylistic acrobatics,” especially with paradox and oxymoron (“Shakespeare's Satirical History: A Reading of King John,” Shakespeare Studies, 11 [1978], 32 ff.).

26. The image occurs in a speech where Salisbury laments the twisted nature of his position in Lewis's camp: he wishes that “these two Christian armies might combine / The blood of malice in a vein of league” and fight the pagan (V.ii.37 ff.).

27. Honigmann, II.ii.23 n.

28. Simmons, “Shakespeare's King John,” p. 68.

29. Tillyard, p. 223.

30. Honigmann, p. lxxvii.

31. See, for example, 3 Henry VI, V.iv.1-32, where Margaret employs the ship metaphor. Note too that, when Arthur jumps from the tower, he does so in “ship-boy's semblance” (IV.iii.4).