[In the following essay, Lane reflects on the ways in which King John addresses the succession crisis of the 1590s, at the end of Queen Elizabeth's reign. Lane explains that the play explores the doubts regarding legitimacy and succession that plagued the reigns of both King John and Queen Elizabeth.]

When Parliament convened in February, 1593 the queen was 59 years old, her age intensifying public concern over that “uncertain certainty,”³ the as-yet unsettled succession on her death. This apprehension had persisted since early in her reign, the succession issue having been the focus of domestic politics as early as the 1560s, especially after Elizabeth's serious illnesses in 1562 and 1564.⁴ Despite, or rather because of, the decisive importance of this question, it remained largely invisible on the landscape of public discourse. Elizabeth's government was determined to see that this preoccupation had no outlet. Public discussion of the succession was forbidden, declared treasonous by parliamentary statute.⁵ Authors of pamphlets on the subject in 1564 and 1568 were imprisoned, even though in the latter instance the author advocated what was the government's own position.⁶ Despite Parliament's active participation in the question of succession during her father's reign,⁷ Elizabeth consistently refused its counsel, “reserving” this prerogative, according to the French Ambassador, “for herself.”⁸ Elizabeth was adamant in refusing to name her successor, fearful that a rising sun would eclipse her, relegating her to lame-duck status.⁹ The result was a population largely cowed into silence on this “notoriously taboo” question,¹⁰ for, as Edmund Plowden declared in 1566,

in dealing in tytles of kyngdomes there is mutche danger … and in these cases I thinke the surest waie is to be sylent, for in silence there is saufftie but in speache there is perill, and in wryting more.¹¹

Despite the danger, however, there continued to be notable protesters against the government's position, whose treatment at the hands of the Crown punctuated its policy of enforced muteness. Most prominent among these was Peter Wentworth, who was imprisoned from 1593 until his death in 1597 for discussing the succession with a few of his parliamentary colleagues.¹² Wentworth had also been incarcerated in 1591 for his efforts to have the queen resolve this issue.¹³ At that time the Lord Chancellor upbraided him before the Privy Council for prompting discussion of the succession in “cobblers' and taylors' shops.”¹⁴ The aim of the Crown's policy was wholly to remove the question of royal lineage from discussion by subjects, since the discussion itself implied their capacity to render judgment on the legitimacy of monarchs, a dangerous contradiction of the Crown's self-representation as immune from all judgment except God's.¹⁵

With Wentworth's example in front of it the 1593 Parliament refused to deal with the succession. “Its failure prompted the publication of the most famous of the 1590s succession tracts, the Jesuit priest Robert Parsons' Conference About the Next Succession to the Crowne of England (1594).¹⁷ Parsons' exhaustive work—together with responses to it by Henry Constable and John Hayward, Wentworth's two pamphlets on the subject, and Thomas Wilson's summary of the claims of the various contestants—define the issues surrounding the determination of Elizabeth's successor as they took shape after 1590.” Defying censorship in an effort to “influence a politically conscious reading public,”” they indicate the intense national interest in the question.

It has been recognized that Elizabethan drama addressed that interest, providing a forum for examination of the issue in a manner sufficiently oblique to avoid government retaliation. Marie Axton, for example, referred to Elizabethan drama as “the medium for speculation and protest, as testing ground for political ideas and situations.”²⁰ What has not been acknowledged, however, is how thoroughly, almost systematically, Shakespeare in King John engages the specific issues entailed in the succession crisis of the 1590s, the issues the pamphleteers devoted so much attention to because their resolution would determine the next monarch of England. Indeed, it is more than plausible that Shakespeare chose King John's reign because its legitimacy—the fundamental focus of the play—turned on strikingly similar issues. The elements of Shakespeare's play are shaped to emphasize that similarity, underscoring three questions: 1. the effect of a monarch's will in naming the successor; 2. the propriety of a foreigner acceding to the throne; and 3. the process by which a successor would be chosen, in particular the role of the people in that determination.

A play about King John would have been self-evidently topical, since his reign figured as a precedent (positive or negative) in the succession debate as to the first two of these issues Shakespeare's fashioning of the historical material intensifies its pertinence not only by highlighting the third, but by the way that he shapes and combines various elements in the play's own succession controversy. While the official representation of John emphasized the religious dimension, portraying him as wholly justified in resisting the illegitimate incursion of papal Rome,²² Shakespeare significantly toned down the religious conflict in order to highlight those matters that pertained more directly to the succession.²³ Further, by framing the issues in a way that pits important principles and values against one another, rather than as all neatly aligned behind a single figure, Shakespeare's drama creates in his audience what Phyllis Rackin calls “divided allegiances.”²⁴ This effect forces the audience to consider the relative weight to be given each of these principles in determining a prince.

When Philip the Bastard rails against the “scroyles scoundrels of Angiers” who

Stand securely on their battlements
As in a theatre, whence thay gape and point
At the kings' industrious scenes and acts of death,

(2.1.373-76)

he means to derogate the citizens' role as frivolous and impudent. But the simile (“As in a theatre”) points up the relative security of the playhouse audience to take up contested political questions, albeit in veiled form, a security that encouraged the theater's role in critically examining those questions. The audience for the play is aligned with the citizens in it as judges of the respective claims of the competitors to the throne.²⁵ By his presentation Shakespeare provokes precisely what the Crown's policy precluded—the exercise of critical judgment on the part of his audience—casting them as participants in the process of determining the successor. In so doing he constitutes the theater as a deliberative forum where that judgment can be stimulated and nurtured.

“BY WILL BEQUEATH'D”: THE MONARCH'S POWER TO FIX THE SUCCESSION BY WILL

In Elizabethan England continuity with the past was a potent source of legitimacy (hence the use of charges of “novelty” and “innovation” to discredit religious and political claims or activities). But in the 1590S discontinuity was unavoidable: the English people were facing, in Elizabeth's impending death without an heir, a radical disjunction in their history. The arguments over the succession were a contest, not just between candidates, but over which of the competing historical narratives could best restore that breach and re-align the monarchy, and the nation, with its antecedents.²⁶ The historical project of bringing past and present into a coherent relationship, one productive of a sense of collective identity, was at the heart of the contest over legitimacy.

Shakespeare's play offers several links to the reign of the deceased Richard I. Most important as far as John's title is concerned is the conflict pitting testamentary disposition of the Crown—a narrative that binds past and present through the exercise of the deceased monarch's will (in both senses)—against the operation of the laws of primogeniture—a narrative forging that link through the legal plotting of lineage. Though John's claim to the throne resides largely in his “possession” of it (1.1.38), we learn later that he was named as heir in Richard I's will, which Elinor claims “bars the title” (2.1.192) of John's nephew Arthur—the better claim under the rules of primogeniture in effect in both John's and Elizabeth's reigns.²⁷ The validity of what was historically a death-bed instrument is put in question by Elinor herself, with her acknowledgment of doubt about John's title (1.1.40) and by the denunciation of Arthur's mother Constance:

A will! a wicked will, A woman's will, a cank'red grandam's
will!

(2.1.193-94)

A will like Richard I's purporting to fix succession to the Crown was central to the 1590s debate. Henry VIII by his will (also a death-bed instrument) had contravened primogeniture by designating the heirs of his younger sister Mary Tudor (the Suffolk line), rather than those of his older sister Margaret Tudor (the Stuart line) as the royal bloodline in the event Elizabeth died childless. If the will was valid, then the sons of Lady Catherine Grey would be next in line, instead of James VI of Scotland.²⁸ The will was challenged on technical grounds as well as for Henry's mental incapacity and was “for a time mislaid,”²⁹ but supporting its validity was the parliamentary authorization for the instrument as well as precedent. That precedent was Richard I's will, giving the succession dispute in King John a direct relevance to the Elizabethan debate.

Shakespeare both intensified and complicated its resonance, however, by the ways in which he shaped the Faulconbridge inheritance dispute that is the centerpiece of Act 1, altering it from the earlier anonymous play, The Troublesome Raigne of King John (1591; herein TR).³¹ At the very outset of Shakespeare's play, John's legitimacy is put squarely in issue when the French ambassador snidely refers to his “borrowed majesty” (1.1.4).³² John tacitly acknowledges the cloud on his title when he demurs, silencing his mother's protest (1.1.5-6).³³ Her objection appears to have been for the Ambassador's benefit, for she soon confides in John that the foundation of his reign lies in “your strong possession much more than your right” (1.1.40).³⁴ With the equivocal status of John's title thus planted firmly in the audience's mind, the scene immediately shifts to the Faulconbridge controversy. This dispute revolves around the legal effect of the will of Sir Robert Faulconbridge (also a death-bed instrument 1.1.109), which had attempted to disinherit his illegitimate son, Philip, conceived by Richard I in his absence. The issue, so to speak, is crystallized by Sir Robert's legitimate son, who argues for the will's validity:

Shall then my father's will be of no force
To dispossess that child which is not his?

(1.1.130-31)

These lines have no analogue in TR. In fact, there is no mention of a will at all in the earlier play; it is wholly Shakespeare's invention.

Shakespeare makes another decisive change in the dispute from TR, namely its outcome. In TR John decided in favor of the legitimate son Robert, while in Shakespeare, though Robert's arguments are more compelling than those in the earlier play, John decides in favor of his older, though illegitimate, brother. In doing so, John repudiates the will of the deceased Faulconbridge. This judgment was apparently in accordance with feudal law and might seem to urge rejection of Henry's will.³⁵ But John's decision is contrary to his own title, resting as it did on the will of Richard I. By putting John, in a sense, at odds with himself, Shakespeare's play virtually forces its viewer to consider the effect of Henry's will, and thus to engage the larger question it posed about monarchical power: to what extent should the prince be able to dispose of the Crown as if it were his/her own property, thereby superseding the historically sanctioned rules of succession? The Faulconbridge dispute raises another issue current in the succession debate: the significance of bastardy. The narrative of continuous bloodline was premised on the preservation and transmission of lineage through legally valid marriages. Birth outside that context was universally regarded as interrupting that line; bastardy “Cut off the sequence of posterity” (2.1.96) in a way fatal to any claim to the throne. Showing illegitimacy was thus the most effective way to defeat such a claim.³⁶ But Shakespeare's play problematizes this disqualification because, unlike TR, Philip's illegitimacy does not bar him from inheriting his father's land. Furthermore, outside the Faulconbridge family context, Philip's birth confers on him legitimacy from yet another narrative of continuity—biological inheritance—the power of which is expressed in physiognomy, Richard's visible presence in the Bastard.³⁷ John says of him: “Mine eye hath well examined his parts, / And finds them perfect Richard” (1.1.89-90). Casting Philip as the physical image of Richard draws attention to the simple fact that he is by far Richard's closest relative in the play, his only son.

But the circumstances of Philip's birth force him to a choice; he can either be a (legitimate) Faulconbridge or an (illegitimate) Plantagenet (1.1-134-37). Both contexts confer status on him which is at odds with his biological lineage: in the Faulconbridge family he succeeds to the position of a man who was not his father. In the royal family by the king's fiat he can be knighted and acquire the Plantagenet name (1.1.160-63), which accords with his embodiment of the “very spirit” of Richard (I.I-167). The lineal proximity imaged by the “trick of Cordelion's face” in him (1.1.85) cannot, however, give him a claim to the throne because the sanctioning narrative did not rest on the biological fact of patrilineage alone, but on marital legitimacy. By forcing Philip to choose between what are presented as mutually exclusive alternatives, Shakespeare invites appraisal of each of these circumstances of birth in determining succession.

“STRANGER BLOOD”: THE CAPACITY OF A FOREIGNER TO INHERIT LAND OR CROWN

By juxtaposing John's dubious title with the Faulconbridge controversy Shakespeare's play poses the question of how inheritance and succession are related. Implicit in the disposition of the throne by will is the analogy between the demise of the crown and the devolution of property. But is the analogy a sound one? To what extent do the legal principles governing the inheritance of property apply to the succession?” Because English law precluded foreigners from inheriting land,³⁹ this question bore significantly on a central issue in the succession debate: whether a foreigner could accede to the English throne. John's reign was a central interpretive crux on this point: did his tenure affirm the principle that no foreigner can sit on the throne (i.e., was Arthur barred by having been born in France?), or was it simply usurpation by John that deprived the rightful king?⁴⁰

The bar cast a dark cloud over James's hopes to succeed to the throne on Elizabeth's death. Though he favored James, Thomas Wilson reports that “some thought Arabella Stuart more capable then he, for that she is English borne (the want whereof, if our Lawyers opinions be corant, is the cause of his exclusion).”⁴¹ James took steps to remove this blemish from his claim by attempting to establish his right to the so-called Lennox lands which had been the property of his paternal grandparents, the Earl and Countess of Lennox. Establishing this right would have bolstered his claim to the throne precisely because of the importance of the analogy between inheritance and succession. Borrowing the Bastard's phrase we could say that James attempted to ground his title to the crown “upon the footing of English land” (5.1.66).

Elizabeth also well understood the significance of this property to the Scottish king, justifying her refusal to resolve the question because “some consequences which depende therupon hath made us forbare to dispose of this matter one way or the other.”⁴² She used those “consequences” to her best advantage, promising the lands to James in 1588 when the approaching Spanish fleet cast its shadow, but later reneging, hinting that James's rival Arabella had a colorable claim to them while never expressly rejecting James's.⁴³ On his part, James sought judicial recognition of his claim, but also continued to press it with the queen most forcefully in 1596 and again in 1601—even trying to cast the annual pension he received from Elizabeth as compensation for the loss of this property. Shakespeare's play gives dramatic impetus to the arguments in the succession debate over foreign influence on the English throne. Shakespeare's portrayal of Arthur, emphasizing his youth (everyone repeatedly refers to him as “boy” or “child”), underscores his dependence on the King of France. Arthur himself acknowledges his subservient status when he refers to his own “powerless hand” (2.1.15). His youth and temperament raise grave questions about his capacity to govern.

Unlike the character in TR, Shakespeare's Arthur does not speak in his own behalf or otherwise actively pursue his own claim (he is even embarrassed about the fight over it—“I am not worth this coil that's made for me” 2.1.165).

His role is symbolized by his absence from the stage during negotiations over the peace pact between the kings.⁴⁶ Arthur's relative impotence enhances the power of the French king, who describes himself as Arthur's “guardian” (2.1.115). Philip's announcement of himself to the people of Angiers—“'Tis France, for England” (2.1.202)—bluntly dramatizes the spectre of alien intrusion. Shakespeare shapes the contest more sharply as one between the countries rather than between John and Arthur, with the French king's ascendancy graphically depicting the disturbing possibility of foreign dominion over the English throne.

At the same time that Shakespeare's Arthur is portrayed as more submissive than his counterpart in TR (and many historical sources),⁴⁷ he is personally treated more sympathetically and his claim to the throne more favorably, all of which casts John in a much more doubtful light in Shakespeare's play than in TRPS Arthur's status as a royal rival has a continuing, decisive impact on the action of the play, his irrepressible claim haunting John and impelling him toward Arthur's murder. Pandulph articulates the pressure Arthur's very existence exerts on John's dubious title:

A sceptre snatch'd with an uruuly hand Must be as boisterously maintain'd as gain'd; And he that stands upon a slipp'ry place Makes nice of no viid hold to stay him up. That John may stand, then Arthur needs must fall. …

(3.4.135-39)⁴⁹

Unlike TR, Arthur's youth and innocence render his death in Shakespeare's play a much more lamentable scene and its link to the barons' defection is much more direct and firm (4.3.11-13). Underscoring the pathos of the event Shakespeare adds the Bastard's denunciation of the “cruel act” (4.3.126) and his apotheosis of Arthur as “the life, the right, and truth of all this realm / Who has fled to heaven” (4.3.144-45).⁵⁰ Pitting the appropriation of Arthur's claim by hostile powers against the record of John's perfidy forces Shakespeare's audience to assess whether the native born John was indeed preferable to his immature, encumbered victim. Once again framed to admit no easy resolution, the question prompts evaluation of the categorical bar against accession by a foreigner.

Shakespeare further amplifies the issue in the figure of the French Dauphin Lewis, who also asserts a claim to the English throne. As with his treatment of Arthur, Shakespeare makes the issue here a subtler question than in TR by rendering Lewis in a much more favorable light than the earlier play, which depicts his villainy at every possible turn.⁵¹ In Shakespeare there is even some sympathy for Lewis's firm resolve in the face of bad news (5.5.21-22; much qualified in TR, Pt. 2, 977-82), especially, in lines without counterpart in TR, for his ringing declaration of independence from the Pope—“Am I Rome's slave?” (5.2.97)—echoing John's own earlier affirmation (3.1.147-60). Even while opposing him in arms, the Bastard applauds Lewis's resolve: “The youth says well” (5.2.128). The split within Catholic Christendom which Lewis's speech represents echoed a historical reality. Some Catholic rulers (and the Pope himself) opposed the Hapsburgs' claim to the English throne because of the disproportionate power it would give Spain.⁵² In England, too, Catholic subjects were split, with some (“the Appellants”) actually negotiating with the Crown's representatives, not for a Catholic king, but for religious toleration under a Protestant one. Perhaps most striking is the difference in the way Lewis's claim is handled. In TR it is repeatedly compromised by being framed as “triumph in conquest” (Pt. 2, 942), his express aim that of French dominance: “The poorest peasant of the Realme of Fraunce / Shall be a maister ore an English Lord” (Pt. 2, 949-50).⁵⁴ In Shakespeare, though, Lewis spells out the substantive basis for his claim, through Arthur, in his union with Blanche (“by the honor of my marriage bed / After young Arthur” 5-2.93-94), the deal struck by Philip and John in 2.1. Unlike TR where the Bastard repudiates Lewis's “fained claime” (Pt. 2, 686), the legal validity of this claim is never challenged. Through Lewis Shakespeare's play replicates the intertwined lineages of the royal houses of Europe. “The centuries of dynastic marriage,” according to the historian Joel Hurstfield, “had indeed created a situation in which most of the crowned heads of Europe could claim each others' thrones with some degree of plausibility.” Because in Lewis's case it is through just such a marriage that the English crown is exposed to a foreigner's claim, the play prompts scrutiny of exactly how that union came about. Specifically, how did it come to be proposed, not by any of the contestants for the throne, but by the citizens of Angiers?

“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 withheld” (I.I.17-18). Virtually all the pamphleteers invoked the spectre of war in urging alternatives for determining Elizabeth's successor. Wentworth warned the queen that “to 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. Both James and the French Ambassador offer violence as a means of enforcing legal right—“shadowing … right under … wings of war” (2-1.14). But the soldier in Parsons' work articulates the more realistic view of force as supplanting considerations of right:

When this matter must come to trial … not you lawyers, but we souldiars must determyne this title. …

We 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” (2.1.177). 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: “The Lawes of England many yeeres agoe determined … that 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 tainted 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 of who would succeed to the throne necessarily entailed the question of how 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 “subject 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 there 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 far-reaching 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 well 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:

This agreement, bargayne and contract between 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: “Who 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 … betried & examined” (5), and the recurrent parliamentary involvement in fixing the succession to Henry VIII created pressure to expand participation in the process. 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 in King 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 right hand man’ 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 1590 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. “Let us hear them speak,” King Philip says, “Whose title they admit” (2.1.198-200).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 wall above 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 “holding the right from both” candidates (281) 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 well-restrained prosecution by violence. Without pausing for consideration of alternatives, however, the royals move impetuously to armed conflict, determined to “arbitrate” the question “with 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” 73/384, 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.

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, leaves the realm vulnerable to violence.⁷⁶ Significantly, war here is not 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 fair-fac'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 very force 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 in Richard 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 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, Anna 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 (1958), 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. 1.

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. “Those 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,” 186-85.

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 from The 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 England 1594, Part I, B. 1r-B. 1v).

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 his Treatise 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 “of 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 the Book 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 L 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-for-one correspondence (not uncommon in earlier historicist criticism) that overlooks important features of King John, such as the reduced 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. “The 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,” in Elizabethan Government and Society, eds. S. T. Bindoff et al. (London: Atheneum Press, 1961), 72. 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. 1 (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 followed The Troublesome Raigne. In the Introduction to his edition, Braunmuller ably compares the two works and summarizes the evidence for the possible relationships (1-15), concluding that King John postdates TR (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 contrast TR begins with the declaration of John's succession to Richard and his acceptance of the burdens of office (the text of TR is that in Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, ed. Geoffrey Bullough, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962, 5: 72-151).

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

34. There are no comparable lines in TR.

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 in TR). 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 101-2), 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 codified 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 E. 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., 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, 150.

43. Axton, 76-77; Stafford, 21.

44. Stafford, 39-40, 175, 250-51.

45. Contrast TR, Pt. 1, 440-51, 525-57. Shakespeare's King Philip gets the lines Arthur speaks in TR challenging the Citizens of Angiers to decide who their king will be (2.1.199-200, 361; TRI Pt. 1, 718-19).

46. Shakespeare's Arthur only tries to quiet his mother's objections to the agreement; in TR 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 naturall uncle”): “Like one that wanted good counsell, and abounding too much in his owne wilful 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 to TR, 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 in TR. Though more inclined to John's point of view, Holinshed confirms Pandulph's logic: “So 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. In TR, 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, 503-61; King John 5.4.10-39).

52. Hurstfield, 378.

53. Hurstfield, 373-74, 384-87.

54. His right is rendered more doubtful in TR 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 these 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., 1.1.16, 2.1.77 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: “The breath shall be no sooner out of your body (if your successor be not settled 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:

    Well 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)

60. Elinor recognizes the distinction when she quips that John's title turns on “your 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).

62. TR 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's Pithie 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 his Treatise—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 his Change 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 147-151). 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 any spoken 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. A. Beaurline (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 188-92.

70. Shakespeare omits the disclaimer of the Citizen in TR that “we comptroll not your title” (Pt. 1, 67-28).

71. Act 3, scene 7 of Richard III employs the same visual logic of priority, though reversing its terms (“Enter Richard of Gloucester aloft …” s.d., 3.7.941). 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 in TR. 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 in TR.

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's Richard 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: “Who 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.