That he is not only plagued for her sin,

  But God hath made her sin and her the plague

  On this removed issue, plagued for her,

  And with her plague, her sin; his injury

  Her injury, the beadle to her sin,

  All punished in the person of this child,

  And all for her. A plague upon her.

  (2.1.184–90)

  That Arthur is cursed as a consequence of Eleanor’s sin is a familiar idea derived from the second commandment (‘I am the Lord thy God, a ielous God, visiting the iniquitie of the fathers vpon the children’ (Exodus, 20.5)), but the precise significance of Constance’s repeated use of ‘sin’ and ‘plague’ depends on the way in which the passage is punctuated – something that editors have regularly disagreed on. In any case, Constance’s ‘plague’ appears in a remarkable five of the seven lines.

  Eleanor, who is herself an accomplished speaker, responds with a terse rebuke: ‘Thou unadvised scold, I can produce / A will that bars the title of thy son’ (2.1.191–2). This invocation of Richard I’s testament provides Constance with on opportunity to pun and repeat: ‘Ay, who doubts that? A will – a wicked will, / A woman’s will, a cankered grandam’s will’ (193–4). This compressed and vehement repetition is a reduction of the usually expansive pattern of repetition found elsewhere, but it begins with word-play, a punning replacement of Eleanor’s testamentary ‘will’ with a sexualized and gendered ‘will’ that designates unruly desire. King Philip immediately intervenes, urging patience and observing that ‘It ill beseems this presence to cry aim / To these ill-tuned repetitions’ (196–7). Philip’s immediate claim is that it is not fitting that his royal presence appear to promote or condone the harsh exchange of charge and counter-charge. At the same time, ‘ill-tuned repetitions’ glances at the mechanical use of repetition, a criticism that is undercut by Philip’s own repeated use of ‘ill’ in the phrases ‘ill beseems’ and ‘ill-tuned repetitions’.

  When Pandulph makes a distinction between his own cursing, which he asserts has ‘law and warrant’ (3.1.184), and Constance’s unsanctioned invective, she rejects his claim:

  when law can do no right,

  Let it be lawful that law bar no wrong.

  Law cannot give my child his kingdom here,

  For he that holds his kingdom, holds the law;

  Therefore since law itself is perfect wrong,

  How can the law forbid my tongue to curse?

  (185–90)

  Her vigorous pursuit of paradox here empties the category of law of any substance. If law cannot secure justice, then law should bar no wrong; law has proved impotent and cannot restore Arthur because John possesses both the kingdom and the law; consequently, law itself is ‘perfect wrong’, and under such circumstances there is no law that can prohibit her curses. Her fluency is also on display in her response to Blanche, who accuses Constance of speaking not from ‘faith’ but from ‘need’:

  O, if thou grant my need,

  Which only lives but by the death of faith,

  That need must needs infer this principle:

  That faith would live again by death of need.

  O then tread down my need, and faith mounts up;

  Keep my need up, and faith is trodden down.

  (211–16)

  Constance displays formidable skill as a debater here. She turns Blanche’s accusation of mere self-interest into a declaration of principle: the opposition of faith and need is real, but what it shows is that Constance’s deprivation is the consequence of a faithless and irreligious world. The end of her deprivation will guarantee the return of true faith. Though Constance never entirely abandons the witty word-play that marks her early speeches, as her situation becomes increasingly desperate she gives voice to her suffering in powerful terms that convey a visceral sense of disappointment.

  Constance’s extraordinary embrace of death continues to use patterns of repetition, but the conspicuous playfulness evident earlier has now evaporated:

  Death! Death, O amiable, lovely death,

  Thou odoriferous stench, sound rottenness,

  Arise forth from the couch of lasting night,

  Thou hate and terror to prosperity,

  And I will kiss thy detestable bones,

  And put my eyeballs in thy vaulty brows,

  And ring these fingers with thy household worms,

  And stop this gap of breath with fulsome dust,

  And be a carrion monster like thyself.

  (3.4.25–33)

  Though Constance begins with repetition – ‘Death! Death’ is an example of epizeuxis, the immediate repetition of a word – and two obtrusive oxymorons (‘odiferous stench’ and ‘sound rottenness’), what follows is notable for its vivid imagery. The gorge rises at her extraordinary combination of eroticism and charnel meditation, and Constance, embracing death like a lover, becomes a bride again, marrying death in a rite sealed with a kiss and ring. Husband and wife become one flesh, and Constance is herself transformed into ‘a carrion monster’. But even as her rhetoric creates a concrete and grotesque image of death, her reliance on repetition remains: the last five lines quoted above are an example of anaphora, a common scheme in which successive lines begin with the same word or phrase.

  The overwhelming force of Constance’s grief, often described as operatic, is one reason the role has been highly prized by actors since the eighteenth century. Colley Cibber’s adaptation of the play in 1745 featured his wife Katherine as Constance, a performance that included ‘such an emphatical scream of agony as will never be forgotten by those who heard her’.1 In 1783, Sarah Siddons, who had become a theatrical celebrity largely on the strength of her Lady Macbeth, performed Constance at Covent Garden and established a new benchmark for future generations of actors and audiences. Siddons was commended by the novelist Elizabeth Inchbald for her ‘potent skill in the delineation of woe’,2 and so dominating was her performance that audience members would routinely leave after 3.4. While this development surely owes much to changing tastes – the eighteenth-century embrace of sensibility leading to a Victorian celebration of domestic virtue that put a premium on extravagant maternal grief – it also answers to something important and interesting about King John. The play offers something that might be termed passionate history: a representation of England’s past that is particularly attentive to the way in which the contingencies of history, the unexpected triumphs as well as the sudden reversals, provoke extraordinary emotional responses. At the same time, the play registers the way that a propensity for passion, a susceptibility to certain feelings, contributes to the unfolding of historical events.

  King John is a play full of passionate excess, and it might well be termed a passionate history. While all drama is essentially about conflict, and conflict is invariably accompanied by passion, the way in which King John presents figures that are close to emblems of particular passions is distinctive. Constance as an epitome of grief is the clearest example. Not only does she give voice to extraordinary sorrow, her gestures and postures reinforce the image of her as composed of sorrow. When she declares ‘Here I and sorrows sit’ (3.1.73), her proclamation is accompanied by a descent to the ground and a refusal to budge. Sitting on the ground is a conventional sign of sorrow, and the moment is closely paralleled in Richard II’s collapse: ‘For God’s sake let us sit upon the ground / And tell sad stories of the death of kings’ (3.2.155–6).1 The extravagance of Constance’s grief is also signalled by her entrance at 3.4.16 with ‘her hair dishevelled’. Another stage convention, a female figure with her hair unbound usually signified madness (the classic example is Ophelia), but in this case, Constance is fully capable of reason, and she rejects Pandulph’s assertion that she utters ‘madness, and not sorrow’ (43). After being twice implored by King Philip to bind up her hair, she consents, but the return to order is brief and she once again unbinds her hair, observing, ‘I will not keep this form upon my head, / When there is such disorder in my wit’ (101–2). In this condition she makes her final exit from the stage, and the last mention of her comes in 4.2 when it is reported that she died ‘in a frenzy’ (122), a word that connotes rage as well as unreason. Constance as a personification of grief is familiar from various graphic representations of the character. In one of a series of striking sketches done of Sarah Siddons by John Flaxman, Constance is shown on her knees with her fists raised over her head (see Fig. 6). A similar painting by Henry Fuseli, exhibited in 1783, depicts Lady Constance, Arthur and Salisbury (see Fig. 7). Though perhaps influenced by Siddons and her star turn, Fuseli’s version of Constance insists on her intransigence: with her elbows resting on her knees, and her fists against her cheeks, she forms a solid and unmovable triangle at the centre of the composition. Both Arthur in the left foreground and Salisbury in the right background display a languid grief that seems almost ethereal in comparison. These two late-eighteenth-century images indicate that Constance had achieved a new cultural resonance, but they also testify to the striking clarity of Shakespeare’s original.

  6 Mrs Siddons, kneeling with her arms raised over her head, her hands curled into a fist, by John Flaxman, 1783

  7 ‘Lady Constance, Arthur and Salisbury’, by Henry Fuseli, 1783

  The prominence of grief in the histories more generally is an important element of the genre. Usually passed over as a straightforward consequence of the history play’s generic hybridity, its uneven mixture of tragic and comic elements, episodes of intense grief punctuate the earlier histories. Though it has become a cliché to refer to winner’s history, the history plays reveal a consistent and serious interest in losers. The taunting of the Duke of York in 3 Henry VI exemplifies the dynamic. Defeated in battle and captured by Queen Margaret and her allies, York is subjected to ritual humiliation and then killed. Before his death, York, hardly a paragon of virtue, gains in sympathy as he excoriates the ‘She-wolf of France’ who triumphs ‘Upon their woes whom Fortune captivates!’ (3H6 1.4.111, 115). Suffolk in 2 Henry VI is another of history’s losers. A deeply compromised character, who stands until the bitter end on his social privilege, Suffolk ‘dies by pirates’ (2H6 4.1.140) which is to say by contingency. Complaints against misfortunes fill the histories, reaching a crescendo in Richard III, which features a full chorus of female figures who have all suffered excruciating losses (Queen Elizabeth, the Duchess of York, Lady Anne and Queen Margaret). The same Queen Margaret, who becomes a virtuoso of cursing in Richard III, displays a false magnanimity when, in 2 Henry VI, she says to the fallen Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, ‘I can give the loser leave to chide’ (2H6 3.1.182). ‘Give losers leave to speak’ is proverbial, and the history plays, rather than silencing the losers, often present them giving full expression to a deep sense of grievance provoked by the injustice of contingent events. The powerful sense that the gains and losses that constitute history are deeply felt and somehow incommensurable limits the sort of triumphalism that is often thought to be an essential element in the Elizabethan history play.

  While Constance presents an image of grief, King John, at times, appears to be an emblem of wrath. The figure of Wrath, as one of the seven deadly sins, had a familiar iconography. Edmund Spenser, in The Faerie Queene, includes Wrath as the last of the six sins who pull Queen Lucifera, herself a personification of pride. Riding a lion, ‘fierce revenging Wrath’ carries a firebrand, and his eyes ‘hurle forth sparkles fiery red’. Guilty of bloodshed and murder, Spenser’s Wrath also suffers remorse: ‘But when the furious fit was overpast, / His cruel facts he often would repent’ (FQ, 1.4.33–4). In the play’s first scene, John boasts of the speed with which he will make France feel his wrath, telling Chatillon, ‘be thou the trumpet of our wrath / And sullen presage of your own decay’ (1.1.27–8). The expedition that John leads is described as including ‘all th’unsettled humours of the land, / Rash, inconsiderate, fiery voluntaries / With ladies’ faces and fierce dragons’ spleens’ (2.1.66–8), and it arrives hard on Chatillon’s heels. John’s alacrity is connected to his propensity for rage, a condition that reaches a climax as he prepares for battle with France at the end of 3.1: ‘France, I am burned up with inflaming wrath, / A rage whose heat hath this condition / That nothing can allay, nothing but blood, / The blood and dearest valued blood of France’ (340–3). Presenting himself as an incarnation of wrath, John here makes a connection between burning and blood that will return at the end of the play. Indeed, King Philip’s response proves prophetic: ‘Thy rage shall burn thee up, and thou shalt turn / To ashes ere our blood shall quench that fire’ (344–5). Immediately after discovering Arthur’s dead body, Salisbury proclaims his death ‘The wildest savagery, the vilest stroke / That ever wall-eyed wrath or staring rage / Presented to the tears of soft remorse’ (4.3.48–50). Salisbury is convinced that King John, working through his creature, Hubert, is responsible, and he identifies the King with a personification: ‘wall-eyed wrath or staring rage’. The possibility that John suffers from a fundamental physiological imbalance, an excess of choler, returns at the play’s conclusion. In his final moments, John vividly describes his viscera as inflamed: ‘There is so hot a summer in my bosom / That all my bowels crumble up to dust.… The tackle of my heart is cracked and burnt’ (5.7.30–1, 52). The tyrant’s rage is, of course, a commonplace, but King John does not out-Herod Herod. Though he is described as raging by his son, Prince Henry (11), he does not rant onstage; unlike Constance’s grief, which borders on madness, John’s irascibility does not present itself as the brief madness familiar from Senecan drama. John remains lucid. His anger is volatile and is especially associated with alacrity, a quality that makes him a successful campaigner on the battlefield.

  If John appears to be an embodiment of anger and Constance of grief, Hubert comes to exemplify pity. Discussing Hubert as a character is complicated by the figure’s textual instability: the Folio is unclear about whether Hubert and the Citizen of Angiers are a single person. Modern editions have divided on this issue.1 The plausibility of both alternatives warns against any attempt to invest Hubert with an essential identity; nonetheless, Hubert’s dominant affective state is pity. Hubert’s failed attempt to blind Arthur is his most evident display of conspicuous sympathy (see Fig. 8). As the scene between Hubert and Arthur opens, Hubert comments in an aside, ‘If I talk to him, with his innocent prate / He will awake my mercy, which lies dead’ (4.1.25–6). Talk he does, and over the course of the scene his mercy is indeed awakened. Hubert concludes the scene persuaded to protect the ‘pretty child’ (129) he was determined to murder. For Hubert, simple human sympathy trumps political loyalty and self-interest. Importantly, in the immediate aftermath, Hubert is accused of being ill-favoured, having the face of a villain. The notion that he is conspicuously ugly or threatening in appearance (an idea taken up in several productions) makes his act of mercy all the more obtrusive. Pembroke interprets Hubert’s ‘close aspect’ as evidence of ‘a much-troubled breast’ (4.2.72, 73). The notion that Hubert’s uncommunicative face is, in fact, evidence of moral turpitude and turbulence is interestingly paradoxical. The audience, in any case, is aware that Pembroke’s accusation is misplaced: Hubert’s breast may well be troubled, but not as result of bloodguilt. John, in a subsequent speech of gymnastic self-rationalization, blames Hubert’s appearance for the murder of Arthur. According to John, ‘Hadst not thou been by, / A fellow by the hand of nature marked, / Quoted and signed to do a deed of shame, / This murder had not come into my mind’ (4.2.220–3). Inspired by Hubert’s ‘abhorred aspect’ (224), King John tentatively raises the possibility, and Hubert embraces the prospect with alacrity. But when Hubert reveals the truth, he does not hesitate to point the moral: ‘you have slandered nature in my form, / Which howsoever rude exteriorly, / Is yet the cover of a fairer mind / Than to be butcher of an innocent child’ (256–9). Hubert here identifies himself as the proper product of nature, endued with respect for her laws, which prohibit murder, especially of innocent children.

  8 ‘Prince Arthur and Hubert’, by L.J. Pott, engraved by D.I. Desvachez, in Charles Knight (ed.), The Works of Shakespere: Imperial Edition, 1873–5

  The discrepancy between what Hubert is ‘exteriorly’ and what he is internally is again subject to scrutiny when the revolted barons confront him over the dead body of the Prince. Pressed to identify the killer, Hubert asserts: ‘’Tis not an hour since I left him well. / [Weeps.] I honoured him, I loved him, and will weep / My date of life out for his sweet life’s loss’ (4.3.104–6). Hubert’s tears are literal, and Pembroke acknowledges his weeping, but warns that ‘those cunning waters of his eyes’ are an imposture, the result of long-practised villainy. Hubert’s tearful protestation does not persuade the barons, who depart to join the French forces; his forceful assertion of innocence does not entirely convince the Bastard, and the scene ends with Hubert carrying Arthur’s body offstage. Hubert’s solicitude for the ‘sweet’ (an epithet he repeats several times) prince is here rendered in iconography reminiscent of a pietà, and it is not necessary to consider Arthur a Christ-figure in order to appreciate the way the play’s dramaturgy configures Hubert as an embodiment of mercy.

  The presentation of such emblematic characters, figures who appear almost as personifications of particular passions, sets King John apart from the other history plays. There are, of course, moments in those other plays when characters become emblematic. Suffolk describes himself as a personification of wrath – ‘Mine eyes should sparkle like the beaten flint, / Mine hair be fixed on end, as one distract’ (2H6 3.2.317–18) – in response to his banishment, and Richard II becomes an icon of grief when he sits upon the ground in despair (R2 3.2.155–6). King John makes this technique central to its presentation of history, and critical scholarship has tended to treat this as a fault. After all, Shakespeare is regularly celebrated for having achieved unparalleled success in the creation of three-dimensional characters who exhibit a complex interiority. Given this trajectory, characters in which a single passion predominates cannot but appear as immature and rudimentary, the residue of an earlier expressly allegorical drama. Without denying the importance of this developmental narrative, putting it aside allows one to see King John as an important innovation, an attempt to represent the way in which passions shape history.