[In the following essay, Traister investigates the character of King John as an example of a Shakespearean monarch lacking his "second body, the public image of majesty and power."]

Compared to Shakespeare's history plays that precede it, King John is a play of reductions. Its cast of named characters is considerably smaller than those of the earlier plays. It has no fully staged battle scenes, despite the ongoing war between France and England. Many of its scenes and lines are devoted to private moments in its characters' lives. The panoply and ceremony that marked the first tetralogy have largely vanished. The crown itself has lost power as a symbol of majesty. The play presents homely kingship, a king who is a flawed and limited man rather than a divinely appointed public force. Only in the play's concluding scenes is lip service given to the "divinity [which] doth hedge a king" that produces so much ambivalence in weak king plays. In act 5 Faulconbridge, the returned nobles, and Prince Henry all attempt to invest England's monarch with his second body, the public image of majesty and power that has been absent from John's version of kingship.¹

King John offers possibilities for spectacle and for elaborate stagecraft but does not urge them. Reporting on the play's stage history, Eugene M. Waith remarks of Macready's 1823 production, "The pageantry of court scenes and marching armies, the movement of large numbers of people across the stage, made it the equivalent of a Cecil B. DeMille extravaganza in the grand old days of film."² Macready had fifty-nine actors on stage when John spoke his opening lines, and eighty-eight people when the armies came together in act 2. Macready's very exaggeration, however, calls attention to the play's rather simple stage demands. Stage directions call for only six people to be on stage when the play opens—John, Elinor, the courtiers Essex, Salisbury, and Pembroke, who have no lines in the act, and the French messenger. The other fifty-three were Macready's elaboration, inspired no doubt by Shakespeare's earlier histories where courtiers, soldiers, and messengers crowd the stage. Acts 1 and 2 are each composed of a single scene, and though there are entrances and exits during those scenes, the effect is one of relative simplicity rather than of ceremonious activity.

Despite the international dimensions of its action, the play is unpretentious. As the armies of France, England, and Austria stand before the walls of Angiers (the stage direction "with forces" is an early editor's addition), the principals in the dispute speak directly to one another with no intervening ceremony or messengers. They are frequently interrupted, to be sure, by the irrepressible Faulconbridge and by the scolding women, but such interruptions can occur precisely because ceremony does not dominate the scene. The kings are not in control of those who accompany them any more than they are in control of the city of Angiers.

Though several rushes of armed men across the stage occur in the play, it contains no real battle scene. At one point Faulconbridge enters with Austria's head, and at another John is told to leave the battlefield. But there is no hand-to-hand combat by specified characters as there is in each of the plays of the first tetralogy.

Just as there are no formal battle scenes, there is little dramatized ceremony. Ritualistic occasions that might have been dramatized are merely reported: the wedding ceremony of Lewis and Blanch takes place offstage, as does John's second crowning ceremony. The one ritual that is dramatized—John's surrender of his crown to the papal legate—is an embarrassing one, lasting only for a few lines and witnessed only by "Attendants." Macready's panoply was indeed primarily of his own creation.

In lieu of ceremony and ritual, King John presents informality and personal drama.³ The king himself is constantly criticized and upbraided by characters who show no fear of reprisals. The play opens with an ambassador who addresses John as "borrowed majesty," and only a few lines later his mother corrects John's claim to have right on his side in the contest for the crown. Faulconbridge speaks his mind before the king with no fear or restraint. John's nobles, curiously silent in his presence except when expressing opposition, directly criticize his insistence on a second coronation. The citizens of Angiers display no fear of the opposing kings and their armies.

Other Shakespearean kings, most notably Henry VI, also receive a good deal of criticism within their plays, but John, unlike Henry VI, is not "weak" except in his claim to the throne. In the play's early acts he is decisive, a good judge of character, and not afraid to act or to fight. But except for a few moments in act 5, John acts and is treated more like an important man than like an untouchable king, apparently inspiring and demanding very little awe. John sets the tone for his relationships with those around him, and he repeatedly encourages a man-to-man straightforwardness; though he himself becomes devious when he attempts to persuade Hubert to murder Arthur in act 3, scene 3. This attempt, interestingly enough, is John's first serious misstep.

As a result of this lack of ceremony—apparent even in his speech ...—the symbols of majesty and power normally associated with a king carry little weight when John attempts to use them for political advantage. For example, as he stands before Angier's walls John offers his crown as proof of his legitimacy as king: "Doth not the crown of England prove the King?" (2.1.273). But evidently recognizing his crown's weakness as a proof, John does not even pause for an answer before continuing with less symbolic but more practical proofs: "Twice fifteen thousand hearts of England's breed" (2.1.275).

John's own lack of belief in what should be his ceremonious second body becomes clear to the audience as well as to his nobles when he chooses to be crowned a second time. According to Tudor theory, the king as present in his second body never died or erred. By ordering a second coronation, John implies that he had not formerly been properly king, that he had not been invested from the moment of the previous sovereign's death with the ceremonial body of kingship. Thus he weakens rather than strengthens his position by betraying insecurity about his kingship. As Faulconbridge demonstrates in the first act, what is important in this play is not so much who is legitimate (for titles and legalities are all subservient to commodity) but rather who is confident enough to base his claim to power on his own merits: "And I am I, howe'er I was begot" (1.1.175).⁴

King John portrays individuals' responses to power and political reality. Repeatedly, characters are judged not on their pedigrees or their positions but on their physical appearance. When Faulconbridge first arrives at court, Elinor and John find in his face, his voice, his build, and his spirit evidence that he is son to Coeur de Lion. Before Faulconbridge forces his mother to admit that he is Coeur de Lion's son, the king has accepted him as a kinsman on the basis of appearance alone. No other proof is necessary.

Constance claims that she pushes her son's claim to the throne of England because he is fair and looks like a king. If he were ugly, "I would not care, I then would be content, / For then I should not love thee; no, nor thou / Become thy great birth nor deserve a crown" (3.1.48-50). Later, Arthur describes Hubert's change of heart about blinding him as a change in appearance: "O now you look like Hubert! All this while / You were disguis'd" (4.1.125-26). When John believes that Hubert has murdered Arthur and regrets ordering him to do so, John blames his own moral lapse on Hubert's appearance:

How oft the sight of means to do ill deeds
Make deeds ill done! Hadst not thou been by,
A fellow by the hand of nature mark'd,
Quoted, and sign'd to do a deed of shame,
This murther had not come into my mind.

(4.2.219-23)

Once Hubert makes clear that he has not followed the king's order to murder Arthur, John's vision of Hubert suddenly changes:

Forgive the comment that my passion made
Upon thy feature, for my rage was blind,
And foul imaginary eyes of blood
Presented thee more hideous than thou art.

(4.2.263-66)

Judgments made on the basis of appearance and manner are, of course, as error-ridden as those based on social position and title. But in this play history is made by individuals on the basis of physical evidence. Given that basis for judgment, John's lack of "majesty" becomes a serious political handicap.

John's style of kingship is apparently to lead his people on the strength of the personal bonds he forges with them. Almost every aspect of his relationships with those around him focuses on the personal. Despite Faulconbridge's subordinate position, John frequently addresses him as "cousin." When he persuades Hubert to kill Arthur, John gives him no direct order. In their fifty lines of dialogue, John addresses Hubert three times as "friend," once as "gentle Hubert," twice as "good," and says that he "owes" Hubert, "respects" him, and "loves" him. He also takes his hand. Not once in the scene does John say anything to break the illusion that this conversation is taking place between two old and dear friends. Hubert remains aware, however, that despite his friendly approach John is still "your Majesty" (3.3.29-64). When Shakespeare's kings hire or command subjects to eliminate their enemies, they conventionally address the murderers-to-be in friendly terms, but this scene goes far beyond what is required to keep an employee happy. John might have commanded as a monarch; instead he begs as a friend.⁵

John is not the only character in the play to stress the personal and individual. Burckhardt's penetrating analysis of the death of Melun points out the personal emphasis in that scene, Melun's two reasons for revealing Lewis's plans to destroy the English nobles being strikingly personal: his grandfather was an Englishman, and he loves and respects Hubert.⁶ Hubert himself, kept from blinding Arthur by the boy's pleading, does not rationalize his decision by appeals to morality or a greater good. Instead, his decision seems purely ad hominem; he cannot bear to hurt the child who stands before him "for the wealth of all the world" (4.1.130).

Earlier in the play, the arguments thrown back and forth across the stage by Constance and Elinor are painfully personal. The women seem to feel that the kingship should be decided on the basis of who was faithful or unfaithful to whose husband; each implies the other is an adulteress. Even Lewis, whose responses to the question of whether he will have Blanch for a wife are Petrarchan clichés, does not define an obviously political decision in political terms. Instead, he personalizes his response, speaking to Blanch as to an individual woman—though one he barely knows. Compared to Henry V's similar attempt to personalize a political liaison, Lewis's response here seems colorless. Yet both political wooers attempt to turn the public political deal into a semblance of personalized romance.

The central question in the plot of King John—who is the legitimate English monarch, embodying majesty?—brings the issue of the king's second body to the fore. Two physical bodies, John's and Arthur's, vie for the right to be the English monarch. John holds the position "by possession." But, as we have seen, he rarely invokes the perquisites of his position. The great exception is, of course, his prompt defiance of Pandulph:

What earthy name to interrogatories
Can taste the free breath of a sacred king?

But as we, under [God], are supreme head,
So under Him that great supremacy,

Where we do reign, we will alone uphold
Without th' assistance of a mortal hand.

(3.1.147-58)

But his claim here only earns him excommunication and loss of the alliance with France. Eventually he submits to Pandulph, in what Faulconbridge terms an "inglorious league" (5.1.65). John's chief attempt to invoke his sacred kingship, his second body, fails; no one pays attention.

The second claimant, Arthur, is even less persuasive than John as an embodiment of sacred majesty. In the first place, he is only a boy and does not particularly want to be king. His claim is supported by foreign powers who clearly see in his kingship a political advantage to themselves. He is dominated by his scolding mother who expects to be the power behind Arthur's throne. Only in his captivity and despair, separated from his mother, does Arthur win sympathy, not so much for his claim to the throne as for his personal eloquence and courage. The words that Faulconbridge speaks over Arthur's dead body—"How easy dost thou take all England up / From forth this morsel of dead royalty! / The life, the right, and the truth of all this realm / Is fled to heaven" (4.3.142-45)—suggest that Arthur may have had the "majesty" that John lacks, but this suggestion comes only after Arthur's death. As the realist Faulconbridge clearly sees, if "majesty" is to live on in England, it can only be in John now that the rival claimant is dead.

In King John Shakespeare examines kingship in a way explored by earlier Tudor dramatists in what is sometimes called "romantic" or "comical" history.⁷ Such drama is perhaps best exemplified by the "historical" plays of Robert Greene: James IV, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, and George a Greene. There the monarch mingles with his people on more or less equal terms, discarding ceremony and pomp. In King John, such unceremonial kingship is removed from the holiday world of the comical history and placed instead in the arena of international politics. Can rulers deal successfully with one another and with their subjects without the trappings of ceremony and "sacred kingship?" Apparently not easily. By the end of act 4, Faulconbridge sees only "the bare-pick'd bone of majesty" and the "imminent decay of wrested pomp" (4.3.148, 154).

Maintenance of kingship on the basis of the king's personal qualities is possible only so long as that king performs well. For a while, John's vigor, determination, and wise choice of subordinates (namely Faulconbridge) carry him along. But when he tires, slows, and makes bad judgments, he has nothing to fall back on. His kingship becomes a bone to be fought over. To emphasize the low point to which John's rule has fallen, act 5 opens with his handing his crown, "the circle of my glory," to Pandulph. From this point, John's personal leadership as king is at an end. But as though by common consent, his followers begin to invoke not the king as individual but the king as sacred majesty. King John gives the reins of command to Faulconbridge—"Have thou the ordering of this present time" (5.1.77)—who begins to speak in the voice of the "English King," though not necessarily in the voice of John:

Now hear our English King,
For thus his royalty doth speak in me:

. . . . Know the gallant monarch is in arms,
And like an eagle o'er his aery tow'rs,
To souse annoyance that comes near his nest.

(5.2.128-50)

The image of kings, the eagle, here appears in the play for the first time, and Faulconbridge's description of John is clearly not of the man as he is but of the king as he should be.

A similar response comes from the nobles who, upon learning of Lewis's plans to kill them after the battle is won, prudently decide to return to "our ocean, to our great King John" (5.4.57). Ironically, the physical body to which this allegiance is pledged is wracked by both fever and poison. But the final scene, despite the painful and rather ignominious death of John, is the most ritualistic of the play. As John dies, his son offers a traditional ubi sunt response: "What surety of the world, what hope, what stay, / When this was now a king, and now is clay?" (5.7.68-69), and Faulconbridge promises—as do Kent and Horatio at the death of their lords—to follow his monarch into death. Later in the scene Faulconbridge and the nobles kneel and pledge their loyalty to Prince Henry, a gesture of fealty stronger than any John received in the play.⁸ Prince Henry has done nothing to show himself more worthy than his father of such a response. But John's lack of success in embodying "majesty" suggests that ceremony and ritual, the continuing acknowledgment of the king's second body, are a necessary part of kingship.

However attractive the informal, unceremonious, manto-man style of leadership may seem, its pitfalls are real. The Henry VI trilogy suggests that the monarchy cannot stand unless the man who embodies it has a certain personal strength and ability. Sacred majesty is not enough. But King John, examining the other side of the coin, suggests that a strong and vigorous man who lacks majesty is not enough either. The individual must be bolstered by the ceremonies and awe owed to the king's second body. The informality of the comical history will not work in the world of Realpolitik. The king needs both his bodies.

The proper use of both those bodies is explored at length in the Lancastrian tetralogy to which Shakespeare turned next.⁹ The reason why Shakespeare chose to dramatize the reign of John in the midst of his War of the Roses histories has often been a matter for critical speculation. If indeed he wished to explore a kingship in which the man and not the "sacred majesty" dominated, then perhaps he had to move back in time, away from his own age in which divine right was so familiarly invoked.¹⁰King John was written at a time when the question of the succession was very much in the minds of the Elizabethan audience.¹¹ Which physical body was to embody "sacred majesty" once the old queen died was not at all clear, and that uncertainty must have called into question, for those who understood it, the whole concept of the undying second body of the monarch. King John depicts a king without a second body, whose physical presence alone proves inadequate to maintain loyalty in his subjects and order in his kingdom. The solution, at least for Faulconbridge and the nobles, is to establish ceremony, to convince themselves and all England that the emperor is wearing his clothes and the king his two bodies.

Notes

¹ Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), has written the seminal work on this theme. In The Queen's Two Bodies: Drama and the Elizabethan Succession, Marie Axton explores how Elizabethan dramatists at the Inns of Court and in the public theaters used this theme to offer veiled advice on the succession. My essay is informed throughout by both discussions.

² Eugene M. Waith, King John and the Drama of History," 204.

³ There is considerable critical disagreement on this point. Alexander Leggatt, in "Dramatic Perspective in King John" sees a change from public to private occurring after act 2: "Instead of great massed public movements, we are more aware of private intrigue, and private feeling. Many scenes involve only two speakers" (8). Larry S. Champion, "'Confound Their Skill in Covetousness,'" sees the play as public: "Inevitably the spectators' interest is directed, not to single individuals, but to the broad sweep of events characterizing critical moments during John's reign" (39).

⁴ John R. Elliott, "Shakespeare and the Double Image of King John," 64-84.

⁵ Ralph Berry, The Shakespearean Metaphor, writes of this scene: "There are limits to the obedience a king can exact of a subject, and the play explores them" (26). But John claims the duty of a friend, not the loyalty of a subject.

⁶ Sigurd Burckhardt, Shakespearean Meanings, 116-43.

⁷ M. C. Bradbrook, The Growth and Structure of Elizabethan Comedy (1955; rpt. Baltimore: Penguin, 1963), 76-83.

⁸ Philip Edwards, Threshold of a Nation, reads Faulconbridge's efforts in act 5 to restore majesty to the English kingship with similar emphasis (120-21).

⁹ Kantorowicz finds Richard II the locus classicus of this concern.

¹⁰ Edwards, Threshold, 115.

¹¹ Axton reads King John as one of a number of plays that comment upon the question of the succession (The Queen's Two Bodies, 107-11).