"SPEAK, CITIZENS, FOR ENGLAND": THE PROCESS OF DETERMINING THE SUCCESSOR

At the very outset of Shakespeare's play, war is introduced as the readiest means for resolving succession disputes. When John asks the French Ambassador "what follows" if he rejects Arthur's claim to the throne, Chatillion declares, "The proud control of fierce and bloody war, / To enforce these rights so forcibly witheld" (1.1.17-18). Virtually all the pamphleteers invoked the spectre of war in urging alternatives for determining Elizabeth's successor.⁵⁶ Wentworth warned the queen that "[t]o leave [that designation] quyte without establishment, to whomever can catch it" would lead to civil war, "so that presentlie, the whole Realme wil be rent into as many shivers, as there be competitors . …And, thus, while the title to the crowne is in trying in the fielde by the dint of bloodie sword, one part will consume & devoure another."⁵⁷ The threat was far from fanciful; by 1599 James was taking concrete steps to arm his subjects to defend his claim.⁵⁸

Both James and the French Ambassador offer violence as a means ofenforcing legal rights—"[sjhadowing … right under … wings of war" (2.1.14). But the soldier in Parsons' work articulates the more realistic view of force assupplanting considerations of right:

[W]hen this matter must come to trial … not you lawyers, but we souldiars must determyne this title. …[W]e should admit [the competing claimants'] causes to examination, and perhapps give sentence for him, that by your lawes would sonest be excluded, for when matters come to snatching, it is hard to say who shal have the better part.⁵⁹

What the soldier affirms is the legitimating power of successful violence. John invokes the same function when he declares that he will "verify our title with [his soldiers'] lives" (2.1.277). His challenge, echoing the assumption of the medieval trial by combat that physical strength correlates with legal validity and moral purity, may strike modern ears as at least naive, if not barbaric, accustomed as we are to regarding might and right as categorically distinct.⁶⁰ But in fact their relationship was more complex than first appears, for possession of the Crown was itself regarded as conferring legitimacy. The historian William Camden, for example, in defending Elizabeth's title against her detractors, stated: "[T]he Lawes ofEngland many yeeres agoe determined … [t]hat the Crowne once possessed, cleareth and purifies all manner of defaults or imperfections."⁶¹ It is thus not merely self-serving hyperbole when John asks rhetorically, "Doth not the crown of England prove the King?" (2.1.273), but an allusion to this principle. The premise of the doctrine is that coronation, as the sign of free acclamation by the secular and religious authorities of the realm, cuts off any competing claims (an obvious effort to bring closure—and peace—to the theoretically endless and potentially lethal succession disputes). In practice, of course, the endorsement was frequently tained by the force used to acquire the Crown and even more frequently ineffective to subdue rival factions. The limitations of reliance on the doctrine are exposed by John's misplaced effort to use "double coronation" (4.2.40) to blot out Arthur's title, the self-destructive quality of which the nobles' speeches emphasize (4.2.9-34): it "doth make the fault worse by th'excuse" (4.2.31).⁶²

While the prospect of violence raised the stakes for all English citizens, it simultaneously revealed the absence of any effective institutional means for authoritatively determining the succession. The issue ofwho would succeed to the throne necessarily entailed the question ofhow that person would be selected from the dozen or so candidates. Adopting the terms of Wentworth's declaration quoted as my epigraph, who should be heard on this question? Specifically, what role should the people play in this decision?

Most of the tracts dealing with the succession addressed this question.⁶³ The most scandalous aspect of Parsons' pamphlet was not its conclusion that the Infanta of Spain had the best claim to succeed Elizabeth but its tenet that the monarch not be determined by lineage alone, that election should play a role. Election worked to "remedy the inconveniences of bare succession," namely, "that some un-apt impotent or evel prince may be offered some times to enter by priority of blood" (Pt. 1, 130). But Parsons stopped short of advocating election as the sole determinant of succession because he felt it was "[s]ubject to great and continual dangers of ambition, emulation, division, sedition, and contention." These threats, Parsons believed, could be neutralized by giving substantial weight to lineage, "for that great occasions of strife and contention are ther by cut of (Pt. 1, 126). In this way each of the determinants—succession and election—would be "salved [by the other], & the one made a preservative and treacle to the other" (Pt. 1, 130).

To assert even a partial role for the people in determining Elizabeth's successor was a radical proposal, and Parsons embedded his in a farreaching discussion of the relationship between the sovereign and the people. He conceived of that relationship in contractual terms,

for as much as not nature, but the election and consent of the people, had made their first Princes from the beginning of the world … they were not preferred to this eminent power and dignity over others, without some conditions and promises made also on their parts, for using wel this supreme authority given unto them. (Pt. 1, 81)

The monarch's responsibilities, as well as those of the people, were spelled out at the coronation:

[T]his agreement, bargayne and contract betwene the king and his common wealth, at his first admission, is as certayne and firme (notwithstanding any pretence or interest he hath or maye have by succession) as any contract or mariage in the world can be. (Pt. 1, 119)

In what was a significant extension of this theory, Parsons endowed the populace with the power to depose even a legitimate prince for breach of these obligations, "to dispossesse them that have bin lawfully put in possession, if they fulfil not the lawes and condicions, by which and for which, their dignity was given them" (Pt. 1, 32).⁶⁴

Henry Constable's response to Parsons' work provides an index of how inflammatory its arguments for popular participation in governance were considered to be. He denigrates Parsons for "treadinge the steps of popularitie" by flattering "the phansies & conceits of people who ever delyghte in change" (21). Where Parsons had repeatedly referred to the people acting collectively as "the commonwealth," Constable derides them as "disordered multitudes, beinge no common wealthes indeed, but prodigious monsters of manye heads" (24), the latter image the common epithet used to express contempt for and deny political capacity to the populace.⁶⁵ The apocalyptic horror with which Constable greets Parsons' ideas is reflected in the following passage, its form as a rhetorical question declaring Parsons' proposal beyond the pale: "[W]ho seethe not those horrible scandals, & steepe downe falls, threatninge present ruyne to all obedience, humilitie & Civil order" should the people acquire the power to "lawfully place & displace kinges and Soveragnes … ?" (48-49). In Constable's view Parsons' "popular doctrine" (21) reduces the king to "a soveraigne upon souffrance" (50), his reign subject to the whim of a fickle rabble.

Amidst his tirade Constable does make one telling point: "how, & by what authoritye, that multitude is to be assembled, & other circumstances most expedient and necessarye, thies lawyers neyther define, nor regarde" (23). There was no discussion in Parsons of the exact means by which the voice of the people speaking as a commonwealth would be institutionalized. Wentworth had proposed that Parliament be the forum wherein "all titles and claimes to the Crowne of England after [Elizabeth's] decease, throughlie … be tried & examined" (5), and the recurrent parliamentary involvement in fixing the succession to Henry VIII created pressure to expand participation in the process.⁶⁶ It was, of course, the absence of a recognizably authoritative institution for judging among competing claims that produced the high premium on possession of the Crown by coronation, as well as the virulent threat of war to secure that position.

Given the proscription on public discussion of succession, and the sensitivity over the political capacity of the citizenry, it is not surprising that Shakespeare's treatment of the people's role inKing John is oblique and muted. But it palpably touched on these troubling questions nonetheless. The effort to elaborate on how it did so must begin with a textual anomaly, namely the abrupt shift in the middle of 2.1 in the Folio from the "Citizen" to "Hubert" as the speaker on the walls of Angiers. The designation of this speaker is crucial to an interpretation of his role.

Most editors conclude there is a typographical error and that the Citizen and Hubert were intended to be the same character; some further conclude that Hubert is that character. But there are compelling reasons based on textual analysis alone for treating the designation of "Hubert" as spurious and his speeches in this scene as the continuation of the Citizen's. Contrary to the prevalent Shakespearean practice Hubert is never named in the dialogue, undermining any claim that there is dramatic significance either to the shift of characters in the scene, or to Hubert's reappearance much later (3.3) as John's righthand man.⁶⁷ There is simply no persuasive rationale for identifying this scrupulously neutral figure with the later Hubert who is John's ally and confidant.⁶⁸ On the contrary, the perspective and tone of "Hubert" reiterates precisely that of the Citizen earlier in the scene—the consistent use, for example, of the first person plural—reflecting this figure's continuing status as spokesman for the people of Angiers, the office the text repeatedly underlines.⁶⁹

Given the weak textual basis, the editorial preference for Hubert over the Citizen signals a reluctance to grant a significant role to an unnamed, untitled figure who speaks for a body of the king's subjects. The choice may well evince a sense of political decorum that would downplay, if not altogether rule out, participation by the people in the selection of the monarch, even though this was a critical issue in the 1590s succession controversy. For in the Citizen the voice of the subjects becomes, as it was in the historical debate, a salient element in the contest over succession. The need both kings feel to actively solicit their consent gives that voice substance and weight. "[L]et us hear them speak," King Philip says, "Whose title they admit" (2.1.199-200).⁷⁰ Not only is the citizens' opinion as to the rightful prince treated as within their competence, at least initially it is portrayed as integral to the royal title. In this scene the consent of the public becomes the foundation for legitimate rule. Its authority here is visually depicted by the Citizen's placement on the wallabove the two kings and their assembled armies.⁷¹ Philip's declaration initiates a dialogue between prince and subject which contains in embryonic form the kind of mutual exchange Parsons theorizes, a conversation in which, however brief their speeches, the people are represented (in both senses) as vital participants.

Instead of straightforwardly rendering judgment on who should succeed, however, the people, by "hold[ing] the right from both" candidates (282) and calling upon them to "prove[] the King" (270), foreground the question of the basis for this decision. While the Citizen's demurral seems a refusal of political agency, its most salient effect is to expose the simplistically militaristic impulses of the kings. He calls upon them to"compound whose right is worthiest" (281; my emphasis), the word implying the settlement of a dispute through negotiation and compromise rather than its unrestrained prosecution by violence. Without pausing for consideration of alternatives, however, the royals move impetuously to armed conflict, determined to "arbitrate" the question "[w]ith fearful bloody issue" (1.1.37). The futility of that carnage—"blood hath bought blood" (2.1.329) of such equal quantity that this effort "verifies" (277) nothing—amounts to a repudiation of war on both pragmatic and moral grounds as a credible means of trying title.

The citizens' refusal to be drawn into an alliance with one or the other faction, an alliance that would surely result in the town's destruction, is impressively astute. Their prudent resolve contradicts Wentworth's prediction that the common people, "at their wits end, not knowing what part to take," nonetheless "shal be driven to followe" rivals among the competing claimants, producing civil war.⁷² Their diplomacy nearly proves unavailing, however, for when the royals' further entreaties for acclamation prove unsuccessful, the Bastard spurs the kings' resentment toward these unmalleable subjects. His comments focus on the impertinence of the town ("these scroyles," "this contemptuous city" and "peevish town," "these saucy walls" [373, 384, 402, 404]), reproaching the people for their presumption in arrogating to themselves the power to render judgment in this dispute, even in the neutral form that they do.⁷³ But his rebuke is undercut, both by the fact that the town has been put into this position by the royals themselves, and even more so by the Bastard's own proposal, which the kings eagerly agree to,⁷⁴ that they conclude a military pact to "lay this Angiers even with the ground" (399). They thus conspire to destroy the city in order to rule it.⁷⁵

This sequence exposes the potentially tragic divergence between the interests of the people and those of the competitors for the throne, a divergence which, without the institutional means of enforcing the will of the populace, leave the realm vulnerable to violence.⁷⁶ Significantly, war here innot the product of a factionalized citizenry, for the subjects remain united and steadfast; the play rejects Parsons' fears of the people as divided and contentious. Rather, the threat comes from the ambition of the two contenders for the crown, portrayed here as extreme to the point of self-defeating absurdity: the destruction of the very substance of the kingdom that crown represents—its subjects.⁷⁷

The neutrality of the Citizens up to this point thus is rendered not as spineless passivity or indecision, but as prudential adherence to a non-violent resolution of this question, for it is their lives and property which are jeopardized by any war that ensues. Their commitment to a peaceful determination becomes more active when, faced with the kings' united armies, they offer a peaceful way out of the conflict, one that satisfies the dynastic aims of both John and Philip, even at the price of Arthur's claim. They propose "peace and fairfac'd league" (2.1.417) through the marriage between the Dauphin Lewis and John's niece Blanche. Not surprisingly, the Bastard rails against the proposal, in lines absent from TR, dwelling on the very fact of the Citizen's participation in the process:

He speaks cannon-fire, and smoke, and bounce,
He gives the bastinado with his tongue;
Our ears are cudgell'd—not a word of his
But buffets better than a fist of France.
'Zounds, I was never so bethump'd with words
Since I first call'd my brother's father dad.
                                   (2.1.462-67)

His rant reiterates the Citizen's audacity he earlier denounced, but adds the imposition he feels, a discomfort that grows from the veryforce of the Citizen's speech itself (the Citizen's words are weapons that "cudgel" and "bethump"). What offends him is that the voice of the people carries weight with the kings, so much that it is effective in actually re-directing royal power.

The creativity of the Citizen's contribution—a "union [that] shall do more than battery can" (446)—lays bare the reflexively violent character of the royal rivals. That the pragmatic character of his proposal leaves matters potentially unstable because it does not resolve Arthur's claim is hardly the responsibility of the Citizens who acted "to keep [their] city" (2.1.455), to spare themselves and their polity the destruction of war. Though that instability has its occasion in the existence of a rival claimant to the throne, it is needlessly and fatally exacerbated by John's misplaced efforts to immunize his reign from that claim through his repeated coronation and Arthur's murder.

But John is no simple villain, nothing like Richard inRichard III in his calculated strategies for eliminating the numerous prior claimants to the throne. Resort to the character of John, as either hero or villain, fails to provide any secure vantage from which to determine the issues the play so insistently poses. Instead, Shakespeare distributes legitimacy among the various claimants,⁷⁸ especially by endowing the young Arthur with doubtful fitness, thus witholding the prospect of a neat resolution. By refusing any single criterion as the standard to be mechanically applied in fixing the successor Shakespeare's play demands that its audience "work, work [its] thoughts"(Henry V, 3.Chor.25). It calls upon its viewers, like the citizens of Angiers to decide "whose title they admit"(King John, 2. 1.200), to mediate among the various candidates by assessing the sanction each invokes. This demand for the audience's active, if only imaginative, participation in determining the monarch is echoed and affirmed by the portrayal of the popular representative in the play, the Citizen. While the precise scope and form of public participation was not to be explicitly addressed for another half century, this play registers the potency of that question, already palpable in Elizabeth's England.

Notes

¹ Thomas Wilson,The State of England, Anno Dom. 1600, Camden Miscellany XVI (3rd. Series, 1936), 5.

² Peter Wentworth,A Treatise Containing M. Wentworths Judgment concerning the Person of the True and Lawfull Successor to these Realmes of England and Ireland (1598), 6.

³ Wallace T. MacCaffrey,Elizabeth I: War and Politics, 1588-1603 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 453.

⁴ John Guy,Tudor England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 269.

⁵ 13 Eliz. I, c.l.

⁶ Mortimer Levine,The Early Elizabethan Succession Question, 1558-1568 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1966), 89-90; John E. Neale, "Peter Wentworth, Part II,"EHR 39 (1924), 185-86.

⁷ It passed succession acts in 1534, 1536, and 1544.

⁸ Quoted in Marie Axton,The Queen's Two Bodies (London: Royal Historical Society, 1977), 11. "[T]hose [in Parliament] who had wished to revive the question [in the 1576 session] had been silenced, and in [1581] … the lord keeper had forbidden its discussion in his opening speech" (Neale, "Peter Wentworth," 178).

⁹ MacCaffrey, 545.

¹⁰ John E. Neale,Elizabeth I and Her Parliaments, 1584-1601 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1958), 251.

¹¹ Quoted in Axton, 20.

¹² Neale, "Wentworth II," 186-205.

¹³ Neale, "Wentworth II," 184-85.

¹⁴ Quoted in Edward P. Cheyney,A History of England From the Defeat of the Armada to the Death of Elizabeth (New York: Peter Smith, 1948), 2: 280.

¹⁵ The government's posture is aptly characterized by the rhetorical question of Shakespeare's Bishop of Carlisle: "What subject can give judgment on a king?"(Richard II, 4.1.121). All passages from Shakespeare's plays are fromThe Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Co., 1974).

¹⁶ The exclamation of James Morice, M.P., may express his colleagues' attitude: "Succession! What is he that dare meddle with it?" (quoted in Neale,Elizabeth I, 258).

¹⁷ Parsons, writing under the name of R. Doleman, identifies Wentworth's suppression as the occasion for his work. It was prompted, he said, "when at length newes was brought, that nothing at al had bin done [in the 1593 Parliament concerning succession], but rather that one or two (as was reported) had bin checked or committed for speaking in the same"(Conference About the Next Succession to the Crowne of Ingland [1594], Part I, B.lr-B.lv).

¹⁸ The works were Henry Constable,A Discoverye of a Counterfecte Conference Helde At A Counterfecte Place, etc. (Collen, 1600); John Hayward,An Answer to a Conference, Concerning Succession (London, 1603); Peter Wentworth,A Pithie Exhortation to Her Majestie (1598) and hisTreatise cited above; and Thomas Wilson's work cited above. There was also a 1592 pamphlet by Richard Verstegen,A Declaration of the True Causes of the Great Troubles, etc. (1592), that addressed the succession at length.

¹⁹ Levine, 89-90.

²⁰ Axton, ix. Axton believes that "[o]f all the media—lawsuit, parliamentary debate, political pamphlet, stageplay—the stage offered the freest forum for speculation about the succession to the throne and the issues related to it" (x).

²¹ Axton, 32; Lily B. Campbell,Shakespeare's "Histories": Mirrors of Elizabethan Policy (San Marino, CA: The Huntington Library, 1968), 142-44.

²² Thus theBook of Homilies:

The Bishoppe of Rome did picke a quarrell to King John of England, about the election of Steven Langton to the Bishopricke of Canterburie, wherein the King had ancient right, being used by his progenitors, all Christian Kinges of England before him, the Bishops of Rome having no right, but had begunne then to usurpe upon the Kinges of Englande, and all other Christian Kinges, as they had before done against their Soveraigne Lordes the Emperours.…

(Certaine Sermons or Homilies Appointed to Be Read in Churches in the Time of Elizabeth, eds. Mary Ellen Rickey and Thomas B. Stroup [Gainesville, FL: Scolars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1968], 315).

²³ "Shakespeare largely forewent," according to A. R. Braunmuller, "the obviously dramatic conflict with Rome because the dynastic struggle itself guaranteed contemporary attention" (William Shakespeare,The Life and Death of King John, ed. A. R. Braunmuller [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989], 60). Lily Campbell sees Shakespeare's play as a straightforward mirror of the troubles of Protestant England with the Catholic Church, and, more specifically, regards the figure of Arthur as a stand-in for Mary Stuart (Campbell, 126-67). This perspective grows out of a model of one-forone correspondence (not uncommon in earlier historicist criticism) that overlooks important features ofKing John, such as thereduced role of religion, and the sympathy generated for Arthur by John's mistreatment. Together with the retrospective posture Campbell attributes to the play as largely a transcription of earlier historical events, her approach saps the play of much of its contemporary vitality, a potency augmented by the work's resistance to simple historical allegorization.

²⁴ Phyllis Rackin,Stages of History: Shakespeare's English Chronicles (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 182. "[T]he ethical and political ambivalences" of the play make it, in her view, "the most disturbing of all Shakespeare's English histories" (182).

²⁵ See Rackin, 53.

²⁶ The importance of history to the succession reinforced the Crown's jealous protection of its prerogative to determine Elizabeth's heir. It was committed to what Annabel Patterson characterizes as "the belief that the history of the realm, not only in terms of access to state documents but in terms of interpretation, belonged to the monarch" (Annabel Patterson,Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England [Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984], 129).

²⁷ Because he was the son of John's deceased older brother, Arthur's title was superior by reason of "representation," "the principle which allows the children or remoter descendants of a dead person to stand in that person's stead" (Braunmuller, 56). Perhaps the best-known example of the operation of this principle is the accession, on the death of Edward III, of Richard II instead of his uncles.

²⁸ Levine, 63.

²⁹ Joel Hurstfield, "The Succession Struggle in Late Elizabethan England," inElizabethan Government and Society, eds. S. T. Bindoff et al. (London: Atheneum Press, 1961), 372. Hurstfield comments that "the whole issue was criss-crossed with uncertainties" (372). See Parsons, Part II, 115-16; Wilson, 8-9.

³⁰ The latter two of Parliament's succession acts—28 Henry VIII, c. 7 (1536) and 35 Henry VIII, c. 1 (1544)—gave Henry limited right to settle the succession by will (Levine, 37).

³¹ Critics disagree over whether Shakespeare's work antedated or followedThe Troublesome Raigne. In the Introduction to his edition, Braunmuller ably compares the two works and summarizes the evidence for the possible relationships (2-15), concluding thatKing John postdatesTR (15). His conclusion is further confirmed by the topical references discussed here, references whose allusiveness to the succession debate would have been amplified by the dissemination of Parsons' work in and after 1594. For that reason I believe Shakespeare's play came long enough after that work's publication for him to read and absorb it.

³² In contrastTR begins with the declaration of John's succession to Richard and his acceptance of the burdens of office (the text ofTR is that inNarrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, ed. Geoffrey Bullough [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962], 5: 72-151).

³³ InTR he responds sarcastically to the Ambassador's demand that he vacate the throne (Pt. 1, 35-44).

³⁴ There are no comparable lines inTR.

³⁵ "George W. Keeton,Shakespeare's Legal and Political Background (New York: Barnes & Noble, Inc., 1967), 121, 127. "Only with legal statutes passed under Henry VIII could a will disinherit a lineal heir" (Virginia M. Vaughan,"King John: A Study in Subversion and Containment,"King John: New Perspectives, ed. Deborah T. Curren-Aquino [Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1989], 66).

³⁶ It is for this reason that Elinor accuses Arthur of bastardy (2.1.122-23; a charge with no counterpart inTR). Such accusations abounded in the succession debate. Charges, for example, that James's grandmother was illegitimate because her father was already married when he married her mother, Margaret Tudor, were urged both in support of and against James's claim to the throne. The illegitimacy would break the line from Margaret Tudor to James that descended through his father, Lord Darnley, but, since James's link to her could also be established through his mother, Mary Stuart, the charge did not completely defeat his claim. It would, however, have broken the line from Margaret to Arabella, her granddaughter, James's closest lineal rival. (See Wentworth,Treatise, 11-12; and Wilson, 2, 6). The accusation of bastardy was also pivotal to the claim of Edward, Lord Beauchamp, son of Lady Catherine Grey, because he was next in the Suffolk line. His status was widely regarded as doubtful and "Elizabeth steadfastly refused to recognize [his parents'] marriage" (Helen G. Stafford,James VI of Scotland and the Throne of England [New York: Appleton-Century Co., 1940], 27). Questions were also raised about the legality of the marriages of Catherine's mother and grandmother (see Levine, 126f.; Wilson, 6; and Parsons, Part II, 130f.).

³⁷ The French king Philip also uses physiognomy, to reinforce Arthur's claim and undermine John's ("Look here upon thy brother Geoffrey's face" [2.1.100; see also ]), opposing Arthur's "living blood" (2.1.108) of Geoffrey, John's older brother, to John's empty title ("How comes it then that thou art call'd a king?" [107]).

³⁸ See Parsons, Part II, 91.

³⁹ A statute during Edward III's reign condified the medieval common law principle precluding inheritance by a foreigner, the rule having originated in response to the loss of Normandy in 1204 as a way of depriving Frenchmen of their English land (25 Edward III, c. 1; see Frederick Pollock and F. W. Maitland,The History of English Law [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968], 1: 458-67; Levine, 99). The act barring aliens contained an exception for children of the king, the scope of which became a disputed issue in the succession controversy, namely, did it extend to more remote descendants? For discussion by the pamphleteers of this rule and its application to succession see Wilson, 7; Parsons, Part II, 5, 111f., 194f., 199f., and 214; and Wentworth,Treatise, 9f. and 43f.

⁴⁰ Levine, 102. A succession tract from 1565 cited John as precedent for its argument against Mary Stuart, asserting that Arthur was excluded by his foreign birth (Axton, 25).

⁴¹ Wilson, 2.

⁴² Quoted in Stafford, 250.

⁴³ Axton, 76-77; Stafford, 22.

⁴⁴ Stafford, 39-40, 175, 250-51.

⁴⁵ ContrastTR, Pt. 1, 440-51, 525-27. Shakespeare's King Philip gets the lines Arthur speaks inTR challenging the Citizens of Angiers to decide who their king will be (2.1.199-200, 362;TR, Pt. 1, 718-19).

⁴⁶ Shakespeare's Arthur only tries to quiet his mother's objections to the agreement; inTR Arthur himself pointedly objects to negotiations over his status (Pt. 1, 765-67).

⁴⁷ Holinshed, for example, pointedly describes Arthur's response to John's solicitous appeal to ally with him ("his naturali uncle"): "[L]ike one that wanted good corniseli, and abounding too much in his owne wilfull opinion, [Arthur] made a presumptuous answer" (W.G. Boswell-Stone,Shakespeare's Holinshed: The Chronicle and the Plays Compared [New York: Dover Publications, 1968], 59).

⁴⁸ In contrast toTR, Shakespeare dwells on John's giving Hubert the order to kill Arthur (3.3); he renders the exchange between Hubert and Arthur over John's order to blind Arthur in much less philosophical and more personal terms (4.1); he more closely links the backlash from the self-defeating second coronation with Arthur, his imprisonment, and the report of his death (4.2); and he makes Arthur's death the axis around which the five moons prophecy and the reaction of the people revolve (4.2).

⁴⁹ These lines have no counterpart inTR. Though more inclined to John's point of view, Holinshed confirms Pandulph's logic: "[S]o long as Arthur lived, there would be no quiet in those parts" (60).

⁵⁰ In similar fashion Parsons questions what he regards as "but a common vulgar prejudice … against strangers" by laying out the tyrannical performance of several native English monarchs (Part II, 197-98, 214f.).

⁵¹ InTR, for example, Lewis's hypocrisy toward the English lords is enacted at length in front of the audience, while in Shakespeare it is only briefly reported(TR, Pt. 2, 503-631;King John 5.4.10-39).

⁵² Hurstfield, 378.

⁵³ Hurstfield, 373-74, 384-87.

⁵⁴ His right is rendered more doubtful inTR by his admission that he could win England only "by treason" (Pt. 2, 1167-71), the term implying John's legitimacy.

⁵⁵ Hurstfield, 372. Just how this condition was perpetuated, and how fraught with political implications, is evidenced by the case of James's rival the Scottish Arabella of the Stuart line. In the years just before Elizabeth's death there were various plots, all foiled, to marry her to one or another descendant of the Suffolk line in a last ditch effort to shore up both their claims. After James's accession, in 1610, she finally succeeded, secretly marrying William Seymour of the Suffolk line. Their imprisonment upon discovery of the union by the Crown testifies to the continuing threat competing claims represented to James, claims that could be solidified and enhanced by marriage. Except for a brief escape, Arabella languished in jail until her death in 1615.

⁵⁶ The contemporary bearing of the threat of violence in the play is urged by the anachronistic references to cannon (e.g., 1.1.26, 2.1.37 and 210), not invented until long after John's reign.

⁵⁷ Wentworth,Exhortation, 21 and 25. He viewed the prospect as imminent on Elizabeth's death: "[T]he breath shall be no sooner out of your body (if your successor be not setled in your life-time) but that al your nobility, counsellors, and whole people will be up in armes with all the speede they may" (101-2). Like others, he cited the Wars of the Roses as precedent for the "mercilesse shedding of rivers of innocent blood" and "the endlesse bloodie battailes" he foresaw (20, 104).

⁵⁸ Stafford, 196-97, 213. In that year he told his Parliament he was prepared to resort to arms, that he knew his right and would venture all for it (Hurstfield, 393).

⁵⁹ Parsons, Part I, B.3r-B.3v. Thomas Wilson echoes this view:

[W]ell I wot that a slender tittle oftentime sufficeth for clayming and gayning of a Kingdome where there is power and opportunity to gett the possession once, as hath been seen often in that poor Island, first by William the Conqueror, and often since that in the struggling of the houses of Lancaster and Yorke, where many times Might hath overcome Ryght. (5)

⁶⁰Elinor recognizes the distinction when she quips that John's title turns on "[y]our strong possession much more than your right" (1.1.40).

⁶¹ William Camden,Annales, The True and Royall History of the Famous Empress Elizabeth, Queene of England France and Ireland (London: Benjamin Fisher, 1625), Book I, 14. The principle, of course, reflected pragmatic considerations growing out of the immediate need for a king. As the legal historians Pollock and Maitland comment about John's accession: "Those barons who had not rejected John did the obvious thing, chose the obvious man as their leader. It was not a time for constitutional dissertations" (Pollock and Maitland, 1: 523).

⁶²TR handles the double coronation very briefly (Pt. 1, 1480-96, and 1538f.), omitting the negative reaction Shakespeare dwells on.

⁶³ Writers' views about the process were, of course, inextricably intertwined with their advocacy of specific candidates: those who favored claimants more distant in blood were much more likely to advocate opening up the process to allow for other considerations (see Axton, 92). For example, Wentworth'sPithie Exhortation, probably written in 1587 when, from a Protestant point of view, the succession was clouded by the Catholic Mary Stuart's claim and the uncertain religious posture of her son James, advocates much greater power for Parliament than does hisTreatise—written 7 or 8 years later, by which time James's Protestantism had been established—downplaying Parliament's role and emphasizing James's right to succeed.

⁶⁴ One measure of the continuing influence of these ideas in Parsons' work is the republication of parts of it in disguised form in 1648 and 1655 as part of the debate over republican government in England.

⁶⁵ See Christopher Hill, "The Many-Headed Monster," in hisChange and Continuity in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), 181-204.

⁶⁶ That involvement, according to the historian Mortimer Levine, "made it almost impossible for Elizabeth, no matter what she felt her authority should be, to settle the succession without Parliament" (Levine, 196; see also ). Almost, but Elizabeth, as we have seen, was successful in keeping the discussion of her successor, let alone its determination, out of the representative public forum, Parliament. By the time Elizabeth's death finally occurred, Parliament was wholly excluded from naming the successor, that denomination officially accomplished by a Proclamation signed by but fifteen nobles and privy councillors (Guy, 454).

⁶⁷ While it is overstating it to say that important characters are always named in the dialogue, here there is a complete absence of anyspoken textual link between the Citizen and Hubert, and thus no reliable way for the audience witnessing a performance to recognize and make meaning out of Hubert's identification with the Citizen. Such connections as are offered are instead the product of editorial speculation.

⁶⁸ In a pithy summary of the distinction between the two figures, Deborah T. Curren-Aquino remarked that "the voice in Angiers suggests a front-of-the-walls person, while the Hubert of subsequent episodes is more of a behind-the-scenes individual" (private correspondence).

⁶⁹ See the careful and detailed analysis of this point in William Shakespeare,King John, ed. L. Beaurline (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 188-92.

⁷⁰ Shakespeare omits the disclaimer of the Citizen inTR that "we comptroll not your title" (Pt. 1, 627-28).

⁷¹ Act 3, scene 7 ofRichard HI employs the same visual logic of priority, though reversing its terms ("Enter Richard [of Gloucester] aloft … " [s.d., 3.7.94]). In both, the vertical superiority of the party whose consent is sought punctuates how decisive that consent is to the nomination of the monarch.

⁷² Wentworth,Exhortation, 25.

⁷³ His rebuke has no counterpart inTR. In a similar vein Constable accused Parsons of "meddlinge in these matters above your reache and capacitye" (4). Elizabeth's punitive policy was premised on the same charge.

⁷⁴ The kings' alliance is Shakespeare's addition; it is not inTR.

⁷⁵ Their posture, which causes "slaughter [to be] coupled to the name of kings" (2.1.349), is echoed in the Vietnam War era justification that "we had to destroy the town to save it."

⁷⁶ It is also a Citizen in Shakespeare'sRichard III who, on the death of Edward IV, marks the danger of such ambition in competing claimants:

For emulation who shall now be nearest
Will touch us all too near, if God prevent not.
                                 (2.3.25-26)

⁷⁷ Verstegen points out that the extraordinary character of the prize they seek impels the contestants to extreme measures: "[W]ho of them is it, that will not dare to venture the uttermost of his meanes, for the gayning of no lesse a thing, then is this kingdom of England" (51).

⁷⁸ See Rackin, 185.

Source: "'The Sequence of Posterity': Shakespeare'sKing John and the Succession Controversy," inStudies in Philology, Vol. XCII, No. 4, Fall, 1995, pp. 460-81.