[In the following essay, Ortego argues that King John, like Shakespeare's other history plays, invokes the Tudor doctrine of providential, divine-right monarchy as a tool of political legitimacy and social unity.]

In the very first play of the Histories, King John, Shakespeare omits the most significantly important event of the time, videlicet, the baronial charter of concessions called the Magna Carta. In the Birth of Britain Winston Churchill describes this singular event as follows:

On a Monday morning in June, between Staines and Windsor, the barons and Churchmen began to collect on the great meadows at Runnymede. An uneasy hush fell on them from time to time. Many had failed to keep their tryst; and the bold few who had come knew that the King would never forgive this humiliation. He would hunt them down when he could, and the laymen at least were staking their lives in the cause they served. They had arranged a little throne for the King and a tent. The handful of resolute men had drawn up, it seems, a short document on parchment. Their retainers and the groups and squadrons of horsemen in sullen steel kept at some distance and well in the background. For was not armed rebellion against the Crown the Supreme Feudal crime? Then events followed rapidly. A small cavalcade appeared from the direction of Windsor. Gradually men made out the faces of the King, the Papal Legate, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and several bishops. They dismounted without ceremony. Someone, probably the Archbishop, stated briefly the terms that were suggested. The King declared at once that he agreed. He said the details should be arranged immediately in his chancery. … They were sealed in a quiet, short scene, which has become one of the most famous in our history, on June 15, 1215. Afterwards the King returned to Windsor. Four days later, probably, the Charter itself was probably engrossed.¹

In the next hundred years the Magna Carta was reissued and reaffirmed by succeeding monarchs no less than thirty-eight times.² Churchill defines the significance of this great charter in the following words.

Even in its own day men of all ranks above the status of villeins had an interest in securing that the tenure of land should be secure from arbitrary encroachment. Moreover, the greatest magnate might hold, and often did hold, besides his estate in chief, parcels of land under the diverse tenures, by knight service, by the privileges of “socage,” or as a tenant at will. Therefore in securing themselves the barons of Runnymede were in fact establishing the rights of the whole landed class, great and small—the simple knight with two hundred acres, the farmer or small yeoman with sixty. And there is evidence that their action was so understood throughout the country.³

Why was Magna Carta omitted in King John by Shakespeare? It cannot be that Holinshed, one of Shakespeare's principal sources, did not mention or at least allude to the event of the charter in his chronicle. And not withstanding Karl J. Holznecht's dismissal that these events may have little interested the Elizabethans,⁴ Shakespeare as a dramatist non plus ultra would have woven them into the fabric of his dramatic manteau had he been permitted. And indeed in the Comedies and Tragedies he wove relevant historical events. But not in the Histories. In King John, Magna Carta is conspicuously omitted. Instead Shakespeare presents as the cause for the revolt of the barons the incarceration and death of Prince Arthur, an almost matter-of-fact prerogative of the victor in monarchial struggles for control. But we are enjoined to accept the innocuity that “a popular playwright does no wrong to let controversial sleeping dogs lie.”⁵ This rationalization is much too neat.

Indeed, rebellion against the Crown was the supreme feudal crime. But feudalism had passed, giving way to a growing urban society in which each man was characterized philosophically as a link in a great chain of being.⁶ The writers of the late sixteenth and seventeenth century pondered the significance of man in the social schema, a significance that monarchy could not countenance. According to G. B. Harrison, “To rebel against the established order was thus, in the eyes of its supporters, to defy God.”⁷ And so the papal-monarchial alliance struck by King John and Pope Innocent III maintained its hammer lock on the English right down to the revolutionary period of the eighteenth century. It cannot be supposed that the theatres enjoyed any exception. Dramatic rebellion was as unpardonable as actual rebellion. Harrison informs us that the theatres of London were avoided by sober business men because they considered the presentations “injurious to public morals” and “often presented unseemly themes.”⁸ Harrison goes on to say about Tudor drama that “when free speech was repressed, men found in drama a speaking commentary upon life which existed nowhere else.”⁹ But we assume it to have been a prudent commentary because Harrison tells us that in 1605 Jonson, Chapman, and Marston were imprisoned for imprudent or “disrespectful remarks” about King James in their play Eastward Hoe.¹⁰ In Tudor England, history plays seem to have been particularly popular because of the parallels they offered to the time. Covertly the double-entendre became the dramatist's social scalpel, and Harrison writes that “It was probably for this cause that when Shakespeare's play History of Henry the Fourth was published in 1597 it went rapidly into three editions.”¹¹ Shakespeare supplies his own comment about drama and the theatre of his time in Hamlet when Hamlet entrusts the players to Polonius: “Do you hear, let them be well used, for they are the abstract and brief chonicles of the time.”¹² And in the prologue to King Henry the Eighth Shakespeare beseeches the audience to “think you see the very persons of our noble story as they were living,”¹³ Thus we see that the only outlet for something approximating free speech was in the drama, laden with puns and double meanings. And through this medium Shakespeare worked his clever art.

In the Histories, Shakespeare's utterances about royalty and the Crown, while critical to the extent permissible at the time, seem to have been acceptable to the Crown, perhaps because kingship, patriotism, obedience, and loyalty were approved themes, or because he “stressed especially the responsibility and loneliness of the sovereign in phrases which Queen Elizabeth herself echoed in a speech to the members of her last Parliament of 1601: ‘To be a King’ she said, ‘and wear a crown is more glorious to them that see it than it is pleasure to them that wear it.’”¹⁴

Admittedly history is not drama; and that Shakespeare breathed a particular kind of dramatic pulse into the immobile and otherwise dead corpse of Medieval and Renaissance history. And we of the twentieth century are unequivocally aware of totalitarian restrictions upon the dramatist and writer to understand the restrictions upon Shakespeare in his own day. The omission of Magna Carta in King John may be just the clue to the full import of these restrictions. Nevertheless, through the brilliant characters of his pseudo-history Shakespeare illuminates the majestic sweep of English history and the role of monarchy in the totalitarian world of the Tudors. From Shakespeare's Histories emerges clearly the Tudor doctrine of Monarchy as it evolved from the time of King John. And from Shakespeare's Histories emerges also Shakespeare's commentary on this doctrine, a singular coup de theatre that can be perceived clearer only from historical distance. For Shakespeare, history was a means to an end. The omission of Magna Carta may have served his purpose all the more, for it was not the documentation of historical fact that was his task, but historical truth. M. M. Reese in The Cease of Majesty writes that “The only truth the historian needed to profess, in this view (and it was certainly the only form of truth that Shakespeare needed or recognized in his history plays) was a conviction of the justice and rightness of the cause he was defending. His aim was to persuade by power of eloquence rather than by the overwhelming accumulation of fact; and if he used material that he knew or suspected to be false, the duty of persuasion, in a cause he believed to be right, outweighed any faint obligation he might feel towards historical accuracy.”¹⁵ Thus on the face of the Histories, Shakespeare was performing such a task and the Tudors found no objection to them. But woven into this tapestry are the sometimes seen, faint-glittering threads of Shakespeare's commentary seen only when held a particular way in a certain kind of light.

The threat of civil war menaced the sixteenth century perhaps more immediately than the threat of nuclear war menaces the twentieth. The omission of Magna Carta in King John, politically considered, was only a question of royal expediency. Nowhere in Tudor England, and particularly on the stage, was the monarchy to be shown bested by any group from any quarter at any time. When monarchs fell, it was because of failure as divinely appointed agents to carry out God's will.

While the belief of divine right of kings had been evolving slowly in England prior to John's accession, it was not until John surrendered his crown to Pope Innocent III through Pandulph, the Papal Legate, and received it back in papal fief, that it finally took root.

KING John:
Thus have I yielded up into your hand
The circle of my glory.
PANDULPH:
(Giving John the crown.)
Take again.
From this my hand, as holding of the pope,
Your sovereign greatness and authority.

(V. i. 1-4)

Thus with a master stroke John extricated himself from a serious domestic and religious situation, and legitimatized his right to the crown which he had wrested from his nephew, Arthur, and held by sheer force of personal strength and will.

The usurpation, central to the development of the history, dominates the start of the play when Chatillon, the messenger from the King of France, announces:

Thus, after greeting, speaks the King of France,
In my behaviour, to the majesty,
The borrow'd majesy, of England here.

(I. i. 2-3)

And the Queen Mother, Elinor, retorts:

A strange beginning: ‘borrow'd majesty!’

But John silences her, portenting Pandulph's words later in the play.

A sceptre snatch'd with an unruly hand
Must be as boisterously maintain'd as gain'd.

(III. iv. 135-136)

Ostensibly the evolution of monarchy was based on the principle of primogeniture. There is no doubt whatever at the start of King John that the succession has faulted not because of the lack of a lineal heir but because of unnatural usurpation.

Before the walls of Angiers in the first scene of the second act, Lewis, the Dauphin, addresses Arthur, the righful heir of England, speaking about Philip, King of France, who is assembled there with his forces and the forces of Austria.

And, for amends to his prosperity,
At our importance hither is he come,
To spread his colors, boy, in thy behalf,
And to rebuke the usurpation
Of thy unnatural uncle, English John.

(III. i. 6-8)

Arthur plaints:

I give you welcome with a powerless hand,
But with a heart full of unstained love.

(II. i. 15-16)

And Lewis replies:

A noble boy! Who would not do thee right?

(II. i. 18)

And Austria consoles Arthur:

Upon thy cheek lay I this zealous kiss,
As seal to this indenture of my love.
That to my home I will no more return
Till Angiers, and the right thou hast in France,
Together with that pale, that white-fac'd shore,
Whose foot spurns back the ocean's roaring tides
And coops from other lands her islanders,
Even till that England, hedg'd in with the main,
That water-walled bulwark, still secure
And confident from foreign purposes,
Even till that utmost corner of the West
Salute thee for her king: till then, fair boy,
Will I not think of home, but follow arms.

(II. i. 19-31)

Thus far the play seems to follow the acceptable Tudor line: a lawful claimant to a crown receives the full support of other crowns to help him overthrow a usurper. But the avowals are too quickly made, too loftily voiced. For at the end of the scene, Arthur has lost his noble support and the two kings, John and Philip, allied with Austria are of accord against Arthur. And it is through the Bastard Faulconbridge that Shakespeare comments on such finagling by kings.

Mad world! mad kings! mad composition!
John, to stop Arthur's title in the whole,
Hath willingly departed with a part,
And France, whose armour conscience buckled on,
Whom zeal and charity brought to the field
As God's own soldier, rounded in the ear
With that same purpose-changer, that sly devil,
That broker, that still breaks the pate of faith,
That daily break-vow, he that wins of all,
Of kings, of beggars, old men, young men, maids,
Who, having no external thing to lose
But the word ‘maid,’ cheats the poor maid of that,
That smooth-fac'd gentleman, tickling Commodity,
Commodity, the bias of the world;
The world, who of itself is peized well,
Made to run even upon even ground,
Till this advantage, this vile-drawing bias,
This sway of motion, this Commodity,
Makes it take head, from all indifferency,
From all direction, purpose, course, intent.
And this same bias, this Commodity.
This bawd, this broker, this all-changing word,
Clapp'd on the outward eye of fickle France,
Hath drawn him from his own determin'd aid,
From a resolv'd and honourable war,
To a most base and vile-concluded peace.
And why rail I on this Commodity?
But for because he hath not woo'd me yet.
Not that I have the power to clutch my hand
When his fair angels would salute my palm;
But for my hand, as unattempted yet,
Like a poor beggar, raileth on the rich.
Well, whiles I am a beggar, I will rail
And say there is no sin but to be rich;
And being rich, my virtue then shall be
To say there is no vice but beggary.
Since gings break faith upon Commodity,
Gain, be my lord, for I will worship thee!

(II. i. 561-598)

Yet, despite Shakespeare's harsh indictment of Commodity there sounds the knell of the force of power. A crown is maintained after all by Commodity and power in true Machiavellian terms (of which boldness and possession were the basis). Here, then, is the first principle in the doctrine of monarchy: the king is he who proves himself to be king. The citizen of Angiers makes this point in rebuttal to Philip's command to open the city gates for Arthur, King of England.

That can we not; but he that proves the king
To him will we prove loyal.

(II. i. 270-271)

And Philip rallies:

Doth not the crown of England prove the king?

But the citizen replies:

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

Thus, a crown does not make a king; rather, a king makes the Crown. And John, whatever else he may be, is an indomitable man capable of the purple.

When kings collide it is the common man who suffers. And again the Bastard comments for Shakespeare.

Ha, majesty! how high thy glory towers
When the rich blood of kings is set on fire!
O now doth Death line his dead chaps with steel!
The swords of soldiers are his teeth, his fangs;
And now he feasts, mousing the flesh of men,
In undetermin'd differences of kings.

(II. i. 350-355)

But Constance ascribes the success of kings to “that strumpet fortune.” Yet, no matter that John was king by fortune's whim, armed rebellion by the English against him was out of the question. The evil of rulers was after all only God's punishment on the people for past wickedness, so said the supporters of the divine right of kings. The church certainly regarded them as divinely appointed. Pandulph greeting the kings says

Hail, you appointed deputies of heaven!

But while John may be an appointed deputy of heaven he resents the yoke of Rome, and thus utters the damning words of apostasy that led to the Tudor separation from the Roman Church.

Though you and all the kings of Christendom
Are led so grossly by this meddling priest,
Dreading the curse that money may buy out;
And by the merit of vile gold, dross, dust,
Purchase corrupted pardon of a man,
Who in that sale sells pardon from himself;
Though you and all the rest, so grossly led,
This juggling witchcraft with revenue cherish;
Yet I alone, alone do me oppose
Against the pope, and count his friends my foes.

(III. i. 162-171)

John fears not excommunication. Roman law is a foreign law. And Constance hits the nail right on the head when she says

For he that holds his kingdom holds the law

But craftily Shakespeare has her add

Therefore, since law itself is perfect wrong,
How can the law forbid my tongue to curse?

Thus, while seeming to comment upon Roman law Shakespeare covertly criticizes Tudor law. And through Pandulph this time we get the first glimmering clue

For that which thou hast sown to do amiss
Is not amiss when it is truly done;
And being not done, where doing tends to ill,
The truth is then most done not doing it.

(III. i. 270-273)

Thus the significance of Magna Carta is perhaps most emphasized by omission. But the omission smacks of rebellion, however. And Austria cries

Rebellion, flat rebellion!

But rebellion is the prime sin of the seven deadly sins. One of the Tudor Homilies said “we may not, in any wise, withstand violently, or rebel against rulers, or make any insurrection or tumult … against the anointed of the Lord, or any of his officers.” Yet Magna Carta indicates that rebellion is proper when seeking public guarantees. The concessions of the Magna Carta were proof visible. Thus the Public like Constance must choose.

Which is the side that I must go withal?

And like Constance, the Public can only lose.

Whoever wins, on that side shall I lose;
Assured loss before the match be play'd.

(III. i. 335-336)

Because monarchy disposes of all who stand in its way, Arthur is designated for death by John who assigns the task winkingly to Hubert, gentle Hubert. But Hubert is a man of compassion and conscience.

Well, see to live; I will not touch thine eye
For all the treasure that thine uncle owes.

(IV. i. 122-123)

And Arthur cries:

O! now you look like Hubert; all this while
You were disguis'd.

(IV. i. 126-127)

By his act of kindness, Hubert stripped away his masks and became human and recognizable. John has given up only his crown which he quickly recovered. The Bastard hearing of John's collaboration with the pope says

O inglorious league!

Even Lewis who was prepared to wipe out John replies to Pandulph's information that John has reconciled with the pope and that the war is now no longer necessary.

Am I Rome's slave?

John is finally deposed, not by combat or rebellion but by God as approved by the Tudors.

Within me is a hell; and there the poison
Is as a fiend confin'd to tyrannize
On unreprievable condemned blood.

(V. vii. 45-48)

And in true Tudor tradition Shakespeare ends the play with a plea for unity, but it is also a plea for truth to oneself.

Notes

1. Winston S. Churchill, The Birth of Britain (New York, 1963), p. 186.

2. Ibid., p. 187.

3. Ibid., p. 188.

4. Karl J. Holznecht, The Backgrounds of Shakespeare's Plays (New York, 1950), p. 309.

5. Ibid., p. 309.

6. Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (New York, 1936), p. 183.

7. A Companion to Shakespeare Studies, ed. H. Granville-Barker and G. B. Harrison (New York, 1960), p. 172.

8. Ibid., p. 164.

9. Ibid., p. 164.

10. Ibid., p. 165.

11. Ibid., p. 165.

12. The Yale Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, ed. Tucker Brooke and Jack Randall Crawford (New Haven, 1963), p. 74.

13. The Yale Shakespeare, The Life of King Henry the Eighth, ed. John M. Berdan and Tucker Brooke (New Haven, 1959), p. 1.

14. A Companion to Shakespeare Studies, pp. 179-180.

15. M. M. Reese, The Cease of Majesty (London, 1961), p. 10.