SOURCE: Hamel, Guy. “King John and The Troublesome Raigne: A Reexamination.” In King John: New Perspectives, edited by Deborah T. Curren-Aquino, pp. 41-61. Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1989.

[In the following essay, Hamel approaches King John as an adaptation of the anonymous 1591 drama The Troublesome Reign of John, King of England, noting that Shakespeare altered his source material in a number of significant ways, particularly his expanded characterization of the Bastard and his improvement upon the play's poetic quality.]

The comparison of Shakespeare's King John to the anonymous The Troublesome Raigne of Iohn King of England has been done so often that one should offer some justification for doing it again.¹ My reasons are both specific and general. The immediate cause is a recent note by Sidney Thomas supporting the “orthodox” opinion that The Troublesome Raigne precedes King John.² That claim now seems to me so strong as to need no further elaboration or support. One need no longer hedge or leave an escape route in assuming that King John derives ultimately from The Troublesome Raigne.

The larger justification for this study is the defense offered in Shakespearean criticism of the past few years for the independent authority of the separate versions represented by multiple-text plays.³ I do not suggest that this essay is to be considered as a contribution to the debate (or paper war) between those who adhere to the notion of a definitive text and those who support the separate-but-equal status of differing versions. I do, however, trust that the new willingness to entertain the merit of inferior or even “bad” texts provides a climate of tolerance permitting an unprejudiced view of the maligned The Troublesome Raigne.⁴

Certainly, The Troublesome Raigne has been generally misprized. E. K. Chambers calls it a “terrible” play.⁵ The bias introduced by the Shakespearean alternative has, one must feel, influenced the contempt for it expressed in the bardolotrous past: Edward Rose describes the play as “rude,” as descending at its worst to “mere schoolboy doggerel”; in its anti-Romish spirit it is “violent and vulgar,” in dialogue “rather dull, and lacking in variety and finish,” and in construction wanting “neatness and clearness.”⁶ Most recent opinion has hardly been more generous. M. M. Reese, for example, is as strongly expressive as Rose: The Troublesome Raigne's “pasteboard characterization,” its “meaningless iteration of defiance and lament” must have struck Shakespeare, the prospective reviser, as “wearisomely unsubtle and familiar.”⁷ But, if one sets it against the surviving historical plays of the period, The Troublesome Raigne is a remarkably advanced work. One need only read the chronicle accounts of the times of King John and contemplate assembling the vicissitudes of his victories and defeats overseas and the confusing alternations of his wavering fortunes at home into a sequence of dramatic events bearing some sense of coherence to appreciate the craftsmanship of the playwright. As Simmons remarks, “Of the known contemporary dramatists, only Shakespeare and Marlowe show the structural powers for handling such sprawling events from the chronicles.”⁸

The striking novelty of The Troublesome Raigne, however, is the invention of the Bastard, a character who, so far as it is possible to determine, is created from slight and scattered hints in the chronicles.⁹ As a parodistic figure the Bastard brilliantly mocks the dynastic confusions attending the state of John Lackland. The appositeness of the cases is, if anything, more strongly urged in The Troublesome Raigne than in King John. The younger Faulconbridge insists on the inviolate sanctity of the laws of succession:

                                                                                let Fauconbridge enioy
The liuing that belongs to Fauconbridge,
And let not him possess anothers right.(10)

The legal principle involved is different in each play. In The Troublesome Raigne, John states clearly that legitimacy is the issue. If Philip, though the elder, is illegitimate, then “by Englands law” his patrimony devolves upon his rightly born younger brother. In King John, John cites a quite different rule. Marriage is the guarantor of legitimacy. If a cow is impregnated by a neighbor's bull, the resulting calf belongs to the farmer who owns the cow. In each play the issue is settled by the same act of volition. Philip declares his bastardy. Doing so in The Troublesome Raigne he conforms to a law that disinherits him. The Bastard's repudiation of his estate in King John is more quixotic and made in circumstances that weaken the precise parallelism between the Bastard and John. The principle that the cow-owner keeps the calf makes the semblance of legitimacy—born in wedlock—a consideration superior to the fact of illegitimacy—sired by a neighbor. The shift seems related to a hardening of moral tone in King John and to a reconsideration of the place of the Bastard that gives him more independence as well as more prominence than he has in the earlier play. The point to make now, however, is the remarkable inventiveness that underlies the creation of such a character. A way to appreciate the achievement of the author of The Troublesome Raigne is to recognize that he fixes in the person of the Bastard the thematic elaboration, the dramatic expansion, and the energy conventionally provided by the comically reflective underplot of Tudor drama.

What is even more significant about the Bastard, however, is that he is contained within a context that is generically foreign. He belongs in historical romance. His place is in works like the Earl of Huntingdon plays. He is in his fictional kind the counterpart of Robin Hood; and the King John of his acquaintance should properly be the wicked fabular-figure of the Robin Hood tales. A principal consequence of the presence of “historical” characters in such plays—the Prince of Wales in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, King James and King Edward in George a Greene, and the like—is to authenticate the stuff of legend. By reversing the relation of figure and ground, the author of The Troublesome Raigne qualifies the formulaic security of romance. King John, as I shall argue later, exploits the possibilities of the generic doubleness, but the crucial accomplishment is achieved by The Troublesome Raigne. Indeed, the originality of The Troublesome Raigne is such that, despite the banalities and gross inadequacies of the play, it is difficult not to suspect that Shakespeare had a hand in it, at least in the plotting. No other of the possible candidates seems nearly so likely.¹¹

As a revision of The Troublesome Raigne, King John shows “improvements” that are often enough direct and modest. Infelicities are removed. Hardly has Chatillion claimed in The Troublesome Raigne that John has no right to “the Kingdom of England” than he addresses him as “King of England” (1.1.45). The Chatillion of King John is guilty of no such imbecility. He speaks to “the borrowed Maiesty of England” (TLN 9; 1.1.4) and gives his addressee no title. One may also observe in King John a sort of dramatic common sense not always present in the earlier play. In The Troublesome Raigne Constance and Arthur are present throughout the negotiations that lead to the marriage of Lewis and Blanch. For the last forty-four lines of the scene, while the deal is effected, Constance is forced to keep an uncharacteristic and inexplicable silence. In the equivalent scene in King John she is absent, and the king of France remarks that it is a very good thing she is, “for this match made vp, / Her presence would haue interrupted much” (TLN 861-62; 2.1.541-42). Yet, concern for explicitness or mundane clarity seems to have been of no regard during revision. John in the opening scene of The Troublesome Raigne decides to meet the challenge of Philip by reinforcing his strongholds on the continent before the French are prepared for him. To that end he privately advises Pembroke to conduct Chatillion to the coast, “But not in hast; for as we are aduisde, / We meane to be in Fraunce as soone as he” (1.1.62-63). In King John the king simply avers that, however quickly Chatillion returns to France, “ere thou canst report, I will be there” (TLN 30; 1.1.25). The explanation of ways and means is not the strong suit of King John.

The attempt to characterize the changes made to The Troublesome Raigne has led to judgments that are rather question-begging and critically suspect. May Mattsson speaks for many commentators when she describes Shakespeare's editorial function as “removing unessential, undramatic material.”¹² Bullough emphasizes how much by his alterations Shakespeare “gained in economy” over his original.¹³ As descriptive terms these are problematic. Even to demonstrate dramatic economy—presumably the achievement of an effect with a lesser expenditure of words and theatrical time—proves difficult. A claim might be made for Shakespeare's handling of a speech in which Pandulph denounces John. The condemnation is made in terms that evoke Counter-Reformation campaigns against Elizabeth. After the battle in which Lymoges is killed and Arthur captured, Pandulph promises “free pardon” to those who will undertake “holy warres” against the “English heretiques” (1.10.8, 15). In the altered version, Pandulph, who has exercised his antischismatic vocabulary earlier in the play, substitutes for the obligations of the faith in the assault against John a cynical assurance to Lewis that the expectations of Realpolitik favor his ambitions. John will find himself forced to murder Arthur and will by the deed lose the support of his countrymen. The echo of Elizabethan circumstances, however, is introduced by Philip's complaint, without parallel in The Troublesome Raigne, that “a whole Armado” of his forces has been “scattered” (TLN 1384-85; 3.4.2-3). Though the reference in King John is brief and oblique, its import is much the same as that of the long speech by Pandulph in The Troublesome Raigne.

A different sort of economy is gained by substituting for three messengers bearing one message each to the Dauphin in The Troublesome Raigne one messenger with three items of information to give. The results, however, represent something other than the saving of time and manpower. The circumstances are not quite identical. The messengers enter in The Troublesome Raigne to inform Lewis, respectively, that the English lords have abandoned him, that his fleet has been lost on Goodwin Sands, and that the English forces have been “ouerwhelmed” attempting to cross the Lincoln Washes. The messenger in King John has a somewhat different report:

The Count Meloone is slaine: The English Lords
By his perswasion, are againe falne off,
And your supply, which you haue wish'd so long,
Are cast away, and sunke on Goodwin sands.

(TLN 2536-39; 5.5.10-13)

In one case Lewis is given a final item of welcome news to offset the first two reports. In King John all the news is bad. The audience's perception of Lewis's success is quite different in each play.

It seems to me altogether evident that these last examples represent the substitution of one dramatic effect for another and cannot be adequately judged according to such a criterion of “improvement” as “economy.” One striking factor in these two accounts is the extent to which details are shuffled. The same information is given to the audience and the same things happen in both plays; but the terms and placing of presentation are crucially different. One more example—slight though it may be—is sufficient further illustration. The death of Queen Elinor is a datum in each play. We are told of the event in The Troublesome Raigne after the death of Arthur and the rebellious intentions of the English lords have been confirmed. The “distraught” king in a despairing catalog of his woes informs the Bastard that his mother, his “onely hope and comfort in distresse, / Is dead” (2.2.117-19). In King John the information is provided much earlier in the play. A messenger enters after the lords leave because they think Arthur is dead (although we know him to be still alive) and informs John that a French fleet is underway and that Elinor is dead. In the first case the information is given secondhand and corroborates a process of deteriorating fortune. In King John the news is news indeed to all, and it helps to initiate the train of events that brings about the king's downfall. The result of such alterations, petty in themselves though many may be, is to bring about a transformation of the original play.

The scene between Arthur and Hubert provides an especially telling illustration of the consequences of Shakespeare's adjustments to his original. The presentation in The Troublesome Raigne centers on the moral status of Hubert's commission. The debate between the two is formal, proceeding for some time in rhyming couplets shared between the two speakers. The matter is resolved by a decision of “conscience”:

My King commaunds, that warrant sets me free:
But God forbids, and he commaundeth Kings.

(1.12.122-23)

In King John the appeal is purely one of pity. Indeed, the pathos of Arthur's innocent words so moves Hubert that he decides to “be sodaine, and dispatch” lest the boy “with his innocent prate … awake my mercie” (TLN 1598-1600; 4.1.25-27). When Arthur reads the warrant commanding that he be blinded, he asks simply, “Haue you the heart?” Hubert, at the end of the debate, surrenders to the appeal for mercy. There is a sharp, almost total, distinction between the matter of “conscience” in The Troublesome Raigne and the matter of the “heart” in King John; and each episode is shaped to emphasize its central concern.¹⁴ The opening of the scene in The Troublesome Raigne is marked by irony. Hubert, in order to lure the prince within reach of the accomplices who are to help in the blinding of Arthur, invites the boy to leave the room in which he has been imprisoned and “take the benefice of the faire euening” (1.12.13-14). Arthur expresses his gratitude: as one “to whom restraint is newly knowen” the chance to get out is welcome, and he “would not loose the pleasure of the eye” (16-19). By contrast, the opening section in King John stresses the bonds of friendship that exist between prisoner and warder, bonds that render Hubert's task especially heinous. Shakespeare sacrifices the irony that in The Troublesome Raigne produces an effect of detachment: we are aware that Arthur's words have a sardonic other meaning. The irony in the revised version is generated by Arthur's innocent expression of affection for his prospective executioner: the doubleness of those words is deeply sensed by Hubert, and our attention is on the emotional tension of the exchange between the speakers.

Shakespeare also adapts the imagery of the original to his new treatment of the episode. Once he has decided to spare the prince, Hubert in The Troublesome Raigne sets aside the instruments of blinding, saying, “Goe cursed tooles, your office is exempt” (125). Arthur notes in King John that the coal and the hot iron have cooled as if they “would not harme” him:

All things that you should vse to do me wrong
Deny their office: onely you do lacke
That mercie, which fierce fire, and Iron extends.

(TLN 1697-99; 4.1.117-19)

In The Troublesome Raigne the “office” of the instruments of torture “is exempt” as a result of Hubert's moral decision to discard them. There is little sense of the innate impropriety of the use to which they were to be put. The emphasis is upon volition. In King John the denial of “office” is treated as a sympathetic reaction of matter itself rebelling against the misuse intended by Hubert; it precedes and justifies Hubert's decision. Even iron has feeling. And one other very small touch may suggest Shakespeare's concern for the separate integrity of his new version. Arthur's first line in the scene in The Troublesome Raigne is “Gramercie Hubert for thy care of me.” Despite the stronger emphasis in King John on the prince's gratitude to his keeper, “gramercie” disappears. In the Shakespearean canon “gramercie” is used eight times, always in address to an inferior, usually a servant, or with condescension. It is removed from King John presumably because the implications of servility are inappropriate.

One cannot, however, build very far on the excision of one word. Shakespeare shows himself in general indifferent to the language of The Troublesome Raigne. Verbal echoes are very few; and they are represented mostly by the appearance of words in places altogether detached from the original context. In the first scene of The Troublesome Raigne the Bastard frightens his mother into admitting his true paternity by swearing to do to her “As cursed Nero with his mother did” (1.1.370). Very near the end of King John the Bastard addresses the rebel lords as “bloudy Nero's ripping vp the wombe / Of your deere Mother-England” (TLN 2406-07; 5.2.152-53). This occurrence, of course, need not be a remembrance from The Troublesome Raigne; but there are only four other references to Nero in Shakespeare's plays, and this sort of recollection of vocabulary does seem to happen elsewhere.¹⁵

Those terms that are picked up from The Troublesome Raigne may be guides to the informing concerns of King John. Early in King John Chatillion speaks of Arthur's claims to “this faire Island, and the Territories” (TLN 14; 1.1.10). The curious “Territories” is glossed by its use in The Troublesome Raigne, where it clearly means an adjunct or subordinate possession.¹⁶ The distinction between England and the rest of the inheritance initially claimed by John proves to be crucial—to my mind, central to the “historical” character of the play—as John comes to be presented less as a Plantagenet claimant to part of his father's empire and more simply as King of England. The separateness—and the greater significance—of England is indistinct in The Troublesome Raigne, despite the references to the “Territories,” but prominent in King John, where it is supported by such references, all unique, as that to “English Iohn” (TLN 303; 2.1.10) and by the Gaunt-like picture of England as a “Water-walled Bulwarke” (TLN 320; 2.1.27).

A second noteworthy extension of the language in The Troublesome Raigne is the reapplication of its images—though King John ignores the imagistic expression of its predecessor almost completely. When the adaptation is made, the consequences may be striking. Salisbury in The Troublesome Raigne greets the invading Lewis with these words:

Welcome the balme that closeth by [?up] our wounds,
The soueraigne medcine for our quick recure,
The anchor of our hope, the onely prop,
Whereon depends our liues, our lands, our weale,
Without the which, as sheepe without their heard,
(Except a shepheard winking at the wolfe)
We stray, we pine, we run to thousand harmes.

(2.3.188-94)

In King John, Salisbury has recourse to the same body of imagery:

I am not glad that such a sore of Time,
Should seeke a plaster by contemn'd reuolt
And heale the inueterate Canker of one wound,
By making many.
.....But such is the infection of the time,
That for the health and Physicke of our right,
We cannot deale but with the very hand
Of sterne Iniustice, and confused wrong.

(TLN 2263-66; 2271-74; 5.2.12-15; 20-23)

The speech in The Troublesome Raigne is puzzling because the extent of the irony is uncertain. Salisbury seems honest in his respect for the Dauphin of France as a balmy shepherd; but the notion that a foreign—especially French—prince may be the savior of the English realm violates the deepest convictions of Elizabethan political doctrine. Salisbury is completely deluded. Yet the absolute nature of his conviction and his naïve faith that a disease must have a remedy are characteristic of the play. The Salisbury of King John knows very well that the physic is wrong. The more he extends the imagery of disease, the more clearly he betrays the error of his action in supporting the invader. He bespeaks a world of confused moral direction.

Michael Manheim writes of the “unrelenting alteration of language” that marks Shakespeare's adaptation of the earlier play. So thoroughgoing is the revision of The Troublesome Raigne that Shakespeare, says Manheim, “not only improved TR; he nearly obliterated it.”¹⁷ Amid the general obliteration there is, however, one major feature of the original so thoroughly curtailed as to represent very nearly the repudiation of a literary practice, a rejection that goes beyond a preference for different words and images or an alternative style. The Troublesome Raigne is in all sorts of ways devoted to ritualistic expression. Formulism is endemic. Messengers, ambassadors, and heralds, all such people, deliver themselves with a full reliance upon the high terms of their office. Here, for example, is the Sheriff of Northamptonshire (in part):

Please it your Maiestie these two brethren unnaturally falling at odds about their Fathers liuing haue broken your highnes peace, in seeking to right their own wrogs without cause of Law, or order of Iustice, and unlawfully assembled themselues in mutinous manner, hauing committed a riot, appealing from triall in their Countrey to your Highnes.

(1.1.75-81)

The King John equivalent is the following from Essex (in full):

My Liege, here is the strangest controuersie
Come from the Country to be iudg'd by you
That ere I heard: shall I produce the men?

(TLN 51-53; 1.1.44-46)

A posturing and self-conscious rhetoric is almost the norm of expression in The Troublesome Raigne. The lines below represent Constance in rather moderate, though still representative, form:

I trouble now the fountaine of thy youth,
And make it moodie with my soles discourse,
Goe in with me, reply not louely boy,
We must obscure this mone with melodie,
Least worser wrack ensue our malecontent.

(1.4.230-34)

Granted, the occasion is emotional—the words are spoken to Arthur on the wedding day of Lewis and Blanch, a day that confirms the alliance that destroys her hopes to advance her own son—and the speaker is by nature excessive. Yet, the nearest equivalent in King John evinces a different poetic character:

… thou art faire, and at thy birth (deere boy)
Nature and Fortune ioyn'd to make thee great.
Of Natures guifts, thou mayst with Lillies boast,
And with the halfe-blowne Rose. But Fortune, oh,
She is corrupted, chang'd, and wonne from thee,
Sh'adulterates hourely with thine Vnkle Iohn,
And with her golden hand hath pluckt on France
To tread down faire respect of Soueraigntie,
And made his Maiestie the bawd to theirs.

(TLN 971-79; 3.1.51-59)

The difference is not only one of improved poetic and dramatic skill. The alliterative patterns of The Troublesome Raigne represent a dependence upon schemes that are less indexes of meaning and emotion than substitutes for them. The device signifies the effect; therefore the device is the effect. The complaint by the second Constance that Fortune capriciously mars what Nature has made good hardly represents novelty of thought. But her utterance is not doctrinal, it is personal. Moreover, it is linked to claims elsewhere in the play about the workings of Fortune, and it finds echoes in other instances that relate desert to personal appearance: the Bastard looks like Coeur de Lion; Hubert's “abhorr'd aspect” invites his employment as a villain; Arthur wishes to keep his eyes only to “look on” Hubert. Constance has more to say in King John than in The Troublesome Raigne and very little of it is restrained; but her passion escapes the confines of rhetorical models and therefore represents the singularity of her feeling, not the universality of the mode.

The repudiation of verbal formulas is brought explicitly into King John by the Bastard. Given to “a good blunt” directness himself, he is contemptuous of verbal excess. When the Citizen of Angiers defies the besieging armies with words of warlike bombast, the Bastard mocks his presumption.¹⁸ Lewis's unprincipled declaration of love for Blanch in words reflecting the worst kind of courtly posturing receives a like condemnation. The Troublesome Raigne gives the Bastard no such lines.

The original versions of the two speeches ridiculed by the Bastard are not nearly so effusive as the parodies that replace them for the obvious reason that the conventions of expression in The Troublesome Raigne allow neither self-reflection nor much departure from a norm already rhetorically excessive. The introduction of the parody and the explicit repudiation of the style that the Bastard derides have two important implications. The first is that words are represented as both effective and deceptive. (The characters in The Troublesome Raigne realize that people lie, but their play provides no access through language to the identification of at least some of the liars. In King John we know that Lewis the wooer is lying.) The second development pointed to by the Bastard's literary criticism is that, simply by drawing stylistic distinctions, the play acknowledges its variety. With occasional exceptions the persons in The Troublesome Raigne adhere to the house style. King John—this is its most immediately evident literary advantage over its source—has fluent access to a range of modes. The consequences are not confined to the obvious merits that make King John a livelier, richer, and more interesting play. We have shifted from a fundamentally homogeneous context to one marked by variability. There is scope for a variety of voices and, consequently and eventually, for a variety of points of view.¹⁹

The theatrical equivalent of the purging of verbal forms is the rejection of ceremony. Even without comparing King John to The Troublesome Raigne one might notice that King John is unusually lacking in formal action for a history play. When one compares the work to The Troublesome Raigne the difference is extremely telling, in part because the earlier work is highly ritualistic. The Troublesome Raigne begins with a solemnity absent from King John. The impression created by the first speeches of Elinor and John is that the king has just ascended the throne and is giving his first audience. Chatillion and the Sheriff express their business with a generous resort to the terms of their office. At almost every possible opportunity The Troublesome Raigne exhibits formality. In King John, when he appears in England for the first time, Lewis simply walks on stage with his allies. The matching scene in The Troublesome Raigne has the following:

Messenger enter.
PENBROOKE.
What newes Harrold.
The right Christian Prince my Maister, Lewes of Fraunce, is at hand, comming to visit your Honors, directed hetherby the right honorable Richard Earle of Bigot, to conferre with your Honors.
PENBROOKE.
How neere is his Highnesse,
MESSENGER.
Ready to enter your presence.
Enter Lewes, Earle Bigot, with his troupe.

(2.3.146-55)

This sort of thing goes on all the time. One reason that there are, as noted earlier, three messengers in The Troublesome Raigne where one serves in King John is likely the greater scope for formal business afforded by the separate entries and representations. Seldom does anyone get on stage in The Troublesome Raigne without being announced. Incidents of tableau-like solemnity abound. The English lords swear formally on the altar to serve Lewis; the French lords swear formally, placing their hands on the same altar, to kill the English traitors once John is overcome; the rebels kneel before the dying John with daggers in their hands to signal their devotion to him and to Prince Henry. King John is much more offhand in each of these instances: the first two, in fact, are merely reported.

The most important ceremony missing is, of course, the coronation. Comparing Shakespeare's treatment of the “long chaotic” scene in which John is crowned in The Troublesome Raigne to the companion piece in King John, Manheim remarks that “the coherence of the scene is of course greatly enhanced by its beginning after the crowning rather than before it.” The events are, he says, “honed, compressed, tightened, unified, and poetically enriched.”²⁰ Manheim's judgments of The Troublesome Raigne depend, properly enough, on the perspective afforded by King John. Yet, the coronation should not be so easily dismissed. One cannot know how elaborate the business on stage may have been, but it obviously involved more than clapping a coronet on John's head. The fault of the ceremony is that it is too decisive. The king becomes, however suspect his motives for the second coronation, a consecrated being. How much stronger must be our reaction to seeing John surrender his crown and humbly sue to get it back from Pandulph when we have witnessed his assumption of regal dignity. Ritualistic events—and this one above all—tend to resolve the possibility of ambiguities. The coronation is not an event challenging the coherence of the scene in The Troublesome Raigne; it is the point of reference for all the other events.

The assault on ceremony is of a piece with the removal of verbal formulas because both represent in the earlier play an acceptance of reductive formulas. The king finds himself in The Troublesome Raigne perfectly comfortable with the design of romantic history. When he comes to adjudicate the Faulconbridge quarrel he resorts to a contrivance from folk stories: he devises an ad hoc ceremony requiring the mother and the older brother to swear thrice to Philip's legitimacy. Robert is understandably upset. It does seem unlikely that his mother will proclaim herself an adulteress or his brother declare himself a bastard. The scheme, of course, works. The play does not remain at this naïve level. Romance is circumscribed by the true happenings of history. Nevertheless, the folk element represents a factor from which The Troublesome Raigne never escapes and that King John, in its much more sophisticated understanding of its historical genre, must suppress. The devices of romance like the other formal presences of The Troublesome Raigne imply the controlling influence of convention. The difficult moral and historical issues of the play are given simplistic solutions that the formulaic structure of the presentation appears to validate:

My King commaunds, that warrant sets me free:
But God forbids, and he commaundeth Kings.

(1.12.122-23)

The Pope of Rome, tis he that is the cause.

(2.2.158)

Let England liue but true within it selfe,
And all the world can never wrong her State.

(2.9.45-46)

Such statements seem to have as much an ontological as a dramatic reference.

A third class of cancellation evident in King John concerns the details of exposition. The changes are especially prominent in the second part of the play—the scenes after John's return to England. Almost every detail in the narration is amended from the original. The Troublesome Raigne, especially in its account of the lords' rebellion and of John's dealings with Peter of Pomfret, is explicit and patiently reasonable about the order and timing of events and about the motives of the participants. Shakespeare's treatment of such details is cavalier. The version in King John manifests an impressive sense of “economy.” The details suppressed may represent “unessential material,” but not in terms of the ordinary laws of evidence. The reader who places the two plays side by side must conclude, I think, that for the author the elements obliterated were not merely expendable but inimical to the informing principles of the new play. It is probably true that the causality so carefully articulated in The Troublesome Raigne, satisfying as it may be to our affection for intelligible order, is unnecessary to dramatic presentation and may, in fact, obscure more important values. In King John, however, Shakespeare undermines rational explanation to such a degree as to call into question our ordinary faith in narrative exposition and our trust that events are knowable.²¹

Certainly, there is no reason to believe that the relative indifference to causality in King John means that Shakespeare is careless about the integrity of his play. The treatment of Hubert in these last episodes reveals, again, consistent differences in the issues that concern him. In both plays Hubert insists when the king blames him for Arthur's death that he had a “warrant” for his action. In The Troublesome Raigne, John replies in words that echo Arthur's successful argument against Hubert that the “seal,” because it establishes their deliberate commitment to an evil intention, damns them both. The speech appears to confirm the validity of Arthur's position. After the king's seven-line comment in The Troublesome Raigne, Hubert reveals that he has not killed Arthur. The issue remains one of moral legality. Although the king in King John also avers that the seal will “witnesse against vs to damnation” (TLN 1943; 4.2.218), he accuses his accomplice of the ultimate guilt because Hubert's “abhorr'd aspect” invited villainy and because when the king “spake darkly” of his intentions Hubert did not interrupt but did “let [his] heart consent.” The question is shifted, as it is in the scene with Arthur, to center on human relations and the promptings of the heart.

The added dimension of personal involvement is also extended in Hubert's next appearance. Hubert's attempt to persuade the lords that he is innocent of Arthur's death is both poignant and ironic in The Troublesome Raigne, but the episode is essentially self-contained. Hubert interrupts the lords as they mourn Arthur's death to assure them that he has spared the prince and that, if they rejoin the king, he will “conduct young Arthur streight” to them. They reject his claims of innocence, and he departs. In King John, Hubert's protestations that he is guiltless of the death of Arthur offer an important test of the Bastard's powers of judgment. His cynicism has been well enough instructed that he realizes Hubert may be lying, but he reserves a decision. The episode becomes for the Bastard emblematic of the “vast confusion” that permits at best qualified moral responses. Hubert, permitted to mourn the loss of “sweet breath” from the “beauteous clay” that was Arthur and to bear away the body, is allowed to express his last offices of affection and pity. The love that Arthur both invokes and prompts when he convinces Hubert to spare him is allowed a fitting extension.

Shakespeare's unwillingness to restrict himself to the narrow and almost legalistic conclusion given Hubert's dilemma in The Troublesome Raigne reflects his systematic suppression in King John of the comfort created by expressions that carry their own innate impetus towards resolution. His assault on formulas—on commonplaces and conventionalities, on presentation and representation, on ceremony and rite, on phrases and acts that breed their own termination, result, and pieties—reveals itself in almost every departure from The Troublesome Raigne. The coronation scene begins in The Troublesome Raigne, and only in The Troublesome Raigne, with John's boast of his security and success. (Indeed, a major reason for his second coronation is that the ceremony is to represent a “confirmation” of his triumph and to offer an outward “witnes” of the loyalty demonstrated by the lords towards their king and of the “Kingly care” of his subjects that John is consequently bound to express. Shakespeare, characteristically, neglects such explanations.) The dramatic presentation in The Troublesome Raigne intimates a medieval scheme of fall from prosperity. The author of the address “To the Gentlmen Readers” that prefaces the Second part of the troublesome Raigne of King Iohn appears to have such a view of matters. He reminds his readers that they last saw “Iohn repleate with blisse,” but that none can withstand “the changeles purpose of determinde Fate.” Such hints of limitation Shakespeare avoids. The suppression of the anti-Catholic business seems to me to answer to similar considerations. Certainly, a Bale-like John would be too simple for the play. Even in The Troublesome Raigne John's status as a prefigurement of Henry VIII is occasional and qualified. The objection to the antimonastic material is that it is in its way also restrictive. A number of suggestions have been made to explain why Shakespeare discarded the episodes with the monks and friars altogether: that they were too crude and antiquated; that he was of the old faith himself; that he could not afford to offend his patron, the Catholic Earl of Southampton. Such factors may, indeed, have had some force. But, certainly, one fault in material of this kind by the time of King John is its inflexibility. It is the stuff of burlesque, the matter of fabliaux. Even the scene in which the monk decides upon and plans the murder of the king cannot be presented seriously. The abbot, who overhears the monk, believes with farcical consequences that it is his own murder that is being contemplated. The antimonastic matter is generically confining in a play that as part of its strategy in establishing its own form appears to avoid even the incidentally schematic.²²

The clearest entry into Shakespeare's altered concept of the play is to be made through the Bastard. He has his genesis in fable; and in The Troublesome Raigne as a character he never fully escapes the limiting conditions of his fictional context. The lines of the story are very clear, consistent, and satisfying. He discards the humdrum security of a yearly two thousand marks (raised in King John to “a faire fiue hundred pound a yeere”) in favor of adventure and honor. He serves the lady Blanch in courtly fashion. He redeems Coeur de Lion's lion's skin from the craven Lymoges and offers his trophy to Blanch as a “Ladies fauour” and souvenir of his “first aduenture.” Though Lymoges evades the Bastard's challenge to a duel, as John tells his kinsman, the “honors thine” from the exchange. Later, the Bastard slays his adversary, thus revenging the death of Coeur de Lion. In the last scenes he is John's faithful captain and the proper spokesman for the patriotic declaration that ends the play. In his second coming in King John the Bastard is not so romantic a figure. His chivalric identity, his courtly service, even his heroic actions are curtailed. Instead of actually fighting with Lymoges on stage and defeating him, the Bastard walks on stage carrying a property head and complaining that he needs to catch his breath. Freed from the restrictions of type, he is allowed to become a commentator on events and a guide for our judgments of them. He nevertheless remains, as Robert C. Jones emphasizes in his helpful essay on King John, a “fictive presence.”²³ One result of that status is that he is limited in his scope of action. He cannot alter events that he was not actually able to influence in the first place. He cannot prevent the English forces from drowning in the Lincoln Washes. History governs fiction. The Bastard of King John has moved further into history than is the case with his romantic counterpart, and consequently in his double identity as “historical” and as fictional character he witnesses to the interchange of history and fable. On the one hand, fiction gives way to history. On the other, fiction provides what history lacks: form.

The Bastard in King John diverges steadily from his prototype until, near the end of the play, the two figures surprisingly coalesce. The rousing nationalistic appeal with which he closes the play is more eloquent than its matching piece in The Troublesome Raigne, but the import is the same. In The Troublesome Raigne the closing address is perfectly sufficient because there has been nothing in the play to challenge its simple affirmations. Indeed, the authority of declarative formality has been steadfastly advanced throughout the work. However, the adequacy of the Bastard's speech in ordering the closure of the more complex presentation of King John has been a central issue in the criticism of the play.

Some dislike the message and some the messenger. Burckhardt thinks that Shakespeare “saw no way to put Humpty Dumpty together again” and that “the orthodox sentiments at the end are faute de mieux.”²⁴ Virginia Mason Vaughan expresses a similar judgment: “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.”²⁵ Julia C. Van de Water finds the role assumed by the Bastard in the last part of King John incompatible with his character as it is initially established. The reason the Bastard has the last word is “simply that among the unprepossessing characters in this play there was no one else to whom Shakespeare could give his fine patriotic lines.”²⁶

More responsive to the play are those accounts of its conclusion that describe a link between the insufficiency of the Bastard and the limits of what it is possible to say. Alexander Leggatt concentrates on Shakespeare's use of the Bastard as “an unstable amalgam of participant and commentator” who at the close of the play becomes, as he is in the earlier scenes, “a point of reference” whose “primitive, amoral virtues” offer “the only way of living in a violent, chaotic world.”²⁷ For Leggatt the limitation of the Bastard's judgment corresponds to the narrow scale of possibilities offered by the world depicted in the play. For Eamon Grennan the Bastard in his last speech paradoxically undermines the official patriotism he advances. Throughout, the Bastard has been the agent of Shakespeare's mocking of the assumptions of historia. By surrendering his position “in so blatant and inevitably problematic a way,” the Bastard “sustains the critique he appears to have abandoned.”²⁸ Jones connects the need to make sense of time with the conscious attempts of the character, once he is forced to abandon his role of “angry observer,” to create right by asserting the only “fiction” that is serviceable.²⁹

The study of what Shakespeare has done to The Troublesome Raigne corroborates the sense expressed by those quoted earlier of a conflict between the formal expectations of poesy (or of historia) and the disorderly confusions of experience. By undermining the steadfast causality of The Troublesome Raigne, Shakespeare so qualifies the principles to which the Bastard's last appeal makes implicit reference as to affirm nothing much more than our need for closure.

There is nothing to be observed about King John that cannot be known without recourse to The Troublesome Raigne. The comparison of the two plays does, however, give a greater prominence to those features that are most radically altered from the original. It is easy to see how much Shakespeare added. It is surprising to discover how much he was willing to sacrifice. Dropped are scenes that must have had popular appeal: “faire Alice the Nun” discovered in the abbot's treasure chest, for example, and the Bastard chasing the cowardly Lymoges around the stage and stripping him of his lion's skin. The first might be discarded without much care, but why the second? Such elements, presumably, could not be accommodated within the design of this history, though the Gadshill escapade and scenes of low-life clownage are acceptable in 1 Henry IV. The indifference to motives and narrative detail that the source declares with considerable emphasis seems willfully negligent: it is one thing to inherit muddle and another to create it.

And yet the somberness that closes over the play precludes the larks with the comic monks and the buffoonery of the chase after Lymoges. King John opens with a marvelous display of energy and high spirits. The defiant John promises Chatillion that should he be “as lightning” in his return to France, the King of England will (by means unspecified) be there before him. The madcap Bastard throws away his inheritance preferring the “spirit of Plantagenet” to the worldly security of the Faulconbridge estate. But the adventures very soon turn sour for reasons all the more disturbing in that they are unclear and not easily avoided. What should John have done? Uncertainty becomes the prevailing condition of the play. Events assume the character they have when they are experienced within time—alms to entrophy: confusing, discontinuous, arbitrary, and marked by an irony merely incidental. Arthur kills himself in a desperate attempt to escape the king's rancor when there is no longer any danger; John gets blamed for killing his nephew after he decides not to harm him. Conventional appeals to agencies outside time are pointless. The Providence that wrecks the French navy on the Goodwin Sands and drowns the English army in the Lincoln Washes seems to have difficulty deciding what side it is on. There are “historical” gains accomplished by John's reign. Prince Henry inherits an English crown free of the uncertainties of imperial ambitions and the impediments of doubtful right that marked his father's ascent to the throne. Only the very large perspective of all the histories is capable of recognizing the importance of that accomplishment. Lacking such vision, the Bastard does the best he can.

Notes

1. Writing in 1960, James L. Calderwood complains that critics have been so preoccupied with “the source problem of the play, especially … the relationship between King John and The Troublesome Raigne,” that the character of the play “as a work of art in its own right has been largely ignored” (“Commodity and Honour in King John” in Shakespeare: The Histories, ed. Eugene M. Waith, 85). For extensive discussion of the relation between the two plays (hereafter in the notes generally referred to as KJ and TR), see especially the introductory matter in the Cambridge edition, ed. J. Dover Wilson, the New Arden edition, ed. E. A. J. Honigmann, and the New Penguin edition, ed. Robert Smallwood. See also Edward Rose, “Shakespeare as an Adapter,” reprinted in the TR facsimile prepared by Charles Praetorius, v-xvii; Geoffrey Bullough, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare 4:4-24; Virginia M. Carr, The Drama As Propaganda, 1-20; and J. L. Simmons, “Shakespeare's King John and Its Source,” 53-72.

2. Sidney Thomas, “‘Enter a Sheriffe’: Shakespeare's King John and The Troublesome Raigne,” 98-100. Professor Thomas's note concerns the stage direction in the folio at line 50. The character introduced has no lines and no one is indicated as speaking to him. Thomas points out that the “Shrive” who enters at the corresponding place in TR is “an active speaker and participant in the action” of the play and that he identifies himself by name. Moreover, his presence is explained: the sheriff has quelled the “riot” caused by the quarreling brothers and has escorted them to court at their own request to be judged by the king rather than by “triall in their countrey.” It is possible, as Thomas recognizes, that Shakespeare provided the nonspeaking sheriff as a means of bringing the fighting Faulconbridges on stage and that the author of TR expanded on the business. It is, however, very much likelier that the stage direction is vestigial and owes its presence to the TR original. Thomas's conclusion remains the most convincing explanation of the crux despite recent reconsiderations of his argument. See E. A. J. Honigmann, “King John, The Troublsome Reign, and ‘documentary links,’” 124-26; Paul Werstine, “‘Enter a Sheriffe’ and the Conjuring up of Ghosts,” 126-30; and Thomas, “‘Enter a Sheriffe’: A Shakespearean Ghost,” 130.

3. The (battle?) ground of the newest bibliography has been King Lear. As early as 1976, Michael J. Warren concluded from his study of Q and F that these are “separate versions of King Lear, and that eclecticism cannot be a valid principle in deciding readings.” (See “Quarto and Folio King Lear and the Interpretation of Albany and Edgar,” in David Bevington and Jay L. Halio, eds., Shakespeare, Pattern of Excelling Nature [Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1978], 105.) The consequences of the anticonflation movement are exploited at large in Gary Taylor and Michael J. Warren, eds., The Division of the Kingdom: Shakespeare's Two Versions of “King Lear” (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983). See also Steven Urkowitz, Shakespeare's Revision of “King Lear” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980). It would be inappropriate to try to provide here a readers' guide to all the documents in a substantial and controversial field of study. My purpose in invoking the approach represented in the texts I have named is to gain the advantage of treating the TR as if it were a quarto antecedent to the folio KJ.

4. Two of the most influential defenders of the opinion that TR must be derivative rather than original show themselves influenced by their low regard for the play. For Peter Alexander it is “difficult to understand” that, if TR is the source of KJ, it should be artful enough in its structure to be copied by Shakespeare and “yet show so little corresponding modesty or cunning in its writing” (Shakespeare's Life and Art [London: James Nisbet, 1939]: 85). It is easier to believe that the author of TR duplicated the events, which were easy enough to follow, but lacked the wit to match the language. Honigmann argues that the TR “features some recognized ‘bad quarto’ characteristics, being (i) a tissue of stolen phrases; (ii) a text much more untidy than ‘foul paper plays’ usually are, which, moreover, contains summarizing and descriptive directions” (New Arden KJ, lvi.). The mere existence of “bad quartos” as a category has had an influence on the assessment of TR according to that law by which a hypothesis creates evidence. Dover Wilson admits that his own claim for the “priority of the inferior text” is challenged by Pollard's recognition of “bad quartos” as “a special class by themselves” (Cambridge KJ, xix-xx). The opinion that TR is a “bad quarto” version of a play by Shakespeare of which KJ is the good version is advanced by E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's History Plays, 217.

5. E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare, Vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930), 367.

6. Rose, “Shakespeare as an Adapter” in Praetorius, vi-viii.

7. M. M. Reese, The Cease of Majesty, 262. The author of TR is, however, praised by Simmons (“Shakespeare's King John”) and by John Elson, who remarks upon his “skill as a plotter” and his “creative power” in the “depiction of the Bastard's magnetic personality” (“Studies in the King John Plays,” 185).

8. Simmons, “Shakespeare's King John,” 54.

9. A list of the possible antecedents for the Bastard is provided by Dover Wilson, Cambridge KJ, xxxix-xli. The character, Wilson concludes, “appears to be compounded of most of the valiant bastards in English history” (xli). See also Honigmann, New Arden KJ, xxii-xxv.

10. TR 1.1.127-29. Quotations are taken from the Praetorius facsimile edition of The Troublsome Raigne. For the quotations from King John I have provided both the through-line number (TLN) assigned in Charlton Hinman's Norton Facsimile of the First Folio (New York: Norton, 1968) as well as a reference to the Riverside Shakespeare.

11. None of the attributions that have been made carries much conviction. See the summaries of the candidates in Dover Wilson, Cambridge KJ, xviii-xx and Bullough, ed., Sources 4:4. Sigurd Burckhardt notes incidentally that he is drawn to the possibility, advanced by Courthope in 1916, that Shakespeare is the author of TR. Burckhardt is reluctant, as I am, to insist upon a claim so open to dispute and, anyway, ancillary to the argument of his essay as to mine (Shakespearean Meanings, 118 n. 1). I raise the unprofitable question of authorship because one's willingness to entertain the possibility of a Shakespearean influence on TR is related to the estimation one has of its quality. Burckhardt finds in TR the “decisive question” concerning the doctrine of degree that becomes the center of the reworked version (125). For Wilson, Courthope's bizarre suggestion of Shakespeare's authorship of TR is “one of the curiosities of criticism” (xix).

12. May Mattsson, Five Plays about King John, 8.

13. Bullough, Sources 4:20.

14. The scene is discussed at length by Burckhardt. He emphasizes that Arthur in KJ “never once employs the argument of higher authority and more terrible sanctions” (Shakespearean Meanings, 121). For Burckhardt the switch to an appeal based on compassion signals Shakespeare's desire to make KJ a critique rather than a confirmation of Tudor doctrines of authority.

15. Another possibly reshuffled word is the epithet “dunghill” which Bigot addresses to Hubert. Reese takes the term to indicate that the lords “are plainly influenced by aristocratic dislike of the low-born Hubert” (Cease of Majesty, 276). However, in TR the Bastard addresses Lymoges as a “dunghill swad” (1.2.140), and the Duke of Austria, however base his conduct, is hardly baseborn.

16. At 1.2.2 Philip refers to Arthur's title to the “Albion Territories,” an expression which seems in the context to mean the continental parts of the Angevin inheritance. Much later in the play the rebellious nobles are asked to swear allegiance to Lewis “as true and rightfull King to England, Cornwall and Wales, & to their Territories” (2.3.221-23).

17. Michael Manheim, The Weak King Dilemma in the Shakespearean History Play, 130.

18. TLN 761-70; 2.1.446-55. I find no sufficient reason for believing that the spokesman for the people of Angiers is Hubert. That the use of his name was brought about by confusion over doubled parts seems likelier than that the one character who becomes the active Hubert of the second half of the play begins his career as the Citizen of Angiers. Manheim's construction of a duplicitous Hubert whose mask of neutrality as representative of Angiers conceals a Machiavellian design to trick the French into accepting John's right to rule in England asks a lot of the evidence. See Manheim, The Weak King Dilemma, 147-50.

19. The old style of TR is not so thoroughly “obliterated” that no trace remains in KJ. It is a testament to the stylistic breadth of KJ that the old-fashioned formulaic writing can be resurrected—and to good effect. After Philip of France at Pandulph's entreaty abandons John, there is the following exchange:

    CONSTANCE.

    O faire returne of banish'd Maiestie.

    ELINOR.

    O foule reuolt of French inconstancy.

    (TLN 1254-55; 3.1.321-22)

    So the two might have expressed themselves in TR (although they do not). These are the last words that they speak in each other's presence, whereas in TR they have rather extended “brawles,” as Arthur calls them, later. The couplet of KJ links the two women, the most bitter and perhaps the ultimate antagonists of the play. Shakespeare brings the two together again when the Messenger reports that they have died within three days of each other. TR gives us no last word on Constance. Shakespeare's scheme is satisfyingly neat; and his modest couplet in an old style has its satisfying place in the scheme.

20. Manheim, The Weak King Dilemma, 137.

21. Robert Ornstein comments at some length on the loss of clarity in King John. He writes: “Although one cannot anticipate from one scene to the next which way the action of The Troublesome Reign will turn, the plot is lucid at every moment. One understands precisely why John does what he does, because his motives and intentions are always made explicit. … We cannot say that for reasons of dramatic economy Shakespeare was compelled to omit essential information about John's motives, because not many additional passages would have been needed to elucidate John's behavior and anticipate his plans. Two or three dozen lines added at the proper places in the dialogue would have dissolved the opaquity of crucial scenes and lent fluidity to the plot” (A Kingdom for a Stage, 90). There is, for Ornstein, who regards King John as a deeply flawed work affected by Shakespeare's “boredom with the assignment” of revising an old play, no particular purpose in the changes: “My impression is that Shakespeare was careless rather than obtuse” (99). Carelessness and obtuseness are not, of course, the only possibilities. The narrative system of TR, which stresses the intelligibility of plot and motive, seems to me replaced by a dramatic system, which implies the limitation of full understanding that characterizes real experience.

22. Simmons takes the view that the “Protestant cause” as it is presented in TR is “extraneous and jarring” because it has little bearing on the “genuine moral conflicts—the one between the king's and the rebel forces and the one within John himself” (“Shakespeare's King John,” 57). It was a mistake “to let John's defiance of the Pope represent an absolute spiritual value. … The structure and moral effect of TR clearly became incoherent as a result of the author's use of the Protestant cause as an absolute appeal, and Shakespeare carefully avoided it” (58).

23. Robert C. Jones, “Truth in King John,” 397.

24. Burckhardt, Shakespearean Meanings, 134, 140-41.

25. Virginia Mason Vaughan, “Between Tetralogies,” 419.

26. Julia C. Van de Water, “The Bastard in King John,” 146.

27. Alexander Leggatt, “Dramatic Perspective in King John,” 15-16.

28. Eamon Grennan, “Shakespeare's Satirical History,” 31.

29. R. C. Jones, “Truth in King John,” 417.

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———. “‘Enter a Sheriffe’: A Shakespearean Ghost.” Shakespeare Quarterly 38 (1987): 130.

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