The twentieth century"

33Etty, J. Lytelton, 1901

"Studies on Shakespeare's History. V.—King John" from Macmillan's Magazine Cambridge, 1901 (Candido, 320).

Topics: character, John

[Commenting on TLN 1800-1965, in which John tries to convince the lords that he innocent of Arthur's murder and to shift the blame entirely onto Hubert]

The tragic episode is complete here, the real tragedy of John's life. It matters little now if Arthur be alive or dead, though the news that he yet lives at once restores Hubert to favour. It matters little if John succeed or fail. For morally his failure is now achieved. Hitherto he has been a villain certainly, but he has not lacked a certain grand consistency in his wickedness together with traces of intellectual power. But now in the revelation of his feebleness, of his absolute inability to abide by the result of his actions, John ceases to be in any sense respectable. The attitude in which Shakespeare draws him here tallies with his abject submission to the Pope after defying him for years; neither his submission in the one instance nor his repentance in the other would make him more contemptible, were it not for the violence which came first. Audacity can scarcely be reckoned a virtue, but persistent courage even in crime ennobles what it cannot excuse.

34Brooke, Stopford Augustus, 1913

Ten More Plays of Shakespeare London, 1913 (Candido, 359)

Topics: character, Constance, performance

And now for Constance. Amid all this hurly-burly of wars, contending kings, selfish interests, walks like a spirit the awful figure of Constance—worn and wasted motherhood maddened by loss and grief; primeval motherhood isolated from everything else in its own passion:[TLN 1400-1402]. When she is present, all the others recede into the background—are only scenery for her wild figure, with disordered garments and hair unbound, and the sound of death in her voice. The actress who should undertake her part is scarcely born in a century. It needs a majestic woman whose soul has lived in the depths; it needs a man's strength to keep up so continuous a frenzy of passion. It needs a self-control, most rarely found in any artist, to prevent the fury of the part, its total abandonment, from carrying away the actress beyond the self-mastery she must hold over her emotion, lest her execution of the part should break down into feebleness, into mere rant and shouting. Moreover, she must have a noble intellect as well as a pitiful heart to act the part adequately; and added to that—a spirit of imagination to feel the poetic passion in the speech of Constance. All she says, in her grief, is steeped in the waters of poetry; the penetrating pity of imagination pierces through her words into the secret recesses of sorrow.

35E. K. Chambers, 1925

Shakespeare: A Survey (Penguin: Middlesex, 1925) 79.

Topics: biographical reading, Constance

For the sake of the wild and whirling words of Constance and the boyish pathos of Arthur's struggle against death, it is possible that King John may always continue to have its share of devotion from readers of Shakespeare. The sentimentalism of commentators is apt to find in the play a reflection of the natural sorrow of the poet at the death of his own son Hamnet. But the sentimentalist is a dangerous leader in the slippery ways of literary biography. King John may well have been already written when Hamnet died in August 1596. Moreover, the psychological theory implied is a fantastic one. The grief of Constance rings true enough; but, after all, her hint of woe is common, and it must certainly not be assumed that a dramatist can only convince by reproducing just those emotions which he has seen at play in his own household. It is safest to regard the tragic figure of the weeping mother as based rather upon broad human sympathies than upon personal experience; but whatever its origin, the part of Constance, like that, almost contemporary, of the unkinged Richard the Second, affords an ideal mouthpiece for the flood of splendid emotional declamation, which is one of the finest and most enduring qualities of the Elizabethan stage.

. . .

But what is the intellectual bearing of King John? Plainly it is conceived as a tragedy, but wherein does the tragedy consist? Is John himself the villain or the hero? Are we, as in Richard the Third, face to face with the Nemesis that waits upon wickedness in high places? And if so, why are so many scenes, and in particular the closing lines, with their emphasis upon England's dissensions as the cause of England's woes, seem to strike another note, and to point out not John, but those who plot against John, as the workers of the tragic evil? One fears the answer is that no answer can be given, and that the infirmity of double purpose here suggested is indeed inherent in the backboneless structure of the play.

. . .

It is perhaps from a consciousness of the ambiguous place which John must necessarily fill in the play, that Shakespeare throws a large share of the burden of his nationalism upon the Bastard. This tall man of his hands, with his blusterous humours and his shrewd mother-wit, is clearly intended to be typical of the stout Anglo-Saxon race. He has the blood of her kings, even though it came to him a little o'er the hatch, and the very spirit of Plantagenet; and in his large composition there are tokens of the greatest of her heroes, Richard Coeur de Lion himself. So he stands for England throughout. . . . But in a drama faults of structure are irreparable, even by a Shakespeare; and neither Constance nor the Bastard can really redeem the incoherent patchwork from ineffectiveness.

36Wilson, John Dover, 1936

Introduction to King John (Cambridge U P: Cambridge, 1936) vii-lxi.

Topics: John, Bastard, TRKJ, nationalism, Henry V

John is the hero of The Troublesome Reign, an Englishman, chosen by the barons of England in preference to the foreign Arthur, and fighting against foreigners and the Church of Rome. In King John, he is a usurper with no rights in the crown at all . . . Shakespeare's John is no hero.

. . .

the great conclusion [Quotes TLN 2723-29] is the theme of the whole play; and the character who speaks it is the mouthpiece of the author. In his bluff and half-cynical humour the Bastrard . . . probably reflects the personality of the actor Burbage who first played him. But his patriotism is all Shakespeare's. . . . The illegitimate son of Cordelion is an early Henry V, called by fate to prop the falling fortunes of a kingdom ruled by an earlier and meaner Macbeth.

37Bonjour, Adrien, 1951

"The Road to Swinsead Abbey: A Study of the Sense and Structure of King John" (ELH 18.4 (1951) 253-74.

Topics: King John, Bastard, structure, dramatic unity

The main reason, we think, that accounts for the change [Shakespeare depicts John as a usurper, whereas in TRKJ he is not] is that it allows Shakespeare to make a dramatically much more effective use of Arthur's death. If John is a usurper "with no rights in the crown at all," it is obvious that Arthur, as the legitimate heir, is much more dangerous for him and, consequently, the temptation to do away with the boy-much stronger. And the motive of the crime is of paramount importance for an understanding of the whole drama.

. . .

[In the first half of the play], though a usurper, [John] proved a competent ruler. But then he succumbs to the temptation of a criminal deed to ensure his position. And this marks the beginning of the end.

. . .

"I am amazed, methinks, and lose my way IAmong the thorns and dangers of this world" [TLN 1245-46]. We almost have a glimpse of an early Hamlet. The Bastard here attains, on the spiritual and moral plane, the dignity of a great character. This point can scarcely be overestimated. The Bastard is now the man in whom centers the interest and sympathy of the audience.

. . .

John's career represents a falling curve, the Bastard's career a rising curve; and both curves, perfectly contrasted, are linked into a single pattern. The structure of the play is thus remarkably balanced; its pattern can be defined in very simple terms: decline of a hero-rise of a hero.

…

And just because the Bastard never lost sight of the higher interest of the nation, while preserving his loyalty and personal integrity intact, he is now able to prevent a total collapse of the English forces, and succeeds in restoring national unity: " rise of a hero."

Rise and fall are thus determined by a dynamic evolution of two closely connected characters, and what is more, the course of this twofold evolution illustrates the very leading idea of the whole drama. Structurally, this is perhaps the highest achievement. The Coghillian notion of a governing idea has, of course, preoccupied critics. Some embodied it in Commodity, others in the doctrine of national unity. But they failed to clearly establish the unmistakable link between Commodity and the great lesson of national unity.

38Honigmann, E. A. J., 1954

Introduction to King John (Arden: London, 1954) xi-lxxv.

Topics: sources, TRKJ, date

Newly discovered facts, moreover, suggest that, quite apart from the T. R.[TRKJ], John must probably be dated back to the winter of 1590/1 . . . it must be said here that we finally side with Prof. Alexander against the commoner view that the T.R. came before John [For the complete evidence that Honigmann uses to support his theory, see the Date section of his introduction.]

39van de Water, Julia C., 1960

"The Bastard in King John" (Shakespeare Quarterly 11.2 (1960) 137-46.

Topics: King John, Bastard

Critics and editors have conceded, almost unanimously, that King John in Shakespeare's play of that name is a failure as either a hero or a villain-hero, since he is in no sense a true protagonist. In casting about for a substitute hero, critical attention has focused on Philip Faulconbridge, the Bastard, a major and ubiquitous figure in the play, and the only character in it who is in the least likeable. The result of this attention has been an increasing tendency on the part of commentators to exaggerate both his function and his merits, so that he has been interpreted progressively as protagonist, hero, and finally as Shakespeare's ideal, both as man and king. The result has also been an increasingly unwarranted distortion of the evidence of the play itself.

. . .

How much closer to the truth it would be to say that Faulconbridge is really only a slightly concealed "vice." He bubbles over with wit and merriment; he is prone to tease and scoff; he is the medium of the comic aside; and he provides cynical commentary on the action. Yet with it all, he is basically a "good blunt fellow" out to make his fortune. These are the very attributes of the vice as he had developed and mellowed in English comedy.

It is only in the fourth act that we begin to find any of the elements of character that could even remotely be said to be "regal."

. . .

Actually, in the last two acts the Bastard comes much closer to epitomizing the loyal follower than he does the regal leader.

40Reese, M. M., 1961

The Cease of Majesty: A Study of Shakespeare's History Plays (Edward Arnold: London, 1961) 261, 280, 285.

Topics: character, politics, Richard III, Bastard Constance

In the present century, King John has never been very popular. It is not a satisfactory play, since it lacks a focal point. Shakespeare's customary insistence on the themes of patriotism, obedience and unity is here entangles in his stern exploration of Commodity.

. . .

King Johnis the most cynical and disillusioned of the histories. By comparison Richard III is just a cautionary tale about a wicked magician, and in the political jungle of King John Richard himself would early lose his way in its thorns and dangers. Among its characters we may make an exception of Constance, whose mother-love, although she carries it in excess, is a decent human instinct, and she revolts from the treacheries and impersonal opportunism of the politicians. We may also except Arthur . . . and Blanch . . . But no one else in the play is a person of integrity, not even Faulconbridge [the Bastard], who cheerfully admits that he is tarred with the same brush as the people he condemns.

. . .

Faulconbridge [the Bastard] is a link with the Prince Hal of plays to come. . . . the appearance here of this concept of a political man, suggested only vaguely, if at all, in the earlier histories, means that King John is not a play to be ignored.

41Gupta, S. C. Sen, 1964

Shakespeare's Historical Plays (Oxford U P: Oxford, 1964) 112.

Topics: Bastard, structure, drama of ideas, patriotism

That is why, as Reese points out, the play seems to lack a focal point, for the man whose interests are at stake plays second fiddle to the man who protects those interests. Although this criticism is largely true, the defect complained of is a part of Shakespeare's basic conception of the play as the evolution of an idea. . . . his theme is not popular (or baronial) liberty against royal tyranny, but the evolution of patriotism out of concrete, living experience, and for this the man who protects John's interests without being directly involved in them is obviously a better hero than John who fights to defend his own 'usurp'd authority'. Thus the principal limitation of this play as a personal tragedy is a part of its strength as a drama of ideas.

42Tillyard, E. M. W., 1964

Shakespeare's Historical Plays (Barnes and Noble: New York, 1964) 216-17.

Topics: TRKJ, date of composition

The common opinion is that Shakespeare took the disposition of his material from the old play [TRKJ] and rewrote it in his own language, with a different intention, and with transformed characters. Alexander sought to put the debt the other way round, but Dover Wilson has quite disposed of this endeavour. . . . Courthope . . . may be nearer the truth when he made Shakespeare the author of both plays. . . . the Troublesome Reign [may] turn out to be a bad quarto. . . not of King John as we have it but of an early play by Shakespeare on the same theme. This play would then be the original both of the Troublesome Reign and of King John: the former keeping on the whole the fine construction of the original but garbling the execution and inserting an alien scene; the latter following but impairing the construction and altering the intention and some of the characterisation of its original.

That Shakespeare wrote and revised an early John cannot be proved; but I find the supposition best able to explain the facts.

43Matchett, William H., 1966

Introduction to King John (Signet: New York, 1966) 3-22

Topics: Bastard, Constance

Insofar as the play has a hero, then, it is the Bastard, and, indeed, a large part of the first act is devoted to introducing him to us. He repeats the national situation on a domestic scale. He also is in possession of an estate to which another, his half brother Robert, is the rightful heir.

. . .

[Referring to the sympathy earlier generations found for Constance and the view of her as the most attractive character in the play]

This is a view I cannot share, though she is indeed forceful in her claims for sympathy. I find it noteworthy that many actresses, in creating their conception of her suffering motherhood, found it necessary to omit some of her more violent speeches, especially her screeching exchanges with Elinor. Constance is a suffering mother, there is no doubt, but she is also an ambitious one, a strident domineering tigress.

. . .

the Bastard has shown us (as, in his lesser role, has Hubert) the self-denying acceptance of a higher duty which true loyalty demands from the man of honor.

44Richmond, H. M., 1967

Shakespeare's Political Plays (Random House: London, 1967) 100-119

Topics: character, John, Bastard, English identity

Shakespeare's play is not popular; it is not often performed, probably because of the emotional problem presented to an audience by the character of its central figure, John himself. Yet it is just this ambivalence of response (a minor-key version of what we feel for Richard III) that constitutes the central political and theatrical interest of the play. This lies in the creative tension of two incompatible sets of values: dislike of John as a man, and recognition of the substantial fact of his kingship.

. . .

Philip [the Bastard] conserves a kind of integrity by this honesty [free from hypocrisy], and with it the power of moral growth, which is denied to such unstable personalities as John himself. Philip's [the Bastard] personality therefore serves in many ways to reflect the relatively detached consciousness of the audience: both have been matured and refined by observation of the events that impinge on his meteoric career. Carrying the audience along with him, Philip [the Bastard] evolves out of the crude cynicism that is youth's first alternative to idealism into a resigned, even world-weary maturity that nevertheless proves compatible with an underlying vital impetus that survives from his youth. This still remaining idealism increasingly develops into a dauntless patriotism, with the result that Philip [the Bastard] is the figure whose perspective governs an English audience's response to the play. By studying its action through his eyes, we shall therefore probably come closest to Shakespeare's own perspective, and to a sense of the political values that he is concerned to dramatize.

. . .

However, as a kind of catalyst of the diplomatic ferment before the gates of Angiers, the Bastard proposes that the opposed kings teach the aloof citizens a lesson, by ravaging their town before proceeding to a further mutual decimation. Again the proposal is laden with Swiftian irony, utterly unperceived by its crudely bellicose hearers. . . . After it has been razed, why fight over its ruins? The Bastard, by contrast, proves likely to have subtler purposes in breaking the deadlock, since it turns out, to being with, that John's two enemies are thus disadvantaged by the subsequent disposition of their two armies facing sides of the town [Quotes TLN 728-29].

Secondly, by shifting the onus of responsibility from the headstrong monarchs, the Bastard forces the now directly engaged but still prudent citizens to intervene, and to achieve a compromise between the greedy but essentially cowardly kings.

. . .

the Bastard has emerged as the symbolic pivot of the play. . . . What turns the balance in favor of England is thus simply the steady political and military energy of the Bastard, which is rooted in a sense of true English identity.

45Smallwood, R. L., 1974

Introduction to King John (Penguin: Middlesex, 1974) 1-46.

Topics: Arthur, Bastard, Hubert

John's two most loyal supporters [Eleanor and the Bastard] leave us in no doubt of their opinions of the legitimacy of his rule. These deliberate modifications of his source material are part of Shakespeare's careful establishment of a complex and testing political situation.

. . .

With [Arthur's] constant courtesy, his persuasive power in the prison scene, and the courage of his attempted escape, we are left in no doubt of his potential regality.

. . .

Even the things that make [Arthur] pathetic and touching disqualify him has a possible ruler: his childishness, his weakness, his anxiety to avoid trouble. Above all is the fact that his hopes for power depend entirely on foreign support: the removal of John will mean that England is ruled by the puppet of King Richard's principal enemies. Perhaps a usurper who acts with strength and speed when his country is threatened is preferable to this rightful ruler who brings the inevitability of foreign domination. Shakespeare presents us with the impossible choice between a man in possession and the claimant with legal right, between the vigorous man of action and the helpless child.

. . .

The alliance of Hubert and the Bastard is inevitable, for they are the only two characters in the play who respond with honesty to the political situation.

46Berry, Edward I., 1975

Patterns of Decay: Shakespeare's Early Histories (U P of Virginia: Charlottesville, 1975) 118.

Topics: Bastard, character,

In the Bastard Faulconbridge, then, Shakespeare creates a character whose development weds the "political" insights and energies of Richard III and the lesser machiavels of the Henry IV plays—Suffolk, Winchester, York—to the moral commitment of a Talbot or a Gloucester.

47Muir, Kenneth, 1977

The Sources of Shakespeare's Plays (Methuen: London, 1977) 78-85.

Topics: sources, TRKJ, date

What makes the Honigmann theory [that Shakespeare's King John was written before TRKJ] impossible, however, is that there are some obscurities in Shakespeare's play which can be elucidated by reference to The Troublesome Raigne. This is not because the anonymous author made plain what Shakespeare had left obscure, but because Shakespeare cut out some connecting links.

. . .

Shakespeare's main sources, we may conclude, consisted of The Troublesome Raigne and Holinshed's Chronicles. He begins his play at line 23 of The Troublesome Raigne, and thereafter follows it scene by scene, although he makes many alterations in the process. He reduces the first scene from 421 lines to 276, but enlarges the next four scnees from 618 to 945. He does not allow Faulconbridge's mother to be present during the establishment of his parentage. Although the outlines of the Bastard's character are in The Troublesome Raigne, Shakespeare makes it much more interesting by giving him the superb speech on commodity (in which a Kent-figure poses as an Edmund) and by the addition of the scene where Hubert is made to prove his innocence by carrying Arthur's body in his arms.

Shakespeare also amplifies Constance's part.

. . .

A last example of Shakespeare's alterations may be given—John's temptation of Hubert.

48Manheim, Michael, 1989

"The Four Voices of the Bastard". In Curren-Aquino.

Topics: Bastard

The Bastard speaks successively in four distinct voices in King John, roughly representing stages of what might today be called his political coming-of-age. . . . The first three of these voices indicate the increasing degree of knowledge of the world and of himself that Shakespeare intends this young man to acquire; the fourth, that of the new Machiavel.

. . .

The Bastard's discovery of a new diction by means of which the king's weakness may be disguised and the state renewed, outwardly at least, is our discovery of the nature of the transition between Shakespeare's two historical tetralogies. Richard III of the first tetralogy was the stage Machiavel, the super-villain who provided a vent for all varieties of audience hostility toward ruthless government. . . . But the new politics was becoming deeply ingrained in Elizabethan public life, and the same audience that hooted the old stage-Machiavel would cheer the real Machiavel on stage as long as he was properly gifted and adorned. The Bastard possesses the necessary gifts from the start, and the adornment is his seemingly spontaneous, highly energetic new language, the legacy he passes on to Henry V. By means of linguistic artifice, Machiavellian tactics, so despised in the earlier plays, are made attractive in both theatrical and political terms.

49Rackin, Phyllis, 1989

"Patriarchal History and Female Subversion in King John" from (Associated U P: London, 1989) 76-88. In Curren-Aquino.

Topics: feminist reading

[Feminine voices in King John] imply that before the masculine voices of history can be accepted as valid, it must come to terms with women and the subversive forces they represent.

. . .

Rending the fabric of patriarchal history, Shakespeare opens a space where women can speak and act. In King John the roles of women are more various and prominent than in any of his other English histories, their subversive power to undermined the masculine historical project most fully reveals. Instead of playing subsidiary parts in a script written by men, the women in King John play crucial roles in determining the course of events. Driven by their own ambitions and by hatred and envy of each other, Elinor and Constance incite the war between England and France.

. . .

[Referring to Act 1 and the issue of the Bastard's legitimacy] According to the laws of patriarchy as expounded by John . . . the woman, like a cow, is mere chattel, possession of the man. All her actions, even an act so radical as betrayal of the marriage bond, are totally irrelevant, powerless to affect her son's name, possession, legal status, or identity. Only the man's entitlement has significance under law. She is his possession, and any child she bears is his, even if he is not the biological father. Thus, the very absoluteness of patriarchal right provides for its own subversion.

By admitting that the relationship between father and son is finally no more than a legal fiction, John attacks the very basis of patriarchal history, as he does throughout the play.

50Dusinberre, Juliet, 1990

"King John and Embarrassing Women" Shakespeare Survey 42 (1990) 37-52.

Topics: Constance, Eleanor

Constance becomes in this speech [TLN 993-96] the locus for the conflict of power and powerlessness which shapes the whole play.

The play of King Johnthus became for the mid-nineteenth-century actress and audience the play of Constance and Arthur.

. . .

Her very impotence seems to cry out against her, and throughout the play alienation might seem more likely to accompany the sallies of the main women characters, Eleanor and Constance, than any great sympathy with their wrongs. They are, for the modern feminist, too palpably acquiescent in the values which have created these wrongs. Indeed some kind of male directorial embarrassment has often accompanied productions of King John,resulting in the cutting of the scolding between Eleanor and Constance.

. . .

In Shakespeare's version John himself is forced into the role of mere child ('good mother') by his mother's manifestly unseemly assertion of power: that is, unseemly within the prevailing discourse, which belongs not to her, as in The

Troublesome Raigne,but to her son (despite the fact that she has done all the work establishing that power).

. . .

With Lady Falconbridge and the Bastard, Shakespeare completed the triad of mothers and sons in King John:Eleanor with the legitimate John whose claim to the throne is illegitimate, as she herself knows; Constance whose son Arthur's claim is the best in terms of lineage but who had been disinherited by Richard Coeur-de-lion on his death-bed; and now the unknown Lady Falconbridge.

51Beaurline, L. A., 1990

Introduction to King John (Cambridge U P: Cambridge) 1-59.

Topics: language, Bastard, authenticity, Constance

The declamatory style in its most blustering form has a special place in King John. Nearly every character uses it from time to time, except for Melun, who is heard at the moment of death, when all men should speak the plain truth.

. . .

In contrast with his fifth-act bluster, the Bastard's more authentic personal voice carries conviction when he whole-heartedly thanks his mother for giving him a great father [Quotes TLN 284-289]. . . .Although the six lines are rhymed, they seem unpremeditated—in natural word order, mostly monosyllabic. In his high spirit the Bastard talks as he feels, so we believe that he is willing to back up his words with action.

[Describing the temptation scene 3.2]

. . . vagueness characterises [John's] talk, as he circles the subject insinuatingly to create what government officials now call deniability and Francis Bacon says was called 'The turning of the cat in the pan—to speak so obscurely about what one wants done until one's subordinates advocates it.

. . .

Constance too suffers from disordered perceptions which govern her rage and enhance her declamatory style when she feels utterly impotent. In Act 2 she and Eleanor sound like a pair of brawling women, hurling imprecations in their 'ill-tunèd repetitions' (2.1.197), but the splendour of her baffled outrage in Act 3 has an energy that surpasses anything of the kind in the play. Her articulate power, which modern audiences may find tiresome, seldom failed to affect eighteenth- and nineteenth-century theatre audiences.

. . .

The signs of Constance's incipient madness are clearest in her increased use of repetition. . . .The most telling speech is her repeated denial that she is mad: 'I am not mad: this hair I tear is mine . . .I am not mad. I would to God I were . . . Preach some philosophy to make me mad . . . being not mad . . . If I were mad . . . I am not mad . . .' (TLN 1429-44).

. . .

Unlike Constance and John, the Bastard keeps his sanity and remains more or less a whole man in a mad world, perhaps because he manages to be both in and out of every complex situation. He can throw himself into action one moment and in the next he can contemplate the moral and political constraints of his position. His sense of humour and his light touch alternate with his earnestness and practicality. In these various modes he is still primarily a social animal, conscious of himself in relation to other people.

. . .

I think the difficulty with these soliloquies [1.1 and 2.1] has been increased by twentieth-century critics who have an exaggerated estimate of the Bastard's integrity. His moral and patriotic grandeur have been elevated so far above the shabbiness of others that some critics wish to turn him into the very hero of the drama. However, if we conceive of the Bastard in a somewhat lower register—as an ebullient, loyal soldier with this head screwed on right and with wonderful perceptions in a crisis, a person with uncanny resources for a public man, as we shall see—he fits the early soliloquies reasonably well.

52Neill, Michael, 1993

"'In Everything Illegitimate': Imagining the Bastard in Renaissance Drama." The Yearbook of English Studies (1993) 23:287-8.

Topics: Bastard, illegitimacy

[Neill discusses the origins of the concept of illegitimacy and its association with deformity and dirt.] This sense of the bastard's inherent deformity may attach itself even to those like Faulconbridge in King John whose character is in many respects attractive, even admirable. An invention of Shakespeare's principal source, The Troublesome Raigne, the bastard had already established himself as the effective hero of that play: but there his bastardy figured merely as a factor in the dramatized debate as to who should properly inherit the patriotic mantle (or lionskin) of Richard Coeur-de-lion. Shakespeare's adaptation, however, makes the issue of his illegitimacy symbolically central to a play in which (in Phyllis Rackin's words) 'every source of authority fails and legitimacy is reduced to a legal fiction';[footnote: Phyllis Rackin, Stages of History: Shakespeare's English Chronicles (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), p. I84.] and where, as a result, 'All form is formless, order orderless' [TLN 1184]. In King John the legitimacy of all claimants to the throne is under challenge: not only is bastardy polemically alleged against both Prince Arthur and his father in Act II, scene i, but the king himself is denounced in the opening exchange for the illegitimate usurpation of his 'borrowed majesty' - a usurpation which the French king figures as an act of violent adultery, by which John has

Cut off the sequence of posterity,
Outfaced infant state, and done a rape
Upon the maiden virtue of the crown. [TLN 393-95]

As 'the presiding spirit' of this play, ' the human embodiment of every kind of illegitimacy',[footnote: Rackin, p.186. For Joseph Candido, the Bastard's 'personal defilement' represents the impossibility of untainted action in 'an adulterate world'. Candido discovers in the play 'a Hamletesque obsession with sullied purity and [...] adultery' ('Blots, Stains', p. I 4).] the Bastard incarnates the deformity in the body politic which is the consequence of John's adulterous usurpation of the crown, and which Salisbury insists that Prince Henry is born to reform:

for you are born
To set a form upon that indigest
Which he hath left so shapeless and so rude' [TLN 2631-33]

The expressive vehicles of this deformity are the 'rude' speech [TLN 72] and 'wild counsel' [TLN 709], with which he persistently subverts the shaping authority of official language - as, for example, in the confrontation between the rival kings at Angers, where his subversive asides disrupt the very form and syntax of the verse itself-

KING JOHN [.. .] I bring you witnesses,
Twice fifteen thousand hearts of England's breed -
BASTARD Bastards, and else.
KING JOHN To verify our title with their lives.
KING PHILIP As many and as well-born bloods as those
BASTARD Some bastards too.
KING PHILIP Stand in his face to contradict his claim. [TLN 581-87]

From the Bastard's perspective, however, the authorized language of chivalric heroism is merely another version of the rhetoric of patriarchal reproof that first pronounced his own illegitimacy:

Here's a large mouth indeed [...]
What cannoneer begot this lusty blood?
He speaks plain cannon-fire [...]
Zounds, I was never so bethumped with words
Since I first call'd my brother's father dad. [TLN 773-83]

It is this iconoclastic licence which, in a world tainted with illegitimacy, makes Faulconbridge, as Joseph Candido observes, 'a sort of moral oxymoron [...] a true bastard to the time', endowing him with a paradoxical quality of' authenticity'. [footnote: Candido, 'Blots, Stains', 123.]

53Baker, Herschel, 1997

Introduction (Houghton Mifflin: Boston, 1997) 805-808. In Riverside Edition.

Topics: Bastard

As John, initially so brisk and bold and callous, sinks through moral torpor to defeat, Faulconbridge grows strong in self-awareness. In a world of knaves and fools that is governed by "Commodity" he alone cuts through fraud and privileged error to assert the claims of valor, truth, and loyalty. With neither John's "possession" of the throne nor Arthur's "right" to it, he exemplifies the true regality of character, for in him there shines "the very spirit of Plantagenet." He is therefore one of Shakespeare's grand creations.

54Cohen, Walter, 1997

Introduction to King John (W. W. Norton: New York, 1997) 1015-1021. In The Norton Shakespeare.

Topics: Bastard, illegitimacy, mothers and sons, TRKJ

In King John, the gods stand up for bastards . . . Constance and Eleanor question each other's sexual honour—an issue that is broached earlier when the Bastard's mother acknowledges her adulterous affair with King Richard. This recurrent concern underscores the uncertainty of biologically legitimate patriarchal succession. Hereditary descent from father to son tacitly accords a central role to women, whose sexual fidelity is felt to be necessary but unreliable. . . . Perhaps as a result of the mothers' deaths, the sons become increasingly inept. . . . Arthur leaps to his accidental, meaningless death . . . John's stunned response to his mother's death helps explain the radical transformation in his behavior—from confident leadership to helpless passivity. By the last part of the play, he is neither tragic nor villainous but simply beside the point, his fall having coincided with the Bastard's rise.

That rise makes possible a defense of illegitimacy. . . [but] despite his crucial role in recognizing John's legitimate heir and in articulating a vision of national unity, the Bastard too is partly undermined. . . . Ineptitude is soon replaced by irrelevance: the Bastard opts for war after others have already negotiated peace.

. . .

[Textual note]

a direct link between the wording of two stage directions in The Troublesome Reign and their analogues in King John is easily explained only on the assumption that the anonymous play came first and that Shakespeare was familiar with it. Shakespeare could have read the relevant stage directions of The Troublesome Reign in the 1591 edition of that play, but it is not clear how the author of The Troublesome Reign could have known of Shakespeare's unpublished stage directions. Stylistic and metrical tests, which date King John to roughly 1596, strongly support this hypothesis.