ACT V
SCENE i
John’s reconciliation with the Church according to Pandulph involves a ceremonial fulfilment of what we know to have been Peter’s prophecy. John reasons that kowtowing to Rome is necessary since his own people display ominous signs of unrest: “the present time’s so sick, / That present med’cine must be minist’red” (V.i.14-15). Pandulph will stop the war-machine he set in motion (V.i.17ff), and John realizes that the prophecy concerning his giving up the crown on Ascension Day came true, but he rationalizes that this was voluntary on his part (V.i.29).
The Bastard reports that the French forces are winning support in England. John is baffled — what about Arthur not being murdered? The Bastard explains that his body was found, and he gives John a pep-talk, trying to prompt more forcefulness and resoluteness, perhaps the kind of bolstering the Earl of Oxford might have offered Elizabeth:
Be great in act, as you have been in thought.
Let not the world see fear and sad distrust
Govern the motion of a kingly eye.
Be stirring as the time, be fire with fire,
Threat’n the threat’ner, and outface the brow
Of bragging horror; so shall inferior eyes,
That borrow their behaviors from the great,
Grow great by your example and put on
The dauntless spirit of resolution.
Away, and glister like the god of war
When he intendeth to become the field.
(V.i.45-55)
Upon hearing the latest, the Bastard is disgusted by John’s catering to Pandulph. He advises they attack the French: “Perchance the Cardinal cannot make your peace” (V.i.74). John listlessly gives command to the Bastard in this matter. Although Oxford may seem to be [self-]glorifying this fictional character, “At Elizabeth’s behest, Oxford himself may have been entrusted with political and diplomatic missions involving espionage, in the same way that Philip the Bastard acts as King John’s eyes and ears on the Continent” (Beauclerk 132). The time Coleen Moriarty and I spent in the Italian archives strengthens the supposition.
SCENE ii
Salisbury is in agony, having to fight against his own countrymen, and the Dauphin Lewis commends Salisbury’s sense of honor and his manly tears (that theme again). Metaphorical reference — “an earthquake of nobility” (V.ii.43) — may place the dating of the play near to an actual earthquake in April 1580 (Clark 489). Pandulph brings word of John’s buckling to papal authority, and Lewis pitches a fit, insisting that the issue has far outgrown its origins. He is no slave of Rome; he will fight England: “I am too high-born to be propertied” (V.ii.79) — or commodified? The Bastard arrives and is brought up to speed. He vividly depicts John as confident and assured of victory.
SCENE iii
Hubert tells a feverish John that the English are doing badly, although the Dolphin’s supply ship is wrecked, and the Bastard asks that John leave the field of battle. John is feeling ill and will go to Swineshead Abbey.
SCENE iv
The English lords ruminate about the state of affairs: “That misbegotten devil Faulconbridge, / In spite of spite, alone upholds the day” (V.iv.4-5). A fatally wounded Count Melune says, “Fly, noble English, you are bought and sold” (V.iv.10). He tells them that they should return to John and beg forgiveness for their rebellion, that Lewis plans eventually to decapitate them after his victory. Melune wouldn’t lie about this; his grandfather was a Brit and he’s dying. He wants to be helped to a nice place to expire. The lords decide to return to John.
SCENE v
Lewis bemoans the death of Melune, the desertion of the English lords, and the sinking of his armada.
SCENE vi
The Bastard and Hubert meet somewhat anonymously in the dark — “Who’s there?” (V.vi.1) — and trade news (in this seeming rough draft for Hamlet I.i). Prince Henry (John’s son who has not been mentioned before and is now a character) has pardoned the returning English lords; and half of the Bastard’s troops have been killed; and John has been poisoned by a monk.
SCENE vii
Prince Henry is realistic about his father’s impending passing:
Death, having prey’d upon the outward parts,
Leaves them invisible, and his siege is now
Against the mind, the which he pricks and wounds
With many legions of strange fantasies,
Which in their throng and press to that last hold,
Confound themselves.
(V.vii.15-20)
Salisbury has faith in this future Henry III. John is carried in, obsessed about the heat in his poisoned veins and wanting iciness: “I am a scribbled form, drawn with a pen / Upon a parchment, and against this fire / Do I shrink up” (V.vii.32-34); “I beg cold comfort” (V.vii.42); “Within me is a hell” (V.vii.46); “And then all this thou seest is but a clod / And module of confounded royalty” (V.vii.57-58). “John’s account of his own suffering has a strange beauty that suspends moral judgement” (Wells 113). “It is the only time that John moves us, though even here Shakespeare distances us from this pathos” (Bloom 62). “The self-conscious evocation of the act of writing, and the vivid image of parchment shrinking as it burns, returns the play to the question of history, and of the chronicles of kings” (Garber 280). The Bastard reports to John that the French are winning, and John dies. “You breathe these dead news in as dead an ear,” states Salisbury (V.vii.65).
Additionally, Jens Münnichow notes:
John’s lamenting reference to being only “a scribbled form, drawn with a pen, upon a parchment” offers a rare choice of words. The word “parchment” appears only 8 times in 7 references in the canon, and the word “scribbled” is even more rare, appearing only twice in the canon, each time connected to parchment. The only appearance other than in King John is in Henry VI, Part 2, where the rebellious Jack Cade expresses his unease with the legal procedures of his time.
Is not this a lamentable thing, that of the skin of an innocent lamb should be made parchment? that parchment, being scribbled o’er, should undo a man? Some say the bee stings: but I say, ’tis the bee’s wax; for I did but seal once to a thing, and I was never mine own man since. (IV.ii.70-75)
John and Jack Cade both emphasize the unpleasantness of being written on a parchment; Jack Cade even goes so far to state the loss of his freedom and independence after being written and sealed on a parchment. If Shakespeare had this loss of independent agency in mind, then the scribbled parchment in King John might indeed be an allusion to the Magna Carta of 1215, which historically cost King John his absolute monarchical powers and submitted him to some extant to the consent of his English barons.
In Shakespeare’s time it was thought that John had been poisoned by a monk disgruntled by the ravaging of the abbeys, but Holinshead claims that he was in an “ague” when pursued by his enemies, gorged himself on raw peaches and cider at Swineshead Abbey, and died in agony October 19, 1216 (Riverside 836). Asimov agrees that John probably died of natural causes (Asimov 250). “John’s death at the close is, in a way, his most dramatic action” (Garber 280). The Bastard provides this surprisingly devoted eulogy, in which one can perhaps hear Oxford speaking to the dead of Elizabeth (a situation better suited than that of the Bastard with John):
Art thou gone so? I do but stay behind
To do the office for thee of revenge,
And then my soul shall wait on thee to heaven,
As it on earth hath been thy servant still.
(V.vii.70-73)
Prince Henry is on deck. The Bastard wants revenge against the enemies of England, but Salisbury announces Pandulph’s having come from the Dauphin with peace offers (why, we don’t know). The Bastard is still hot for a fight, but Salisbury says it’s a done deal — it’s just a matter of going through the ceremony now. Henry sounds the final note to the theme of male tears: “I have a kind of soul that would give thanks, / And knows not how to do it but with tears” (V.vii.108-109).
“Were it not for the Bastard, the play would end in a whimper. Instead, it ends with one of the resolutely patriotic speeches in English drama” (Mannheim 127). The Bastard vows loyalty to Henry and delivers the last rousing patriotic 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.
Now these 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.
(V.vii.112-118)
“It was the Elizabethan custom to give the final lines of a play to the man of highest rank. In breaking that custom … Shakespeare clinches the fact that the Bastard is the king of the play” (Goddard, I 146), or at least the most kingly.
This speech seems to me poetically preferable to such effusions as John of Gaunt’s ‘this sceptred isle’ and Henry V’s ‘we happy few.’ Perhaps I am swayed by liking the Bastard Faulconbridge considerably more than I do Gaunt or the betrayer of Falstaff, but the image of self-wounding is of a higher order than any in the other two speeches. Overtly, the Bastard refers to the rebels returning to royal authority, but the image clearly comprehends John’s hysterical personality and dubious moral character. (Bloom 63)
This last act is generally seen as unsatisfactory, as is the entire play. Instead of an organic culmination of dramatic events, Shakespeare provides a series of declamations. “One interpretation of this ending that can structure unity is that in the end, everyone must capitulate to political reality — the merciless, unyielding ‘policy’ that overrules humanistic, passionate objections” (Carey 147).
FINAL PERSPECTIVE
The elder Ogburns see Queen Elizabeth as represented in John and Blanch, Alençon in the Dauphin, Mary Stuart in Constance, her son James in Arthur, the Bishop of Milan in Pandulph (Ogburn and Ogburn 419-420).
“The larger design of the play pursues a pattern that would become familiar in later histories and tragedies. A king with a clouded title to the throne tries desperately to reinforce that title by repressing, appeasing, or extinguishing a popular rival” (Garber 275).
We are made to feel at the end that not only has John’s possession of the crown and that of his heirs been successfully defended, but his right to it has been established. Strangely enough, for this impression is not brought about by his own character and achievements — in fact, he himself has to die to make way for one unspotted by guilt — but by the perfidy of his external and internal adversities. (Smidt 73)
John is declared “about the unkingliest king Shakespeare ever created” (Goddard, I 140).
“Readers are likely to feel that the natural son of Richard the Lion Heart [the Bastard] deserves a better play than the one in which he finds himself, and a better king to serve than his wretched uncle, John” (Bloom 51). The Bastard “stands for all the popular virtues: loyalty to the monarchy, courage, plainspokenness, honesty, and a refusal to be deceived, whether by foreign princes or domestic churchmen, or by the Pope and his minions” (Bloom 53).
“As the clown was the natural gentleman in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, so the bastard is the natural king in King John” (Goddard, I 141).
King John, Act by Act
King John Act V