ACT I
SCENE i
An ambassador from France named Chatillion reports to King John (1166-1216) that the French King Philip demands, on behalf of Arthur (1187-1203?), posthumous son of John’s late older brother Geoffrey (1158-1186), that John give up his “borrowed majesty” (I.i.4): the throne, England, and other lands. “By the strict tenets of legitimacy, Arthur, heir of the fourth son, had precedence over John, the fifth son, to the crown of England” (Asimov 212). So immediately we face an issue of stand-ins, posers, imposters. John’s mother, Elinore — of Aquitaine (1124-1204), widow of Henry II (1133-1189), and portrayed by Katharine Hepburn in the 1968 movie The Lion in Winter — acts haughtily affronted. In the face of a threat of war with France, John says bring it on. Elinor delivers an I-told-you-so regarding the young Arthur’s ambitious mother Constance of Brittany (1164-1201), warnings which could apply to Mary Stuart not ceasing “Till she had kindled France” (Clark 479). John’s belief in “Our strong possession and our right” (I.i.39) makes him bold, but Elinore acknowledges only the primacy of a sort of squatter’s rights for the throne. And “John has never grown up. He is mentally dominated by his ambitious mother” (Goddard, I 140), wimpy, and “the smallest-minded in his pursuit of selfish aims” (Wells 110).
John taxes the Church — “Our abbeys and our priories shall pay” (I.i.48) — to help fund the war. Then, at the announcement of “the strangest controversy” (I.i.44), he gives audience to the Faulconbridge brothers, introduced into the play “via a disinheritance scheme not unlike the 1563 de Vere case” (Anderson 25). Philip is the eldest son of Sir Robert Faulconbridge; Robert claims he is son and heir. John thinks they must have had different mothers, since they are so different in appearance (I.i.58). Although it seems that Sir Robert was not Philip’s father, he raised him as a son, and John decides that the deathbed dispossession happened too late. Philip resembles and probably is the son of John’s brother, the late King Richard Lionheart (1157-1199) — Coeur-de-Lion, or Cordelion here — and he is “a good blunt fellow” (I.i.71) and a “madcap” (I.i.84) — “madcap” just as the Earl of Oxford was reputed (Ogburn and Ogburn 421). Clearly, Oxford represents himself in Faulconbridge (Ogburn and Ogburn 199), and an identity clue comes in the assertion “Truth is truth” (I.i.105) — akin to the de Vere motto “Vero nihil verius” (Ogburn and Ogburn 427), and stated by Oxford in a 1603 letter to Robert Cecil: “for truth is truth though never so old” (Fowler 773). Elinor asks Philip,
Whether hadst thou rather be a Faulconbridge,
And like thy brother, to enjoy the land;
Or the reputed son of Cordelion,
Lord of thy presence and no land beside?
(I.i.134-137)
Some intriguing lines here for Prince Tudor advocates within the Oxfordian movement: which is better? the de Vere title and estates, or acknowledgement of royal parentage despite illegitimacy?
The character Faulconbridge has been declared “next to Hamlet perhaps the clearest authorial voice in the canon. The names ‘Falconbridge’ and ‘Oxenford’ are precisely parallel in construction: an animal (two syllables) followed by a means of crossing a river (one syllable)” [Chuck Berney, “The Merchant of Venice: 2004 and 1980.” Shakespeare Matters 4.2 (Winter 2005): 31]. Seemingly random mention of “three farthings” (I.i.144) refers to an Elizabethan coin, the three-farthing piece, unknown in John’s time and minted only from 1561 to 1582 (Wright 167).
After an irreverent answer from Philip that insults his half-brother, Elinor encourages Philip, henceforth referred to as “the Bastard,” to pursue his status as Richard’s son. She commends his good nature and hopes he’ll join John against the French. John knights him Sir Richard and he is accepted as a Plantagenet. Elinor tells him to call her “grandame” (I.i.168). As with his initial complaint that “‘a pops me out / At least from of fair five hundred pound a year” (I.i.68-69), “His language is deliberately colloquial, full of regionalisms, contractions, and local color” (Garber 276).
Madam, by chance, but not by truth [Ver?]; what though?
Something about, a little from the right,
In at the window, or else o’er the hatch.
Who dares not stir by day must walk by night,
And have is have, however men do catch.
Near or far off, well won is stil well shot,
And I am I [close to a famous Oxford assertion], howe’er I was begot.
(I.i.169-175)
Thus “the playwright reveals his stake in the sovereignty of his country and his belief in the superiority of character over title” (Beauclerk 226).
The odd phrase “have is have” resembles “to have is to have” in As You Like It (V.i.40), where the more exact infinitive for of the verb in French would be “avere,” and so, a Vere is a Vere.
The defiant utterance “I am I” resembles a noted Oxford assertion from one of his letters to Burghley: “I am that I am” — essentially blasphemic as a translation of the name of God.
After this enigmatic speech, the Bastard notes to himself, “A foot of honor better than I was, / But many a many foot of land the worse” (I.i.182-183). Note the focus on land land land (I.i.73, 91, 93, 137, etc.), the commodity Oxford famously lost so much of. This the “loss of land” theme thus resonates with Oxford (Ogburn and Ogburn 421), but also has subtle contextual relevance as King John was known as “John Lackland,” a nickname it seems his father Henry II gave him since as a younger son he would likely never inherit. (There may have been other political machinations involved.)
The Bastard fantasizes about his new life, referring to his casual use of a “toothpick” (I.i.190); “It would seem that the toothpick was not in Elizabethan days déclassé. And Lord Oxford was evidently an habitual wielder of it” (Ogburn and Ogburn 422). A reference to “poison” — “Sweet, sweet, sweet poison for the age’s tooth” (I.i.213) — signifies “not flattery but truth” being administered (Bloom 54) and is how Oxford saw his work (Ogburn and Ogburn 1218).
Lady Faulconbridge arrives with her servant James Gurney, who seems to exist solely to introduce the name into the play since he has a few syllables and is dismissed. The Bastard’s mother complains of the shame to her in light of the inheritance dispute. The Bastard audaciously elicits from her the identity of his father (Goddard, I 142). Pre-DNA testing, the word of mom may have been the most reliable source for identifying who’s the father. Lady Faulconbridge confirms the father was indeed Richard Lionheart. Rather than dwelling on the shame of the adultery, son and mother reconcile and he is supportive, indeed enthusiastic at the confirmation of having had so splendid a father, although the historical Richard I considered the Aquitaine his home and visited England only twice, briefly, in his life, “and then only to collect money” (Asimov 214). He probably did not speak English and one legend has him saying in French, “The English are dogs, good for nothing but taxes” (unconfirmed).
“Knight, knight, good mother, Basilisco-like” (I.i.244) supposedly alludes to The Tragedy of Solyman and Perseda, a play printed in 1588 and ascribed to Thomas Kyd (Asimov 218). The theme of bastardy occurs yet again in Shakespeare, as it was an all too frequent issue in the life of Oxford (Clark 482). Unlike the “ambitious social climber” Shakspere, “Shakespeare the writer seemed unconcerned with personal, economic upward mobility, but was apparently mesmerized by an assumed and intrinsic superiority of breeding” (Farina 109), and “Faulconbridge is Shakespeare’s only amiable bastard” (Bloom 52). “A heroic and entrepreneurial figure — here, the Bastard Falconbridge — emerges to combine the popular and the ‘noble,’ and to offer a spirit of patriotic energy otherwise lacking from the tired court” (Garber 275). “If all Shakespeare’s history plays were named after their most vigorous, interesting, and theatrically attractive characters (and those that have the longest role in the play), King John would be called The Bastard (Wells 109-110), as contrasted with “John’s hysterical personality and dubious moral character” (Bloom 63).
Elsewhere in this play, we have Salisbury, who actually, as 3rd Earl, was in fact a royal bastard son of Henry II and therefore half-brother to John. But instead, Shakespeare invented his own “Bastard,” who knows he is a prince, as does his king, though nothing, he knows, is likely to come of it” (Wright 167). For additional relevance, Queen Elizabeth was considered a bastard, “at least according to Catholic reckoning and the terms of her own father’s will, as well as a couple of parliamentary decisions” (Wright 174).
When Howard and Arundel made their accusations against Oxford, they “raked up the old story of his half-sister’s effort to have him declared illegitimate” (Ogburn and Ogburn 416). Katherine de Vere, the 16th Earl’s child from his first marriage, tried to have young Edward (and his sister Mary) declared illegitimate. She and her husband petitioned the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1563, less than a year after the 16th Earl’s death. “Fortunately for him, the petition was ultimately unsuccessful, but the threat of bastardy, poverty and disgrace most certainly had a profound effect on the thirteen-year-old” as we see in the early E.O. poem “Loss of My Good Name” (Jiménez 218-219).
Howard and Arundel also “had recalled his youthful rage and humiliation upon the queen’s taunting him with it, when he had burst into tears and dashed from the room” (Ogburn and Ogburn 416). (The theme of male tears being honorable emerges in this play.) The villains assert: “‘The Queen sayd he was a bastard for whiche cause he wold never love hir and wold leve hir in the lurche one daye.’ Among all the charges that were brought against him at this time, this one probably stung him most deeply of all and I believe he answered it by his characterization of the Bastard in King John” (Clark 483) — one which highlights the “utter loyalty” of the man (Ogburn and Ogburn 415). The elder Ogburns figure that Oxford could not have written the play before he has been “purged of rancor, has come to terms with himself” (Ogburn and Ogburn 416). Perhaps less centrally but as part of a long-term haunting, Oxford doubted the legitimacy of his first “daughter” Elizabeth, and had an illegitimate son with Anne Vavasour. “Who can tell but that the Earl was hoping his own bastard son might one day be thus grateful to his mother for giving him the heritage of the … Veres” (Ogburn and Ogburn 423).
Associations between kingship and lions are traditional, but please shut up about Disney. As son of Coeur-de-Lion, Philip the Bastard joins Leonatus (lion-born) in Cymbeline, Leontes in The Winter’s Tale, and Prince Hal called the “young lion” in Henry IV, Part 2 (I.ii.198).
It is particularly striking to find in the Bastard, Faulconbridge, that creature of exuberant patriotism and tart humor, an aspect of the many-sided Oxford himself; he is a man who will stand for no nonsense: he will be stalwart in his defense of his country, take risks and, if need be, die in the service of his sovereign. (Ogburn and Ogburn 415)
King John, Act by Act
King John Act I