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.

Top 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Verified 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.