King John & Henry VIII
Read King John & Henry VIII Online
Authors: William Shakespeare
2012 Modern Library Paperback Edition
Copyright © 2007, 2009 by The Royal Shakespeare Company
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Modern Library, an imprint of
The Random House Publishing Group, a division of
Random House, Inc., New York.
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The versions of
King John
and
Henry VIII
and the corresponding footnotes that appear in this volume were originally published in
William Shakespeare:
Complete Works
, edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen, published in 2007 by Modern Library, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.
eISBN: 978-1-58836-886-7
Cover design: Gabrielle Bordwin
Cover photograph: © Richard Nixon/Arcangel Images
v3.1
The Life and Death of King John
King John
in Performance: The RSC and Beyond
Four Centuries of
King John
: An Overview
The Director’s Cut: Interviews with Gregory Doran and Josie Rourke
The Famous History of the Life of King Henry the Eighth
Henry VIII
in Performance: The RSC and Beyond
Four Centuries of
Henry VIII
: An Overview
The Director’s Cut: Interviews with Gregory Doran and Gregory Thompson
Shakespeare’s Career in the Theater
Shakespeare’s Works: A Chronology
Kings and Queens of England: From the History Plays to Shakespeare’s Lifetime
The History Behind the Histories: A Chronology
Further Reading and Viewing:
King John
and
Henry VIII
References:
King John
and
Henry VIII
Acknowledgments and Picture Credits
TWO HISTORY PLAYS:
KING JOHN
AND
HENRY VIII
Shakespeare dramatized the history of pre-Tudor England in two epic tetralogies, sweeping from the reign of King Richard II in the last years of the 1300s to the defeat of Richard III by the future Henry VII, first of the Tudor monarchs, at the battle of Bosworth Field in 1485. But he also wrote (or in one case cowrote) two standalone English histories:
The Life and Death of King John
and
The Famous History of the Life of King Henry the Eighth
, otherwise known as
All Is True
. Though the former is a solo-authored Elizabethan play and the latter a collaborative Jacobean one—it was cowritten with John Fletcher in 1613, at the very end of Shakespeare’s career—they make an exceptionally interesting pair, since both are deeply concerned with courtly political maneuvering in the context of the heated religious debates about Catholicism and Protestantism, which constituted the great fissure within early modern English and European society and statecraft.
During April 1811 Jane Austen was staying in London with her brother Henry. In a letter home to her sister Cassandra, she complained of “a very unlucky change of the Play for this very night—Hamlet instead of King John—and we are to go on Monday to Macbeth instead, but it is a disappointment to us both.” Two centuries on, we are likely to be astonished that so discerning a woman as Jane Austen would rather have seen
King John
than
Hamlet
or
Macbeth
. There is, however, a simple explanation: Austen was a seasoned admirer of Sarah Siddons, the greatest actress of the age, one of whose most celebrated roles was that of the impassioned Lady Constance, as rewarding a female role as any in the whole corpus of Shakespeare’s English history plays.
It was not for the wronged mother Constance alone that
King John
was held in high regard in the nineteenth century. The Victorians, with their penchant for sentiment, delighted in the pathos of the boy Arthur persuading Hubert not to burn out his eyes with hot irons. But the largest role, bigger than that of the vacillating king who gives the play its title, is that of the Bastard, Philip Falconbridge. The German Romantic critic A. W. Schlegel was compelled by this figure: “He ridicules the secret springs of politics, without disapproving of them, for he owns that he is endeavouring to make his fortune by similar means, and wishes rather to belong to the deceivers than the deceived, for in his view of the world there is no other choice.” The Bastard—a dramatic invention, not a real historical figure—is a key character in Shakespeare’s development of the self-serving type that reaches its apogee with Iago in
Othello
and Edmund in
King Lear
. Yet he is the most sympathetic male adult in the drama. He has wit and wisdom as well as the desire for advancement. The rest are mere politicians. In its anatomy of the mechanisms of their intrigue,
King John
is one of Shakespeare’s most modern plays. Set in a feudal world where monarchs were supposed to be God’s representatives on earth, it exposes power as a “commodity” for which men are in hungry competition.
The Bastard is the only character in whom the audience have confidence because he has confidence in us. Soliloquies offer access to his thought processes and self-conscious theatricality allows the spectators to share his space. “Your royal presences be ruled by me,” he says to two kings at once, and we enjoy his presumption because he makes us part of the story: his lines about the citizens of Angiers, watching from the “battlements” of the stage gallery are equally applicable to the paying crowd “in a theatre, whence they gape and point / At your industrious scenes and acts of death.”
“Speak, citizens, for England,” says the King of France to the townsmen of Angiers as it is besieged by rival armies from opposite sides of the English Channel. Of all Shakespeare’s history plays,
King John
is the one that most explicitly asks what it might mean to speak for England. It explores questions about legitimacy and inheritance that were of concern to all propertied families in Tudor England, but of monumental significance to the monarchy—especially at a time when an aged childless queen was sitting on the throne. In the much better known play of
King Lear
, the legitimate son Edgar is the virtuous one and the illegitimate Edmund is the villain.
King John
imagines a more challenging possibility: suppose that a great king dies and that his bravest, most honest and most intelligent son is an illegitimate one. In such a circumstance, inheritance on the basis of merit is not possible: if a bastard were to ascend the throne, the legitimacy of the entire monarchical system would be called into question. The seamless interdependence of patrilineal state, law, church, and family would begin to unravel.
Richard I, the Lionheart, the exemplary king, has died without a legitimate son; the next brother in line (Geoffrey) is also dead. Who should succeed: the next brother down (John) or the son of the first brother (Arthur)? As if this were not difficult enough, the question of who speaks for England is intertwined with other debates about legitimacy. What is the geographic limit of England’s domain—does England retain the right to rule parts of France? And who should speak for England’s religion? This thorny issue is focused on the appointment of a new Archbishop of Canterbury to head the English church. Does the Pope have the right to impose his candidate or should the English retain a voice in their own ecclesiastical affairs? Is there a point at which the monarchy may legitimately reject the will of the papacy? For a Tudor audience, a confrontation of this sort was bound to reverberate with Henry VIII’s disputed divorce and the break from Rome in the 1530s.
In Protestant ideology, King John was a hero because he stood up against papal tyranny. He was seen as a kind of Henry VIII before his time. In the mid-sixteenth century, the Protestant zealot John Bale wrote a court drama on these lines, while the text of Shakespeare’s probable primary source, the anonymous two-part play
The Troublesome Reign of King John
(published in 1591), is awash with raw anti-Catholic propaganda. Shakespeare’s own play has often been read as testimony of his Protestant allegiance: in the 1730s, at a time of anxieties about a potential Jacobite uprising, an adaptation of it was performed in London with the unambiguous title
Papal Tyranny in
the Reign of King John
. Yet the authentic Shakespeare is profoundly ambiguous. There is a clear vein of anti-Catholicism in John’s “no Italian priest / Shall tithe or toll in our dominions,” together with the way in which the papal legate Cardinal Pandulph is a scheming politician who speaks by indirections and equivocation (“But thou dost swear only to be forsworn, / And most forsworn, to keep what thou dost swear”). At the same time John is accusingly addressed as “The borrowed majesty of England” and his tergiversation hardly makes him a model ruler.
Back in the first scene, before there is any resolution to all the difficult questions of succession and faith, power and proprietorship, a sheriff enters. His presence signals the jurisdiction of the shires, the “country” as opposed to the “court” interest. The question of which of two brothers will inherit a parcel of land in the shires parallels that of which of Richard Coeur-de-lion’s brothers, John or Geoffrey (through Arthur), will inherit the nation as a whole. Again, for the original audience in the 1590s, an encounter set in the distant thirteenth century would have echoed with debates in their own time, where it was not unknown for a Member of Parliament to give voice in the House of Commons to words that one might have expected to belong to the queen alone: “I speak for all England.” In many quarters, there was a strongly held view that “England” was not synonymous with the English queen and her court based in and around London. Though the Tudor monarchs had tried to unify the nation by establishing a network of legal representatives across the shires, the “country” gentry as well as the great barons of the north and west guarded their autonomy fiercely.
