THE LIFE AND DEATH OF

KING JOHN

INTRODUCTION

THE editors of the first folio arranged the English historical plays of Shakespeare in the order of the successive reigns of kings, and therefore King John is placed first and King Henry VIII last. No quarto of King John had appeared, and it has the singularity among its author's undoubted plays then added of not having been entered in the register of the Stationers' Company.

King John is mentioned by Meres in his Palladis Tamia of 1598. Neither external nor internal evidence sufficient to ascertain its precise date can be discovered. It contains much less rhymed verse than does King Richard II; it has, through the character of Faulconbridge, a larger element of humour; like Richard II it admits no prose. We may well believe that it immediately followed Richard II, and that the date 1595 is approximately correct.

For his material Shakespeare does not seem to have gone to the chroniclers. He based his King John upon an older dramatic treatment of the reign in two parts, which had been printed in 1591 under the title The Troublesome Raigne of King John of England. The authorship of these old plays is a matter of mere conjecture. In the main Shakespeare follows the course of The Troublesome Raigne; yet scarcely a line of King John agrees with a line of his predecessor. His work consisted in free alteration, condensation, and, where he deemed fit, development. From the present play better than from any other we learn how the greatest of dramatic poets dealt with dramatic material which came to his hand; a comparison of the

older with the newer play exhibits Shakespeare at work in the processes of his art.

The

We may at once set aside, as too profound or too shallow, those commentators who allege that Shakespeare designed here to present a philosophical view of history. He was quite content with the politics of the old play. He reproduced its historical errors and confusions, and even added something to them. King John was not regarded by his contemporaries as a usurper. Philip of France, when he claimed the overlordship of the continental possessions of the English king, did not aim at placing Arthur on the English throne. The Arthur of history had a good deal more in common with the aspiring prince of the old play than he had with Shakespeare's pathetic child. Austria of the drama is confounded by Shakespeare's predecessor with the Lymoges before whose castle Richard Coeur-de-Lion was slain, and Shakespeare repeats the historical error. His sorrowful widow Constance in fact married a second and a third husband. The chronology of the reign is hopelessly confused; in the fourth Act of King John we pass from 1202 and 1203 to the arrival of Pandulph in England in 1213; we return to 1203, and find occurrences of that year and of 1216 represented as almost simultaneous. The most memorable event of the reign-the granting of the Great Charter-is never referred to in the old play and is never referred to by Shakespeare. Three great powers-the English Monarchy, the Barons, the Church-are exhibited in their mutual relations. could hardly have been otherwise if the matter of history were handled at all. But Shakespeare presents these contending powers in no new light. It is a perversion of criticism to maintain that in this play he made any original contribution to the philosophy of English history. He was before all else à dramatic poet, caring in chief for the characters, the passions, and the actions of individual men and women. If these were connected with the life of a nation, they stood out from an impressive background. In writing King

It

John Shakespeare was animated by an ardent patriotic feeling, which finds its exponent in the bastard Faulconbridge; but Faulconbridge is no type or abstraction; he is first of all an individual, and his patriotic passion forms only one element of his character.

All the dramatis personae, with one exception, may be found in the old plays. That exception is James Gurney, servant to Lady Faulconbridge, who appears for a moment in the first Act, utters four words-Good leave, good Philip'-and is withdrawn that certain disclosures may be made which cannot with propriety reach his ears. The king, who more than any other of Shakespeare's kings of England unites weakness with wickedness; Cardinal Pandulph, representative of the I power and policy of Rome; Philip Faulconbridge, representative of English courage, manliness, tenderness and humour; Constance, the afflicted mother; and her gentle Arthur-these are eminently dramatic figures, and it is on these that Shakespeare expends the energy of his imagination. He at once decided that Faulconbridge must be the true hero of the piece, and several of the alterations which he effected are determined by this fact. He touches with darker shadow the figure of the king. He deepens the pathos of Arthur's little life by a violation of historical fact, which changes him from ambitious youth to innocent childhood. He presents the maternal passion, its hopes, griefs, despair, in the person of Constance.

Shakespeare's omissions from the old plays are noteworthy and are characteristic of his method or principles of work. In the struggle for power between Rome and England his sympathies are strongly with his own country; but he does not import into his patriotism the bitterness of theological strife. The Troublesome Raigne endeavours to cast contempt and odium upon the old faith; its temper is violently, bitterly Protestant. Almost every editor of Shakespeare has noticed his omission of a ribald scene in which Faulconbridge, commissioned by the king to make provision for the wars, ransacks a Franciscan monastery, and

discovers the iniquity of its inmates. Again, at the close of the old play, when King John in his hour of decline and sickness seeks refuge, like a creature wounded to death, in the Abbey at Swinstead, he is received by the abbot with words of welcome and good wishes for his health and happiness; but presently the monk who is to prepare poison for the king, plans the murder with the approval of the abbot, and, before the crime, receives absolution at his hands. The king's dying words are a declaration that since he yielded to the priest of Rome neither he nor his has prospered, accompanied with words which prophesy the better days of Henry VIII, when the Babylonian harlot shall be cast down from her throne of exaltation. In Shakespeare the crime is referred to in one line as a possible explanation of the king's sudden malady— The king, I fear, is poison'd by a monk'-and John utters no ecclesiastical moral to account for his calamities. The old play represents Peter of Pomfret, prophet and hermit, as a somewhat vulgar impostor; for the common people he reads fortunes in the lines of the hand, and promises husbands to pining maidens ; he receives a prophet's reward in the form of a cheese and ribs of bacon. With Shakespeare, while Peter is not deprived of his prophetic character, he becomes significant chiefly as an exponent of those popular rumours and forecasts which Bacon tells us in one of his Essays are often the preludes of sedition'; and, as a substitute for the interpretation of the five moons that have appeared, we are given a highly dramatic description of the excitement of the populace. The scene in the old play in which Hubert's brandingirons are heated to destroy young Arthur's eyes is impressive, as is the corresponding scene in Shakespeare. But the Arthur of the elder dramatist pleads on grounds of religion for a reversal of the sentence. In Shakespeare the boy's appeal is not to his keeper's religious feeling but to his humanity, and Hubert relents because he is touched by human pity.

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On various occasions Shakespeare enhances the part

of Faulconbridge. In The Troublesome Raigne his half-brother Robert appears as appellant while Philip is the respondent; with Shakespeare Philip becomes the appellant, and as he is magnified Robert is dimin

ished and lowered in contrast with one who has a trick of Coeur-de-Lion's face, and token of his parentage in the 'large composition' of his manhood. Philip, in the old play, is an aspirant for the hand of Blanch. Shakespeare's Bastard is not a lover but a mocker at the amorous gallantry behind which lie self-interested motives. His is a spirit made for action of a more strenuous kind than capering nimbly in a lady's chamber. He is sufficiently happy in reducing the insolent pride of Austria and in taking vengeance for his father's death. The lines in sonnet-form which - mock the blandishments of the lovers-' Drawn in the flattering table of her eye!' and what follows-are of Shakespeare's invention. When the English queenmother is captured by the French, it is King John who, in the old play, recaptures Elinor. Shakespeare transfers the action from his ignoble king to the gallant Faulconbridge. The soliloquy of the Bastard that closes Act II, a soliloquy which bravely rails against 'commodity', has nothing corresponding to it in the old play. We feel that some honest voice is needed as a relief after all the Machiavellian statecraft; and if Philip professes in the end that he too must be governed by self-interest, we know how to interpret a turn given humorously to his indignation at the baseness of the men about him-'Why unpack my heart with words?' he would say. 'Am I any better than my fellows? In a society given over to evil must not I too accept my evil destiny?' And as a fact he never accepts it.

With the third Act of King John the female characters disappear. The stage in the fourth and fifth Acts is filled with armed warriors, amid whom moves the great figure of Cardinal Pandulph, dominating material power by spiritual authority, and for a short time we see the pathetic boy, Arthur, now a prisoner and with