OATH-TAKING AND VOW-BREAKING

  Legitimacy in the pre-modern world was often secured by oath-taking, and in King John the swearing of oaths is central.1 The public swearing of fealty guaranteed the structure of layered loyalties that constituted feudal society, and even as English society underwent a transition from feudalism to capitalism, oaths of allegiance retained a special prominence. Oaths and their breaking are alluded to on several occasions, but the most sustained discussion is provided by Pandulph, who presents an especially convoluted argument explaining why King Philip’s abrogation of his oath to King John is in fact an act of religious piety. Philip describes his alliance with John as another marriage: ‘This royal hand and mine are newly knit, / And the conjunction of our inward souls / Married in league, coupled and linked together / With all religious strength of sacred vows’ (3.1.226–9). The emblematic status of this handclasp is reinforced by the actors’ gestures, as Philip once again draws attention to ‘these hands so lately purged of blood, / So newly joined in love’ (239–40).2 Confronted by this physical and rhetorical display of monarchical solidarity, Pandulph rejects the notion that an irreligious oath must be maintained, embarking on a complicated exposition of the incoherence of maintaining the sanctity of a commitment to impiety.

  His argument is extravagant, making a conspicuous display of logic that has frequently been dismissed as specious, as making a mockery of the very thing that it seems to defend: the sanctity of the oath (263–97). Pandulph is here engaged in casuistry: although the word now has an exclusively pejorative connotation, in early modern Europe casuistry was an important enterprise, devoted to the analysis of ethical dilemmas on a case-by-case basis. However, Pandulph’s use of pun and paradox has led many scholars to conclude that the speech parodies an explicitly Roman Catholic discourse. According to E.A.J. Honigmann, ‘Pandulph propounds the doctrine of equivocation, hated by Protestants’ (69). Though Austria offers a hearty endorsement, Pandulph’s speech is met by perplexed silence from Philip, which, as Furnivall observes, after surveying the various attempts to parse the legate’s speech, may well be the desired effect (227). After an extended hesitation, Philip announces, ‘England, I will fall from thee’ (320).

  The repudiation of his oath of alliance may appear a minor consideration in a play that is marked by oath-breaking of various types, but the scene’s explicit consideration of a world in which oath is set against oath demonstrates a particular sensitivity to an England of divided loyalties produced by the English Reformation. Though King John was responsible for establishing the Coronation Oath as a regular feature of subsequent English accessions, it was Henry VIII’s deployment of the Oath of Supremacy in the wake of his break with Rome that made oaths a major preoccupation for the political nation. However one interprets Pandulph’s argument, it registers uneasiness with the way in which the oaths given a divine sanction (‘as God is my witness’) are deployed to affirm religious identity. When Pandulph objects to King Philip’s refusal to disjoin his faith from King John, it is impossible not to hear an allusion to a late-Elizabethan world of religious pluralism and conflict: ‘So mak’st thou faith an enemy to faith’ (263).

  The conjunction of oaths and religion returns in a different key in the play’s final act. When Melun reveals the plan to betray the rebellious English lords once victory has been achieved, he emphasizes that Lewis has ‘sworn’ to this effect, ‘Even on that altar where we swore to you / Dear amity and everlasting love’ (5.4.16, 19–20). Pandulph’s treatment of competing obligations may be sophistry, but it at least attempts to preserve the sanctity of the oath. The perfidy of the French as described by Melun mocks the very idea of an oath by revealing that the sanctity conferred by swearing at the altar is merely rhetorical. Indeed, it creates a peculiar problem for Melun, who can hardly now swear to the truth of his claim and is instead compelled to invoke the commonplace notion that a dying person has no motive to lie. Oath-breaking for King Philip is no easy matter, but here it has become an explicit political strategy, a cynical Machiavellianism, adding to the impression that the world of King John displays an increasing disenchantment in which the sacred is routinely instrumentalized, made to serve a political purpose.

  DISENCHANTMENT

  Though a broad scholarly consensus holds that the play presents a disenchanted world, the precise quality of the play’s disenchantment remains a subject of debate. An attitude of disillusionment toward political action is palpable, but this sort of disappointment needs to be distinguished from the technical sense in which disenchantment refers to a general loss of belief in the supernatural. The episode treating Peter of Pomfret suggests that the world of King John is not disenchanted in this restricted sense. Peter appears at a crucial juncture in the action: John has just learned that his mother, who commanded his forces in France, has died. Reeling from the shock of a loss that is at once deeply personal and thoroughly political, John turns his attention to the newly arrived Bastard, who is accompanied by Peter. The Bastard reports that he has successfully extracted money from the clergy but adds that throughout the land the people are ‘strangely fantasied, / Possessed with rumours, full of idle dreams’ (4.2.144–5). This popular discontent has been exacerbated by a prophet found in Pomfret who has been predicting that King John will ‘deliver up’ his crown before the next Ascension Day (151–2). In language that anticipates Caesar’s rejection of the soothsayer, John dismisses Peter as an ‘idle dreamer’, but, suspecting a political motive, demands to know why he has made the claim. Peter disavows any concern for political action, insisting that his only motive is to speak truth: ‘Foreknowing that the truth will fall out so’ (154). John commands that he be imprisoned until Ascension Day and then, at the very moment when his prophecy fails to be realized, hanged. Of course, as the opening of Act 5 reveals, Peter’s prediction proves accurate: John yields his crown to Pandulph and submits himself to the Pope in order to gain the support of the Church against his enemies both foreign and domestic. Reminded that it is Ascension Day, John muses:

  Is this Ascension Day? Did not the prophet

  Say that before Ascension Day at noon

  My crown I should give off? Even so I have –

  I did suppose it should be on constraint,

  But, God be thanked, it is but voluntary.

  (5.1.25–9)

  Peter’s prophecy provides an illuminating contrast with Pandulph’s earlier prognostication. The prophecy is highly specific about chronology but unconcerned with causality; Pandulph’s prediction depends on an understanding of political psychology, whereas Peter denies any interest in or understanding of political agency. Perhaps most importantly, Peter’s prediction is accurate but misleading; it does not provide actionable intelligence. Like the demonic prophecies in 2 Henry VI, Peter’s prophecy gestures toward an uncanny supernatural order that remains robust but inscrutable.

  Associated with the supernatural, Peter of Pomfret is one of the few characters identified with the people in a play that largely restricts its focus to the political elite of both England and France. If the barons present the prospect of aristocratic disloyalty, Peter, ‘With many hundreds treading on his heels’ (4.2.149), embodies the threat of popular revolt. Elizabeth and her government were highly sensitive to the subversive potential of ‘rude harsh-sounding rhymes’ (150) promoting political prophecies, and the Peter of Pomfret episode registers an Elizabethan anxiety about the possibility of religiously motivated rebellion.1 At the same time, though Peter is associated with the people, he hardly qualifies as a leader of popular revolt. Shakespeare diminishes the threat presented by the episode in both Troublesome Reign and Holinshed’s Chronicles. In the first place this is a consequence of compression. Troublesome Reign provides an expansive staging of the episode: not only is there an elaborate stage effect in which ‘five moons appear’ (Pt 1, 13.130), but Peter is invited by King John to expound on this portent. In addition, King John does not associate Peter with the diabolical, a connection that is conspicuous in both Holinshed and Troublesome Reign. Finally, though the appearance of Peter and the popular unrest provoked by the five moons are anticipated by Pandulph’s secular prognostication, Peter’s own prophecy is vindicated, and with it the notion that an inscrutable supernatural order governs human events. In a play in which order of any sort seems in short supply, Peter, even in his reduced form, points to the existence of the supernatural while simultaneously insisting on its inaccessibility. Peter may be divinely inspired, but his knowledge is finally useless. King John remembers the prophecy once it has come to pass, but spares not a thought for Peter, whose ultimate fate remains undisclosed.

  HISTORY PLAYS AND HISTORIOGRAPHY

  The genre of the history play is an Elizabethan invention. A hybrid that combines elements of the classical genres of tragedy and comedy, the history play lacks a strict definition, which has caused some to question whether it actually counts as a genre.1 However, despite the difficulties associated with determining what precisely defines a history play, there seems little reason to reject the category. One of the key moments in the process of consolidating the genre occurred in 1623, when the First Folio presented Shakespeare’s dramatic works according to a tripartite division: Comedies, Histories and Tragedies (see Fig. 4). The Folio catalogue makes no room for ‘Romances’ or ‘Tragicomedies’, a fourth category usually found in modern editions of the complete works, but it does clearly set apart the series of plays treating specifically English history. Moreover, it arranges this material according to its historical chronology, beginning with The Life and Death of King John and ending with The Life of King Henry the Eighth, an arrangement that serves to advertise the sweep and extent of Shakespeare’s engagement with the matter of England. The principle of selection adopted by John Heminges and Henry Condell relies more on content than on form. Plays based on foreign history, whether ancient or modern, are excluded: Julius Caesar, despite its basis in history, is found among the tragedies, as are the British history plays Macbeth and King Lear. The genre’s reliance on established historical narrative guarantees that it will have a complicated relationship toward its sources. In the first place, it means that there will be sources. Though Shakespeare regularly adapted source material for other genres, there is no necessity determining that a tragedy or a comedy will be built on a precursor text. A history play, however, invariably reconfigures available historiography, transforming a narrative (or a set of narratives) into a compressed dramatic representation. While modern understandings of historical representation are much preoccupied with accuracy, the early modern history play aims for another sort of verisimilitude. History plays present the truth about the past, but the sort of truth that does not preclude the radical rearrangement of events, the excision of vast swaths of material and the invention of episodes, speeches and characters with no precedent in the historical record.1 In such circumstances, sources assume enormous significance: they are at once necessary and subject to revision and reshaping. Scholars of the genre regularly assert that history plays are bound to observe the major facts of the received national narrative (e.g. the English win at Agincourt), but there is no clear demarcation between the class of events that stand inviolable, above and beyond revision, and those details that can be rearranged for dramatic effect. What is clear is that the history play derives its cultural authority from its reliance on the chronicle histories themselves.

  4 ‘A Catalogue’ from the First Folio, 1623

  The two major non-dramatic sources used in the writing of King John were Holinshed’s Chronicles and Foxe’s Acts and Monuments. However, discerning how Shakespeare handled these two major historical works is complicated by his reliance on The Troublesome Reign of King John. Indeed, some scholars have concluded that Shakespeare confined himself to this source play (Boswell-Stone, Dover Wilson), while others have made the case for the direct consultation of both Holinshed and Foxe. Honigmann, holding that Troublesome Reign is in fact derived from Shakespeare’s King John, makes an argument for two additional sources: the Historia Maior (1571) of Matthew of Paris and the Latin MS Wakefield Chronicle (Ard2, xv–xviii). Presenting Shakespeare as a serious scholar carefully sifting a range of sources, including manuscript material in Latin, Honigmann seeks to dispel the notion that Shakespeare was untroubled by learning and happy to use whatever came to hand. In contrast, Geoffrey Bullough’s Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare identifies only Holinshed and Troublesome Reign as established sources; Edward Hall’s The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancaster and York (1548) is listed as a probable source, and Foxe is identified as a possible source. Despite Bullough’s hesitation concerning Foxe’s status as a source, the evidence for a direct link between Acts and Monuments and King John is persuasive.

  Evidence of a dependence on Holinshed takes several forms. Moore Smith and Honigmann both cite verbal parallels that support the case. In addition, there are plot elements in King John that are closer to Holinshed than to Troublesome Reign. For example, the handling of the episode involving Melun includes several details (his arrival in England in advance of the Dauphin to incite rebellion, his dying speech in which he reveals the treachery of the French) not found in Troublesome Reign and evidently taken from Holinshed (Ard2, xiii). Honigmann argues that John’s reaction to the apparent death of Arthur is derived from Holinshed. John’s attack on Hubert’s overzealousness (which presumes ‘to know the meaning / Of dangerous majesty, when perchance it frowns / More upon humour than advised respect’ (4.2.212–14)) is very close to Hubert’s reasoning as reported by Holinshed: Hubert ascribes John’s command to ‘heat and furie’, anticipating that ‘afterwards, vpon better advisement, he would both repent himself so to have commanded, and giue them small thanke that should see it put in execution’ (cited in Ard2, 106). Indeed, Honigmann identifies John’s psychological volatility as his central attribute and argues that Shakespeare’s portrait of the King is essentially the same as Holinshed’s depiction: ‘Shakespeare’s John is Holinshed’s John’ (lxix).

  The influence of Foxe on King John is less obvious, and scholars have tended to discount evidence of a reliance on Acts and Monuments in part because Shakespeare’s play does not seem to traffic in the sort of militant Protestantism associated with the famous martyrology. If as is often remarked, King John tones down the virulent anti-Catholicism of Troublesome Reign, why then would Shakespeare resort to one of the principal purveyors of the very discourse that animates the earlier play? Honigmann, who makes a case for Shakespeare’s reliance on Foxe, explains: ‘Since John, more than any other of his plays, impinges on religious issues, we need not be surprised that Shakespeare glanced at the leading English Church historian’ (xiii). No one seems prepared to argue that Shakespeare assiduously pored over Acts and Monuments, but there are connections worth considering. The most interesting of these is the treatment of John’s death.

  The historical sources do not provide a definitive account of King John’s death. Lacking modern autopsies, it is hardly surprising that in cases where there was no obvious physical trauma the precise cause of death often remained mysterious and, even, controversial. Acts and Monuments clearly supports the theory that John was poisoned by a monk, but the existence of alternatives is not suppressed: ‘Many opinions are among the Chroniclers of the death of king Iohn. Some of them doe wryte that he died of sorrowe and heauinesse of heart, as Polydorus: some of surfetting in the night, as Radulphus Niger: some of a bloudy flixe, as Roger Houeden: some of a burning agewe, some of a cold sweat, some of eating apples, some of eating peares, some plummes, &c’ (1, 279). Shakespeare’s text also affords competing accounts of the King’s death. When King John retires from battle in 5.3, he is clearly suffering from a fever before he retreats to Swinstead Abbey (5.3.3–4, 14), a detail that would seem to point toward a ‘burning’ ague. While Foxe does not claim absolute certainty regarding the cause of King John’s death, there are elements within the book that point in that direction. A marginal note flatly declares, ‘K. Iohn poysoned by a Monke’ (256), and the same claim appears in the section heading. But perhaps the most definitive version of the King’s demise appears in one of the volume’s more elaborate woodcuts. A multi-panel depiction of the poisoning of the King presents a graphic rendering of Foxe’s preferred narrative, and it is easy to forget that this version only represents what Foxe describes as the scholarly consensus: ‘the most agree in this that he was poysoned by the Monke’ (256).

  Certainly, the woodcut seems to have attracted Shakespeare’s attention. But his response to it is complicated and subtle. In the main, he avoids making the guilt of the monk demonstrable. The event, rather than being depicted, is reported, a technique that of course invites questions of reliability. Hubert announces: ‘The King, I fear, is poisoned by a monk’ (5.6.23). Hubert’s uncertainty (‘I fear’) presumably reflects his worry that the King has been fatally poisoned. In response to the Bastard’s questions about how the King ingested the toxin and who was acting as his taster, Hubert elaborates: ‘A monk, I tell you, a resolved villain / Whose bowels suddenly burst out’ (29–30). The occult operation of poison remains invisible, but Hubert can testify to the spectacular demise of the monk who served as taster. Hubert’s act of witnessing in fact perfectly reproduces the experience of a reader of Acts and Monuments, who would have encountered an image depicting the demise of the perfidious monk (see Fig. 5). Importantly, the text cartouche that accompanies the image of the dead monk reads: ‘The monke lyeth here burst of the poyson that he dranke to the king.’ The adjectival ‘burst’ in Foxe becomes a vivid verbal phrase in Shakespeare’s play: ‘suddenly burst out’.

  5 ‘The description and manner of the poysoning of king Iohn’, John Foxe, Acts and Monuments, 1563