King John – William Shakespeare, c. 1596 ★★½

When Ruthlessness Fails

The more I read Shakespeare’s history plays, the more I feel I am watching a debate between the author and another Renaissance legend, Niccolò Machiavelli, over what constitutes effective leadership.

Is it better to be loved or feared? Is religion a useful prop, or something more meaningful and lasting? Is there such a thing as being too ruthless, or can one only err on the side of mercy?

Time and again, Machiavelli clearly states one thing; Shakespeare gently suggests quite another. Take Shakespeare’s King John.

When his authority is challenged by France, King John of England responds by threatening an allied city with wholesale destruction if they don’t submit at once to his rule, then orders the killing of a captured relative with a better claim to England’s crown. John even tells off the Pope. It all might work in a Machiavellian world. 

Not so here:

KING JOHN
Within me is a hell, and there the poison
Is, as a fiend, confined to tyrannize
On unreprievable, condemned blood. [Act V, scene vii, lines 46-48]

Is King John a villain, though? The play is not clear on that. There are a lot of things King John is not clear about. Ambiguity seems its point.

King John hunting a stag, as depicted in the 14th-century manuscript De Rege Johanne, produced over a century after his reign. Image from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:King_John_from_De_Rege_Johanne.jpg.

History itself is of little help. King John, ruler of England from 1199 to 1216 and the earliest Norman king featured in a Shakespeare play, oversaw a nation in continual crisis and had a reputation for brutality even for those days, but he also is credited as an able administrator who picked up the pieces left by his dashing but irresponsible brother, Richard the Lionhearted. He was respected by some, liked and trusted by fewer.

Falsity is brought up many times in the play. King John talks firmly about his right to rule, but all he really has is the crown. The French King, Philip, claims injury over John denying England to its true king, Arthur, only Philip betrays Arthur when John offers up some territory. In fact, the whole political landscape is open season for betrayals. 

Seeing through all this subterfuge is the main character of the play, known alternately as Philip or Richard but referred to in the play as “Bastard,” because unlike everyone else in the cast he’s honest about it.

The Bastard calls out proclamations of principles as so much empty air:

PHILIP THE BASTARD

Zounds, I was never so bethumped with words
Since I first called my brother’s father Dad. [II, i, 461-467]

King John wears its cynicism proudly, which recommends it to moderns. George Orwell once called it “extraordinarily up to date” for the way its characters operate without scruple. That’s something I learned from its Wikipedia page, a short one for a Shakespeare play.

In the 1800s, King John was a hot ticket. The Shakespeare Blog notes Jane Austen's annoyance one night at having to see Hamlet instead. The above 1823 handbill lists both "Authorities for the Costume" and actors.
Image from http://theshakespeareblog.com/2015/06/is-king-john-shakespeares-most-unloved-play/

Looking through the performance history found there confirms this is a play easier to review than it is to view. The oldest surviving Shakespeare adaptation on film, from 1899, is a brief scene of King John dying, but it hasn’t been seen much on screen since then. The play hasn’t made it to Broadway since 1915; it rarely appears in festivals.

Back in the 1800s, though, King John was a very popular play. Its pageantry and showy dramatic setpieces appealed to theatergoers. Entire productions advertised the authenticity of the costumes. The language is assuredly Shakespeare’s, and quite striking in its originality:

CONSTANCE

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. [III, iv, l. 25-33]

So why has the play fallen by the wayside? Perhaps it is because of core issues regarding its murky main character.

John is a figure of no real personality or even defining trait. At times, he is someone to root for, urging battle against French aggression and telling off a haughty emissary from the Pope. That’s a patriotic stand to cheer a Protestant English audience. But he’s also cruel and treacherous, focused on holding the throne no matter whose back he has to stab.

King John is having a bad moment on the throne in an 1899 film adaptation, with the producer-actor Herbert Beerbohm Tree in the title role. Only one scene survives of this earliest-known Shakespeare movie. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_John_(film).

Not only does he order the murder of poor Arthur, but after his nobles call him out on it and rise against him, he attempts to shift the blame on his own assassin, Hubert, for being too obedient:

KING JOHN

But thou didst understand me by my signs
And didst in signs again parley with sin;
Yea, without stop, didst let thy heart consent,
And consequently, thy rude hand to act
The deed which both our tongues held vile to name.
Out of my sight, and never see me more! [IV, ii, l. 237-242]

Here again the theme of falsity raises its head, along with some Shakespearean dark humor. John reverses back to buddy when Hubert reveals he didn’t actually obey John’s death sentence. Relieved by Hubert’s disobedience, John orders him to bring Arthur out so the nobles can see he is alright; neither knowing Arthur will shortly wind up dead in an accident that smacks of murder.

Murder or accident; what does it matter in such a catch-as-catch-can environment. As one character observes: “Mad world, mad kings, mad composition!” [II, i, 561]

King John is confronted by rebellious nobles and a document they demand he sign known as the Magna Carta. This turning point of John's reign and for Western democracy goes unmentioned in the play.
The above 1875 illustration by John Leech is from https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofEngland/Why-Only-One-King-John/.

That character, the Bastard, is something of a moral center for the play, despite his own loose conception of morality in any traditional sense. He’s all for action, and not one for talking, because he understands – alone among these characters who all seem in constant danger of being taken in by words – how easily one can be misled.

The Bastard alone sees matters for what they really are:

PHILIP THE BASTARD

Now for the bare-picked bone of majesty
Doth dogged war bristle his angry crest
And snarleth in the gentle eyes of peace.
Now powers from home and discontents at home
Meet in one line, and vast confusion waits,
As doth a raven on a sick-fallen beast,
The imminent decay of wrested pomp. [IV, iii, l. 148-154]

The Bastard is King John’s best character, maybe its only one. You see shades of Falstaff in the way he plays against expectations for comic as well as plot-advancement purposes, mocking tradition and seizing the initiative. By play’s end, the Bastard is running England’s army while John lies abed, dying from what we are told is a monk’s poisoning.

George Costigan as the Bastard speaks to Leonard Rossiter's King John in a 1984 BBC-TV production. Rossiter was a famous and beloved comic actor; ruthless John was for him both an atypical role and pretty much his final one, as he died shortly after it aired.
Image from http://bbcshakespeare.blogspot.com/2016/.

King John jumps around a lot for Shakespeare. No sooner is it established that there is to be a war with France than we are sidetracked by a long scene introducing the Bastard having a dispute with his brother which King John observes as judge.

Recognizing the Bastard as the likely son of his own brother, Richard the Lionhearted, John and his mother end the dispute by welcoming the Bastard into the royal court. Perhaps they recognize in this fellow something of the steel John himself lacks.

John’s lack of strength defines him. At the outset, we see him managed by his mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, no minor Machiavell herself:

KING JOHN

Our strong possession, and our right for us.

QUEEN ELINOR

Your strong possession much more than your right,
Or else it must go wrong with you and me;
So much my conscience whispers in your ear,
Which none but God, and you, and I, shall hear. [I, i, l. 39-44]

Eleanor of Aquitaine, as depicted at her resting place in northern France. The mother of John and two other English kings, she was herself alternately Queen of France and England.
Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleanor_of_Aquitaine.

When she is lost to the French mid-play, John is left adrift. He can’t kill Arthur, yet suffers the same consequences as if he had. John is a selfish, brutal ruler, but England’s only alternative is becoming a French colony, something Shakespeare clearly opposes. Enter the Bastard.

Just what this character offers in the way of a leadership thesis is hard to pin down. Mostly he’s one long soliloquy about watching one’s back:

PHILIP THE BASTARD

But this is worshipful society,
And fits the mounting spirit like myself;
For he is but a bastard to the time
That doth not smack of observation,
And so am I whether I smack or no… [I, i, l. 205-209]

A better Shakespeare play would give the Bastard more of an active part in the play’s direction. But Shakespeare’s license for creativity was hemmed in both by actual history and by the fact he was working off a well-regarded source play, The Troublesome Reign Of King John, which shares key elements with this.

When King John dies, attended by a prince we haven’t yet been introduced to, it is an anti-climactic conclusion to a play with brilliant lines but little dialogue, no clear aim, and ambiguity reigning supreme.