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Article Excerpt
While traditionally noted for its unpopularity with critics and audiences, the supposed uniqueness of King John among Shakespeare's history plays has been reassessed over the last two decades. In 1989 Deborah Curren-Aquino proclaimed that time "may have finally caught up with ... King John" since its portrayal of "the heroic, the absolute, and the certain" giving way to "the pragmatic, the relative, and the contingent" seems particularly "fitting" to the late twentieth-century mindset. Yet if the play does indeed depict a world that "pays homage to the immanent rather than the transcendent," the specific way in which the text can be construed as more secular than the first tetralogy coming before it, and the second tetralogy succeeding it, needs closer consideration. (1) After all, the first tetralogy itself is often held up for its portrayal of a "ruthless and amoral [political] world," and the application, to the second tetralogy, of the "story of disenchantment in which religious attitudes toward history and politics give way to secular and humanistic attitudes" is familiar enough, even while Harry Berger labels such readings "historical reductionism." (2) The transition from Richard III to King John, assuming this order of composition, does reveal a fairly daring artistic or ideological development on Shakespeare's part, and the latter play represents an "experiment" remarkable in its ramifications--which include, I contend, political and psychological consequences so progressive that the playwright in one sense retreats from them again in the second tetralogy. (3)
In spite of such radicalism, however, King John's apparent "secularism" or "modernness" should be carefully qualified and historically contextualized. The play is now, not surprisingly, receiving renewed attention in light of current debates about Shakespeare's personal sympathy with either Protestant or Catholic religious positions in the late sixteenth century. Regarding this fascinating but very controversial question, King John offers no easy answers. As Donna Hamilton observes, the play, "merely by virtue of its narrating an archetypal story of a king's struggle with the pope, situates itself in the midst of [anti-catholic] discourse," yet Shakespeare has "eliminated from it the far more blatantly anti-catholic rhetoric of it presumed source play, the anonymous Troublesome Raigne of King John." (4) Moreover, John Klause in 2001 very convincingly identified new sources for the play in the writings of Robert Southwell, the Elizabethan Catholic poet and martyr whose possible connections to Shakespeare have more recently been elaborated upon by Richard Wilson, in Secret Shakespeare, and Alison Shell, in her important essay, "Why Didn't Shakespeare Write Religious Verse." (5) But how are scholars to reconcile Klause's provocative conclusion that "Shakespeare seems both consciously and unconsciously to have welcomed a Jesuit into his mind" (6) with Donna Hamilton's reading that the play actually supports a radical Puritan, non-conformist position against the more obviously anti-Catholic bias of the Troublesome Raigne, a play ideologically underwritten by the "increasingly hierarchical and absolutist conformist platform" in Elizabethan church polity? It could be argued, tentatively, that the "non-conformist" element of both these approaches would appeal to a "Catholic" Shakespeare, if we were to assume that commitment to a specific religious doctrine was one of his primary artistic motives. However, rather than using this, or any other, text as proof of Shakespeare's either Catholic or Protestant subject position, it is my thesis that the playwright to an extent de-saturates both religious platforms of their spirituality, insofar as such spirituality compromises individual moral and rational agency. In King John this striking, and evolving, emphasis on personal agency and masculinity finds its most significant expression through the character of the Bastard.
The object of much recent critical attention, the Bastard constitutes a most original development, or offshoot, of the Vice figure in Renaissance drama. As Robert Weimann observes, "Faulconbridge is made faithfully to rehearse most of the attributes of the Vice, only to go beyond them ... He seeks to redeem the unbridled energy of the valiant performer on behalf of his arduous task in the building of, historically speaking, an anachronistic image of the nation-state." (7) While Shakespeare in Richard III had sought to impose the divine sanctions and more ritualized action of a morality play on the "amoral" political chaos of the Henry VI plays, the aggressive self-fashioning of the Vice-like Richard nevertheless threatened to overwhelm the pale cipher of the ideological savior Richmond, and in fact Richard's emerging humanity in the final scenes apparently gives him more psychological substance than the divinely ordained but surprisingly shadowy and "shallow" Richmond (5.4.198). (8) While Richard's repeated swearing by St. Paul might be taken to indicate, ironically, his lack of divine substantiation, and his status as a kind of negative exemplum of Paul's assertion in Colossians 3:3, "For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God," Shakespeare at the same time subtly but subversively raises doubts about the supposed sanctity of the Earl of Richmond's political agenda. When, on the eve of the Battle of Bosworth, Norfolk points out to Richard, "This found I on my tent this.morning: / 'Jocky of Norfolk, be not so bold, / For Dickin thy master is bought and sold,'" and the king replies, "A thing devised by the enemy" (5.5.32-35), Shakespeare includes the "unofficial" and rather incongruous view--especially in light of the traditionally assumed relation of the play to Tudor propaganda--that "Richmond owed his victory to a bribe." (9) Moreover, in Richard's famous exclamation, "I think there be six Richmonds in the field. / Five have I slain today instead of him. / A horse, a horse! My kingdom for a horse!" (5.6.11-13), Shakespeare anticipates, through Richmond's crafty and calculating ruse to confuse his enemies and increase his chances of survival, the undermining of the regicide Henry IV's nobility at the Battle of Shrewsbury, where participation in the same ruse emphasizes his role as a "counterfeit" king, lacking personal courage and integrity, in the second tetralogy. Ironically, then, the Earl of Richmond and not Richard is the one who emerges as a shadow king, and renders the male achievement of the "sun" of Christhood even more tentative and uncertain. But if Richard III, partly through its recurring imagery of sun and shadow, ultimately emphasizes the indeterminacy, the uncertainty of signs, the obfuscation of (a transcendental) signified through shifting signifiers, Shakespeare in King John further transforms an exploration of the admittedly often treacherous capacity of role playing into a startling expose of the uselessness of any "moral" position, no matter how fine or correct, without individual agency and assertiveness to substantiate it in the context of pragmatic social interaction.
"Traditional" designations of right and wrong are systematically dismantled in the course of the plot of King John, and the originally Vice-like Bastard grows into a peculiar kind of moral center, therefore extending and elaborating upon the subversive potential in Shakespeare's portrayal of Richard III, although in a more distant, and therefore (from the perspective of the playwright) safer, historical context. Perhaps the first striking contradiction involving this characterization is the fact that King John in the play's opening scene defends the Bastard's rights to inheritance of his father's land, in opposition to old Sir Robert Faulconbridge's will, a move which is, as Robert Lane points out, "contrary to [the king's] own title, resting as it did on the will of Richard I." In his will Henry VIII "had contravened primogeniture by designating the heirs of his younger sister Mary Tudor (the Suffolk line), rather than those of his older sister Margaret Tudor (the Stuart line) as the royal bloodline in the event Elizabeth died childless." (10) King John's position with respect to the Bastard's inheritance, however, confirms primogeniture in that the sovereign defends the claim of an elder son, even though his support of an illegitimate son would, in another sense, appear to support his own unorthodox position of questionable legitimacy. The apparently contradictory, even self-canceling political implications are, if not resolved, most intriguingly contextualized by Hamilton, when she argues that "the relationship between the opening scenes of The Troublesome Raigne and King John turns on the differing attitudes ... regarding interrogation, self-accusation, and privacy." In The Troublesome Raigne the younger son Robert is awarded the lands after the bastard Philip is repeatedly interrogated and finally confesses that his father was in fact Richard Coeur de Lion. In King John, however, Shakespeare "redirected the scene away from the issue of having to prove whether or not there has been an act of adultery ... the issue that takes its place is whether a bastard can inherit, an issue which, when settled in the affirmative, makes irrelevant whether or not this person truly is a bastard or whether or not there has been adultery." (11) The Shakespearean text, therefore, while echoing, according to Hamilton, the nonconformist position which strove to limit the power of ecclesiastical courts over the matter of private thoughts, argues ultimately for the worthiness of the individual according to his or her virtuous character and action, regardless of social or sexual derivation. In other words, in terms of traditional codes of class privilege and legitimacy, the play appears highly unorthodox. That the Bastard is the offspring of Richard I might conceivably return us to an aristocratic bias in the play--the biological essentialism of noble blood--but Shakespeare's Bastard daringly relinquishes the Faulconbridge estate in order to accept service as a soldier to Queen Eleanor, and a knighthood from the king. He thus courageously forsakes material advantage for the opportunity of a fairly risky self-fashioning, replaying, voluntarily, the manly vigor of Richard III's desperate but heroic, "A horse, a horse! My kingdom for a horse!" The Bastard's speech to Queen Eleanor, "Who dares not stir by day must walk by night, / And have is have, however men do catch. / Near or far off, well won is still well shot, / And I am I, howe'er I was begot" (1.1.172-75), clearly echoes the contrast between "strong possession" and traditional "right," the terms which John and Eleanor earlier use to define the king's questionable claim to the throne. (12)
Whether King John is ever quite "strong" enough in his "possession" of the crown emerges as one of the haunting ambiguities of the text. Morally he may possess too little virtue, or, conversely and more emphatically, too little Machiavellian virtu. (13) His most shocking moral behavior, subtly soliciting Hubert to kill Arthur, Shakespeare carefully and rather lovingly...
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