King John

Summary

Shakespeare's King John is a history play about a crown held by possession rather than undoubted right. John rules England, but his dead elder brother Geoffrey left a son, the boy Arthur of Brittany, whose claim is pressed by his mother Constance and backed by King Philip of France and the Duke of Austria. Into this quarrel walks Philip Faulconbridge, a country gentleman who learns in the opening scene that he is the illegitimate son of Richard Coeur-de-lion, gives up his land for the honour of that blood, and becomes the play's most vivid voice. The Bastard watches kings swear, unswear and bargain, and names the force that moves them: commodity, the self-interest that tilts every resolution off course. The action moves from the walls of Angiers, where two armies fight to a draw and then patch up a peace by marrying the Dauphin Louis to John's niece Blanche, to the papal legate Pandulph's arrival, John's defiance of Rome, his excommunication and the collapse of the French alliance. John captures Arthur and, in one of Shakespeare's most chilling half-spoken commissions, lets Hubert de Burgh understand that the boy should die. Hubert cannot bring himself to burn out Arthur's eyes, but Arthur dies anyway, leaping from a castle wall in disguise. The nobles, believing John a murderer, go over to the invading Louis; John surrenders his crown to Pandulph and takes it back as the pope's vassal; and he dies at Swinstead Abbey, poisoned by a monk, while the Bastard holds the realm together for the young Prince Henry. The play has no single hero. John begins as a defiant patriot and ends as a frightened man who has bargained away his defiance; Constance's grief turns rhetoric into raw lament; Hubert discovers a conscience he had seemed to lack; and the Bastard grows from a mocking outsider into the loyal servant of a kingdom rather than of any one ruler's interest. Shakespeare omits Magna Carta entirely and compresses the events of 1199 to 1216, shaping chronicle history around questions his audience still felt: whether a usurper may be obeyed, whether a foreign church may depose a king, and what loyalty owes to a sovereign who has done wrong. For a classical Christian class the play repays attention to speech as moral action. John never says the word murder to Hubert; the Bastard's honesty about his own temptations is part of what makes him trustworthy; and Hubert's mercy shows that an order does not remove a man's responsibility. The full Project Gutenberg text (#1511) is attached, so every scene cited here can be checked against the play.

Plot or Argument

• Act I: An embassy and an inheritance

  At Northampton the French ambassador Chatillon demands that John yield England, Ireland, Anjou, Touraine and Maine to Arthur; John answers with war. Robert Faulconbridge then disputes his elder brother Philip's inheritance, and Queen Eleanor recognises King Richard's features in Philip. Offered land or the name of Richard's son, Philip chooses the name, is knighted as Sir Richard Plantagenet, and wrings the truth from his mother.

• Act II: Before the walls of Angiers

  France, Austria, Constance and Arthur besiege Angiers; John and Eleanor arrive and the two queens trade insults over the boy. The citizens refuse to open to either king until the rightful one is proved, and an indecisive battle follows. When the Bastard proposes that both kings sack the town together, a citizen offers a marriage instead: Louis weds Blanche, John cedes five provinces, and the Bastard delivers his soliloquy on commodity.

• Act III: Excommunication and capture

  Constance denounces the broken faith of France. Cardinal Pandulph demands why John keeps Stephen Langton from Canterbury; John defies the pope, is excommunicated, and Pandulph forces Philip to break his new league. In battle the Bastard kills Austria and Arthur is taken. John hints to Hubert that the boy is a serpent in his way, Constance laments her lost son, and Pandulph predicts that Arthur's death will deliver England to Louis.

• Act IV: The irons, the wall and the second crowning

  Hubert comes with executioners and hot irons to blind Arthur, but the boy's pleading melts him and he hides the child. John's needless second coronation alarms the lords; when Hubert reports Arthur dead they leave in anger, the French land, and word comes that Eleanor and Constance are dead. John turns on Hubert, then learns Arthur lives. Too late: Arthur, disguised as a ship-boy, leaps from the castle wall and dies, and the lords find his body and swear vengeance.

• Act V: Submission, defection and death at Swinstead

  John yields his crown to Pandulph and receives it back from the pope's hand on Ascension Day. The rebel lords join Louis at Saint Edmundsbury, but Louis refuses Pandulph's call to withdraw. The dying French lord Melun warns the English that Louis means to kill them, and they return to their allegiance; Louis's reinforcements sink on Goodwin Sands. Fevered and then poisoned by a monk, John dies in the orchard of Swinstead Abbey, and the Bastard and the lords kneel to Prince Henry.

Characters

• King John, King of England

  Youngest son of Henry II, holding the throne by possession and his mother's support; defiant toward Rome, secretive toward Hubert, and finally submissive and broken.

• Philip the Bastard (Sir Richard Plantagenet), illegitimate son of Richard I

  Witty outsider and chorus figure who mocks the bargains of kings, admits his own appetite for gain, and becomes the steadiest defender of England in Acts IV and V.

• Arthur, Duke of Brittany, John's nephew and rival claimant

  Son of John's elder brother Geoffrey; a gentle child whose pleading saves his eyes but who dies escaping his prison.

• Constance, Arthur's mother

  Fierce advocate of her son's right whose lament after his capture is the play's most sustained expression of grief.

• Hubert de Burgh, the King's chamberlain and Arthur's keeper

  Accepts John's dark commission but cannot carry it out; suspected of murder, he must defend a mercy no one believes.

• Queen Eleanor, John's mother

  Shrewd political partner who admits privately that John's strength lies more in possession than in right.

• Cardinal Pandulph, papal legate

  Excommunicates John, breaks the Franco-English peace, coolly predicts the consequences of Arthur's death, and later brokers peace once John submits.

• King Philip of France and Louis the Dauphin, French king and his son

  Philip champions Arthur until commodity and the church change his course; Louis marries Blanche and later invades England claiming the crown through her.

• Salisbury, Pembroke and Bigot, English lords

  Protest the second coronation, desert to Louis after Arthur's death, and return when Melun reveals the Dauphin's treachery.

• Blanche of Spain, John's niece, married to Louis

  Pledged in marriage to seal the peace and immediately torn between husband and uncle when the peace collapses.

Lessons

• Commodity, the bias of the world

  The Bastard's speech at the end of Act II pictures the world as a bowl that would roll true if self-interest did not weight one side. He sees France abandon a cause professed in the name of God for a profitable marriage, and then confesses that he rails only because no bribe has yet been offered him. The play asks students to judge both the corrupt bargain and the honesty of a man who admits his own temptation.

  • What exactly has France given up at Angiers, and what has it gained?
  • Is the Bastard's vow to worship gain sincere, ironic or a test of himself? Trace his conduct afterward to decide.
  • Where in your own life does a bias of advantage pull a good resolution off course?

• Speaking darkly: complicity without a command

  In Act III, Scene III John never names murder; in Act IV, Scene II he blames Hubert for understanding his signs. Shakespeare shows how a ruler can try to commit a crime while keeping clean words, and how a servant who takes a hint becomes a partner in sin. The scene is a study in responsibility shared and evaded.

  • Count the half-sentences and pauses in John's commission. What does he gain by never finishing his thought?
  • John says that if Hubert had hesitated, shame would have stopped him. Is that true or self-excuse?
  • Is Hubert guilty for accepting the warrant even though he did not use it?

• Mercy at the brazier

  Arthur's plea in Act IV, Scene I turns on small things: a mote in the eye, a cold iron, a fire 'dead with grief'. Hubert yields not to argument but to the plain presence of a child he has come to know. Students can see how pity rightly overrules an unjust order, and what Hubert risks by disobeying.

  • Which of Arthur's images most changes Hubert, and why?
  • Hubert says he will tell the king the boy is dead. Is this lie defensible?
  • How does the scene prepare us to read Hubert's tears in Act IV, Scene III?

• Grief that will not be argued away

  In Act III, Scene IV Pandulph and King Philip tell Constance she is mad or too fond of grief. She answers that she is not mad, that grief has taken her son's place in the room, and that those who never lost a child cannot comfort her. The scene teaches students to hear lament as a truthful response to real loss, while noticing the cardinal's cold use of her sorrow for policy.

  • Why does Constance insist she is not mad? What would madness spare her?
  • She hopes to know her son in heaven but fears grief will change his face. What does this say about her faith and her despair?
  • Compare Pandulph's comfort with his political advice to Louis in the same scene.

• Loyalty to a flawed king

  After Arthur's body is found, the Bastard feels himself lost among the thorns of the world, yet chooses to go to the king. The lords choose rebellion and a foreign prince. The ending, with Melun's warning and the closing speech on England true to itself, invites a careful debate about obedience, conscience and the common good when a ruler has sinned.

  • Were Salisbury, Pembroke and Bigot right to leave John? Were they right to return?
  • What does the Bastard serve when he stays loyal: John, the crown, England or Prince Henry?
  • Does the play's last couplet answer the problem of a guilty king, or set it aside?

Context

The historical John reigned from 1199 to 1216. His nephew Arthur of Brittany disappeared in captivity in 1203, widely believed in the chronicles to have been killed on John's orders; the dispute over Stephen Langton led to an interdict on England and John's excommunication, and in 1213 John submitted to the papal legate Pandulf and held his kingdom as a papal fief. Rebel barons invited Prince Louis of France, who invaded in 1216, and John died that October at Newark after losing part of his baggage in the Wash. Tudor Protestant writers, notably John Bale in his play Kynge Johan, made John an early defier of papal power; Shakespeare's play keeps that strain in Act III but also shows John murderous and humbled.

Composition

Usually dated c. 1595-96. Francis Meres names King John among Shakespeare's tragedies in Palladis Tamia (1598). The play closely follows the structure of the anonymous two-part The Troublesome Reign of King John, printed in 1591, and draws on Holinshed's Chronicles; most scholars treat Troublesome Reign as the source, though a minority have argued Shakespeare's play came first. Compared with Troublesome Reign, Shakespeare reduces the anti-Catholic comedy and enlarges the Bastard, Constance and Hubert. It was first printed in the First Folio of 1623, where it opens the sequence of histories, and it is written almost wholly in verse.

Reception

Often staged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when Constance was a leading tragic role and productions such as Charles Kean's in 1852 aimed at archaeological spectacle; Herbert Beerbohm Tree's 1899 production supplied the earliest surviving filmed Shakespeare, a short silent fragment of John's death. It has been revived less often since, but it was included among the Shakespeare plays in the second edition of Great Books of the Western World (1990, vol. 26). Critics have read its anxieties about a disputed succession, a papal excommunication and a foreign invasion against the 1570 papal bull against Elizabeth I and the Armada of 1588, and some have compared Arthur's fate with Elizabeth's disavowed responsibility for the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots; these are interpretive readings.

Comparisons

• Richard II

  Both plays turn on whether a crown held without clear right can command loyalty, but the movement is reversed: Richard II shows a lawful king losing his throne to a usurper, while King John shows a doubtful claimant keeping his and ruining himself to do so.

• Richard III

  Each king arranges the death of child heirs who stand between him and security. Richard plans the murder of the princes with relish; John speaks around the deed and then recoils from it, which makes his guilt less theatrical and more ordinary.

• Henry V

  The Bastard's closing lines on England true to itself anticipate the patriotic rhetoric of Henry V, but here the speaker is an illegitimate soldier over a dead king's body rather than a victorious monarch, and the triumph is survival, not conquest.

• Magna Carta

  The charter is the event modern readers most associate with John, and the play never mentions it. Reading the two together shows how Shakespeare and his sources chose a story of papal conflict, succession and invasion over one of baronial law.

• Foxe's Book of Martyrs

  Foxe's Acts and Monuments helped shape the Protestant image of John as a king wronged by Rome, including the story of his poisoning by a monk; Shakespeare uses the defiance and the poisoning but refuses to make John a martyr.

• Hamlet

  Constance's lament and Arthur's death set grief inside politics as Hamlet does; both plays ask what mourning sees that statecraft hurries past.

Quotes

Medical Lens

The play gives a theatrical account of death by poison and fever, a well-known scene of grief examined as possible madness, and a humoral description of melancholy. John's final scenes join an older chronicle tradition (the monk at Swinstead) to a physiological picture of burning, thirst and delirium; Prince Henry's speech on the brain as the soul's dwelling-house and on death's siege of the mind is a compact Elizabethan statement of mind-body thinking. Constance's insistence that she is 'not mad' but 'sensible of grief' lets a class discuss how the period distinguished sorrow from madness. These are readings of dramatic language, not diagnoses of historical persons; the historical John's death is usually attributed in the chronicles to dysentery.

• Act III, Scene III

  John wishes that the 'surly spirit, melancholy' had baked Hubert's blood thick and heavy, a humoral account of how melancholy suits dark purposes.

  Humoral Medicine
• Act III, Scene IV

  Constance tears her hair and is told she utters madness; she answers that she is not mad and wishes she were, since madness would let her forget her son.

  Grief Madness Psychosis
• Act IV, Scene I

  Hubert prepares hot irons to blind Arthur; the boy's plea dwells on the sensitivity of the eye and the cooling of the coals.

  Disability Deformity
• Act V, Scene III

  John, leaving the battle, complains that the fever that has long troubled him now lies heavy on him and burns him up.

  Fever Infection
• Act V, Scene VI

  Hubert reports that the King has been poisoned by a monk whose own bowels burst, and the Bastard asks who tasted for the king.

  Pharmacology Poisons
• Act V, Scene VII

  Prince Henry speaks of the brain as the soul's frail dwelling-house and of death besieging the mind with fantasies; John, carried into the orchard, begs for cold to quench the poison burning within.

  Pharmacology Poisons Death Dying Mind Body

Creative Prompts

• Dialogue

  Rewrite John's commission to Hubert in Act III, Scene III so that Hubert pauses and asks John to say plainly what he means. Continue the scene for twenty lines.

• Essay

  Is the Bastard a better servant of England than the lords who rebel? Argue from his speeches in Act II, Scene I, Act IV, Scene III and Act V, Scene VII.

• Fiction

  Tell Arthur's last night in the castle from his point of view, ending at the moment he decides to leap, using only what the play allows us to know.

• Classroom

  Stage Act IV, Scene I with three readers. Afterwards, have the class mark the line at which they believe Hubert's resolve breaks and defend their choice.

Further Reading

• The Troublesome Reign of King John, Anonymous

  The two-part play printed in 1591 whose plot Shakespeare's play follows closely; useful for seeing what he changed.

• Kynge Johan, John Bale

  Mid-sixteenth-century Protestant morality play presenting John as a defender of England against Rome.

• Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland, Raphael Holinshed

  Shakespeare's main chronicle source for the English histories, in the 1587 second edition.

• King John: England's Evil King?, Ralph V. Turner

  A modern historical account of the reign that helps separate the historical king from the dramatic one.

• King John (Arden Shakespeare), William Shakespeare, ed. E. A. J. Honigmann

  Annotated edition whose introduction argues the minority case that Shakespeare's play preceded The Troublesome Reign.