SOURCE: Lerner, Laurence. “King John, König Johann: War and Peace.” Shakespeare Survey 54 (2001): 213-22.

[In the following essay, Lerner compares Shakespeare's King John with Friedrich Dürrenmatt's König Johann (1968), an adaptation of Shakespeare's work with marked changes in tone and characterization. The critic considers such issues as the more overt cynicism of Dürrenmatt's play with respect to political motivations for the pursuit of war and Shakespeare's subtle treatment of whether to use military force or diplomacy to settle the conflict between France and England.]

Friedrich Dürrenmatt's König Johann, published in 1968,¹ is described as a Bearbeitung (reworking or adaptation): it departs considerably from Shakespeare's original, inventing and modernizing freely, and sometimes inserting material from The Troublesome Reign of John, King of England.²

Dürrenmatt's version is certainly more cynical (or at least more openly cynical) than Shakespeare's. There is, for instance, the arrival of the Archduke of Austria as ally to the French at the beginning of Act 2. Since he was responsible for the death of Richard Coeur de Lion, he might not seem an appropriate person to help restore the English crown to Richard's nephew Arthur: in Shakespeare we are told, by the French king, that he is doing this to make amends (no doubt this is the official version); in Dürrenmatt the French king remarks:

                                                                                          Österreichs Zug
Hierher ist nur ein Vorwand, unser Land
Zu plündern.

(Austria's campaign is just a pretext to plunder our country.)

A more complex example is the bargain that ends the battle, by which France abandons Arthur's claim to the English throne in return for receiving the English possessions in France. In Shakespeare, the governor of Angiers proposes that further fighting be avoided by means of a match between Blanche of Spain, John's niece, and the Dauphin, which is accepted once John has offered ‘Anjou and fair Touraine, Maine, Poitiers, / And all that we upon this side the sea … / Find liable to our crown and dignity.’ (2.1.488-91) In Dürrenmatt the kings strike this bargain themselves, with no mention of the marriage, before the battle begins:

KöNIG Johann
Wenn in Angers das bürgerliche Pack
Zum König mich erwählt, gibst du dann nach?
KöNIG Philipp
Ich gebe nach. Und wenn es Arthur wählt?
KöNIG Johann
Ich gebe ihm Touraine und Anjou dir.
KöNIG Philipp
Nicht viel.
KöNIG Johann
Mein Heer ist stärker …
KöNIG Philipp
Einverstanden.
K JOHN
If the crowd of citizens in Angers choose me as king, will you give in?
K PHILIP
I'll give in. And if they choose Arthur?
K JOHN
I'll give him Touraine, and you Anjou.
K PHILIP
That's not much.
K JOHN
My army's stronger …
K PHILIP
Agreed.

The Austrian archduke, overhearing this, decides to sabotage it (‘This stinks of rotten peace, I'd better act’) by launching an attack on the rear of the English army, whereupon Philip indicates with a shrug that the bargain is off:

                                                                                                              Es tut
Mir Leid, Johann, doch gib es zu: Es wäre
Ein Wahnsinn, meinen Vorteil nicht zu nutzen
I'm sorry, John; but you must admit
It would be madness not to use this advantage.

Even more nakedly cynical is the fate of Angiers. In Shakespeare, the governor's proposal is made in self-defence, even desperation. After the drawn battle between the two armies, the Bastard suggests to the two kings that they join forces to destroy ‘this peevish town’, then resume their contest, and it is in response to this that Hubert, the governor, proposes his diplomatic solution—which succeeds. In Dürrenmatt the diplomatic solution also succeeds (i.e. the battle is not then resumed) but the kings then decide, out of annoyance, to destroy the town after all (‘Doch weil ihr keine der Parteien wähltet / Und weder warm noch kalt war, laue Hunde, / Seid jetzt bestraft’: All the same, because you wouldn't take sides, and were neither hot nor cold, you lukewarm dogs, you'll now be punished). The town is attacked, and the cathedral destroyed.

The other principle discernible in Dürrenmatt's changes is pacifist: the question of war v. peace is made, over and over, the centre of attention. Cynicism, pacifism: the two cannot always be distinguished.

Wars are arranged by kings but fought by ordinary people: this is perhaps the first and most striking point that will occur to the modern reader of Renaissance plays with their heroic value-schemes. In The Humorous Lieutenant of Beaumont and Fletcher, for example, the kings whom Demetrius has defeated in battle refuse to give up their ‘cities, forts and frontier countries’, protesting indignantly that they would then be ‘Traitors to those that feed us’. Demetrius is so impressed by their spirit that he tells them they can keep the lands; whereupon they in turn, not to be outdone in generosity, declare ‘You shall have all our countries—All, by heaven sir!’—an offer which Demetrius naturally refuses.³ Completely absent from this generosity contest is any awareness that these ‘countries’ have inhabitants, to whom it might matter who they are ruled by, or whether their land becomes a battlefield: the ‘cities, forts and countries’ have become tokens for royal gestures, nothing more.

The obvious antidote to this concern with heroic gesture is to bring the ordinary people into the play, as Shakespeare most famously and successfully does in Henry V; but Dürrenmatt refuses this easy method, explaining (in a note) that this is a play dealing with the murderers, not the victims. Instead, he uses a brilliant device which in the theatre is very powerful: the royal families greet one another effusively, and sit down to dinner together with a good deal of bonhomie, while soldiers drag corpses away in the background. During the battle they wear plastic aprons, which they later remove when covered with blood. When Shakespeare's kings discuss the battle it is an argument about who's winning—

          England, thou hast not saved one drop of blood
In this hot trial more than we of France;
Rather, lost more

(2.1.341-3)

—whereas Dürrenmatt's are as proud of their armies' performance as a football manager of his players' skill:

Gib's königlicher Bruder, zu: Der Angriff
Des rechten Flügels unsrer Reiterei
In deine linke Flanke, das war Klasse.

Come on royal brother, admit it: that attack by the right wing of our cavalry on your left flank, that was real class!

When the two kings argue about Arthur's claim to the throne, and then move to settling it by battle, the Troublesome Reign had John say: ‘What wants, my sword shall more at large set down.’ My sword: the convenient fiction that the kings themselves do the fighting is vividly undermined by Dürrenmatt's device.

This representation of war as a game for the kings is further underlined when John breaks the ‘rules’ and threatens Philip personally: Philip is shocked.

Du bist beleidigt? Nimmst persönlich,
Was unumgänglich durch die Politik?
Das kann nicht Ernst sein, mein lieber Freund.

You're offended? Such things are unavoidable in politics, and you take them personally? You can't be serious, old man.

The kings' detachment is, however, not altogether successful, since Chatillon, the Herald, later comes in hobbling on a crutch, and reveals that none of the French royal family has escaped unscathed (though Philip's injury was only indirectly the result of the war: he fell off his horse). Most interesting of all is Chatillon's reproach to King John that he didn't handle the negotiations very well: he could easily have avoided the battle by appearing to give in to the cardinal's demands (in Dürrenmatt, the cardinal Pandulph intervenes before, not after the battle):

Als Diplomat habt ihr nicht sehr vernünftig
Gehandelt. Ich bin offen, Sir, verzeiht.
Der Krieg war leicht vermeidbar. Was
Der Kardinal von Euch verlangte, nun,
Ein Kloster weniger geplündert, sei's
Zum Scheine nur, die Antwort bloss ein wenig
Konzilianter, und zufrieden wäre
Der Kardinal nach Rom zurückgereist.

You didn't handle the diplomacy very well. Excuse my frankness, sir. It would have been easy to avoid this war. What the Cardinal demanded—well, plundering one cloister less (or pretending to)—a slightly more conciliatory answer—and the Cardinal's on his way back to Rome, quite satisfied.

The interminable negotiations for peace in Northern Ireland have kept stumbling over the question of decommissioning: will the IRA give up their weapons? If Chatillon could be brought into that situation, one can imagine him pointing out to the IRA negotiators that a gun or two handed over, a slightly more conciliatory answer, and Senator Mitchell is on his way back to America, quite satisfied. The parallel is tempting—not least because it shows once again how close to each other pacificism and cynicism can come in politics.⁴

Dürrenmatt inserts into his version constant small reminders of the difference between war and peace. His citizens of Angiers are much more explicit than Shakespeare's governor in declaring

Wir lieben Frieden, weil wir Frieden brauchen
Zu unserer Geschäften

We're for peace, since we need peace for our business affairs

No doubt that too could be seen as cynical; but there is also the blunt riposte which Konstanze receives when urging Philip not to agree to the bargain: ‘Du, Vampir, willst nur Blut!’ Shakespeare's Constance is excessively rhetorical, building her concern (and later her grief) for Arthur into mountainous structures of paraded emotion, and is rebuked precisely for her rhetoric: ‘You are as fond of grief as of your child’ (3.4.92-3)—to which she (inevitably) delivers an extended reply—‘Grief fills the room up of my absent child’—that can be regarded as a confirmation of the accusation. Since Dürrenmatt's dry modernism removes a good deal of the concern with rhetoric, judgement on his Konstanze is passed not in terms of how she speaks but in terms of what she is proposing.

The character whom Dürrenmatt most strikingly changes is Blanche, King John's niece, the subject (the victim?) of the diplomatic marriage that is intended to end the fighting. In his notes, Dürrenmatt informs us, without further explanation, that it became clear, in the course of the rehearsals, that she needed to be changed. Instead of the ‘touchingly naive creature’ depicted by Shakespeare, he makes her into a self-aware, rich millionaire heiress (‘zu einer selbst-bewussten reichen Millionenerbin’). Taking a detail from the Troublesome Reign he introduces a possible match between Blanche and the Bastard, which is now abandoned. In the Troublesome Reign it was an opportunity for the Bastard to acquire wealth and land, in Dürrenmatt it is a love affair, and Blanche objects to the arranged match with the Dauphin on the grounds that she is not a piece of goods to be traded, to which the Bastard replies in what is perhaps the most interesting speech in the play, informing her that though they spent hot nights together and he loves her ‘von ganzem Herzen / Wie Redensart’ (with all my heart—as one says), her body was not made for enjoyment but as a bargaining counter which she now needs to take into bed with Louis, ‘diesem fetten Gockel’ (this fat slob, this old goat). Even this violently cynical moment has its pacifist touches, since he explains that the purpose of the disgusting bargain would be to bring peace, and the result of her refusal would be the spilling of a sea of blood from thousands of poor devils. (‘Wenn nicht, vergiesst Ihr Meere roten Bluts / Von vielen Tausend armen Teufeln’.) When therefore Angiers has been destroyed and the war is about to be resumed, she is given perhaps the most violently bitter speech in the play, pointing out that she has been sacrificed for nothing, and when lying like a whore in the Dauphin's bed she'll think of the Bastard as the biggest fool there is (‘Im verhurten Bett des Dauphin denk ich Euer / als aller Narren allergrösster’).

How relevant to our understanding of Shakespeare's play is this brilliant, controversial modern adaptation? The question it opens, and to which it provides such an illuminating answer, can be stated as: How will a pacifist read King John? No doubt the question itself needs defending: to some it will seem not only an improper question, but the very model of an improper question. It will seem to treat a work of literature not as something from which we can learn, but as an examination candidate who has to conform to our expectations. And if the literary work is four hundred years old, this would be to assume that its concerns are the same as our concerns: to assume the unchanging human nature, the timeless values, that our new historicists have tirelessly denounced as (this has become one of the newer terms of reproach) humanist.

The terminology of E. D. Hirsch's Validity in Interpretation will be useful here. Hirsch distinguishes between meaning, attained by means of understanding, the criterion for which is authorial intention (and of course historical knowledge on our part), and significance, attained by judgement, which relates the author's verbal meaning to ourselves, to history, even to the author himself and his other works.⁵ A historical reading of a literary text, attempting to attribute to it the meaning which the author intended and contemporary readers understood, guarding against the temptation to assume that our concerns today were its concerns then, would clearly be an example of what Hirsch called understanding, the attempt to find the meaning. The historical critic will then go on to assert that if we find the concerns, or the values, of an earlier work to be different from ours, we must then read it ‘as Elizabethans’, granting it a willing suspension of disagreement. Since few people, other than scholars (and not all of them), are prepared to suspend disagreement, this will mean that there is almost always an alternative way to read, not historical but immediate, or committed.

Hirsch's distinction is a valid and even necessary one, but it should not blind us to the fact that the process of responding to literature involves a constant traffic between understanding and judgement—a fact which Hirsch does not deny, his aim being to draw a theoretical distinction. Only the most austere Dryasdust will be able to devote himself exclusively to the establishing of meaning without allowing any concern with significance to cross his mind. This will be particularly difficult in the case of a work like King John, not only because it deals with issues that can hardly fail to be of concern to the modern reader, but also because it is a play: that is, a theatrical event.

We need to remind ourselves of the situation in a theatre today. The ideological gap between modern audience and Renaissance text is, as I have already remarked, immense. It is not only impossible to recreate the situation of the 1590s: it is arguable that the more conscientiously a production strives for authenticity (apron stage, no scenery, Renaissance acting style, even sixteenth-century pronunciation) the more aware the audience will become of the gap. If therefore there are elements in the production which draw attention to this gap (such as the plastic aprons) they are, arguably, simply methods of making explicit what is already and inevitably there. The usual rule of thumb in the English theatre today for stating what should and should not be modernized is that you must not monkey with the text: even outrageous production effects are allowable but the words must be Shakespeare's. That rule is of course not available to a German production. When the play is performed in translation, the question of how far the production should be modernized has already been anticipated by the question how far the language should be modernized.

When Shakespeare's John, in the opening scene, asks the French herald what will happen if he refuses King Philip's demands, he receives this reply:

The proud control of fierce and bloody war,
To enforce these rights so forcibly withheld.

(1.1.18)

In Dürrenmatt this becomes a single word, ‘Krieg’. This is almost like an announcement, at the very beginning of the play, that war is also being declared on rhetoric. The reduced language is ready to receive reductive accounts of political motives. This is to make articulate an awareness that political language is the better for shedding its rhetorical dress, and this is an awareness the audience have brought into the theatre with them.

Just as they have brought with them an awareness that the difference between war and peace is important; and it is this awareness which enables me to describe the value of König Johann as a guide to our reading of King John. If in experiencing King John we are aware both of our own values and of historical understanding, then the experience will involve constant shifts and tensions between the two, and Dürrenmatt's version offers us a series of goads that remind us of our values. By calling these values ‘pacifist’, and using the shorthand term ‘pacifist reading’ I do not of course mean to claim that all modern readers are pacifists, but to call attention to the crucial point about political conflict, that it presents us with two sides, each claiming to be in the right, and each trying to defeat the other. A conventional representation of this invites us to decide which side we support; in contrast, what I have called a pacifist reading directs our attention to how the dispute is to be settled. Settling it by war could cause more suffering than the victory of either side. The crucial moments in such a reading, then, will not be the moments of choice between the two sides (should John or Arthur sit on the English throne?) but the moments of choice between ways of settling the matter (war or diplomacy, war or compromise).⁶

There are two episodes in King John which present us with this choice: the encounter of the two kings outside the gates of Angiers in Act 2, and the French invasion of England in Act 5. Act 2 brings the contrast between war and diplomacy in front of us. Angiers (technically an English town) is invested by both the French and the English armies, each of which demands entrance; Hubert the governor tells them to sort out who is really king of England, and then he will open the gates. They fight, the result is indecisive, and the Bastard suggests that they join forces to destroy ‘this contemptuous city’, and then resume their fight against each other. They agree, and prepare to attack the town; whereupon Hubert proposes a way to ‘win this city without stroke or sound’ by means of a compromise: if Blanche, King John's niece, marries the Dauphin, the war can end. John agrees, and offers all the English possessions in France as dowry. This means he is giving up part to retain the whole: his title to England itself will now be recognized. The agreement is presented as consequent on the marriage, and there is some public insistence that Lewis the Dauphin and Blanche need to declare ‘I love’, but the fiction is transparent: asked if he can love Blanche, Lewis replies, ‘Nay, ask me how I can refrain from love.’ It is very tempting for the actor to deliver this with a smile, since it can so obviously mean ‘Because I'm being ordered to’. Blanche too disposes of any possibility of taking ‘love’ seriously, declaring ‘My uncle's will in this respect is mine.’ It is a purely political marriage.

Constance, of course, objects, regarding the agreement as a betrayal:

                              You are forsworn, forsworn!
You came in arms to spill mine enemies' blood,
But now in arms you strengthen it with yours.

(3.1.27-9)

This is a most convenient pun: the contrast between arms as weapons and arms as what one embraces with contains the issue that has lain under the surface of the whole encounter: that the open conflict between France and England, which culminated in a stage battle and has remained undecided, can be replaced by a different kind of conflict, the argument about means: should it be settled by fighting, or patched up by diplomacy? The more carefully we look at the scene, the more prominently this second conflict appears. Austria announced near the beginning:

The peace of heaven is theirs that lift their swords
In such a just and charitable war.

(2.1.35-6)

Religious language here is not applied to earthly situations by analogy: the love of God is not a way of bringing us to love one another, the peace of Heaven is not a path to peace. This sums up what has been said in the first twenty-five lines: Austria's intervention in the war is presented as an act of love towards Arthur, on whose cheek he lays ‘this zealous kiss’, but the vocabulary of love is used to justify fighting. The idea that religious vocabulary can contradict ordinary usage is of course familiar in Christianity, the religion of paradox. The purpose of such paradox is to shock us out of the familiar onto a higher plane of thinking—from the values of this world to the contrasting values of the kingdom of God; but every shock is not necessarily an elevation, and we see here that religious language can be seen as duplicity: ‘peace’ does not really mean peace.

There is a parallel between this linguistic trickery and the crucial evasiveness of Hubert's response to the demands of the two kings. Both France and England demand entrance to Angiers as a matter of right, since Angiers belongs to the English king: it's just a matter of deciding who, as a matter of right, is the English king. ‘He that proves the king, To him will we prove loyal’, declares Hubert, delicately playing on two meanings of ‘prove’: he that advances evidence to show his right, or he that turns out to be king. A moment later he declares

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

(2.1.281-2)

‘Compound’ here means ‘come to an agreement about’ (OED 6 or 7 if transitive, 10 or 11 if ‘whose right is worthiest’ is used adverbially). Hubert says nothing about how the proving or compounding will be done: that is left to the kings, just as the application of ‘Heaven's peace’ to earthly situations is left to God—or His interpreters! Is Hubert being evasive? Does he not know perfectly well how the matter will be settled? When the battle takes place and is indecisive, Hubert's language is franker:

Blood hath bought blood, and blows have answered blows,
Strength matched with strength and power confronted power.
Both are alike, and both alike we like.
One must prove greatest. While they weigh so even,
We hold our town for neither, yet for both.

(2.1.329-33)

Both the vocabulary of Hubert and that of the kings hover on the edge of an open admission: that might is right, and the language of justice is only a rhetoric that conceals. Such would be the cynical reading; but we are faced with the realization that the cynical and religious interpretation can be equated. Either ‘Cut the cackle and admit that it's just a matter of who is stronger’, or ‘Cut the tortuous evasions of human lawyers and leave the decision to God.’ Two contrasting ways of saying the same thing. There is a parallel to this in the opening of Macbeth. The question of legitimacy is important in Macbeth, as it is in all Shakespeare's political plays: Duncan's murder is ‘deep damnation’ because he is the rightful king, Macbeth's claim to the throne is illegitimate, he is a usurper. Yet the first act of the play makes it clear that Duncan has only retained his throne because Macbeth and Banquo fought better than the Norwegian invaders. Is this a reminder that might is right and illegitimacy only a rationalization, or that God ensures, as in trial by combat, that the right side wins? Trial by combat can always be presented in religious terms.

To raise such questions is precisely the function of a political play; in this scene the Bastard's intervention offers an answer. He proposes that the two kings should join forces to destroy the town and then resume their battle. This is a response to Hubert's prevarication in general, and to his invoking of Divine Justice in particular, since he has just declared ‘A greater power than we denies all this.’ The suggestion that God approves of his refusal to take sides appears to be the last straw for the Bastard:

By heaven, these scroyles of Angers flout you, Kings,
And stand securely on their battlements
As in a theatre, whence they gape and point
At your industrious scenes and acts of death …

(2.1.373-6)

Including the theatre audience in his contempt might set up an ironic cheer—true, we spectators are enjoying the battle scenes in safety, but that, after all, is our function, whereas Hubert could decide to join in: ergo, he's as bad as us. And now the Bastard is offering us more scenes and acts of death (the vocabulary rubs home the point) to gloat over.

One thing is certain about the Bastard's suggestion: that there is nothing religious about it. Perhaps it could be made in religious terms—we must never underestimate the possible ingenuity of the casuist; but it is quite clear that it isn't.

I'd play incessantly upon these jades,
Even till unfencèd desolation
Leave them as naked as the vulgar air.

(2.1.385-7)

An if thou hast the mettle of a king,
Being wronged as we are by this peevish town,
Turn thou the mouth of thy artillery,
As we will ours, against these saucy walls.

(2.1.401-4)

‘Saucy’, ‘peevish’, ‘contemptuous’: there is no suggestion that Angiers is defying Heaven, only that they're defying us. ‘Playing incessantly’ presents the attack as offering the pleasures of destruction, not the moral satisfaction of acting as God's instrument.

The Bastard has traditionally been regarded as the most sympathetic figure in the play,⁷ and since he delivers the choric commentary that ends this long scene, there is clearly some kind of special relationship between him and the audience. But this may also suggest a gap between audience and dramatist: the dramatist is showing them—or some of them, the more jingoistic and more bloodthirsty part—the real nature of their enjoyment. An audience is no more uniform than a play, and one function of the Bastard may well be to excite cheers from some spectators, and invite others to reflect on what is going on. The famous concluding soliloquy, about ‘commodity’ (which could be glossed as ‘self-interest’) observes that France has been drawn

From a resolved an honourable war,
To a most base and vile-concluded peace.

(2.1.586-7)

Since he immediately goes on to ask ‘Why rail I on this commodity?’ and answers ‘But for because he hath not wooed me yet’, we can interpret ‘honourable war’ as meaning a war that gives me chance to shine, and ‘base and vile-concluded peace’ as meaning one that takes it away from me.

Act 2, Scene 1 is explicitly about war, and also the scene in which it takes place; in the following scene (3.1) peace and war are explicitly opposed. Hubert's suggestion has prevailed, Lewis has married Blanche, and ‘John, to stop Arthur's title in the whole, / Hath willingly departed with a part.’ (2.1.563-4) What undoes the treaty is the arrival of Cardinal Pandulph, that wily and evasive rhetorician. Pandulph's demand for the reinstatement of Stephen Langton as Archbishop has nothing to do with the question of succession, and can be seen as quite irrelevant to the concerns of the play: it no doubt provided an opportunity for the audience to hiss at this example of Papal interference, and to cheer when John denounces Popish practices (‘By the merit of vile gold … Purchase corrupted pardon’) as a form of commodity. Whether they went on cheering when the French king joined in the denunciation of Pandulph is not easy to decide.

That would, in Hirsch's terms, be a question about meaning only, perhaps merely about partial meaning; when, shortly afterwards, the scene reverts to the question of peace and war, it is very difficult, if we get interested in the argument, to exclude significance. The war party now consists of Constance, Pandulph and the Dauphin (plus, of course, the Bastard), and the very fact that they all want war for different reasons necessarily focuses our attention on the question of war itself. And the peace party? Well, of course, there isn't one. The only person who speaks unequivocally for peace as desirable in itself is Arthur, who in Act 2 says:

                                                                                Good my mother, peace.
I would that I were laid low in my grave.
I am not worth this coil that's made for me.

(2.1.163-5)

No one takes any notice of him. The two who speak against war in Act 3, Blanche and King Philip, do not do so out of principled objection. Blanche is distressed that her wedding feast should be ‘kept with slaughtered men’, and that her husband should war against her uncle; Philip now finds slaughter distressing for much the same reason, and feels no inconsistency between his ordinary kingly belligerence in Act 2 and his politic change of position now. There is no one like Burgundy, who in the last act of Henry V delivers his wonderful speech on the horrors of war as such (and of course even on this the cynical remark is possible that this is the way one speaks once the war is over).

But the fact that there is no principled pacifist in this scene should neither surprise nor worry us. We cannot expect such principles to be formulated in the thirteenth century, and perhaps not in the sixteenth either; what we can expect—and do find—is the experience of the horror of war causing a reaction in those who suffer from it, a turning towards a position that has not yet been formulated as a principle. That is, after all, the way literature reaches towards the future.

‘Peace’ and ‘war’ are not only underlying ideas in the play, they are also active as words; and to look at how the words behave is always illuminating when considering how the ideas operate.

The grappling vigour and rough frown of war
Is cold in amity and painted peace.

(3.1.30-1)

Why does Constance describe peace as ‘painted’? Paint presumably refers here to makeup, and peace is regarded as deceptive, a painted face being a sign of hypocrisy. But what is the difference between real peace and hypocritical peace? To accuse apparent peace of not being genuine is one of the commonest strategies of the bellicose idealist: if true peace means peace in which all conflicts have been resolved and there is no longer any possibility of war, then true peace is not possible in human society: a war party can always denounce peace as ‘painted’. Just as it can always declare its belligerent strategy through the syntax of ‘peace if’: Philip's speech in 2.1.235 is the best example of this, telling Hubert that he will ‘leave your children, wives and you in peace’ if they yield to his demands, and followed inevitably by the balancing syntax ‘but if …’

Austria attempts to interrupt Constance in Act 3 with ‘Lady Constance, peace!’; she replies: ‘War! War! No peace! Peace is to me a war.’ (3.1.39-40) When Austria said ‘peace’ he meant, of course, ‘silence’, as in ‘hold your peace’, and Constance's word-play can be seen as rebounding back on her, as evidence of her bad faith: the case for war is made by a disputant who will not ‘hold her peace’ and will not let others speak.

And finally, Act 5, which is almost universally regarded as clumsy: either a botched rewriting of the Troublesome Reign or a sign that Shakespeare had lost interest by this stage. This common judgement may well be correct, but it is of course not always easy to distinguish clumsiness from a deliberate undermining of conventional expectation. John's poisoning by wicked monks, so prominent in the Troublesome Reign, is played down in Shakespeare's version in order to concentrate on the invasion of England by the Dauphin, who seems at first set for an easy victory: the islanders are shouting ‘Vive le roi’, he has ‘the best cards for the game’, and there seems to be little resistance. Here is another opportunity to address the question of war v. peace, but it is not taken—or not explicitly taken. Pandulph's exhortation to ‘tame the savage spirit of wild war’ (5.2.74) is never elaborated into anything like Burgundy's vision of peace and its blessings—and Pandulph is by now thoroughly tainted by his duplicity (we see the great advantage of introducing a wholly new character as the peacemaker in Henry V). Once again, the treatment of the word ‘peace’ is revealing. It is used five times in 5.2, and only once (line 76) in its primary sense, as the opposite to war. The other uses are John ‘making his peace with Rome’ (line 92 twice, and line 96), where it means ‘recognizing Rome's authority’, and line 159, where it means ‘silence’. No attention is paid to the word because no attention is paid to the concept.

In contrast to this, the Bastard's military zeal is very prominent. He uses the very rhythms and thoughts of Henry V's more famous defiance:

Be stirring as the time, be fire with fire;
Threaten the threat'ner, and outface the brow
Of bragging horror.

(5.1.48-50)

Now set the teeth and stretch the nostril wide,
Hold hard the breath, and bend up every spirit
To his full height.

(Henry V 3.1.15-17)

Similarly, in the following scene, the Bastard's flyting expresses a lengthy contempt for ‘This apish and unmannerly approach, / This harnessed masque and unadvisèd revel’ (5.2.131-2) before working up to the threat of ‘warlike John’ (since John is dying of poison, he is only ‘warlike’ in the Bastard's vocabulary: but vocabulary is itself a weapon.

The rhetoric of Act 5 makes it clear that war has all the best tunes, just as the Bastard (as everyone seems to agree) got the cheers of the groundlings—perhaps of everyone. This would be decisive as a reading of the last act, if it were not for Shakespeare's talent in leaving us with an aftertaste. The Bastard's famous concluding speech (‘Naught shall make us rue / If England to itself do rest but true’) certainly leaves him as the patriotic hero. This conclusion is not as bellicose as some of his earlier speeches, since it puts the case for security through strength, a position he had already adumbrated in 5.1.73-6:

                                                                                Let us, my liege, to arms!
Perchance the Cardinal cannot make your peace,
Or, if he do, let it at least be said
They saw we had a purpose of defence

—and reasserted in 5.7.87-8, when he remarks that the Dauphin is more likely to sue for peace

                                                                                          when he sees
Ourselves well-sinewed to our own defence.

And how is peace finally achieved? Not, certainly, through a principled rejection of war; but not through defiance either. The war simply fizzles out; there is no decisive battle, no concluding treaty. Count Melun is slain, the English traitors revert (presumably with their soldiers) to John again, and Lewis' reinforcements ‘are cast away and sunk on Goodwin sands’. (5.5.13) It is all very cursory, as if we are being shown that Nature does not go in for high-flown climaxes and splendid victories. This may mean that Shakespeare botched the ending of an indecisive play; it may also mean that he ended it with great subtlety.

Notes

1. Friedrich Dürrenmatt, König Johann (nach Shakespeare) (Zürich, 1968).

2. The Troublesome Reign of John, King of England was published in 1591. The controversy about its relation to Shakespeare's play will probably never be settled: the majority view is that it preceded King John, and was, along with Holinshed, his main source; a minority view claims that it is a corrupted text of Shakespeare's play. Settling this question is, fortunately, not relevant to the argument of this essay.

3. Beaumont and Fletcher, The Humorous Lieutenant, Act 3, Scene 7 in The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, ed. by F. Bowers, vol. 5 (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 363-4.

4. It is of course common to see King John as cynical (e.g. M. M. Reese, The Cease of Majesty, p. 280: ‘the most cynical and disillusioned among the histories’); the point that the present essay seeks to add is the close link between cynicism and pacifism.

5. E. D. Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation (Yale, 1967), especially pp. 61-7, 139-63.

6. I have developed this position further in ‘Peace Studies: A Proposal’, New Literary History, 26, no. 3 (1995), 641-65.

7. Ornstein (A Kingdom for a Stage p. 95) even speaks of his ‘fundamental innocence’—a view that can only be reconciled with the present essay if we use the wordplay of Maria (‘He hath all the good gifts of nature’—‘He hath indeed almost natural’) and say he is almost an innocent.