120Irony and surprise

As Arthur's body lies on the stage after his leap from the wall, Shakespeare develops a series of layered ironies as the stage fills. First the three lords enter, then the Bastard, and finally Hubert. All are initially unaware of the child's death. The scene is a fascinating exploration not only of grief, but of the contingency of moral decisions based on partial knowledge. None of the characters present knows how Arthur met his death, and only Hubert is aware of the earlier (subverted) attempt on his life at King John's instigation. The lords use their moral indignation to justify their switch in allegiance to the Dauphin, but the scene opens with them discussing their decision to change sides--before they see the body, and before they know for certain that Arthur is dead. In this context, Salisbury's hyperbolic outrage (TLN 2040-49) hardly rings true. Hubert remains silent as to King John's earlier plot on Arthur's life, which very probably triggered the boy's attempt to escape; the Bastard is left to muse on Arthur's death, and on the larger question of the integrity of the kingdom when its ruler is weak and compromised by the young prince's death however it occurred. His choice is to remain loyal to the king, and through him to the kingdom.

121After this scene the action of the play speeds up, and there are fewer situations where dramatic interest is generated by irony. In its place, the audience witnesses a series of surprises: King John passes the management of the kingdom to the unhistorical figure of the Bastard; Lewis refuses the mediation of Pandulph (though this may not be altogether a surprise); the "great supply" (TLN 2451) that Lewis expected is lost on Goodwin Sands; the count Melun reveals the treachery of Lewis to the rebellious English lords; Lewis seems determined to continue his campaign despite the two pieces of bad news about his supply and the return of the English lords; King John is poisoned, with no apparent warning; Prince Henry suddenly appears as the legitimate heir to the throne; and we are belatedly informed that Lewis, after all, has abruptly yielded to the persuasion of Pandulph and accepted terms of peace.

122These unexpected twists in both plot and character have been largely responsible for the opinion of many critics that the play as a whole lacks coherence, and that its plot is untidy. Our usual sense of Shakespeare's dramatic art is that he is far more likely to exploit the effect of dramatic irony than to build suspense or to surprise his audience. There are indeed some moments of intense irony in these latter scenes, most notably when the Bastard, in high style, boasts before Lewis of the power and resolution of King John, when the audience knows full well that the king is ill, weak, and ill-equipped in men (TLN 2381-2412). But the play seems rather to re-create the "fog of war" through conflicting signals, where neither the characters on stage nor the audience has the full picture. Some of the ambiguity (or confusion) is the result of Shakespeare changing and condensing the plot he inherited from The Troublesome Reign. A good example is the fact that he does not dramatize (or warn the audience) of the treachery of Lewis--the subject of a complete scene in TRKJ; thus the audience (unless they remember the earlier play in some detail) is as surprised as the lords by Melun's announcement. The debates that fired the dialog in the earlier scenes of King John fade in these last scenes, as events outside human agency decide the movement of the plot (see my discussion above). The Bastard continues to believe that human choice can direct the course of history; he urges continued vigilance against the French army even as he learns that Pandulph has negotiated reasonable terms of peace (TLN 2691-8), but the dramatic energy in the final scenes is emotional, stressing the pathos of John's death and the grief of his son. Henry can say thanks to the assembled lords only in tears.

123King John's structural use of surprise and of chance events is not unique in Shakespeare. Two plays written at roughly the same period in his career in striking ways generate surprise and rely on accident within the plot. The sudden announcement of the death of the King of France at the end of Love's Labor's Lost comes as a shocking surprise (anticipated by a single comment in the opening scene [LLL TLN 148]); it is a matter of pure chance that its timing is such as to postpone, at least for a year, any happy ending. Romeo and Juliet, on the other hand, studiously avoids surprise (in the Quartos, though not in the Folio text) through the device of the opening Chorus that warns the audience not to get their hopes up. But the tragic plot is explicitly precipitated by chance as well as the hot haste of both the young lovers and the older generation: Friar John is arbitrarily delayed in delivering the crucial message by an outbreak of the plague, and Friar Laurence conveniently, and somewhat improbably, gets an attack of tomb-fright just at the right moment to leave Romeo to discover the still apparently dead Juliet with no one to tell him of her imminent recovery. Even Richard II, which looks forward to the character-driven structure of what we think of as Shakespearean tragedy, recounts the coincidence that the supporting army, supposed to meet him on his arrival from Ireland, is disbanded the day before his landing (R2 TLN 1423).

124Shakespeare did not, in general, adopt the dramatic modes he experimented with in these later scenes of King John, but even his much later plays return at times to the same techniques. The Winter's Tale stands out, with its magical mixture of deep exploration of character and happenstance (Florizel's hawk leading him to the discovery of Perdita, who of course turns out to be the daughter of his father's enemy), and its astonishingly improbable and carefully staged revelation in the final scene that Hermione lives. But a tragedy as profoundly based on character as King Lear also involves unkind chance when Edmund delays the revelation that he has given the order for the deaths of Lear and Cordelia until it is just too late. The ending of King Lear would also come as a shock, not so dissimilar from that of Love's Labor's Lost, to those members of the audience who remembered the historical narrative, or the earlier King Leir, as Shakespeare wrests tragedy from the mouth of romance in reversing the traditional happy ending.

125As an experimental play, King John may be untidy, but it offers actors a wide range of characters to celebrate, giving them opportunities to stir their audience in speeches and scenes of high emotion. The debates it stages resonate with the same audiences as they are invited to explore issues of politics, power, and powerlessness. It remains a play that explores unblinkingly a "mad world" where the most ingenious political maneuvers are ultimately ineffective as unplanned events overshadow human stratagems.