The idea of England as a place apart returns in Salisbury’s speech justifying his decision to support the invading French. He regrets that the day has come when he and his fellow barons, ‘the sons and children of this isle’ (5.2.25), have been compelled to join ‘Her enemy’s ranks’ (29). The violation of place is seen as especially wounding, and Salisbury conjures a bizarre image to express his sense of alienation: ‘O nation, that thou couldst remove: / That Neptune’s arms who clippeth thee about, / Would bear thee from the knowledge of thyself, / And grapple thee unto a pagan shore, / Where these two Christian armies might combine / The blood of malice in a vein of league’ (33–8). The notion that conflicts among Christians are a version of civil war, that Christian belligerence were better directed at pagans, the true enemy, is familiar and appears, among other places, in Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays, where the King’s ambition to lead a unifying crusade to the Holy Land is conspicuously disappointed. What makes the image startling is the notion that the island might itself become mobile, serving as an assault craft landing its contending armies on a pagan shore. It is perhaps not entirely coincidental that both these images operate under pressure – Austria only invokes England’s natural defences as he boasts that he will overwhelm them, Salisbury’s paean to insular England converts into a fantasy of Christian aggression whose logic points to the erasure of national boundaries under global Christendom.

  King John treats the territory of England in the abstract. Imagined as vulnerable yet bounded, insular England is presented largely in ideal terms. Unlike the Henry IV plays, King John spends little time on the mapping of English locations that might contribute to a more granular sense of the English landscape. There are, of course, exceptions. The Bastard makes a conspicuous reference to the streets of Pomfret (4.2.148), a town in Yorkshire, and also to the Lincoln Washes (5.6.41), a large bay on the eastern shore of England between East Anglia and Lincolnshire. A messenger makes mention of Goodwin Sands (5.3.11), a treacherous sandbar off the coast of Kent. The play’s most prominent English location, Swinstead Abbey, the place of King John’s death, is actually a mistake, also found in John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments as well as other historical accounts, for Swineshead, a different Lincolnshire village, that was the historical site of a Cistercian abbey. More generally, the play is not committed to topographical accuracy. The place of Arthur’s imprisonment is clearly within England, but precisely where remains obscure (perhaps because in the historical sources Arthur is held in Rouen). The encounter between Arthur and Hubert in 4.1 is set somewhere in England; the following scene, depicting events at John’s court, may be elsewhere, but the action of 4.3 returns to Arthur’s place of imprisonment. Before he takes his fatal leap, Arthur addresses the land itself: ‘Good ground be pitiful and hurt me not!’ (4.3.2). Though the notion that there might be a fundamental sympathy between the rightful monarch and his land proves illusory, Arthur’s final words insist on a physical connection: ‘Heaven take my soul and England keep my bones’ (10). There are good dramatic reasons for bringing Arthur into England, but the play takes the opportunity to stress the intimate connection between a claimant to the throne and the land itself.

  Conspicuously absent from King John’s depiction of the English nation are the common people (Auden, Shrank). In fact, Shakespeare rarely presents the people (understood as a collective) in a positive light. The history plays do include exemplary commoners, figures like the Gardener in Richard II, Alexander Iden in 2 Henry VI, the soldiers and gamekeepers in 3 Henry VI and the English soldiers Bates, Court and Williams in Henry V, but these characters, plain, pragmatic and decent, come into focus only to the degree that they resist absorption by their social group. The only English commoner to feature prominently in King John is Peter of Pomfret, and his unworldliness disqualifies him as a model of Englishness. Hubert clearly stands as a representative commoner, a servant to the crown tortured by the conflict between his conscience and his obligation to obey his sovereign, but he is conspicuously not English. The Bastard, at certain moments, functions as a model Englishman, but his social status (even without his royal lineage he is a gentleman) distances him from the commons. Indeed, both Hubert and the Bastard are marked by their social mobility in terms of both status and geography. A willingness to abandon their original positions – Hubert leaves Angiers and Philip Faulconbridge leaves the estate that would have guaranteed his social identity – makes it impossible to see them as embodying some fundamental sense of Englishness.

  Despite their past mobility, both characters come to espouse an unwavering loyalty to England. This commitment enables the Bastard to give voice to a ‘nationalist discourse’ in the play’s concluding couplet: ‘Naught shall make us rue, / If England to itself do rest but true’ (5.7.117–18).1 Of course, this declaration of the simple virtue of self-identity leaves unanswered the vexing question of what precisely constitutes England. At the opening of the play Chatillon asserts the King of France’s claim, in Arthur’s name, ‘To this fair island, and the territories – / To Ireland, Poitiers, Anjou, Touraine, Maine’ (1.1.10–11). With only slight variation this catalogue is repeated by the Dauphin: ‘this is the very sum of all: / England and Ireland, Anjou, Touraine, Maine’ (2.1.151–2). Though Ireland is included in both lists, the play is untroubled by the Celtic periphery that looms large in 2 Henry VI, Richard II and Henry V. Moreover, King John is prepared to part with five provinces (Volquessen, Touraine, Maine, Poitiers and Anjou) as part of Blanche’s dowry (2.1.527–9). England’s always shrinking French territories are a recurring theme in Shakespeare’s histories, and though England’s last toehold on the continent, Calais, was lost in 1558, English monarchs continued to style themselves Kings of France until 1800. The duplicity of the French was a durable theme in the discourse of English nationalism, but King John, unlike Henry VI, does not dwell on lost imperial ambitions. Instead, the play presents a version of little England opposed to foreign entanglements and adventures.

  REFORMATION AND THE PAPAL DEPOSING POWER

  International politics are, in King John, initially a matter of imperialism and dynastic conflict, but this situation is made a great deal more complicated by the arrival of Pandulph, who as papal legate asserts the rights of the Pope. Many Elizabethans would have known of this episode from its prominent place in A Homily against Disobedience and Wilful Rebellion (1570), where it features as the first domestic example demonstrating the dire consequences of papal interference in the political realm.1 At first a dispute over whether the King will accept the Pope’s choice of Stephen Langton as Archbishop of Canterbury, the conflict quickly becomes a more wide-ranging argument about the extent of the Pope’s powers. This simplification of the untidy history presented in Holinshed draws most directly on The Troublesome Reign and its depiction of John as a proto-Protestant. Though Shakespeare is frequently credited with having toned down the anti-popery that animates the earlier play, the elements that remain are bracing enough. Deploying rhetoric that is emphatically post-Reformation, King John insists on the independent sovereignty of the English monarch: ‘What earthy name to interrogatories / Can test the free breath of a sacred king?’ (3.1.147–8). Insisting that ‘we, under God, are supreme head’ (155), John echoes the claims made for royal supremacy by Henry VIII and his daughter Elizabeth I, and his strident denunciation of the Pope extends to all other kings in Christendom who mistakenly accept the Pope’s rule.

  King John thus positions himself as a singular figure, the only Christian monarch with the courage to resist the Pope’s illegitimate authority, and Pandulph’s extraordinary defence of the Pope’s power is designed to provoke shock and outrage:

  Thou shalt stand cursed and excommunicate,

  And blessed shall he be that doth revolt

  From his allegiance to an heretic,

  And meritorious shall that hand be called,

  Canonized and worshipped as a saint,

  That takes away by any secret course

  Thy hateful life.

  (3.1.173–9)

  This language, which has antecedents in both Troublesome Reign and Holinshed’s Chronicles, would have reminded the audience of Regnans in Excelsis, the papal bull promulgated by Pius V in 1570. Declaring Elizabeth a heretic, the bull released her subjects from all oaths of obedience and further charged them not to obey ‘her orders, mandates, and laws’ on pain of excommunication.1 The bull does not, however, include a direct call for the Queen’s assassination; but absolving Elizabeth’s subjects of their allegiance to her was interpreted by the Queen and her Privy Council as an incitement to open rebellion, an interpretation encouraged by the appearance of the bull in the immediate aftermath of the Northern Rising of 1569. Though Pope Gregory amended the bull in 1580, indicating that Catholic subjects should obey the Queen in civil matters, the original was affirmed by Pope Sixtus V in 1588 as the Armada sailed for England, and the question of the papal deposing power would remain a subject of bitter controversy for decades to come.1 Pandulph’s language goes considerably beyond the claims articulated in the bull; explicitly advocating regicide, the passage presents tendentious versions of the Catholic doctrine of meritorious works as well as the worship of saints. These two familiar anti-Catholic shibboleths – the idolatrous veneration of saints and the spurious merit of good works – undermine the Pope’s claim to excommunicate a heretical monarch but also flatter the Protestant patriotism of the audience. That the anti-Catholicism of the play is less virulent than that of Troublesome Reign usefully establishes a continuum, but this does not indicate that Shakespeare’s King John is itself somehow sympathetic to Catholicism.2

  The deletions made to the copy of the Second Folio owned by the English College at Valladolid in the mid-seventeenth century suggest that at least one Catholic reader, usually identified as Father William Sankey, found King John’s comments on the papal deposing power objectionable (see Fig. 3).1 The expurgations are not extensive; the vast majority, about fifteen lines, are found in 3.1, with an additional two phrases deleted from 5.7. Sankey’s cuts preserve the dignity of the Pope and remove a reference to the Royal Supremacy and the suggestion that papal deposition was tantamount to an endorsement of political assassination:

  So slight, vnworthy, and ridiculous

  To charge me to an an answere, as the Pope:…

  But as we, vnder heauen, are supreame head, …

  So tell the Pope, all reuerence set apart

  To him and his his vsurp’d authoritie.…

  Are led so grossely by this medling Priest,

  Dreading the curse that money may buy out,

  And by the merit of vilde gold, drosse, dust,

  Purchase corrupted pardon of a man,

  Who in that sale sels pardon from himselfe:

  Though you, and al the rest so grossely led,

  This iugling witchcraft with reuennue cherish,

  Yet I alone, alone doe me oppose

  Against the Pope and count his friends my foes.…

  From his Allegeance to an heretique,

  And meritorious shall that hand be call’d,

  Canonized and worship’d as a Saint,

  That takes away by any secret course

  The hatefull life.

  (3.1.150ff.)

  That Sankey found these lines offensive is hardly surprising – but the difficulty of surmising the consciousness that undergirds a particular act of expurgation should not be underestimated. On the very next page, Sankey scores through the Bastard’s ‘And hang a Calues-skin on his recreant limbs’, but leaves untouched three earlier versions of this insult to Austria (3.1.199, 129, 131, 133). The motive behind Sankey’s final expurgation seems, in comparison, transparent. Where Hubert reports, ‘The King, I fear, is poisoned by a monk’ (5.6.23), Sankey crosses out ‘by a monk’. Hubert’s subsequent elaboration, ‘A monk, I tell you, a resolved villain’ (29), is also altered, to read, ‘I tell you, a resolved villain’. The cause of John’s death is not as clear cut in Shakespeare’s play as it is in Troublesome Reign; nonetheless, Sankey repressed even the possibility of monkish malice. The upshot is a version of the play that downplays the role of the Church in promoting political violence; at the same time, the limited scope of the deletions indicates that Sankey deemed the play, unlike Measure for Measure, which is cut from the volume entirely, acceptable reading for the students of the college (Kastan, Will, 65–7).

  3 Page image from expurgated Valladolid Folio, Shakespeare, Mr. William Shakespeares comedies, histories, and tragedies, 1632

  CONSCIENCE AND COMMODITY

  While the extent of the play’s anti-Popery remains subject to debate, there is almost nothing in it that would qualify as an endorsement of Protestantism. But this is merely to acknowledge that King John presents a world in which religion in any of its available forms is thin on the ground. There are no conspicuous exemplars of piety, and characters routinely break faith with one another, a condition that invites a consideration of the conflict between conscience and what the Bastard terms ‘Commodity’. While the idea of conscience has ancient origins, it assumes a new visibility in the early modern period. Animated by a post-Reformation social world in which states claimed a compelling interest in policing the religious views of their subject-citizens, casuistry – the branch of ethics that treats cases of conscience – enjoyed a boom. A settled assumption about the unity of religious truth was confronted by a new world of de facto religious pluralism, and consequently conscience became a widespread preoccupation. Nowhere is this more evident than in the drama, especially the drama of Shakespeare.

  Shakespeare’s pre-eminent play of conscience is surely Hamlet, but the concept gets an extensive elaboration in the genre of the history play. Conscience features importantly in Richard III and Henry V, but it is especially prominent in the two non-sequential history plays, Henry VIII and King John. The prominence of conscience in the history plays is perhaps attributable to their focus on politics at a moment in which the spheres of religion and politics remained fused. Under these circumstances political action is inevitably construed in terms of conscience. The importance of conscience is announced early when Queen Eleanor delivers an aside to King John: ‘Your strong possession much more than your right, / Or else it must go wrong with you and me; / So much my conscience whispers in your ear, / Which none but God, and you, and I, shall hear’ (1.1.40–3). Her conscience seems balanced between a moral faculty oriented toward discerning right action and something closer to private thought, an absolutely unvarnished assessment of the available political options. The conscience that ‘whispers’ here seems more geared toward avoiding disaster than affirming virtue. Relying on the argument from right is, in Eleanor’s judgement, not persuasive or tenable – ‘it must go wrong’ – but this does not lead her to abandon John and his cause or to affirm a providential order that will assure the victory of the righteous. An argument based on possession may seem to abandon principle entirely, but the claim that possession confers entitlement has a long history in common law. In King Edward III, a history play roughly contemporary with King John, Prince Philip deploys proverbial language when he remarks to his father, King John of France, ‘’Tis you are in possession of the crown, / And that’s the surest point of all the law’ (4.109–10).

  This basic problem – the slipperiness with which arguments are attached to various political projects – is arguably the play’s fundamental preoccupation. The Bastard’s soliloquy on Commodity addresses the problem directly. In response to the deal brokered between John and Philip of France, the Bastard expresses amazement at the apparent omnipotence of ‘that same purpose-changer, that sly devil, / That broker that still breaks the pate of faith, / That daily break-vow … That smooth-faced gentleman, tickling Commodity’ (2.1.567–9, 73). ‘Commodity’ is usually glossed as self-interest, but the word has a wide range of meanings extending from suitability, convenience and expediency to an article of commerce. The term was also used to describe a transaction in which usury laws were evaded by having the borrower ‘purchase’ a commodity of wares from the lender at an inflated price on credit; the wares were then immediately sold back to the lender for cash at a reduced price, with the difference between the debt established and the cash received amounting to an interest charge. ‘This bawd, this broker, this all-changing word’ (582) points not only to self-interest but also to the wider world of exchange animated by a desire for gain. Bawds and brokers are, after all, figures exemplifying exchange; the ‘all-changing word’ is protean because its range of reference is constantly shifting and because it transforms agents, making them adopt new goals. France, ‘whose armour conscience buckled on, / Whom zeal and charity brought to the field / As God’s own soldier’ (564–6), succumbs to the insinuating blandishments of commodity, abandons principle and embraces an opportunity to advance his dynastic fortunes.

  Conscience and commodity identify two countervailing aspects of the early modern individual: a split between the conscientious objector, a figure of dissent, who will emerge as a powerful articulation of the modern notion of moral autonomy, and the acquisitive individual, a person understood fundamentally as a holder of property. Several characters are troubled by an uneasy conscience: they include Hubert, Faulconbridge and Melun. But it is the conscience of the King that is at the heart of the play. Salisbury, observing the King in a whispered conversation with Hubert, comments, ‘The colour of the King doth come and go / Between his purpose and his conscience, / Like heralds ’twixt two dreadful battles set’ (4.2.76–8). The conceit that John’s blood is moving between ‘his purpose and his conscience’, causing him to alternate between blushing and blanching, insists not only on the fact of internal division but also on its visibility. Convinced that the King and Hubert are discussing the recent murder of Arthur, Salisbury concludes that a bad conscience makes itself manifest, that guilt is a visible condition.