[In the following essay, Stubblefield presents contrasting appraisals of John and the Bastard based on their differing perceptions of the chaotic, deceitful, and insecure political world of Shakespeare's King John.]

No two commentators read Shakespeare's King John alike, and in some instances there are directly opposed views as to what the meaning of the play is. What characterizes a large portion of the criticism that one reads on King John is its tendency to consider only one element of the play, such as characterization or imagery. Such criticism, while it is true enough in its limited way, cannot hope to derive a meaning which is valid for the total play. Most commentators seem reluctant to look at the play closely to determine just what its central issues are. One has the feeling that they have read the play perfunctorily and that they wish to deal with it as quickly as possibly so they can move on to the meatier subjects in Shakespeare. This surface treatment condemns the play out of hand, and while one must agree that King John does not rank with Shakespeare's great plays, it is much more significant than such criticism indicates.

A play, or any work of art, derives its meaning from its parts; it can be dissected, the parts analyzed and separate meanings derived for each of them. But, more important, it has meaning as an artistic whole. When all the parts are assembled and the play is whole again, then there is meaning to that combination of parts which is the play. The total meaning encompasses the meanings of the separate parts, but it goes beyond them; from the combination of the parts a greater, more significant meaning emerges. It is this total meaning that most commentators of King John have missed or have failed to consider. They deal well enough with separate parts of the play, but when it comes to bringing those parts together and considering them as a unity, they fail as critics. We have the notion as we read their remarks that they have the idea that King John is an early, insignificant work by Shakespeare; thus they are loath to spend much time on it. Either they have been unable to see the forest for the trees or else they have not considered the forest interesting enough to explore.

Perhaps it is true that King John is not a great play, but it is a good play, much better in fact than its critics are willing to allow. It has meaning and that meaning is available to one who is ready to look at the play as something more significant than a training ground for the maturing Shakespeare.

To identify a point of view which sees the play first as a unit and then considers the separate parts, we might reverse Shakespeare's “all the world's a stage” and say, “every stage is a world.” A world is created in King John; it is visible to the audience from John's opening speech to Faulconbridge's ringing close. To define and understand the world of King John is to go a long way toward an understanding of what the play is about. Looking at the play as a dramatic whole, what is the nature of the world which the audience sees portrayed in King John?

The world of King John is a world of confusion, of shifting loyalties, of deceit, of treacheries, of distrust, of insecurity. It is a world without a predictable order, a world without form, a world without meaning. The disorder extends from the most basic social institution, the family, to the most complex, the nation. Richard Faulconbridge does not know who his father is, and England does not know who her father is. Faulconbridge is England in microcosm. As the play opens, the rug of institutional security has been jerked from beneath the feet of England, and she is poised in mid-air, her feet above her head, awaiting the plunge downward that is sure to come and sure to end in a crash.

The individuals in an insecure world vacillate, or they shift their loyalties from one to another party; they look for the “best deal,” the deal that will insure their security. And so it is in King John. From the highest citizen of the realm, John, to the lowest citizen of Angiers, the people do not know what to do. They are caught between equal hostile forces. They attempt to evaluate the situation so that they can ally themselves with the stronger side, but the forces are balanced; they defy evaluation. John wears the crown, but Athur has the stronger legal claim to it. John is driven by his mother, Elinor; Arthur by Constance. John is backed by the English nobles; Arthur by France. John must defend his position; Arthur cannot abandon his. Each is a threat to the other to the extent that each must win or die. This delicate balance is established between a number of opposed forces in the play, and as the balance becomes finer the world loses more of its stability.

Fate and the acts of individuals have created the insecurity of the world of King John. What do the individuals who inherit this world do to stabilize it? Nothing. In fact, their acts to save themselves but add to the disorder and the meaninglessness of the world. Consider this: John gives up a niece and English claims on the continent to placate Philip of France, who, as his part of the bargain, betrays Constance and Arthur, whom he has sworn to support. The people of Angiers will not support either John or Philip and contrive to bring them to battle so that they can side with the victor. Pandulph persuades Philip to break the truce by promising him the support of the Pope. Hubert is asked, for political expediency, to murder Arthur, whom he loves. John, who suggests the murder, repudiates Hubert when he hears that news of the boy's death has leaked out and alienated both nobles and commoners. Pandulph tempts Lewis by promising him the English crown to persuade him to invade England and then betrays Lewis by going over to John when John relinquishes his crown to the Pope. The English nobles side first with John, then with Lewis, and finally with John when they learn from Melun that Lewis will put them all to death once John has been defeated and killed. Over half of John's army is destroyed by a freak high tide, and then a large portion of Lewis' reinforcements are lost in a storm at sea. Finally, John is poisoned by a monk whose commandment from God is, “Thou shalt not kill.” This is the picture of a mad world, unpredictable and insane. It is no wonder that Faulconbridge characterizes it early in the play by exclaiming, “Mad world! Mad kings! Mad composition!” or that he later reports:

… as I travell'd hither through the land,
I find the people strangely fantasied;
Possessed with rumors, full of idle dreams,
Not knowing what they fear, but full of fear.

Finally, becoming affected by it himself, he says, “I am amazed, methinks, and lose my way / Among the thorns and dangers of this world.”

Faulconbridge has characterized his world correctly. It is mad, ruled by mad kings, and controlled by a mad destiny. To Faulconbridge, the most stable character in the play, it is a sick, a disgusting, a terrifying place, where no man can know his friends and where even nature and fate consort to confound him and destroy his confidence. It approaches the absurdity of the Kafka world, and it is the forerunner of similar worlds Shakespeare will create in Hamlet, King Lear, and The Tempest.

Having created such a world, what would Shakespeare have the individual do to live in it? Does he suggest a way? An examination of how his characters cope with the problems of existence might provide an answer.

John attempts the politician's approach—he has been called a master politician. But he is a failure in the world. With all the power of his kingship, he is countered at every turn. Other humans with similar ambitions thwart him, fate thwarts him, and nature thwarts him. He cannot be a king because he lives defensively to protect his throne and his life. He cannot make a full commitment to life because a large portion of his commitment is already made to preserve the throne, not for England but for himself.

John's failure to live in the world is repeated by all the other characters in the play except one. Each of the other characters misses his goal because it has been determined by an ignoble ambition, personal greed and the desire for security. Each of them overreaches himself and is brought to humility, defeat, or death by it.

But there is one. There is Faulconbridge. He is a refreshing character, a product of a Shakespeare who has already recognized the world as unpredictable and dangerous, and who is pondering the fate of the individual in that world. In his later plays he will create the same world several times, populating it each time with different personalities and offering each time a less optimistic picture of the fate of the individuals born into it. Not that King John is a happy play. Far from it. But at this stage Shakespeare allows one of his characters a positive and optimistic stance, and the stance enables that character to exist, even succeed, in the world, albeit with some misgivings. In the later plays there is no place for a Faulconbridge. Some adopt his approach (Edmund, Hotspur) but they are not alive at the end. Hamlet, in a similarly meaningless and dangerous world, is unable or unwilling to assume such a positive control over his destiny. When he finally does, it is too late and he is doomed. Lear tires, relinquishes control of his world and sees it degenerate into savagery and insanity.

But Richard Faulconbridge, in the same formless and degenerating world, steps forward and commits himself to a course of action, and in doing so he saves himself and England. In the opening act he says, “Brother, take your land, I'll take my chance.” He has cast his die. With this repudiation of his name, this relinquishment of his property, this denial of commodity, and this resolve to act, he becomes a man responsible to none but himself and thus a man able to make a full commitment to each moment of existence. When he turns to Elinor and says, “Madam, I'll follow you unto death,” he pledges himself, like Kent of King Lear, to a cause from which he never turns. From this point he is John's man, not I think, because he is blindly patriotic or because he is deceived by John, but because he must be constant to something. He cannot fluctuate when all the world fluctuates about him. To be indecisive is to abandon oneself to the madness of the world. His salvation is his own consistency in an inconsistent universe. He does not represent, as Goddard says, “Truth.” He recognizes that there is no truth.

Faulconbridge is no fool. He is deceived by nothing; neither John, Pandulph, nor the circumstantial evidence against Hubert misleads him. He penetrates John's treachery, his duplicity, his compromises to commodity, and he doesn't like them. But John's cause—and England's—is his, and where can he go if he abandons it? Through his energy and devotion he gives the cause dignity and sees it triumph. He is the one optimistic note in a tragedy where the tragic truth evolves not from a grand figure with a tragic fault who makes a tragic error, but where the tragic truth is resident in the ignobility of lives forfeited because they are frightened, uncommitted lives that compromise themselves out of existence.

For this reason, despite our acceptance of him, Faulconbridge is not the hero of King John. He is just a sympathetic character. The play is a tragedy and John is the tragic figure. The world is his world, and the tragedy which surrounds John spreads to those about him, not because they are allied to him, but because they attempt to live as he lives. Compromise will not work any better for them than it will for him, and they creep about with their petty ambitions until the world takes note of them and squashes them.

Faulconbridge is a stand-up-and-declare-it man. He is a refreshingly dynamic character and Shakespeare does not forget him. He becomes a charter member in a notable company of Shakespearean characters. Aaron of Titus Andronicus, Richard of Gloucester, Edmund of King Lear have his directness and his penchant for positive action, but not his goodness nor his devotion. Hotspur and Faulconbridge are brothers in every respect but blood, except that where Hotspur chooses the wrong side and is destroyed, Faulconbridge manages the right choice and is left alive at the closing speech. These characters of whom we speak may err, but they are never niggling. They recognize who they are, what the world is like, and what they must do to live in the world, and they accept the challenge of their existence. Collectively they can be accused of many crimes, but compromise and vacillation are not among them.

One might object that this is a rather simple-minded approach to life which Shakespeare allows Faulconbridge. Perhaps it is, but it is an approach that has a chance to succeed. Did Hamlet or Lear, who lived in similar worlds, have better answers? Did Camus' stranger or Kafka's Joseph K. fare any better? Did Faulkner's Quentin Compson solve the dilemma? What answer does literature or life offer us that is better than Richard the bastard's when we finally recognize that the world about us is insane?