Though Holinshed’s Chronicles and Foxe’s Acts and Monuments are important sources for King John, Troublesome Reign is the play’s most significant precursor. Probably written in 1589–90, Troublesome Reign was printed in quarto format in 1591 for the bookseller Sampson Clarke. The decision to present the play in two parts was, according to its most recent editor, Charles R. Forker, ‘almost certainly a tactic of the publisher who wished buyers to associate it with Marlowe’s Tamburlaine (1587–8), the two parts of which had been published together the year before’ (31). This first quarto of Troublesome Reign appeared without an authorial attribution, but a second quarto published in 1611 assigned the work to ‘W. Sh.’ The publisher, John Helme, clearly hoped to take advantage of the growing demand for Shakespeare’s printed drama, but his claim for Shakespeare’s authorship, despite having convinced a number of eminent Shakespeareans, has not held up. Lacking external evidence, claims about the authorship of Troublesome Reign are probable rather than demonstrative; however, Forker makes a convincing case for George Peele.1 Though Troublesome Reign has inevitably suffered as a consequence of being not Shakespeare, critics have recognized the play’s artistic achievements. A.W. Ward, writing in 1875, finds Troublesome Reign ‘the best example of the Chronicle History pure and simple’.2 More recently, Janet Clare has argued that the play ‘exerted considerable popular appeal’ as part of the repertoire of the Queen’s Men (Clare, 38).

  Allowing that Troublesome Reign is a source for King John, Shakespeare’s play reveals a closeness to its predecessor that surpasses that seen in other cases where a dramatic source was available.3 King John follows closely the selection of episodes and the cast of characters found in Troublesome Reign. Curiously, despite the structural similarities, sustained verbal parallels between the two are limited to short phrases scattered throughout the text.4 Shakespeare further compresses the action delineated in Troublesome Reign. At the same time, he puts a greater emphasis on internal, psychological states. The notion that Shakespeare specialized in the depiction of interiority has become a critical commonplace, but in this case familiarity should not breed contempt: the claim still deserves serious attention.

  The distinctive way in which the character of the Bastard is treated in the two plays is instructive. Shakespeare’s version of the Bastard points to future developments. Murry identified both Hotspur and Falstaff as ‘the Bastard’s direct descendants’ (154). At the same time, the character remains indebted to the early version that appeared in Troublesome Reign. The Bastard that appears in Troublesome Reign is given a much more developed relationship with the Duke of Austria. The business concerning the lion’s skin once worn by Coeur-de-Lion is given extensive treatment. Philip the Bastard makes its meaning explicit: ‘My father’s foe clad in my father’s spoil’ (Troublesome Reign, Pt 1, 2.136). Troublesome Reign includes an episode in which the Bastard recovers the trophy, having seized it from the fleeing Austria, and subsequently presents it to Lady Blanche (Pt 1, 3; 4.39). The Bastard’s resistance to the proposed peace is motivated by a desire to revenge his father’s death. In explicitly chivalric language he asks a boon of the recently reconciled kings, demanding a single combat with Austria. When Austria refuses to fight ‘With one so far unequal to myself’ (Pt 1, 5.35), King John invests the Bastard with the Dukedom of Normandy. Though the Duke of Austria still refuses the encounter, when hostilities again break out, the Bastard kills him, and then, alone onstage with the body, reflects: ‘Thus hath King Richard’s son performed his vows / And offered Austria’s blood for sacrifice / Unto his father’s everliving soul’ (Pt 1, 6.1–3). All of this business is absent in King John; the audience is left to infer that the Bastard’s animus toward Austria is produced by a personal sense of injury and a desire for revenge. Shakespeare’s Bastard taunts Austria relentlessly and makes much of his ‘skin-coat’ (KJ 2.1.139), but his indecorum earns a rebuke from King John: ‘We like not this, thou dost forget thyself’ (3.1.134). When, during the battle, the Bastard enters ‘with Austria’s head’ (3.2.0.1–2), there is no triumphalism and no mention of revenge.

  Two other scenes that contribute to the characterization of the Bastard in Troublesome Reign that lack equivalents in King John are the ransacking of the abbey and the poisoning of King John (Troublesome Reign, Pt 1, 11, Pt 2, 8). Troublesome Reign’s depiction of religious life is satire bordering on farce, and it clearly emerges from an anti-monastic tradition that was given renewed energy by the Protestant Reformation, but it also shows the Bastard threatening violence to a group of hapless friars and nuns. The scandal of clerical greed and the sexual corruption of the cloister are familiar tropes, but the rampant corruption on display does not entirely mitigate the sense that the Bastard is a bully. The poisoning scene is also associated with Protestant polemic; however, in it, the Bastard displays the bloodthirstiness visible in his attitude toward Austria, immediately killing the Abbot whom he suspects of complicity in the murder of King John (Pt 2, 8.50). The absence of these two scenes severs the association between the Bastard and a particular anti-Catholic discourse, but it also has the effect of downplaying his propensity for violence.

  Shakespeare’s Bastard is not only less violent than the Bastard in Troublesome Reign, but also more thoughtful. While Troublesome Reign’s character has asides and speaks on an empty stage, he has nothing like the two soliloquies given to Shakespeare’s Bastard. The first of these occurs immediately after he discovers and embraces his true parentage: in it, he declares, ‘he is but a bastard to the time / That doth not smack of observation’ (KJ 1.1.207–8). As a critical observer of society’s hypocrisy, the Bastard is a forerunner of the stage figure of the malcontent; but unlike the malcontent, whose cynicism is usually pessimistic, the Bastard proclaims himself a ‘mounting spirit’ (206) and exudes confidence. Like Edmund in the opening of King Lear, the Bastard unites a sharp-eyed criticism of society’s false pieties with a declared desire to seek advancement. The Bastard’s second soliloquy (‘Mad world! Mad Kings! Mad composition! (2.1.561ff.) ends with a declaration of allegiance to gain: ‘Gain be my lord, for I will worship thee!’ (598). The parallel to Edmund’s ‘Thou, Nature, art my goddess; to thy law / My services are bound’ (KL 1.2.1–2)is unmistakable. In both cases the soliloquy serves less as an opportunity to plumb the depths of a developed psyche and more as an opportunity to demonstrate a character’s alienation from his immediate social world and its values. In rewriting Troublesome Reign’s Bastard, Shakespeare has inverted the former’s obtrusive commitment to chivalry and replaced it with an apparent capitulation to acquisitiveness. It is in the action that follows this second soliloquy that the Bastard emerges as a character with a distinct and sympathetic vision. Confronted by the body of Arthur and the prospect of a world ruled by self-interest and blind contingency, the Bastard declares himself perplexed: ‘I am amazed, methinks, and lose my way / Among the thorns and dangers of this world’ (4.3.140–1). Despite this expression of uncertainty, the Bastard does not waver in his support of King John. As the play reaches its conclusion he dominates the action, serving as commander of the English forces, and it is he who gives the play’s final rousing speech.

  The affinities between the Bastard of Troublesome Reign and the character in Shakespeare’s play are multiple and dense. Indeed, Janet Clare goes so far as to suggest that Shakespeare’s characterization is reliant upon audience familiarity with the earlier version of the character. Whether true or not, there is no reason to doubt that Shakespeare was aware of the connection between the two characters. Arguably, such an awareness in part accounts for King John’s sophisticated consideration of its own status as a literary artefact. Not only is the play drawing from sources such as Holinshed’s Chronicles and Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, it is also using a prior dramatization of the action. Such a situation appears to have produced a heightened sensitivity to the play’s textual status. As David Scott Kastan argues, King John ‘declares its fictionality’.1 King John’s dying declaration – ‘I am a scribbled form, drawn with a pen / Upon a parchment’ (5.7.32–3) – is, according to Kastan, an acknowledgement that ‘Both the “historical” John and the fictional Bastard are “scribbled” forms, characters in a play drawn with Shakespeare’s pen.’ A.R. Braunmuller similarly argues that both the play and Holinshed’s Chronicles are ‘essentially fictive or recreative’ (‘Historiography’, 327).

  Erasing the genre distinction between history and fiction entirely, however, makes it hard to maintain the distinctiveness of the history play as a type of drama. History’s claim to truth mattered to the Elizabethans. But the way in which it mattered remains vexingly hard to determine. The usual position regarding history plays is to invoke a basic framework that cannot be violated (Richard III cannot win the battle of Bosworth) and then concede that everything else remains open to embellishment, excision and invention. An adequate description of the practice of writing history plays, it remains frustrating because there is no crisp articulation of the framework. What sort of fact is inviolable? The sneaking suspicion is that there is no rationale at work, whether implicit or explicit, that the playwrights happily rearrange material to meet the demands of drama without concern for accuracy. The concern for accuracy may not be a wholly modern imposition, but there is no question that a modern preoccupation with accuracy combined with an ambition to discover the laws of history have transformed history from what was a moral and rhetorical practice into a discipline that aspires to scientific status and consequently seeks to establish objective standards of accurate measurement and recording. To say that for Elizabethans, history was a practical discourse that enabled a consideration of ethics in action, does not resolve the problem of truth. Sir Philip Sidney’s famous denigration of history is instructive. In The Defence of Poesie (c. 1579, published 1595), Sidney maintains the superiority of poetry to history, and makes the argument precisely in terms of fiction’s ability to create true exemplars, unlike history, which remains captive to the truth of a fallen world. As Sidney argues, the historical record provides too many examples of flourishing evil and suffering virtue to count as a reliable incitement to moral action. It is precisely the commitment to the truth of what actually happened that hobbles history, in Sidney’s account. And yet, despite Sidney’s assertion that ‘a feigned example hath has much force to teach as a true example’, it is clear that the truth of history was thought to invest it with a particular potency.

  While there was no revolution in Tudor historiography, there was a surge of interest in history, and a proliferation of forms in which history appeared. It is in the early modern period that a distinctively English historical culture emerges, and the genre of the history play contributes to this development. What matters for the history play might best be called, following Stephen Colbert, ‘truthiness’. The playwright George Chapman is invoking a similar idea when he ascribes to The Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois, ‘not truth, but things like truth’ (see Braunmuller, ‘Historiography’, 311). As Braunmuller puts it: ‘plausibility (the coherence of invented motive with historical result), not fact and truth, are the only pertinent, the only available, tests of history writing’ (326). But the pursuit of plausibility does not entirely explain the way in which King John takes up the matter of history and historiography. Almost every consideration of the relationship between King John and Troublesome Reign comments on the way in which Shakespeare’s version of the play tones down the militant Protestantism found in the other play. This is often construed as sympathy for the Catholic position (and it may be), but there is another possibility. The rehabilitation of King John presented a particularly clear example of the way in which religious affiliation could colour the writing of history. Shakespeare’s response to this is nuanced and subtle. He neither embraces the revisionism of the Protestants nor does he flatly reject it. His version of the reign presents a King John who is neither hero nor villain. He follows Troublesome Reign in presenting an entirely fictitious version of Arthur’s death that exculpates John. But unlike the single version of Arthur’s death, King John gives two reasons for the King’s death: he suffers from a fever and he is the victim of poisoning. Shakespeare is acutely aware of both the gaps in the historical record and the artistry required to make the ‘bare was’ of history into a compelling dramatic narrative.1

  The sophisticated treatment of history found in King John reappears in Shakespeare’s only other ‘Reformation’ history. Written in collaboration with John Fletcher, King Henry VIII aims, in Gordon McMullan’s words, to elicit a ‘productive anxiety about the nature of historical and political truth’. McMullan describes the play as permeated by ‘a thoroughgoing scepticism about the possibility of access to the truth of motivation and of historical event’.2 The play’s prologue displays a deep awareness of its status as a ‘chosen truth’, a selection from the vast storehouse of available episodes that might be depicted. At the same time, the play itself makes a case for charitable interpretation in the writing of history and offers conciliatory portraits of both Catholic and Protestant heroes. A clear bid to lay the ghosts of the recent post-Reformation past, the play undoubtedly failed to please partisans on both sides of the religious divide, but it provides an important link back to King John. It used to be argued that the Shakespearean history plays were a response to the trauma of the War of the Roses. The horror of civil war was an ever-present threat to the Elizabethans. There is an element of truth to this, but the more immediate trauma that the population had endured involved the change of religion between an astounding four positions in the space of thirty years. These changes were attended by religiously motivated violence that led to the torture and execution of hundreds, but in addition they created an environment that promoted symbolic violence. When Shakespeare is writing about the actual Wars of the Roses, he is largely able to avoid the shifting sands of religious controversy, but when he takes up the figure of King John or Henry VIII, the interpretative battles of the Reformation are impossible to avoid. King John does not promote a Foxeian version of its titular king, but neither does it undermine the case for England’s independent status as an imperium free from papal rule. The play focuses almost entirely on the political consequences of the papal deposing power; it has almost nothing to say about the theological disputes that were central to the Reformation. The result is a play that comfortably inhabits the orthodox Protestant position regarding the legitimacy of the English Church and crown. The Bastard’s final speech has been read as a straightforward piece of Protestant triumphalism, as an ironized bit of empty verbiage and as an expression of anxiety. These multiple perspectives on the play’s concluding statement are not merely a testament to the ingenuity of interpretation; the play, made up out of disparate source materials, invites such divergent views.

  RHETORICAL PATTERNS

  With few exceptions, Roman historians were happy to provide invented speeches for their subjects, and the Elizabethans, as good humanists, were content to continue this practice. Dramatizing historical narrative by including rousing speeches and set debates prepares the way for historical drama comprised entirely of invented dialogue. Thinking in terms of historiography illuminates an aspect of King John that might otherwise seem odd (and has been criticized as an aesthetic failure). A significant amount of the play’s action consists of highly rhetorical debate. Episodes of structured argument – the dispute over Faulconbridge’s paternity, John’s claim to the throne, the problem of Angiers, Pandulph’s argument about the impiety of maintaining an irreligious oath – dominate the action up to and including 3.1. After the battle in 3.2 the action gains momentum, but the tendency toward debate does not entirely disappear. The dialogue between Hubert and Arthur lacks the public character and the appeal to high principle that is on display on earlier occasions, and yet, despite the obvious use of emotional appeals, it takes the form of a debate. Having been shown the warrant and having had Hubert confirm his intention to execute the order, Arthur asks, ‘Have you the heart?’ (4.1.41). A series of appeals to compassion that play on Hubert’s sensitivity follows. First, Arthur reminds him of the solicitude that he demonstrated when Hubert suffered from a headache; the young prince’s ministrations should not now be rewarded with violence. When this personal appeal fails, Arthur embarks on an elaborate fancy:

  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.

  (4.1.60–6)

  The conceit posits an elemental sympathy in which hot iron responds to the tears of innocence by cooling and corroding away to nothing. The conspicuous wit displayed by Arthur tends toward the intellectual pyrotechnics that are a hallmark of John Donne’s poetry, and it sits oddly both with Arthur’s status as innocent child and with the more general appeal for sympathy.

  Though there are a number of passages in the play that present images of considerable intellectual complexity, the dominant rhetorical trend exploits patterns of repetition. Conventionally a distinction is made between schemes and tropes, and modern literary critics are invariably attracted to tropes, involving changes in meaning, as opposed to schemes, entailing the artful arrangement of words. But King John displays a typically Elizabethan exuberance in its deployment of highly patterned rhetoric. Though the tendency is visible in the language of almost all the characters, Constance excels in the use of rhetorical repetition, and her speeches display a dazzling verbal facility that puts her in a class apart. In the initial confrontation with John and Queen Eleanor, Constance insists that Arthur has been plagued by his grandmother’s sins: