J.J.M. Tobin

  University of Massachusetts Boston

  The making of books is invariably collaborative, and, as John observes, editions of Shakespeare are especially so. I share John’s sense of obligation to the accomplished and erudite editors who have made King John available for generations of readers. While each new edition enters into conversation with its predecessors, I also want to acknowledge the more immediate collaborations made possible by the extraordinary work of the entire Arden team. In particular, the judicious criticism of Richard Proudfoot and David Kastan, our General Editors, has proven invaluable again and again. Margaret Bartley has managed the project with consummate skill and consistent grace. Jane Armstrong’s acuity has saved us from a multitude of errors, and her patient good humour never wavered. Finally, I am deeply gratified to have joined forces with John Tobin, an exacting scholar and an astute critic.

  Jesse M. Lander

  University of Notre Dame

  INTRODUCTION

  Surprisingly, King John is the first Shakespeare play to appear on film. All that remains of this inaugural film, produced by the British Mutoscope & Biograph Company in 1899, is a fragment depicting King John’s death performed by the celebrated English actor and theatrical manager Herbert Beerbohm Tree. The film is, of course, silent, and this silence focuses attention on the actor’s extraordinary use of gesture and expression. The image is far from crisp, but Beerbohm Tree manages to convey a sense of excruciating agony as he writhes in a chair set against an architectural background of arches evoking the cloisters of Swinstead Abbey (see Fig. 1). The dying King reaches a hand out to his son, who offers tentative comfort but is finally unable to assuage his father’s anguish. Contact is broken: Prince Henry steps back and watches in horror as his father suffers his final death throes. This intimate drama between parent and child is framed by two onlookers wearing armour (presumably the Earls of Pembroke and Salisbury) who stand in for the wider political and social world in which this particular death unfolds.

  While the pathos of the scene is striking, perhaps more remarkable is the strange irony that a play now widely considered obscure should initiate the long tradition of Shakespearean cinema. Obviously, the event is, on one level, the result of contingency. Beerbohm Tree’s production of King John was a major cultural event, and the British Mutoscope & Biograph Company saw it as an opportunity to bring news of current events to the still nascent audience for cinema. At the same time, Beerbohm Tree presumably saw the film as a way to publicize his theatrical production and increase its audience. Fittingly, a play that is itself deeply concerned with opportunism, what the Bastard calls ‘Commodity’ (2.1.574), turns out to be the beneficiary of just such an accidental conjunction of interests.

  1 Still from the first Shakespeare film, King John, American Mutoscope & Biograph, 1899

  But there is another important point of contact to consider. King John is a play preoccupied with the question of historical representation. A highly sophisticated version of the history play, King John is constantly aware of its complicated relationship to the received historiography of the reign that it depicts. The questions of dramatic and literary form raised by King John are raised again by the film version of the play’s death scene. The figures in the frame are clearly wearing costumes and their actions are performed against a theatrical backdrop; despite the British Mutoscope & Biograph Company’s pursuit of what were referred to as ‘actualities’ (an early form of the newsreel), the film manages to faithfully capture a theatrical performance. What, then, does the clip provide access to? The British Mutoscope & Biograph Company’s sense of a newsworthy event? Beerbohm Tree’s vision of King John’s final moment? A fragment of Shakespeare’s chronicle history? Paradoxically, the very fragmentariness of the clip makes it labile and available for a variety of interpretations. At the same time, the fragment serves as a radical reduction, making the final scene serve as an epitome. This scrap of film is King John, the Shakespearean history play, perhaps history itself, contracted and compressed into one pivotal moment: the death of the King. Richard II famously, and self-pityingly, makes history entirely a matter of ‘sad stories of the death of kings’ (R2 3.2.156). But to entertain such a thought is immediately to invite consideration of the way in which Shakespeare’s treatment of history invariably expands beyond the titular monarchs that organize the presentation of the material. This strangely evocative piece of film is, in many respects, a wonderful reflection of and on what one scholar has called ‘Shakespeare’s most postmodern history play’ (Vaughan, Companion, 379). King John is arguably also Shakespeare’s most political play, the play that gives widest expression to a series of questions concerning both domestic and international political order. At the same time, it is the history play that is most self-conscious about its status as a play, the play that most persistently queries its sources, raising perplexing questions about the status of history and our understanding of it.

  DATE

  Shakespeare’s King John was written about three hundred years before it was captured on film by the British Mutoscope & Biograph Company, but the precise dates of the play’s composition and initial performance remain uncertain. First printed in the Folio of 1623, it was written and performed at least twenty-five years earlier. The play was in circulation by 1598 when Francis Meres, in Palladis Tamia, listed it along with six others as examples of Shakespeare’s excellence in tragedy. The earliest possible date for the play’s appearance is established by the publication date of one of its major sources, Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles, which appeared in 1587. Claims about where the play falls within this range (1587–98) are informed, if not determined, by the assumed relationship between Shakespeare’s play and a similar play, The Troublesome Reign of John, King of England, published in 1591. Though there are dissenting voices, a robust scholarly consensus holds that Troublesome Reign was used as a source by Shakespeare, and that his version thus postdates 1591 (for the textual relationship between King John and Troublesome Reign, see pp. 43–8). These three publication dates exhaust the range of external evidence regarding the play’s chronology. The internal evidence provided by stylistic markers, ably surveyed by Wells and Taylor (TxC), supports a date of 1595–6.

  In the absence of conclusive evidence, scholars have frequently resorted to an analysis of the play’s many topical allusions in an attempt to establish its date. King John makes conspicuous and frequent gestures toward a range of political events in the late sixteenth century.1 The fortuitous decimation of the French forces by high tides has been seen as a parallel to the storm that dispersed the Spanish Armada, and King Philip compares his defeat to the scattering of a ‘whole armada’ (3.4.2). Perhaps more persuasively, the episode in which King John delivers a warrant to Hubert for the blinding of Arthur appears to refract Queen Elizabeth’s obfuscation of her role in the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots. Famously, Elizabeth signed the death warrant but later claimed that she had asked her Secretary of State, William Davison, to delay having the warrant sealed. Davison, however, took the warrant to the Lord Chancellor, who sealed it, and the Privy Council then forwarded the warrant to Fotheringhay Castle, where the captive Queen was executed. In the aftermath of the execution, Elizabeth denied her responsibility, casting blame on her privy councillors, especially Davison, who was subsequently tried in Star Chamber for having disobeyed his Queen. Whether accurately or not, the common view was that Davison had been made a scapegoat by Queen Elizabeth, and the episode became an emblem for the indirections of sovereign power, the problems of agency and delegation, and the liabilities of royal service. While these issues all get an airing in King John, the topical connection does not help to date the play, because Mary was executed in 1587.

  Another point of topical reference is the preoccupation with succession, and it is impossible to avoid the suggestion that John’s troubled claim invites consideration of Elizabeth’s successor.1 However, what has been called the Elizabethan succession crisis was a recurring concern throughout Elizabeth’s long reign.2 While anxiety about the Queen’s succession was more acute at particular moments, the larger question of royal legitimacy was a persistent problem. Indeed, the genre of the history play is itself a response to this general concern. What the Duke of York in Richard II identifies as ‘fair sequence and succession’ is at the heart of the chronicle history play. But York’s insistence that inheritance and primogeniture are, like linear time itself, fundamental principles that order the universe, is contested by every plot twist that forces audiences and readers to reckon with contingency and discontinuity. King John ends with an affirmation of ‘The lineal state’ (5.7.102), but it is hard to escape the conclusion that this is a hard-won victory, an outcome that might well have been otherwise.

  Succession is topical, but it does not point to a specific date. The play’s depiction of a foreign invasion of England may afford a more precise allusion. Rather than seeing the French invasion as an echo of the famous Armada of 1588, it might instead be understood as a response to a Spanish raid on Penzance and several villages on the coast of Cornwall in 1595. This episode, in which English militia conspicuously failed to defend their positions and Spanish troops, after burning and looting, concluded their operation by conducting a Catholic mass, was a vivid reminder that Spain and England were still at war. Most importantly, for the first time during the hostilities, Spanish forces had landed on English soil. Moreover, in the wake of this sortie, Spain fitted out invasion fleets in both 1596 and 1597. The first of these armadas was destroyed by bad weather just north of Spain; while the second managed to come closer, it too was forced to retreat by bad weather in the English Channel. Such circumstances make King John’s consideration of foreign invasion especially timely, but they do not establish a precise date for the play. Worries about domestic security are perennial; they ebb and flow but are never entirely absent.

  POLITICS: INTERNATIONAL AND NATIONAL

  Dynastic politics are, of course, a central element in the history play, and the genre’s ostensible treatment of the past is peculiarly sensitive to the pressure of the present (a point that obtains at the moment of composition as well as in subsequent productions). Lily B. Campbell famously argued that the history plays were a consistent and considered expression of Elizabethan ideological orthodoxy. While this position, which risks reducing a polyvalent drama to the status of a government white paper, no longer commands wide assent, the basic point – that history plays are not merely antiquarian and pious representations of the nation’s heroes and villains but are engaged with contemporary conflicts within the polity – is inescapable. Even allowing for this generic tendency toward political reflection (in both senses), King John stands out as what Howard Erskine-Hill has called ‘Shakespeare’s most explicitly political play’.1 A survey of the political topics treated by the play reveals an extraordinary range, running from nation and its place in the international order of Christendom, the papacy and its power over Christian nations, conscience and its conflict with expedience, Machiavellianism and prognostication, to legitimacy and wills, oaths and their fragility, death in custody and public opinion. In almost every case, the play presents matters as starkly disenchanted – the magic of royal charisma is almost entirely absent. Indeed, the only glimmer of it appears in the figure of the Bastard, who as the illegitimate son of Richard the Lionheart carries traces of a recognizable royalty that seems largely to have evaporated in the wider world depicted by the play.

  Though the play is deeply interested in the question of England, it conspicuously sets its action in a much wider context. It is the only one of Shakespeare’s history plays to treat an Angevin monarch, and this fact has immediate consequence for the play’s geographic scope.2 Henry II, the first of the Angevin kings, assembled a vast array of territories that stretched from Ireland to the Pyrenees. While it is a misnomer to refer to these holdings as the Angevin empire, a term only coined in the late nineteenth century, they did make Henry the most powerful European monarch of the time. Unlike the Lancastrian plays, which show later English kings battling for territory in France, King John presents a sustained consideration of the difficulties of extending rule over a range of heterogeneous territories and alien cultures, and there is nothing to be found in the other Shakespearean history plays like the confrontation that takes place at Angiers in King John. This episode, in which the citizens of Angiers refuse to choose between rival claimants to the English throne, is a fascinating treatment of the problem of sovereignty and imperialism. The citizens are happy to acknowledge that they owe fealty to the King of England; however, they demur when it comes to identifying the rightful occupant of the English throne. This burgherly pragmatism amounts to a refusal to adjudicate claims of legitimacy; the citizens will bar their ‘gates against the world’ (2.1.272) and only acknowledge fealty to ‘some certain king’ (372), but how this particular king is to be identified remains undetermined.1 The battle that might supply a providentially ordained solution to the problem is initially delayed – first by the Bastard’s politic suggestion that the two kings join forces in order to raze the town and its insubordinate citizens, and then by Hubert’s proposed compromise, which appeals to the interests of King John and King Philip but does nothing to further Arthur’s cause – but when Pandulph arrives the deal collapses and the arbitrement of bloody strokes ensues. King John and his followers emerge victorious, and having killed Austria and captured Arthur they return to England, leaving Eleanor to secure the crown’s French territories. However, King John’s triumphant return to England soon appears to be a retreat; assailed by internal dissent, the King is quickly confronted with the news that French troops have landed in England, a crisis immediately compounded by the announcement that his mother Eleanor is dead. ‘How wildly then walks my estate in France!’ (4.2.128), he exclaims, but his attention is soon confined to maintaining his precarious estate in England (see Fig. 2). By the end of the play, the action has telescoped inward, and in place of the capacious European scene at the beginning, the focus is on England as a place apart.1 ‘This England’, celebrated by the Bastard as a realm that ‘never did, nor never shall / Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror / But when it first did help to wound itself’ (5.7.112–14), is a restricted zone. No longer the transnational empire imagined in the play’s first act, it is now a single and singular realm.

  The contribution made by history plays to a nascent sense of the English nation has been explored by an extraordinary range of scholars. For Felix E. Schelling, author of the earliest monograph on the history play, it was axiomatic that the histories were infused with a post-Armada spirit of English nationalism.2 And later scholars, while disputing the notion that the history plays traffic in naïve patriotism, have tended to agree that they are fundamentally concerned with the larger project of imagining the nation (Tillyard, Helgerson, Howard & Rackin). While King John contributes to the collective project of creating a shared past for the political nation, it treats claims for English exceptionalism in a nuanced fashion. Though there is an older critical tradition that identifies the Bastard as a straightforward embodiment of English character – best exemplified in John Middleton Murry’s assertion that he is ‘manifestly Shakespeare’s ideal of an Englishman’ (154) – more recent criticism has treated the Bastard with greater suspicion and argued for a less bellicose form of English patriotism (Vaughan, ‘Transition’; Knapp). ‘The play’, according to Cathy Shrank, ‘invokes England not to rouse Shakespeare’s compatriots to patriotic indignation against the Roman Church, but to interrogate what is meant by England’ (576). In a similar vein, Willy Maley concludes: ‘If King John is a play engaged in inventing England, then the England it invents is arguably as mutable and multiple as the one that exists at the present time, an England surrounded by European bureaucrats and pilfering borderers.’1 Though King John is frequently referred to as ‘England’, there is no suggestion that the King is the mystical embodiment of England or the exemplification of a particularly English character. Indeed, the play registers doubt over the possibility that John is England even in the narrowly political sense. When the Bastard sees Hubert carrying the dead body of John’s rival, Arthur, he observes, ‘How easy dost thou take all England up!’ (4.3.142).

  2 ‘Herbert Beerbohm Tree as King John in King John by William Shakespeare’, by Charles A. Buchel

  The idiom that identifies monarch and realm suggests a restrictive understanding of the nation as the personal patrimony of a particular incumbent, ‘some certain king’ (2.1.372). An alternative, and ancient, sense of nation defines it as a specific people or ethnicity, but over the course of the early modern period a nation is increasingly understood to be the combination of polity, people and place. The importance of a particular territory, the way in which geography contributes to political identity, is visible in the play’s version of what might best be described as the island topos. This commonplace construes England as, in the famous phrase from Richard II, a ‘sea-walled garden’ (R2 3.4.43). According to this image, England’s island status secures it from foreign invasion and serves as a mark of divine favour. Obviously, such an image conveniently overlooks the existence of Scotland and Wales on the same landmass, presenting instead a simplified vision in which topography guarantees political integrity. Austria, even as he promises to subjugate the English, uses precisely this language: ‘that England hedged in with the main, / That water-walled bulwark, still secure / And confident from foreign purposes’ (KJ 2.1.26–8).