King John & Henry VIII
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.
MODERN LIBRARY and the TORCHBEARER Design are registered trademarks
of Random House, Inc.
“Royal Shakespeare Company,” “RSC,” and the RSC logo are trademarks
or registered trademarks of The Royal Shakespeare Company.
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
www.modernlibrary.com
Cover design: Gabrielle Bordwin
Cover photograph: © Richard Nixon/Arcangel Images
v3.1
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
King John
Henry VIII
About the Text
The Life and Death of King John
Key Facts: King John
List of Parts
Act 1
Scene 1
Act 2
Scene 1
Scene 2
Act 3
Scene 1
Scene 2
Scene 3
Act 4
Scene 1
Scene 2
Scene 3
Act 5
Scene 1
Scene 2
Scene 3
Scene 4
Scene 5
Scene 6
Scene 7
Textual Notes
Scene-by-Scene Analysis
King John in Performance: The RSC and Beyond
Four Centuries of King John: An Overview
At the RSC
The Director’s Cut: Interviews with Gregory Doran and Josie Rourke
The Famous History of the Life of King Henry the Eighth
Key Facts: Henry VIII
List of Parts
The Prologue
Act 1
Scene 1
Scene 2
Scene 3
Scene 4
Act 2
Scene 1
Scene 2
Scene 3
Scene 4
Act 3
Scene 1
Scene 2
Act 4
Scene 1
Scene 2
Act 5
Scene 1
Scene 2
Scene 3
Scene 4
The Epilogue
Textual Notes
Scene-by-Scene Analysis
Henry VIII in Performance: The RSC and Beyond
Four Centuries of Henry VIII: An Overview
At the RSC
The Director’s Cut: Interviews with Gregory Doran and Gregory Thompson
Shakespeare’s Career in the Theater
Beginnings
Playhouses
The Ensemble at Work
The King’s Man
Shakespeare’s Works: A Chronology
Kings and Queens of England: From the History Plays to Shakespeare’s Lifetime
King John Family Tree
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
INTRODUCTION TO
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.
KING JOHN
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.
The Bastard announces himself as a gentleman born in Northamptonshire; he is “A good blunt fellow,” that is to say a plain-speaking English countryman; later, he appeals to St. George, the patron saint of England. His, then, is the voice of Shakespeare’s own place of origin, the Midlands, deep England. He is given a choice: to inherit the Falconbridge estates or take his “chance” and assume the name, though not the patrimony, of the royal father who sired him out of wedlock.
The norm in the English gentry was for the older son to inherit the land and the younger to become mobile, to go to London and find a career in the law, the clergy, the army, the diplomatic corps, or possibly even the entertainment business. Settled legitimacy was pitched against the life of the adventurer. By accepting his illegitimacy and renouncing the land he is actually entitled to (because it was the mother’s adultery, not the father’s, he is not forcibly disinherited in the manner of Edmund in King Lear), the Bastard takes the route that was usually that of the younger brother. Shakespeare did the same when he left Stratford-upon-Avon.
The Bastard’s origin in middle England is further stressed by the arrival of Lady Falconbridge and James Gurney, wearing riding-robes that signify the journey from country to court. The Bastard then describes his half-brother as “Colbrand the Giant, that same mighty man.” Colbrand was a Danish invader who was defeated in single combat by Guy of Warwick—a legendary figure who was immensely popular in chapbook, ballad, and drama. If Robert Falconbridge is symbolically Colbrand, then Philip the Bastard is symbolically Guy, a Warwickshire folk hero. Perhaps he is even a version of Robin Hood, with the Sheriff of Northampton standing in for his colleague from Nottingham. Robin Hood himself, the most famous folk hero from the reign of John, cannot be mentioned because his name would immediately turn the king into a villain, which Shakespeare did not want to do at the beginning of the play, both because he wanted to keep open the question of the relative legitimacy of the claims of John and Arthur and because he was working in that tradition of chronicle and drama in which King John was a proto-Protestant hero because of his refusal to allow the Pope’s nominee, Stephen Langton, to become Archbishop of Canterbury.
When the Pope excommunicates the English king and gives permission—indeed promise of canonization—to anyone who conspires to kill him, the parallels with contemporary England, where the Pope had delivered the same sentence upon Queen Elizabeth, are impossible to ignore. So too with the way in which the fickle French swing one way and then the other (“O, foul revolt of French inconstancy!” exclaims Queen Elinor): in the sixteenth century, France was racked by religiously motivated civil wars and it was well nigh impossible to guess whether the state would end up with a Catholic or a Protestant on the throne. “The grappling vigour and rough frown of war” dominates the action of this play, just as wars of religion and dominion in the Netherlands, Ireland and elsewhere impinged upon the lives of Shakespeare’s audience. Like Thersites in Troilus and Cressida, though without the vicious streak, the Bastard anatomizes the resulting chaos of alliances and divisions: “Mad world, mad kings, mad composition!”
The Bastard stands in for Guy of Warwick, who stands in for Robin Hood of old England. It was Robin who maintained the values of good King Richard at home, while the latter was fighting his crusade in the Middle East (“Richard that robbed the lion of his heart / And fought the holy wars in Palestine”). As the play progresses, the Bastard’s role shifts to that of stand-in for the dead Coeur-de-lion himself. He ends up fighting the war on John’s behalf and at one point comes within a whisker of ascending the throne. He speaks for England in the closing lines:
This England never did, nor never shall,
Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror,
But when it first did help to wound itself.
…
… Nought shall make us rue,
If England to itself do rest but true.
The world-weary voice is that of a dramatist who in his Henry VI plays has shown the bloody consequences of England turning against itself.
Tragedies and history plays had a convention that the final lines were spoken by the person left in charge of the nation, so we may assume that the Bastard effectively takes on the role of regent during Prince Henry’s minority. Historically, Henry III was ten years old when he came to the throne;
in the play, he calls himself a cygnet and is clearly a boy actor (the part could neatly be doubled with that of the dead Arthur).
The Bastard is the conscience of the nation, the symbolic heir of Lionheart, the voice of the shires. But he is also an adventurer, the embodiment of illegitimacy, a new man, an individualist who foreshadows the more sinister figure of Edmund in Lear: “I am I, howe’er I was begot.” Improviser, player, speaker of soliloquies, both inside and outside history, could he be the voice not only of Guy but also of William of Warwickshire? Who speaks for deep England? A bastard. An entrepreneur. A player. A man who idealizes the shires even as he leaves them to enter the theater, the market, the emergent empire. Who speaks? A Shakespeare.
HENRY VIII
Henry VIII, coauthored with John Fletcher, is the only English history play of the second half of Shakespeare’s career, when his men were under the patronage of King James I. Written at a time of nostalgia for the age of Queen Elizabeth, the action comes to a climax when a doll representing the newborn future queen is brought on stage, her reign as a “maiden phoenix” is predicted, and her chosen successor, King James, is praised:
This royal infant—heaven still move about her—
Though in her cradle, yet now promises
Upon this land a thousand thousand blessings,
Which time shall bring to ripeness: she shall be—
But few now living can behold that goodness—
A pattern to all princes living with her,
And all that shall succeed …
“A pattern to all princes,” she is later described as one who “shall make it holiday”: such language suggests how the English Protestant cult of the Virgin Queen derived some of its power from the way in which it reworked the Roman Catholic cult of the Virgin Mary.
The speech is spoken by the princess’s godfather, Thomas Cranmer, famous as the architect of the English Reformation and a martyr burnt to death in the reign of bloody Queen Mary: the linking of the infant Elizabeth to Protestant ideology could not be more strongly expressed. Though the final scene was written by Fletcher, Cranmer’s subsequent image of a “cedar” tree as a representation of the royal genealogical line replicates a prophecy spoken by the god Jupiter in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline. Events in Henry VIII do not, however, seem to have been driven by that sense of destiny, of a providential design leading to the establishment of a new dynasty, which shaped Shakespeare’s earlier chronicle plays. The emphasis is rather on the vicissitudes of court life. The play’s structure is built on an apparently arbitrary pattern of rises and falls: Buckingham falls, Anne Bullen rises, Wolsey rises, Katherine falls, Wolsey falls, Cranmer rises. Again, as Wolsey goes down, Thomas Cromwell comes up: Anne Bullen is “the weight” on this pulley of fortune. There is some skilled compression of history for the sake of dramatic effect: in the play, the fall of Cardinal Wolsey and the triple elevation of Thomas More, Thomas Cranmer, and Anne Bullen effectively work as a single event, whereas in reality these three came to eminence in, respectively, 1529, 1532, and 1533. Wolsey actually died in 1530, three years before the coronation of Anne as Henry’s second queen.