SOURCE: Beaurline, L. A., ed. Introduction to The New Cambridge Shakespeare: King John, by William Shakespeare, pp. 1-62. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

[In the following excerpt, Beaurline traces parallels between the structural design and characterizations of King John.]

Like Shakespeare's other histories and tragedies, [King John] falls into two unequal parts, roughly equivalent to Acts 1-3 and 4-5.¹ The first part concerns two challenges to John's authority, one of which he finesses, the other he overcomes: the second part concerns the French invasion, which the kingdom survives but John does not. Part I is dominated by three massive scenes with Tamburlaine-like debates, used as weapons with intent to beat down an opponent. Part II still contains some big speeches, but the scenes are scaled down and they move ahead breathlessly from one catastrophe to the next. Part I creates the conditions for John's tragedy in a series of dubious and difficult choices, vows and broken vows, that foreshadow worse times to come. In the second part the characters still must choose, but in their compounded troubles events seem to slip from their control. As a result the world becomes so treacherous and unpredictable that oath-breaking seems more meritorious than oath-keeping.²

Therefore, in the world of the play most decisions are necessarily impure: an idea that Shakespeare also dramatises in the dilemmas of York in Richard II, and he devotes four plays—Julius Caesar, Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure and Coriolanus—to the futility of moral absolutism in politics. Although some of the characters make their difficult choices quickly, without agonising over them very much, John goes through a series of personal trials in 3.3 and 4.2, Hubert in 4.1 and 4.2, Salisbury in his passionate, hand-wringing speech at 5.2.12-39, and Blanche in 3.1.326-8. The audience is helped to piece out the implied human significance of events by the Bastard's two soliloquies and his occasional asides. The larger patterns of the play, especially its symmetries, also help define the issues and knit the two parts of the play together.

On the one hand are three power-brokers—Eleanor, the Citizen of Angiers, and Pandulph—who promote bargains between antagonists. They have mastered the arts of policy: a talent for knowing when to talk sweetly or to threaten, when to offer inducements and to compromise, and when to stand on high principles. What the Bastard calls Commodity, the vile-drawing bias of the world, a form of self-interest, is the main purpose of their statecraft, whereby a prince's or pope's personal interest is thought to be coextensive with national and church interest.³ Their results are generally mixed, but in one case the bargain is relatively happy and long-lasting. In the dispute between the Falconbridge brothers Eleanor offers the Bastard a different kind of inheritance if he wants to join the Plantagenet family and will give up his land to Robert. Everyone is satisfied, nor does the Bastard give up all commodity, as is often claimed, for his is an achievement of self and of social standing to be recognised as the son of Cœur-de-lion. This is the only bargain that holds to the end of the play. Other bargains with a shorter life generally harm someone. The Citizen of Angiers's proposal of a dynastic marriage between Blanche and the Dauphin saves the city from destruction, recognises John's right, and enriches the provinces of France. His bargain receives Eleanor's crafty approval and amendment, as she whispers to John (2.1.467 ff.). But to one of the other mother-son pairs it leaves only a token satisfaction; Arthur, created Duke of Brittany, is given just the city of Angiers as his bitter inheritance.

The arch-politician of them all enters in Act 3, Scene 1 as if in answer to a widow's cry for help, but Pandulph is not heaven's avenger, for he soon shows that he has no interest whatsoever in Constance's need. He represents the power of the church militant and uses its curses of interdiction and excommunication to discipline rebellious kings. If France's vow of friendship impairs the interests of papal authority, the vow must be broken at any cost. Thus he drives a wedge between the two kings, and he promotes armed discord all right, but it is part of a cruel game in which Arthur once more becomes a pawn, this time a fatal pawn of French and papal aspirations. Since the Citizen disappears from the play after Act 2 and Eleanor soon fades away, Pandulph, the quintessential power-broker, has the stage clear for his kind of shuttle diplomacy. Henceforth, he instructs the Dauphin in military opportunism, raising his hopes to become King of England by exploitation of Arthur's inevitable murder and by the consequent civil disorder. Then, when England is pressed by the invasion, he negotiates John's submission to the church, confident that the breath that blew up this storm of war can make fair weather in the blustering land (5.1.21). But by the logic of events Pandulph's pupil has grown up and refuses to be controlled. Like John in defiance of the Pope in Act 3, the Dauphin will not be Rome's slave (5.2.97), and the war must run its eccentric course. With a final twist Pandulph is by chance true to his bargain with John when he returns with the Dauphin's peace offer (5.7.82). The zigzagging fortunes of war allow the return of the English lords upon Melun's persuasion, and the treachery of the Goodwin Sands allows Pandulph to keep one promise in the end.

Like figures in a Morality play, the power-brokers are matched with three innocents—Arthur, Lewis, and the Bastard—who encounter public life and are changed by it.⁴ Arthur, being the youngest and most helpless of the three, is largely passive in his political role; for example, he must tolerate the distasteful assistance of Austria. But in private he begins to mature. He starts as a precocious child, a ‘green boy’ who ‘promiseth a mighty fruit’ (2.1.472-3), sensitive to the feelings of adults and protective of his mother. When separated from Constance, he looks for a father in Hubert, but under threat of losing his eyes he finds his tongue and seems to save himself (4.1). Just before he dies while escaping, Arthur faces his personal dilemma as squarely as the most mature characters: ‘As good to die and go, as die and stay’ (4.3.8).

The Dauphin begins nearly as ‘green’ and ‘fresh in this old world’ as Arthur (3.4.145), suggested by his naïve use of the clichés of love-making (2.1.496 ff.), and his shame and disillusion at the loss of glory when the French have been defeated (3.4.107-11). However, under Pandulph's instruction he grows into an adventurer, who knows his own interests and pursues them without scruple. His urbane corruption is represented in his reply to Salisbury's regrets that the infection of the time forces him and the other lords to march after a foreign leader in their land. The Dauphin mocks this ‘noble temper’ and recommends that the peers

Commend these waters to those baby eyes
That never saw the giant world enraged,
Nor met with Fortune other than at feasts …
Come, come; for thou shalt thrust thy hand as deep
Into the purse of rich prosperity
As Lewis himself …

5.2.56-62

Perhaps the corruption of Lewis's values reflects that ‘falling away from social unity’ that is ‘constantly present in every generation’ of historical tragedies, following the murder of a prince.⁵ Moreover, the Dauphin thinks of his change as a healthy maturation; let babies shed tears, not hearty men of the world like himself, who know how to make the most of opportunity.

Finally, like Arthur, he must recognise the facts as distinct from illusions about his military position. At sunset on the day of battle, he declares that he has forced the English to retire weakly; he thinks the French have come off ‘bravely’ when they furl their tattered colours, sure that they are ‘Last in the field and almost lords of it’ (5.5.8). Still, undeniably bad news destroys his confidence. Count Melun is slain, the English lords have defected back to John, and Lewis's supply ships are sunk. The best he can say now about the day's battle is ‘The stumbling night did part our weary pow'rs’, and he looks for some comfort in the thought that John himself left the field two hours before sunset. The whole enterprise of his invasion is so like a stumbling night that the Dauphin sounds world-weary and deflated when he orders the next morning's trial of ‘fair adventure’.

The Bastard's mock-innocence at the start of the play animates his original, many-sided character, and his movement to a wider experience of the world constitutes a major theme in the tragedy. In his bemused simplicity he already seems larger than life. Whether he is true-begot or not, he scarcely conceals his pleasure in being well-begot, and his unmixed zest for his lineage colours everything he says to Eleanor and his mother in the first act. Without the slightest guile, he is a ‘good blunt fellow’ and a ‘perfect Richard’ in spirit and appearance (1.1.71, 91). He seems not to care a whit whether his whimsical diffidence about his parentage harms his chances for £500 a year, and it is entirely in character that he should renounce his safe inheritance in favour of the risky pursuit of honour. His wit casts an intelligent light upon his disarming remarks, and his capacity for self-mockery reveals his native sensitivity to the very conditions of life. The distinction is familiar in the Senecan tradition, restated by Ben Jonson in praise of a man who

Dar'st breathe in any air, and with safe skill,
          Till thou canst find the best, choose the least ill;
That to the vulgar canst thyself apply,
          Treading a better path not contrary …(6)

Thus Falconbridge is ‘one who sees the worst, seems to approve of it, and chooses the best’.⁷

On the battlefield at Angiers he achieves personal revenge upon the murderer of his father, earning the right to wear the lion skin to match his heart. At first hand he learns the dangers of Commodity, even though he has not yet been tempted. Under the pressure of difficult public choices that test him harrowingly in the pivotal scenes of Act 4, he reaches his full stature. There and in the final scenes he remains deeply engaged, presenting the audience with an ideal self. He is a profoundly realised character who guides the audience and himself through the maze of the world.

He remains a loyal servant in spite of what he grievously suspects about John and Hubert. Earlier in the play he recognises his ambition and the attractions of personal gain, and inevitably he becomes implicated in the king's business, for he recommends as well as practises dissimulation. He remains detached enough, nevertheless, and different from others. On the whole he is ethically and politically in the world but not of it. Like Shakespeare's later creations (Hamlet, Lear, Coriolanus), the Bastard begins as a type and ends as an archetype, representing a deeper and broader humanity.⁸ England needs him as much as the play needs him; yet for all his great qualities and integrity, he plays a subordinate role in the action.

Since several critics have taken an exaggerated view of his political role and persistently magnified his place in the second movement of the action, we must reexamine the case. A rough contrast of the Bastard and King John was made by G. G. Gervinus more than a hundred years ago:

[The Bastard's] course through the tragic events … is the very reverse to that of King John. The latter begins with power and kingly thoughts and ends in weakness, the Bastard bounds light of heart into the wider sphere that opens before him, and advances steadily in seriousness and strength even to a tragic greatness⁹

H. H. Furness sharpened the contrast by asserting that ‘the titular hero is not the protagonist’ and Shakespeare must have seen that ‘John's was not a character which lent itself to dramatic treatment’: he was ‘utterly perfidious, a poltroon, and a moral coward’.¹⁰ Dover Wilson was equally misleading to say that John's ‘character is evidently drawn as a foil to that of the real hero, the Bastard’ (p. lx). In a sustained defence of this interpretation Adrien Bonjour asserted that John's role diminishes as the Bastard's grows in a series of moral tests which confer on him ‘the depth … of a dramatic hero’. Hence, the design of the play is determined by the character—the man of integrity—with whom the audience feels the most sympathy. ‘And just because the Bastard never [loses] sight of the higher interest of the nation, while preserving his loyalty and personal integrity intact, he is now able to prevent the total collapse of the English forces, and succeeds in restoring national unity.’¹¹

There can be no doubt that the Bastard takes on greater responsibility late in the action, for John in his decay leaves to him ‘the ordering of this present time’—to negotiate with the Dauphin and to repel the French army (5.1.77). In the name of John he addresses the Dauphin in the style that he urged John to use (5.2.127 ff.). We are told that he asked the king, now suffering with fever, to leave the field, presumably for his safety when the battle seems to go against the English (5.3.5), and ‘In spite of spite, [Falconbridge] alone upholds the day’ according to Salisbury (5.4.5). In the last scene he leads the peers in swearing allegiance to Prince Henry, and he delivers the final speech, assessing the state of the kingdom and its political future, ‘If England to itself do rest but true’. He means that they are safe if England—including king, nobles, and commons—does not behave again as John, the barons, and citizenry did, helping to wound themselves. In his role as commentator he calls our attention to the political meaning of this cautionary tale; moreover, the closing speech is an important statement for Shakespeare's contemporaries, considering the threats and fears of England's internal enemies in the late 1580s and early 1590s.¹²

We should also keep in mind that other characters grow in stature and importance as John fades: Hubert and Salisbury, for example. And the accumulated impressions that the Bastard gives on stage do not create a central character nor a dramatic hero in the usual sense. Although the audience is invited to sympathise with him throughout, he is not at the centre of the political action. After leading the volunteers behind Eleanor, his mainly private quest is for revenge upon Austria in the first part; in the second part he brings news, carries messages, saves Hubert from the angry peers, and he stays with John in spite of his worst suspicions. He tries to buck up the king, unsuccessfully, and he loses the best part of his army in the Wash—certainly a monumental blunder. He is an inchoate leader in the final scenes, lurching from one crisis to the next. Above all, he does not save England in any historical or dramatic sense that the audience can tell.¹³ The battle between the French and English forces depicted in 5.3, 5.4, and 5.5 appears to be a stand-off, and the two armies are rendered impotent by unrelated disasters. Contrary to the exaggerated view of the Bastard, it is Melun's confession and the subsequent return of the peers to John (but, in effect, to Prince Henry) that change the tide of events, along with the Dauphin's loss of his fleet, enabling Pandulph to intercede. If anything saves England, it is Fortune and the awakened consciences of several characters.

In the last scene Falconbridge is somewhat confused and out of touch. Ignorant of the peace offer, he brings news that the Dauphin is raging at their heels and that he has lost his army, a message that he shouts into the dying king's ear. Apparently that false report breaks the last string of John's heart, one more cause of anguish piled upon anguish that contributes to the king's bad death. In a formal expression of grief, the Bastard pledges to follow the king ‘to heaven’: good words that put the best face on an ugly situation, rather like Prince Henry's pious hope that his father's soul and body will go to an everlasting rest. As Smallwood points out, the audience is shown clearly enough that John dies with ‘no sign of repentance, no indication of hope of salvation; only that unobserved, despairing death’. His ‘unreprievable condemnèd blood’ burns like a living hell-fire within.¹⁴ Consequently this is something of an embarrassing moment that no one wants to mark in its naked desolation. The Bastard breaks the ice by rallying the peers to repel the enemy attack, but is told that there is no external enemy. As Salisbury says earlier in the same scene, it is going to be up to Prince Henry, not the Bastard, to set a form upon the chaos which John has left behind. Although the Bastard gestures to take charge of the funeral arrangments, Henry has them already in hand. Altogether, this is hardly a heroic climax for Falconbridge, who has to be disabused of his errors and presumption. He is not the one who holds in his hands the ‘destiny of the nation’.¹⁵

The Bastard has splendid instincts, and he maintains a loyalty to the ancient and accepted laws of the monarchy, but he seldom takes the centre of the stage. He is in and out of the action, engaged and detached, a commentator with special rapport with the audience, a tester of other characters' mettle, a loyal servant, and a resolute soldier: in short, the most interesting and complex character in the play. But it tells us much about his role that he typically comes late to a bad situation (4.2, 4.3, 5.1, 5.2, 5.7). He is well-meaning but relatively ineffectual. Still, he is one of the few characters in Shakespearean tragedy who is capable of an impersonal loyalty, like Brutus or perhaps York in Richard II.¹⁶ Although he starts as an adventurer, the Bastard finally gives of himself to the welfare of the kingdom without asking much in return. John, however, has brought the body politic to such chaos that one good man can do very little.

The vicissitudes of John and his kingdom remain, therefore, at the centre of the play, for Shakespeare's larger plan incorporates the Bastard along with others—Hubert, Arthur, Constance, the Dauphin, and the power-brokers—in the most articulated network of mirroring devices of his early plays. In part I John and his supporters go to France with an army to defend his ambiguous right to the throne, and the war for the city of Angiers ends in a draw, followed by a dishonourable bargain. In part II Lewis goes to England with an army to establish his slender right to the throne, and that war ends in a draw, with a presumably honourable treaty.¹⁷ Both leaders vociferously declare their independence of Rome (3.1.162-71; 5.2.78-116), and both make a bargain with Pandulph. Both are betrayed by a conscientious subordinate—Hubert and Melun—with whom they have conspired to commit murder. One gratuitous detail, not in the historical sources, calls attention to this mirroring device when Melun credits his change of heart partly to his friendship with Hubert (5.4.40-1). Moreover, their honourable disobedience to authority reflects badly upon their masters, and in effect they save John and Lewis from blood-guilt. But their intention to murder for political gain cannot be forgotten. The defection and return of Salisbury and the other peers also suggests that from the English point of view Lewis deserves less respect than John. At any rate Salisbury feels relieved when, given the opportunity to recant, he and the other peers decide they will ‘calmly run on in obedience / Even to our ocean, to our great King John’ (5.4.56-7).

The contrast of Lewis and John reinforces this preference if we notice that the Dauphin is absolutely unscrupulous and cynical in part II of the play, whereas from Act 3 to the end, John consistently exposes his troublesome conscience. Although, like Macbeth, he overrules his conscience frequently, John only once hardens his heart. He is closer, perhaps, to Clarence or Buckingham than to Richard III, in his moral sensitivity and remorse after the fact. Still he feels immensely guilty when he proposes the ghastly deed to Hubert, and some of Shakespeare's best writing in the play is found in depiction of this guilty awareness, as we have seen in the discussion of style and expression.

If the Dauphin casts an oblique light upon John's character and draws attention to his better and worse qualities, the symmetrical positioning of Constance and John juxtaposes her helpless, proud, frenzied outrage and his final, half-mad delirium. What happens to Constance at the end of part I happens to John at the end of part II, a device that Emrys Jones calls structural rhyming.¹⁸ Constance grieves magnificently at the expected loss of her son, and John, who began with rage, degenerates into a helpless and hellish fever for the seeming loss of his kingdom. Constance moves step by step toward her great mad scene and her impending death; John is drawn into a vortex of receding hopes, hastened by the death of Eleanor but also as a consequence of Arthur's supposed death and its repercussions. In her last scene Constance wishes death would come to her like a lover cramming her ‘gap of breath with fulsome dust’ (3.4.32), and she will kiss him as her husband. Although she protests that she is ‘not mad, but sensible of grief’ (53), she wishes that Pandulph would preach to her some philosophy to make her really mad. She implies that behind apparent madness her reason teaches her to find a way to destroy herself (25-6). When she leaves the stage King Philip follows her for fear of ‘some outrage’ (106) and later she is said to have died in a frenzy, three days before Eleanor, her natural antagonist and John's mentor.

In his last scene John raves in much the same way but with reduced grandeur. His blood is thoroughly corrupted by poison, but his brain still works enough to foretell his death. At times he is ‘insensible’ to pain,¹⁹ as Henry reports, but when he is carried on stage he indicates that he feels the fire of hell. As vividly as Constance calls for ‘amiable lovely Death’ to cram her ‘gap of breath’, he bids winter to ‘thrust his icy fingers in [his] maw’, and the ‘bleak winds’ to ‘kiss [his] parchèd lips’ (5.7.36-40). Both characters die a bad death, the expression of their tremendous rages, and both die thinking, perhaps, that they have lost what they treasure most. Yet, typically in this play, the audience sees that it is not quite so. Constance grieves in anticipation of her son's death, but Arthur survives the king's plan to have him murdered, only to die by accident. Similarly, the last news the Bastard shouts into the king's ear is half true and half false, and it may or may not have broken the king's heart string. Salisbury assumes, too comfortably, that the Bastard breathes ‘dead news in as dead an ear’ (5.7.65).

The symmetry of Constance and John's despair invites us to think about other resemblances that call attention to their tragic waste. They share an anxious instability, combined with towering assurance of their rights; therefore, their moral outrage is always ready to break out. Constance is ‘sick and capable of fears’ (3.1.12), and her rages come upon her when she complains of any injustice to Arthur and her ambitions for him. She lives and dies in her son's fortunes so violently that her grief becomes larger than life; like Seneca's Medea, she has apocalyptic premonitions,²⁰ wishing that her outcries could shake the earth and bring on the end of the world:

O that my tongue were in the thunder's mouth;
Then with a passion would I shake the world,
And rouse from sleep that felt anatomy …

3.4.38-40

Since, as Gordon Braden points out, anger is a dangerous emotion even for a wise man, she needs that inner control which Arthur and King Philip urge upon her: ‘be content’ (3.1.42), ‘Patience, good lady’ (3.4.22), ‘you utter madness and not sorrow’ (43). But her rages become obsessive, for she is ‘as fond of grief as of [her] child’ (192). In her proleptic mourning she compels all outward signs to correspond to her inward disorder: ‘Grief fills the room up of my absent child, / Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me …’ Her hair must come down, for she cannot keep any form upon her head when ‘there is such disorder in my wit’ (93-102).

John goes through much the same cycle in a different order, because he is trying to defend his power, not to obtain it. At first he is indignant when his authority is challenged; he thunders righteously to Chatillon in Act 1, at Pandulph in 3.1.147-71, and at King Philip:

France, I am burned up with inflaming wrath,
A rage whose heat hath this condition,
That nothing can allay, nothing but blood …

3.1.340-2

Once he has possession of Arthur, his fear of the boy struggles with his inhibitions, suggesting an incipient derangement when he orders the murder (3.3.20-55). At the beginning of 4.2 his anxious need to placate the English lords reveals rather than conceals his guilt, causing him to misstep. Then, like Constance, he complains that Hubert is trying to possess him with his fears (4.2.203). Although John kindles flickering hopes from time to time in the second movement of the play, they die at the next and the next bit of bad news. As Arthur and King Philip spoke to Constance, the Bastard attempts to stiffen John's self-control by putting him in mind of his earlier resoluteness: ‘Be great in act, as you have been in thought. / Let not the world see fear and sad distrust …’ (5.1.45). But it is of no avail, for John droops and dwindles. Fever and poison may be another manifestation of a sick heart (5.3.4). The king, whose heroic wrath had no bounds in the first movement of the play, falls in the second movement under the tide but rises temporarily ‘aloft the flood’ with each new hope to salvage his authority (4.2.138-9). He is finally inundated (5.1.12), and he wishes that all his kingdom's rivers could ‘take their course / Through [his] burned bosom’ (5.7.38).

The difference, however, between John and Constance is that she dies in a half-mad fit of grief for the injustice done upon her and her son. John dies in the madness of a criminal conscience. His hell within is peopled with ‘a fiend, confined to tyrannise / On unreprievable, condemnèd blood’ (5.7.47-8); his bowels ‘crumble up to dust’ (31), and he shrinks against ‘this fire’. In the end he is just a ‘clod / And module of confounded royalty’ (57), like the kingdom he leaves behind—a chaos shapeless and rude, to which others must give a new form.

John's success turns into despair at the end, like that of Macbeth, whose ambitions are gradually displaced by fears and by compulsive and self-defeating attempts to shore up his diminishing power. Like Macbeth when he stops listening to his wife, John seems to lack insight, particularly after the death of his mother. Montaigne puts it well: ‘there is nothing that throws us so much into dangers as an unthinking eagerness to get clear of them’, for ‘Fear sometimes arises from want of judgement as well as from want of courage.’²¹

Notes

1. See Emrys Jones, Scenic Form in Shakespeare, 1971, ch. 3.

2. Sigurd Burckhardt, ‘King John: the ordering of this present time’, ELH 33 (1966), 150.

3. See 2.1.367 and supplementary note.

4. Emrys Jones, The Origins of Shakespeare, 1977, 235-46.

5. Northrop Frye, Fools of Time: Studies in Shakespearean Tragedy, 1967, p. 36.

6. Epigrams, 119.

7. F. P. Wilson, ‘The English history play’, in Shakespearean and Other Studies, 1969, p. 31.

8. For this special meaning of an archetypal character see Eric Bentley, The Life of the Drama, 1967, pp. 40-51.

9. Gervinus, Shakespeare Commentaries, 1849-50, trans. Bunnètt, 1875 edn, pp. 366-7.

10. A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare, The Life and Death of King John, ed. H. H. Furness, 1919, pp. x-xi.

11. A. Bonjour, ‘The road to Swinstead Abbey,’ ELH 18 (1951), 269-71.

12. King John, ed. E. A. J. Honigmann, 1954 (Arden Shakespeare), pp. lxxii-lxxiii.

13. Honigmann, p. lxxi-lxxii.

14. King John, ed. R. L. Smallwood, 1974 (New Penguin), p. 43.

15. Bonjour, pp. 271-2. See supplementary note to 5.6.38, on the supposed temptation of the Bastard.

16. Frye, Fools of Time, p. 26.

17. Honigmann, pp. lxix-lxx.

18. Jones, Scenic Form, pp. 76-8. The device first appears in 2 and 3 Henry VI and is repeated in Julius Caesar and Hamlet, where in each case the two parts conclude on the same note.

19. Hanmer and Capell's emendation; the Folio reads ‘invisible’.

20. Medea, 464-5, 374-79. See Gordon Braden, Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradition, 1985, ch. 2; Jones, Origins, pp. 269-70.

21. ‘Of Coaches’, The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame, 1958, pp. 685-6.