90Women and children

Shakespeare's expeditious method of dispatching Lewis back to France in a brief report from Salisbury (TLN 2692-705) is remarkably similar to the almost casual way the women disappear in the second half of the play. My heading here, separating the characters of the women and children from the men, might seem to resuscitate the now discredited habit in the opening dramatis personae of listing the women after the men; my justification is that although King John provides strong roles for women it is striking that their stage time ends so abruptly. We may not expect Lady Faulconbridge or Blanche of Spain to return after their cameo appearances in acts one and two, but the two women with major parts, Eleanor and Constance, die arbitrarily off stage in a single speech from a messenger (TLN 1839-41). It is almost as though Shakespeare decided to follow Lewis's patriarchal injunction "Women and fools break off your conference" (TLN 450). Not surprisingly, the women are all shown to be dependent on the power of the men in their lives; Dusinberre comments that Eleanor and Constance are, for the modern feminist, "too palpably acquiescent in the values which have created [their] wrongs" (40). But it is also clear that within their limitations they all show eloquence and some strength. Their disappearance in the latter part of the play, when action rather than discussion dominates, prefigures the reduced role of women in the plays of the second tetralogy, where the woman's voice is marginal at best--the most vivid examples being Catherine of France in Henry V, with her comic attempts to learn her future husband's language, and Mortimer's wife, in Henry IV, Part One, who can sing and speak in Welsh, but who cannot communicate to the men in any other way. Despite the presence of Queen Elizabeth on the throne, "Female authority is always absent in Shakespeare's histories" (Rackin 78); in Shakespeare's hitories, the closest the women can come to power is through their faithfulness as wives, passing on the unblemished rights of their husbands to their sons; in these terms the women in King John are restless and subversive. Although Lady Faulconbridge is the only woman to admit she has borne a bastard, the two queens, Eleanor and Constance, use the accusation of infidelity as their main weapon when they attack each other before the walls of Angiers. What is most striking about these interchanges, however, is the way the women are deprecated, and ultimately ignored, by the men. At least they avoid the fate of Lady Faulconbridge, who is equated with a cow (Rackin 86) when King John judges in favor of the Bastard's inheriting the Faulconbridge estate by invoking a law concerning cattle:

In sooth, good friend, your father might have kept
This calf, bred from his cow, from all the world,
In sooth he might.
(TLN 131-3)

91The wider irony of this judgment is that in overruling old Sir Robert's will the king is unwittingly commenting on the uncertain validity of the will his own brother made in leaving the kingdom to him.

92Of the four women in the play, only Eleanor seems to have responsibilities of her own. King John sends "powers" (TLN 1375) to her, so it is clear that she has forces to command, and the king depends on her "intelligence" (her spies) to bring him news of events in France (TLN 1834). Eleanor is a striking and somewhat surprising figure. The play has scarcely begun, with formal ceremony as the ambassador from France is invited to speak, when Eleanor interrupts, and King John must ask her to be silent. Dusinberre (41) asks a good question at this point: who does Chatillon speak to after Eleanor's caustic remark? Does he ignore her and continue the formal confrontation with the king, or does he speak to her, recognizing her as the power behind the throne? In any case, as soon as Chatillon leaves Eleanor takes over the stage, lecturing the king on his lack of effective diplomacy, and openly acknowledging his tenuous claim to the throne. She takes the initiative in claiming the Bastard as her grandson, and in the scene before Angiers is fierce in her attacks on Constance. The text is cryptic on the subject, but it is certainly possible to see her as a co-conspirator with John in the death of Arthur; she draws him away so that the king and Hubert can confer--at which point the king suborns Hubert to kill the child (TLN 1318ff).

93However the scene is staged, the play is frustratingly silent when it comes to Eleanor's possible complicity in Arthur's death, and she is given no opportunity to reveal her thoughts. We have seen that an effective way of understanding the interiority of the male characters in the play is through the manifestation of conscience. Conscience is triggered by self-judgement concerning an action--or by inaction when action is possible--but the women in the play have reactive rather than active roles, and they are given no opportunity to express the kind of internal debate that is central in our response to King John or the Bastard. Blanche, as a dutiful daughter, unquestioningly does what she is told when she is offered as collateral for peace between France and England:

My uncle's will in this respect is mine.
If he see aught in you that makes him like,
That anything he sees which moves his liking
I can with ease translate it to my will. . . .
[I am] bound in honor still to do
What you in wisdom still vouchsafe to say.
(TLN 827-30, 841-2)

94Similarly, Lady Faulconbridge, who exists only as the vessel through which the seed of Richard I passes to the Bastard, and who was swayed by the king's power "through long and vehement suit" (TLN 267), can only passively protest as others, principally her sons, hold "in chase [her] honor up and down" (TLN 234). Because the women in general lack agency, if we are to explore their interiority we must listen to a different voice, turning our attention from the internal debate that reveals conscience to the overt expression of emotion. In this register, the text does provide a great deal of information about the interiority of the women in King John especially in their response to grief.

95Grief--whether sincere or insincere--is clearly a central emotion in King John. Shakespeare uses the word "grief" sixteen times in the play; in only three plays is the word mentioned more often--Romeo and Juliet (17), Hamlet (18), and Richard II a remarkable 34 times. Of the sixteen uses of the word in King John ten are spoken either by Constance or about her.

96Constance

My earlier discussion of the importance of emotions in the play began with a focus on the role of Constance, and its attraction for the great nineteenth century actresses. Early critics of the play, especially those writing of Shakespeare's female characters, debated earnestly the motivation that drove Constance: was it her own ambition, expressed through her son, or was she acting through pure maternal love? The text, however, offers ample evidence for a complex character, driven by more than one simple motivation: she is not shown to go through the same process of learning as the Bastard, but she has several "voices" in the play, nonetheless (see the many discussions of her character by earlier critics).

97The first impression she gives is of a woman of judgment and political good sense, as she graciously thanks Austria for his support, and urges King Philip to wait for news from Chatillon of his embassy from King John. Soon enough we hear a very different voice as she and Eleanor engage in a series of verbal battles. Both women trade barbs, accusing the other of infidelity, thus supposedly producing more bastards in the over-arching debate about legitimacy, and trading sarcastic taunts concerning the other's sinfulness. It is, at least for modern ears, excellent theater, as the women speak more openly than the men about the issues of the succession to the throne.

98Constance is conveniently absent from the stage when the peace is concluded between the armies. King Philip is keenly aware of the effect his volte-face will have on her:

Is not the Lady Constance in this troop?
I know she is not, for this match made up
Her presence would have interrupted much.
(TLN 860-2)

99The following scene, where she learns of the pact King Philip has made with the English, despite all his promises, provides evidence enough for those who see her as ambitious for power, when she responds with incredulity and passion close to fury at the news. And she seems as much concerned for her own status as for that of her son:

Lewis marry Blanche? O boy, then where art thou?
France friend with England? What becomes of me?
(TLN 955-6)

100In a fashion later to be made even more emphatic by Cleopatra, she attacks the messenger, dismissing the hapless Salisbury as a "common man" (TLN 929). Her speeches as she responds to Salisbury are those of Shakespeare in full organ-music mode with repeated phrases and rhetorical questions:

Gone to be married? Gone to swear a peace?
False blood to false blood joined? Gone to be friends?
Shall Lewis have Blanche and Blanche those provinces?
It is not so. Thou hast misspoke, misheard.
Be well advised, tell o'er thy tale again. . . .
Thou shalt be punished for thus frighting me,
For I am sick and capable of fears,
Oppressed with wrongs and therefore full of fears,
A widow, husbandless, subject to fears,
A woman naturally born to fears.
(TLN 922-6, 932-6)

And her description of her son (who tactlessly suggests that she stop complaining) approaches the lyricism of a lover:

. . . thou art fair, and at thy birth, dear boy,
Nature and Fortune joined to make thee great.
Of Nature's gifts thou mayest with lilies boast,
And with the half-blown rose.
(TLN 972-5)

101But while hers is a formidable stage presence, the character Shakespeare creates is not always wholly sympathetic. In a curious contrast with her admiration for Arthur's "gifts," she has earlier made clear that her love for Arthur depends on his physical beauty:

If thou that bidst me be content wert grim,
Ugly, and slanderous to thy mother's womb,
Full of unpleasing blots and sightless stains,
Lame, foolish, crooked, swart, prodigious,
Patched with foul moles and eye-offending marks,
I would not care; I then would be content,
For then I should not love thee.
(TLN 965-70)

Constance's language as she describes ugliness is more arresting and colorful than her far more conventional vocabulary of beauty; it is hard to avoid the conclusion that a maternal love grounded on physical beauty is somewhat less than ideal. In a later scene, when Arthur has been taken prisoner, she repeats her focus on his surface appearance:

But now will canker-sorrow eat my bud
And chase the native beauty from his cheek,
And he will look as hollow as a ghost,
As dim and meager as an ague's fit,
And so he'll die; and, rising so again,
When I shall meet him in the court of heaven
I shall not know him. Therefore never, never
Must I behold my pretty Arthur more.
(TLN 1468-74)

102In her political wrangling, Constance is splendid in her scorn for Austria when he tries to pacify her, and Shakespeare gives her a moment where she seems to be channeling the prophetic queens of the first tetralogy:

Let not the hours of this ungodly day
Wear out the days in peace, but ere sunset
Set armèd discord 'twixt these perjured kings.
(TLN 1032-6)

103A few lines later, Pandulph arrives, right on heavenly cue, reigniting the enmity between France and England. Constance is, for the moment, triumphant, but while the political fortunes of the character fall, the role for the actor reaches its height as Constance laments Arthur's capture, and (presciently) fears for his death. The intensity of her feelings, and her unconstrained expression of them, is figured in her hair, which hangs loose as she enters. As she addresses "amiable, lovely death" (TLN 1408) her language at times approaches the excessive ("Thou odoriferous stench, sound rottenness" [TLN 1409]), and clearly the men observing her are uncomfortable. King Philip is restrained, asking her to be patient (TLN 1405, 1420), but Pandulph is impatient: "Lady, you utter madness and not sorrow" (TLN 1427). The men on stage conveniently dismiss her grief as madness, and it is equally true that some critical approaches have accepted Pandulph's diagnosis. Editors of the play have tended to modernize the punctuation of her speeches by sprinkling them with exclamation marks as a signal of the seeming excess of her emotion; but to do so in effect provides stage directions that limit our response: a sentence or phrase may equally be a statement or an exclamation, and the frequent use of exclamations will make Constance seem more extreme than need be the case. At the end of her first speech, Constance says, apostrophizing Death, "Misery's love, / O, come to me" (TLN 1419-20). Is this a quiet moment where she pleads, or an exclamation where she is demanding? The Folio, which uses very few exclamation marks, has a simple period, leaving both alternatives open; editors as distinguished as Honigmann and Braunmuller decide which tone she is adopting and furnish the reader with an exclamation mark. My own practice has been to use exclamation marks sparingly, since Constance is insistent that she has only a "lady's feeble voice" (TLN 1425), and, while she is grieving intensely, she is in full possession of her senses:

I am not mad. I would to [god] I were,
For then 'tis like I should forget my self.
O, if I could, what grief should I forget? . . .
If I were mad, I should forget my son,
Or madly think a babe of clouts were he.
I am not mad: too well, too well I feel
The different plague of each calamity.
(TLN 1432-44)

104Especially when performing for the camera, the effect of quiet intensity in her speeches can make Constance's grief especially compelling. In the BBC version of the play, Claire Bloom's conviction is the more effective for its lack of exclamation.

Constance disappears from the play after this scene, and (in a departure from Holinshed and other chroniclers) the messenger reports that she dies "in a frenzy" (TLN 1841).

105Grief is not confined to the female characters, of course. Both the Bastard and Hubert are deeply moved by Arthur's death. Hubert's response is particularly interesting, in that the audience knows far more than the characters on stage, and will trust his response:

'Tis not an hour since I left him well:
I honored him, I loved him, and will weep
My date of life out for his sweet life's loss.
(TLN 2106-8)

An audience may be moved by the simplicity of Hubert's language; not altogether surprisingly, however, the Bastard and attendant lords are deeply skeptical. The audience has seen Hubert's affection for Arthur in the scene where he chooses not to blind him, but neither the Bastard nor the lords have this information. The dramatic irony at this point neatly encapsulates the ambiguity both the critic and the actor face when they seek to imagine a character's interiority; is the character's expression of emotion (or conscience) sincere, or is it a facade concealing something quite different? The play provides examples enough of political and emotional insincerities. It is certainly possible to read the passion of Salisbury as insincere, both in his self-serving defense to Lewis of his desertion of King John (TLN 2259-90) and his hyperbole as he, in turn, laments the death of Arthur:

This is the very top,
The height, the crest, or crest unto the crest
Of murder's arms. This is the bloodiest shame,
The wildest savagery, the vilest stroke
That ever wall-eyed wrath, or staring rage
Presented to the tears of soft remorse.
(TLN 2044-9)

106In addition to the four women in the play, King John has one, probably two, additional roles for child actors: Arthur, and Prince Henry. Two of the six parts require experience. Eleanor must carry mature conviction in advising King John, and Constance requires a child actor of truly virtuoso skill; Lady Faulconbridge is a bit part for an actor who can communicate a sense of age sufficient to have had two grown sons, while Blanche, like Arthur, is a role appropriate for a younger actor. Four of the six are on stage at the same time (2.1): Eleanor, Constance, Blanche, and Arthur; the other two roles (Lady Faulconbridge and Prince Henry) could readily be doubled. I have already suggested that doubling Arthur and Henry is both practical and thematically striking; it would also be simple for the part of Lady Faulconbridge to be taken by the actor who plays Constance.

107The princes, Henry and Arthur

One effect of the parts of the two children, Arthur and Henry, is that their presence on stage keeps alive the issues raised by the women. Arthur, in particular, is a reminder of Constance's grief, and his situation echoes that of the women in that he so decisively lacks power; similarly, Shakespeare's stress on the tenderness of Prince Henry's response to his father's death recalls Constance's earlier lyricism as she speaks of her love for her son. Responding to the report that his father was singing a few moments earlier, the Prince muses:

'Tis strange that death should sing.
I am the cygnet to this pale faint swan,
Who chants a doleful hymn to his own death,
And from the organ-pipe of frailty sings
His soul and body to their lasting rest.
(TLN 2626-31)

108For an heir, and newly acknowledged king, Henry expresses himself in a surprisingly tearful fashion. When he comes on stage, the king rejects his son's tears (TLN 2652), but Henry is still weeping as he speaks his final words:

I have a kind soul that would give thanks,
And knows not how to do it but with tears.
(TLN 2719-20)

Manly tears are possible, of course, even though tears are "women's weapons" (Lr TLN 1577), and Hubert earlier fought against "tender womanish tears" (TLN 1608-9). Lewis has a fine, if hypocritical, response to Salisbury's tears as he laments his betrayal of the English forces, moved by the mere fact that it is a man weeping:

Let me wipe off this honorable dew
That silverly doth progress on thy cheeks.
My heart hath melted at a lady's tears,
Being an ordinary inundation,
But this effusion of such manly drops,
This shower, blown up by tempest of the soul,
Startles mine eyes and makes me more amazed
Than had I seen the vaulty top of heaven
Figured quite o'er with burning meteors.
(TLN 1296-1304)

109Prince Henry's emotional response ensures that the pathos of King John's suffering is emphasized. Shakespeare's characterization of Prince Henry differs radically from that of the author of The Troublesome Reign, where the prince is feisty enough to challenge the Dauphin in words that sound more like Shakespeare's Bastard:

Henry Lewis, what law of arms doth lead thee thus
To keep possession of my lawful right?
Answer in fine if thou wilt take a peace,
And make surrender of my right again,
Or try thy title with the dint of sword?
(TRKJ TLN 3111-15)

110If Henry's brief role is changed between the two plays, Shakespeare made an even more striking change in the age and character of Arthur. In TRKJ Arthur is more than a child--closer to the historical age of fourteen recorded in the chronicles--and he asserts his presence consistently in the scenes where he appears. Although the Citizen says he "is but young and yet unmeet to reign" (TRKJ /i>TLN 778), The Troublesome Reign's Arthur joins in the debate before the city at some length; similarly, in the focal scene where he pleads for his life with Hubert, he begins with a long speech attacking King John, then engages in a rapid, combative interchange over a further 20 lines, arguing the general issue of the responsibility of a subject to follow either the King's orders or god's law:

[Arthur] Advise thee Hubert, for the case is hard,
To lose salvation for a king's reward.
Hubert. My lord, a subject dwelling in the land
Is tied to execute the Kings command.
Arthur. Yet god commands, whose power reacheth further,
That no command should stand in force to murder.
Hubert. But that same essence hath ordained a law,
A death for guilt, to keep the world in awe. . . .
(TRKJ TLN 1551-72)

111In Shakespeare's King John, the part of Arthur would clearly have been acted by a very young, and therefore appealing, actor. His part perfectly matches the pattern of "scaffolded" roles Evelyn Tribble attributes to young apprentice actors (126-50, especially 142-6): he speaks rarely in the major scenes he takes part in, such that a more experienced actor (the actor playing King Philip, perhaps) could mentor and prompt him; and he has one brilliant extended scene with Hubert, which could well have been carefully rehearsed. Arthur's youth and shyness are emphasized throughout, from his opening, clearly prepared speech to Austria, to his embarrassment when his mother and grandmother are verbally sparring:

Good my mother peace.
I would that I were low laid in my grave;
I am not worth this coil that's made for me.
(TLN 467)

112In his big scene with Hubert, Shakespeare makes Arthur both winsome and precocious; that he is a child (and performed by one on the original stage) makes his appeal to Hubert even more moving, as he first unconsciously, then deliberately and ingeniously, plays on Hubert's emotions. The winsome moments fit well with the focus of the play on emotions. Before he learns of Hubert's mission, Arthur talks happily of the warmth of their relationship, wishing he were Hubert's son (TLN 1597), and reminding Hubert of his role as nurturer when he nursed his headache (TLN 1601-4). Hubert, unwilling to tell Arthur the nature of his mission, requires that the child read his own death-warrant (or near-death warrant, perhaps, since technically only his eyes are to be put out).

[HUBERT]
Can you not read it? Is it not fair writ?
ARTHUR
Too fairly Hubert, for so foul effect.
Must you with hot irons, burn out both mine eyes?
HUBERT
Young boy, I must.
ARTHUR

HUBERT

(TLN 1610)

113In his response when Hubert asks if the warrant is not fairly--that is clearly--written, Arthur plays on the words "foul" and "fair." Wordplay at a moment such as this runs the risk, to a modern (or Victorian) ear, of seeming precious rather than moving. When Hubert insists that he has sworn to put out his eyes with hot irons, Arthur's reply personifies the hot iron with some ingenuity:

Ah, none but in this iron age would do it.
The iron of itself, though heat red hot,
Approaching near these eyes, would drink my tears,
And quench his fiery indignation,
Even in the matter of mine innocence;
Nay, after that, consume away in rust,
But for containing fire to harm mine eye.
(TLN 1637-43)

114In passages like this, Shakespeare gives Arthur an intelligence that suggests his love is more--to use his own word--"crafty" (TLN 1629) than innocent (see Weil 47-9). Arthur's final, successful, attempt to sway Hubert is no less elaborately structured, as his language personifies the physical instruments of torture, comparing their seeming mercy (the hot irons have cooled), to his obduracy:

All things that you should use to do me wrong
Deny their office: only you do lack
That mercy which fierce fire and iron extends . . .

He then generalizes the image to embrace all fire, all iron, used for torture and warfare:

Creatures of note for mercy-lacking uses
(TLN 1697-1700).

115It does seem that at this period in his career Shakespeare often associates intense feelings with elaborate language, or at least uses them as springboards to intricate wordplay and the exploration of complex images. When the Nurse brings Juliet the news of the brawl that resulted in Mercutio's death, and the circuitousness of her language makes Juliet fear that Romeo is dead, her language manifests the same combination of elaborate language and strong emotion:

Hath Romeo slain himself? Say thou but "Ay,"
And that bare vowel "I" shall poison more
Than the death darting eye of cockatrice.
I am not I if there be such an "I,"
Or those eyes shut, that makes thee answer "Ay."
If he be slain say "Ay," or if not, "No."
Brief sounds determine my weal or woe.
(Rom TLN 1694-1700)

116In the openly language-smitten Love's Labor's Lost, written at about the same time as King John and Romeo and Juliet, the young lord Berowne has a moment of keen insight at the climax of the play when comedy suddenly darkens with the news of death: "Honest plain words best pierce the ear of grief" (LLL TLN 2711). It would be some years before Shakespeare fully learned Berowne's lesson, but it is certainly true that by the time he was writing his great tragedies the high moments achieve their effect in part by sudden and arresting simplicity of language.

117The adult language of Arthur and Shakespeare's other children may be in part a cultural artifact, a legacy from attitudes to children in the Early Modern period (see the pages in the Life and Times on children, and on the education of boys and girls). It is certainly true that Shakespeare's child characters tend in general to be precocious, and to speak in what we would think of as very adult terms. Shakespeare had already explored the dramatic appeal of pert youth in young Rutland of Henry VI, Part 3, and the young princes in Richard III; he would return to a similar combination of precocious youth and horror in the murder of Lady Macduff's oldest boy in Macbeth. Shakespeare's actors were, after all, talented boys, carefully selected and trained. One of the appeals of the acting companies like the Paul's Boys was the pleasure of seeing children acting the parts of adults--witness the well-known comment by Rosencrantz in Hamlet that the adult companies are being upstaged by the child actors: "little eyases that cry out on the top of question, and are most tyrannically clapped for't" (Ham TLN 1386-7). The child actors are like eagle fledglings, trained in rhetoric so that their high voices mimic adult inflections, and are applauded by a doting audience. The general tendency of productions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (and in some more recent productions as well) to cast women in the role of Arthur reduces this kind of appeal in the scene; at the same time, somewhat paradoxically, it will complete the gender reversal involved in giving the parts of Lady Faulconbridge, Blanche, Eleanor, and Constance to women rather than boy actors.

118In the absence of a strong tradition of training young boys in acting, it is not surprising that the part has so often been played by more mature women, since Shakespeare's characterization of Arthur allows the actor to appeal to far more than the merely winsome and pathetic. He has moments of pride where he flourishes his rank, and, when pushed, he acts with courage. As he does his best to plead his love for Hubert, he comes close to a boast about his royalty:

Many a poor man's son would have lain still
And ne'er have spoke a loving word to you,
But you at your sick service had a prince.
(TLN 1626-8)

119This flash of pride when faced with torture and probable death goes beyond simple pathos, and gives his character some resonance. It is the kind of moment that Shakespeare generates in his far more complex tragic characters: in his final moments, Lear boasts of his earlier prowess with weapons, Othello recounts his earlier exploits in battle, and both Antony and Cleopatra recall their earlier splendor in their final moments. Both in his big scene with Hubert and in his final appearance on the battlements of the castle as he attempts to escape, Shakespeare creates in the character of Arthur a combination of timidity and courage: "I am afraid, and yet I'll venture it" (TLN 2001).