THE BATTALION, College Station, Texas.
Yet I alone, alone do me oppose
Against the pope, and count his friends my foes.”
In John’s mouth some of these utternces are an anechron-
ism; but they were words well fitted to express the views of
Henry Tudor and his courageous daughter. It is evident
that, for the time at least, Shakespeare identified the cause
of King John with the cause of E izabeth,
It is the honor of England that Shakspeare has at heart
L roughout, John’s purpose to have Arthur murdered is al-
m6st blotted from the record against him by his vigorous
protest against Hubeit’s ready consent to his bloody sug
gestion. Why is this effort made to soften the Impression of
the king’s deadly intent? Unquestionably, that we may be
able to keep some sympathy with^him in his struggle against
foreign invasion.
All the particulars in John’s history that might tell
against him are softened. The surrender to the pope’s le
gate is presented as a private treaty in the palace. Faul-
conbridge, the representative of genuine English spirit, gen
ial, joyous, humorous, brave, and loyal, treats the king’s
submission to Rome as a needless yielding to the seeming ex
igences of themoment, and is ready to make the fightwith the
foreigner without any abatement of the odds against the roy
al side. The regrets of Salisbury in following the banner of
the French prince are made to further the same general de
sign of exalting patriotism. .lolin’s despicable character is,
as far as possible, divested of its harshest and ugliest linea
ments, to throw into as strong a light as may be, the duty of
standing by the English sovereign against the foreign invad
er. It was the spirit that had saved Elizabeth from the ma
chinations of those who were perpetually plotting in behUf
of Mary, Queen of Scots, and from tne mighty invasion of
Philip of Spain. It was tha spirit that Shakespeare had im
bibed in his boyhood and that we find dominant in all his
historical plays. It was the spirit that inspired Spenser’s
great poem, and that Kingsley so well expresses in the fiery
enthusiasm of the young Englishmen of Devon he brings us
acquainted with in Westward Ho! It was the spirit that
Raleigh still possessed when l:e set out from his prison in
London Tower to rescue Eldorado from the Spaniard and
the pope.
It is this that prompts in our play the use of the story
that the French prince meditated destruction for his English
allies in the event of success. It is this that prompts the
suggestion that King John was poisoned by a monk.
While there is a touch of retribution for his many frail
ties in the horror of his death, I cannot but think that there
is also some pity in the breast of him who put these heart
rending words into the hapless king’s dying mouth:
“Poisoned—ill fare—dead, forsook, ea-d off:
And none of you will bid the winter come
To thrust his icy lingers in my maw,
Nor let my kingdom’s rivers take their course
Through my burn’d bosom, nor intreat the north
To make his bleak winds kl.-s my parched lips
And comfort me with cold, I do not a-k you much,
I beg ctdd comfort; and you are so straight
And so ingrateful, you deny me that.”
The keynote to the whole play and to Shakespeare’s con
ception of King John is contained in stout Foulconbridge’s
closing words:
“This England never did, nor never shall,
Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror,
But when it first did help to wound itself.
Now the.-e her princes are come home again,
Come the three corners of the world in arms,
And we shall shock them. Nought shall make us rue,
If England to itself do rest but true.”
To Shakespeare and to the Englishmen of his dtqy there
can be little doubt that, with all his faults, John Plantagenct
was the prince who had contedend with two foreign powers,
Rome and France. To us, who know better the history of
his age and the character of the man, it is perhaps natural
that he should seem the incarnation of all that was vile in
the b ood of Fulk, the Black, the wicked count of Anjon, and
we are well prepared to give our adherence to the words with
which the historian Green sums up his estimate of King
John:
“The closer study 7 of John’s history clears away the char
ges of sloth and incapacity with which men tried to explain
the greatness of his fall. The awful lesson of his life rests
on the fact that the king who lost Normandy, became the
vassal of the pope, and perished in a struggle ot despair
against English freedom, was so w r eak and indolent voluptu
ary, but the ablest and most ruthless of the Angevins.”
Yet, when we come te read Shakespeare, we must be care
ful to remember that he and the men of his time saw him
from a wholly different point of view.
The two scenes in which he is alone with Hubert, the
one in which he tempts him to the murder of the young
prince and the one in which he upbraids him for doing his
wicked will, are among the most masterly to be found in
Shakespeare. They have been often analyzed and comment
ed on. Metaphysicians, discussing the subtleties of the hu
man brain and will; divines, setting forth the depravity and
deceitfulness of the heart of man; counsel learned in the law
illustrating the devious ways of crime, have all appealed to
the passages as the very witness of nature.
The terrible half-whispered monosyllable, “death,” has
at once the great opportunity and the despair of actors.
The common view is to regard John’s upbraidings of Hu
bert as intended to be taken by the audience as insincere and
only 7 expressing the natural longing to have the m^ans to win
back his lords again. To my mind this is not all of Shake
speare’s meaning, which is rather to mitigate the horror in
spired by John’s intended crime and to put him in a better
light before the audience, who are not expected wholly to
lose sympathy wi h him.
Read over the passionate words of reproach, with this
idea in mind, and it will be seen that there is some warrant
for it:
“It is the curse of kings to be attended
By slaves that take their humors for a warrant
To break within the bloody house of life,
And on the winking of authority
To understand a law, to know the meaning
Of dangerous majesty, when perchance it frowns
More upon humor than advised respect.
“O’, when the lad account ’twixt heaven and earth
Is to be made, then shall thi- band and seal
Witness against u- to damnation !
How 7 ott the sight of means to do ill deeds
Make deeds ill done I liadst not thou been by,
A fellow by the hand of nature mark’d,
Quoted and signed to a deed of shame,
This murdsr had not come into my mind;
But taking note of thy abhorr’d aspect,
Finding thee fit for bloody villainy,
Apt, liable to be employed in danger,
I faintly broke with thee of Arthur’s death;
And thou, to be endeared to a king,
Made it no conscience to destroy a prince.
Hadst thou but shook thy head or made a pause
When I spake darkly what I p irp ised,
Or.turned an eye of doubt upon my face,
As bid me tell my tale in express words,
Deep shame had struck me dumb, made me break off,
And those thy fears might have wrought fears in me:
But thou did-t 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 hold.
So much for his accusation of Hubert, bitter, eloquent,
unquestionably meant by Shakespeare to be, for the time at
least, the earnest utterance of a troubled heart. Now, note
the confession of remorseful feelings, that need not Inure been
expressed but tor Shakespeare’s purpose that the distressed
king should have some of our sympathies:
“My nobles leave me; and my state is braved,
Even at mygate.-q with ranks of foreign powers;
Nay, in the bod} 7 ot this fleshly land,
This kingdom, this confine of blood and breath,
Hostility and civil tumult reigns
Between my conscience and my cousin’s death.”
To which Hubert pertinently replies:
“Arm you against your other enemies,
I’ll make a peace between your soul and you.”
It is in consonance with this intention to represent John