Shakespeare's Bastard Nation Skepticism and the English Isle in King John

This essay explores the troublesome question of English national identity in Shakespeare’s King John, a strikingly skeptical history play that often appears to subvert more than support any cohesive notion of English nationhood. I argue, however, that the play’s skeptical attitude toward English identity and legitimacy ultimately leads to a surprisingly robust conception of the English nation, one based less on the monarch than on the material ground of the island of England itself. In dramatizing the historical King John’s loss of his Angevin Empire’s Continental territories, Shakespeare actually endorses the reduction of that nebulous Franco-English realm into “This England,” a providentially ordained and “water-wallèd” island state. Now geographically separated from its French ancestor and rival, “England” as such arrives by the end of King John at a more concrete and clearly defined sense of itself as a nation. In a play whose chief English patriot is the Bastard Falconbridge, however, this new national selfhood also involves a strong and positive sense of England as a “bastard” nation—a heterogeneous mixture of French and English roots that endows Shakespeare’s island race with its own unique character, strength, and possibilities for future adaptation.

Aperplexing likeness between enemies lies at the heart of The Life and Death of King John (1594–96), a history play that singularly revels in its own troubled retelling of England's past. Always something of an outlier, King John is the only one of Shakespeare's chronicle plays, besides the co-authored Henry VIII, not to form part of a tetralogy, and the England it depicts is an older and stranger nation than that of the other histories. The political and moral sphere in King John is startlingly unstable and contingent—far more so than that portrayed in its anonymous predecessor, The Troublesome Reign of John, King of England (1591).¹ As Walter Cohen writes of King John, in contrast to the providentialist and moralizing strategies of much Renaissance humanist history, "the logic of the plot is to undermine logic, to frustrate expectation, to reveal the uncertain relationship between intention and outcome in a world that offers only fragments of an overarching consolation—religious or otherwise—for the frequent futility of human endeavour."²

This decidedly skeptical view of history is particularly evident in the play's representation of England itself. Set in the medieval Angevin Empire (circa 1154–1216), whose origins lay not in England but in the French county of Anjou and which included half of modern-day France as well as the British Isles, King John purposefully and insistently emphasizes the territorial, linguistic, and dynastic intersections and indistinctions between the nascent states of "England" and "France," to the point where nearly all the likeliest sources of a distinct English national identity—the monarch, the church, the nobility, historical origins—are exposed as compromised and insecure. The play's famous last lines declare, "Naught shall make us rue / If England to itself do rest but true" (5.7.117–18). But what England exactly? These lines, spoken by the Bastard Philip Falconbridge in the aftermath of England's deliverance from French invasion, have been much debated, with critics often wondering how to square their closing patriotic message of national unity and self-reliance with the rest of this most "troublesome" history play.³

Shakespeare's histories have long been aligned with a widespread movement in Elizabethan literature to define, delimit, and justify the sovereign English nation that, over the course of the sixteenth century, was fast replacing the older concept of a kingdom or realm.⁴ Accompanying this fundamental shift in thinking was an acute anxiety over England's cultural identity, in response to which a generation of writers crafted literary signs of Englishness in order to fashion for their new state a national sense of self. Thus, as Richard Helgerson and others have argued, Shakespeare's histories are invested in writing an emerging Elizabethan nation-state and rethinking the question of its identity—that is, of what constitutes "This England" (King John, 5.7.112) in the first place, of the source and authenticity of its supposed roots and origins, of the foundations and legitimacy of its governmental structures, and of its very geographical and territorial demarcations.⁵ Yet assuming that such national self-definition is part of King John's project, the play would appear—at first glance, at least—potentially unequaled in its attempts to disrupt any kind of "stable and unified national self to which English men and women can remain true."⁶ Most modern critics see King John as being more successful at questioning and destabilizing the underpinnings of English nationhood than at reestablishing or securing them. In one influential reading, Virginia Mason Vaughan interprets the play's final lines as an awkwardly hasty attempt to contain the political and historical subversion of the previous five acts with one last, if unsuccessful, "burst of patriotism."⁷ Willy Maley similarly argues that King John calls "authentic Englishness" into question, operating as "a staging post for versions of Englishness that are also forms of national identity. Anomalous, transitional, and troublesome, it is a play preoccupied with England's divided state, and with the ways in which sovereignty, statehood and empire interact."⁸ As Robert Maslen observes, "In King John, England is made strange to its own citizens. … The English aren't sure who they are or who should govern them."⁹ Far from assuming or reiterating a coherent national identity, then, King John unsettles the very idea of England, denaturalizing the concept and threatening to expose it as little more than a tenuous, artificial construction.¹⁰

Yet skeptically interrogating something and discarding it altogether are two very different things. In this essay I argue that King John is in fact committed to working out and defending a viable notion of English nationhood and not simply to deconstructing it. For all its instability and uncertainty, Shakespeare's play turns out to be a skeptical experiment in search of a firm basis, or underlying cogito, for English identity—one that, in contrast to recent critics, I believe it finds. While this essay thus follows such writers as Vaughan and Maley in exploring the contingency, skepticism, and overall "strangeness" of King John, it ultimately does so in order to argue for the play's unexpectedly concrete reconception of the grounds of English nationhood: grounds that Shakespeare locates in the literal ground of the island itself. Rather than continuing to regard King John as a play that questions everything but affirms nothing, the present reading reinterprets it as a crucial early work that attempts to sort through the dim tangle of premodern "English" history in order to arrive at a conception of England as an elect island nation, an idea that would remain key to Shakespeare's understanding of English nationhood in later plays.¹¹

The essay's first section argues that Shakespeare's deliberate problematizing of English history in King John's first three acts produces the skeptical "Mad world, mad kings, mad composition" (2.1.562) of the play, a strategy that calls into question contemporary Elizabethan claims to a purer, historically grounded English identity. After considering Shakespeare's relation to the sixteenth-century skeptical tradition and King John's own unique skeptical project, I explore how the Angers scenes in particular analyze and deconstruct such familiar values as "right," national identity, and faith. I go on to show that the play's skepticism reaches a crisis point—as well as a potential solution—in Act 4, with the death of John's young rival to the throne, Arthur. The boy's tragic fall and the subsequent vain attempts of the other characters to make sense of this inexplicable event highlight the ethical importance of skeptical interpretation, even as they simultaneously open up a new, land-based narrative of English nationhood that the play comes to support. For rather than settling for indeterminacy, King John ultimately identifies the land, specifically the bounded shores of the newly delineated English island, as the one thing that might arrest the play's own skeptical free fall and serve as the ground of national identity. As the third section explains, King John (reigned 1199–1216), last of the Angevin monarchs, was still known in Shakespeare's day as John "Lackland," and it was this unfortunate son of Henry II who lost his father's vast Continental territories to Philip Augustus of France.¹² During his reign, the Angevin state contracted from a cross-Channel, France-centered empire to a separate island realm: "This England." King John concludes with precisely this infamous territorial contraction. But rather than lamenting it as one might expect, the play approves of and grimly sanctifies it, valorizing the necessary reduction of the English state to its proper, sea-lined bounds. Thanks to this separation from and opposition to its former French double and ancestor, Shakespeare suggests, England as such achieves the beginnings of a distinct national "self" to which it can at last, as the Bastard prophesies, be "true": a selfhood grounded on the sacred, delimited soil of the island.

The fledgling nation that emerges by the end of King John is thus possessed of a strange, yet oddly coherent, twofold nature. The many vicissitudes of John's reign and his crucial loss of England's French territories allow Shakespeare to posit a kind of origin for the elect island nation, a concept central both to Elizabethan ideology and to other works of Shakespeare's such as Richard II and Cymbeline. (It was also, of course, a blatant "misrepresentation of geographic reality"—one that appropriated and rhetorically annulled the threat from both Scotland and Wales and the island of Ireland.¹³) At the same time, however, in a play whose chief patriotic exemplar is the ever-changeable yet loyal Bastard, King John acknowledges and endorses England's own bastard heritage, portraying the island nation as one defined by a self-consciously heterogeneous, Anglo-French "bastard" nature that endows it with unique possibilities for future adaptation and renewal. Thus, out of the skeptical maelstrom of this most volatile and potentially nihilistic of Shakespeare's histories, there emerges a robust faith in England as an elect island nation that, far from denying its hybrid historical origins, embraces those origins and makes them the ground of a distinctive bastard identity.

I. "In undetermined differences of kings": Skepticism in the Angevin World

In the long scene that opens the second act of King John, the Citizen of Angers delivers the following judgment—or, rather, nonjudgment—to the monarchs of England and France waiting below, whose forces have just fought a battle before the gates of the town to determine which of them holds the right to Angers itself and, by extension, to the English throne:

Heralds, from off our towers we might beholdFrom first to last the onset and retireOf both your armies, whose equalityBy our best eyes cannot be censurèd.Blood hath bought blood and blows have answered blows,Strength matched with strength and power confronted power.Both are alike, and both alike we like.One must prove greatest. While they weigh so even,We hold our town for neither, yet for both.

(2.1.325–33)

As the sole surviving brother of King Richard Cœur de Lion, the recently crowned John has crossed the Channel to assert his right to the throne and defend in person the Continental possessions of his family's empire. At the dawn of the thirteenth century, that vast Angevin realm was still the dominant polity in Western Europe, extending from England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales in the west to the wealthy French territories of Aquitaine, Normandy, Anjou, and Gascony in the east. Yet, as John's mother, the formidable Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine, reminds him early in the play, it is his "strong possession" of the crown "much more than [his] right" to it that makes John king (1.1.40). For according to the law of primogeniture, the legitimate heir to Richard's throne is not John, but John's nephew Arthur, Duke of Brittany. And while the meek Arthur's claim, however legitimate, initially lacked sufficient force to challenge John's "strong possession," the support of Philip of France now allows the young duke to assert his true "right" to the empire before the gates of Angers itself, the ancestral home of his and John's shared Angevin dynasty.

Given this confused backdrop of overlapping borders, identities, and claims, the battle in Act 2, scene 1 becomes yet another in a series of disorienting struggles in King John between seemingly equivalent, even identical, combatants and claimants. In contrast to the earlier first tetralogy and the later Henry V, in King John Shakespeare constructs a far more nebulous Angevin-English history play, one in which the familiar nationalist binary between the "native" English and their "foreign" French enemy is challenged so insistently that this key national(ist) distinction becomes blurred and even in danger of complete erasure. Based in a period not much removed from the Conquest, King John explores a more primordial England struggling to differentiate itself from its French forebear. Indeed, as Shakespeare would have known, despite their English crown, the three Angevin rulers—Henry II and his sons, Richard and John—were less English kings than "French princes who numbered England amongst their possessions," the French-speaking descendants of the Plantagenet counts of Anjou, whose point of origin was Angers itself.¹⁴ Appropriately enough, then, the pivotal Angers scenes in Acts 2 and 3 provide a focal point for King John's problematization of English identity. Sworn to obey the English king, but unsure whether John or Arthur is the rightful claimant to that title, the bewildered Citizen proposes to settle the question through medieval trial by combat, agreeing to open the city's gates to whichever army proves victorious in battle. Yet, as the Citizen is forced to confess in the quotation above, even this physical test of right fails to distinguish the true from the false, for neither army manages to secure a decisive victory over the other. Even in battle, the English forces under John and the French under Philip appear indistinguishable from one another, so that, as the Citizen concludes, "Both are alike, and both alike we like."

This confounding "likeness," or "equality," between the two armies—and between them and the equivocal city of Angers ("both alike we like")—is one that extends to the two rival kingdoms themselves.¹⁵ Michael Saenger, citing Sidney's Sonnet 41, observes that, for early modern writers, France is the perpetual "'sweet enemy' of English culture, its proximate and more legitimate other, whose identity is so deeply interwoven with Englishness that such a relationship can best be captured in an oxymoron."¹⁶ By focusing on an Angevin period in which England was not only culturally but also geographically, lineally, and politically "interwoven" with France, King John critically interrogates this unique national intimacy. Both 1 Henry VI and (perhaps more ironically) Henry V chauvinistically emphasize an almost ontological difference between the French and English, portraying the former as effeminate and faithless hedonists who, in the words of their demonic heroine Joan la Pucelle, "turn and turn again" (1 Henry VI, 3.7.85), and the latter as valiant and lusty milites whose success is limited only by their own internal disunion. Or, as Sir William Lucy puts it, "Submission, Dauphin? 'Tis a mere French word. / We English warriors wot not what it means" (1 Henry VI, 4.7.54–55). Yet in King John such popular national distinctions are minimized to the point that it can seem all but impossible to tell one nation apart from the other; here, the English "turn and turn again" no less blatantly than the French, and the French perform no less nobly in battle than the English—indeed, it is they who fight on behalf of England's legitimate monarch, Arthur. Largely stripped of the jingoistic rhetoric familiar from 1 Henry VI, King John presents something even more troubling than that play's traditional Continental nemesis: a France whose identity, far from being lesser or other than England's, is indistinguishably like that of its island cousin, a confounding reflection that ends up throwing English identity into doubt.¹⁷

This view of Shakespeare's outlier chronicle play as a work invested in demystifying England's national origins coheres with a broader critical sense of King John as a particularly skeptical history. Phyllis Rackin has argued that this "most Machiavellian of all Shakespeare's histories" reflects a turn away from the providential historiography of the first tetralogy and toward a more radically contingent understanding of historical causation, "depict[ing] a world without faith or ceremony, where failure and success ride on the shifting winds of chance."¹⁸ Indeed, given its disjointed and ironic historical perspective, it is hardly surprising that, though reasonably popular in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, King John came to be regarded by the later Victorian era as that rarest of Shakespearean phenomena, an artistic failure—a reputation that persisted well into the twentieth century.¹⁹ Yet the latter half of that century saw an upsurge in scholarly interest, alongside a positive reassessment of the play's artistic value; as A. J. Piesse explains, it is precisely "the notion that King John is a play deliberately unstable in structure and characterisation, in keeping with a view of history as unstable, which prompted so vibrant a revival in critical interest."²⁰ Recasting it as "Shakespeare's postmodern history play," modern critics have tended to celebrate King John's atypical elements, so that "its sustained contradictions, discontinuities, polarities, [and] unresolved shifts of focus or perspective" are now more typically read, not as signs of dramatic ineptness, but as essential aspects of an experimental and challenging drama.²¹ Skepticism has thus become something of a watchword in King John criticism, for the play is clearly fueled by doubt, insistently exposing traditional concepts and ideals as constructed, inconsistent, and untenable.²² In dramatizing the story of John's conflict with Arthur, his break from the Catholic Church, his feud with his own barons, and his defense of England against French invasion, Shakespeare critiques one source of authority and legitimacy after another, highlighting the conceptual volatility and unreliability of monarchical right, rule of law, religious faith, feudal order, and even personal and familial identity. In the midst of this "Mad world," both characters and audience alike are seemingly left with little firm ground to stand on, caught in a skeptical vertigo that is most poignantly expressed by the Bastard: "I am amazed, methinks, and lose my way / Among the thorns and dangers of this world" (4.3.141–42).

Yet the actual nature and purpose of the play's skepticism require more careful definition. Certainly, to a greater degree than any of Shakespeare's other histories, King John's attitude toward England's past and the limits of understanding reveals strong affinities with the sixteenth-century revival of ancient skepticism, "a philosophical view that raises doubts about the adequacy or reliability of the evidence that could be offered to justify any proposition."²³ In this period of religious and political upheaval, Europe saw an increased availability of such classical skeptical texts as Cicero's Academica (printed in 1548) and Sextus Empiricus's Outlines of Pyrrhonism (printed in 1562), with the latter becoming especially influential through its impact on Montaigne and, later, Descartes.²⁴ Thanks to Stanley Cavell and others, Shakespeare has come to be seen as a significant figure in this early modern skeptical discourse. For in their preoccupation with (mis)interpretation, the (un)reliability of the senses, the (in)accessibility of the divine, and the questionable grounds of knowledge in general, Shakespeare's plays return again and again to the ethical and epistemological concerns of skepticism.²⁵ As ever with Shakespeare, how and to what degree he actually engaged with skeptical texts is less clear: though he was undoubtedly familiar with Montaigne at least in translation, it is unlikely he read the Essais as early as the mid-1590s, nor does he ever use the word "skeptic" itself.²⁶ Most scholars therefore take a somewhat balanced view of his familiarity with the skeptical tradition, aligning him with a broader, more readily accessible heritage of radical doubt extending from Machiavelli through Erasmus, Luther, Rabelais, and so on.²⁷ Or, in the words of one critic, it seems likeliest that "a temperamental affinity … pushed Shakespeare toward sceptical views of the world, an affinity sharpened and encouraged by encounters with bits and pieces of scepticism."²⁸

This view of Shakespeare's relation to the skeptical tradition as a profound but partial one accords well with the complicated nature of King John's skepticism, which, resembling but not neatly cohering with either of the two main categories of the time, appears less Academic or even Pyrrhonian than, of all things, Cartesian—that definitive modern skeptical method which would come to achieve preeminence more than forty years after King John's first performance. Though often judged a Pyrrhonist work intent upon questioning everything while affirming nothing, the play's skepticism in fact serves a more concrete purpose, critically interrogating England's origins and legitimacy in order to arrive at a firmer sense of national identity.²⁹ In dubbing such skepticism Cartesian, therefore, I mean to suggest that the play's methodical doubt serves neither to Academically demonstrate the impossibility of any definite knowledge, nor to Pyrrhonistically suspend judgment on the certainty of knowledge altogether; instead, like Descartes in his later Meditations (1641), Shakespeare deploys certain skeptical techniques in King John (most of them already familiar from Pyrrhonism) with the nonskeptical goal of clearing away the debris of accreted uncertainty and uncovering a sturdier ground of understanding beneath.³⁰ This is not to say that Shakespeare reaches Descartes's revolutionary epistemological conclusions a generation early; the resultant national "subject" that emerges by the end of King John is clearly more ontic and material than Descartes's famous cogito, and it certainly cannot make the same claim to imperviousness from skeptical assault. Yet there exists nevertheless a meaningful similarity between the constructive skeptical method employed by both Shakespeare and Descartes, as well as between the newly isolated and bounded products of their respective skeptical experiments—the lone subjective cogito on the one hand, the lone objective island on the other.³¹ Several scholars have highlighted this seemingly anachronistic link between the two thinkers, including Cavell who claims "that the advent of skepticism as manifested in Descartes' Meditations is already in full existence in Shakespeare" and who reads the great tragedies as existential confrontations with Descartes's own skeptical problematic of "how to live at all in a groundless world."³² King John (though but a mere history play) presents a no less groundless world of misleading appearance and misinterpretation, but one out of which Shakespeare ultimately seeks to identify and establish a firmer basis. This early dramatic experiment in skepticism thus shows the playwright anticipating, in a sense, the Cartesian method by using the corrosive tools of skepticism to arrive at a foundation of certitude, so that in its plunge back into Angevin history King John adopts a skeptical attitude toward traditional constructions of nationhood precisely in order to define that nation more rigorously.

As suggested above, then, the initial, "corrosive" phase of this operation occurs primarily in the play's first half, particularly in the Angers scenes of Acts 2 and 3 where the bewildering likeness between England and France—what the Bastard aptly terms the "undetermined differences of kings" (2.1.355)—takes center stage. The highly artificial rhetorical and martial confrontations in these scenes present an almost comical series of declarations, rebuttals, and reversals, as the two "equal potents" (l. 358), John and King Philip, hyperbolically insist upon their differences even as they persistently mirror one another:

king john

Peace be to France, if France in peace permit

Our just and lineal entrance to our own.

If not, bleed France, and peace ascend to heaven,

…………………………………………………….

king philip

Peace be to England, if that war return

From France to England, there to live in peace.

England we love, and for that England's sake

With burden of our armour here we sweat.

(ll. 84–86, 89–92)³³

The irony of a French army besieging a town of Frenchmen in support of a claimant to the English throne is repeatedly emphasized, as when Philip declares his intent to "Wade to the market-place in Frenchmen's blood" (l. 42), or when, at the commencement of battle, he calls out the English royal motto, "God and our right!" (l. 299). Despite their best attempts to justify their competing claims and differentiate their national identities, the two kings' inescapably parallel rhetoric creates instead a frustrating indistinction between them, as when they first announce themselves to the Citizen of Angers:

king philip

'Tis France for England.

king john

                England for itself.

You men of Angers and my loving subjects—

king philip

You loving men of Angers, Arthur's subjects.

(ll. 202–4)

Such easy slippages of identity underline the problem of determining not only "whose right is worthiest" (l. 281)—the word "right" is in fact used more often in King John (thirty times) than in any other Shakespeare play—but also what ground, if any, can be relied upon to distinguish one nation, king, or right from another. "Doth not the crown of England prove the king?" John asks in exasperation:

king john

And if not that, I bring you witnesses:

Twice fifteen thousand hearts of England's breed—

bastard [aside]

Bastards and else.

king john

To verify our title with their lives.

king philip

As many and as well-born bloods as those—

bastard [aside]

Some bastards too.

king philip

Stand in his face to contradict his claim.

(ll. 273–80)

Beneath the Bastard's joking asides lies a trenchant point about the similitude and, indeed, consanguinity between "England's breed" and France's: for both nations' forces are made up of bastard stock that, in no small part, is the result of Franco-English crossbreeding (see 5.4.40–43). In this hybrid Angevin context, neither nation can make a claim to anything like racial purity, no more than John can rely on his usurped crown as evidence of his "right" to rule England.

Such "undetermined differences of kings" are key to Shakespeare's attempt to "expose[] the inadequacy of all explanatory schemes" and all conventional sources of authority and legitimacy in King John, a demystificatory project that relies on skeptical techniques.³⁴ As has been said, Shakespeare anticipates Descartes by paving the way for a ground of certitude by first employing so-called "modes" of skepticism from the Pyrrhonist tradition that were intended to upset the assumed relation between appearances and knowledge. The deconstruction of supposedly universal values in the Angers scenes reflects the Tenth Mode, which, as defined by Sextus Empiricus, "is mainly concerned with Ethics, being based on rules of conduct, habits, laws, legendary beliefs, and dogmatic conceptions" and involves one recognizing the inevitable contradictions within or between any human systems of values, laws, or traditions.³⁵ It is this mode that King John applies with a vengeance when critiquing such concepts as "right," faith, legitimacy, or Englishness, often through the use of skeptical doubling. The "equality" between Angevin England and France is a crucial example of this practice, in which two similar but opposing entities are brought into tension until their irreconcilable likeness works to destabilize a supposedly immutable value or authority. Other examples abound, however, from the monarchical (John's right to the throne versus Arthur's) to the legal and social (the Bastard's claim to the Falconbridge land versus that of his brother); each time this doubling effect is applied, the play's plurality tends to disrupt traditional values and radically relativize them.

This effect is fully on display in Act 3, when Philip's new-sworn "faith" to John as his political ally is confronted by his religious "faith" to the Catholic Church, which now requires him, according to Cardinal Pandolf, to resume his war against the excommunicated John. "I am perplexed," the French king laments, "and know not what to say":

And shall these hands, so lately purged of blood,So newly joined in love, so strong in both,Unyoke this seizure and this kind regreet,Play fast and loose with faith, so jest with heaven,Make such unconstant children of ourselves,As now again to snatch our palm from palm,Unswear faith sworn?

(3.1.147, 165–71)

Opportunist though he is, even Philip fears a truly "faith"-less world in which kings degenerate into mere "unconstant children," and he beseeches Pandolf to "devise, ordain, impose / Some gentle order" on the scene (ll. 176–77). The Cardinal insists, however, that "All form is formless, order orderless, / Save what is opposite to England's love" and that should Philip remain faithful to John "So mak'st thou faith an enemy to faith" (ll. 179–80, 189). Just as the previous act saw the deconstruction of "right," so the ideal of "faith" is now undermined by the conflict between two incompatible claims. Faced with the threat of a "formless" and "orderless" chaos, Philip breaks with John, and the immediate and opposite responses of Constance and Eleanor only highlight the difficulty of assessing whether Philip's is an act of faith or treachery, of religious duty or political expediency:

constance

O, fair return of banished majesty!

queen eleanor

O, foul revolt of French inconstancy!

(ll. 247–48)

Such moral skepticism and conceptual volatility characterize the first three acts, in which one value after another is conjured and tested, only to be found wanting. Amid their ever-shifting loyalties and identity crises, the Angers scenes emphasize the seeming impossibility of remaining "true" to any one thing, a dilemma made particularly apparent through the contrast between the characters' high rhetoric and blatantly fickle actions. "Mad world, mad kings, mad composition!" concludes the Bastard, and, indeed, it is characteristically ironic of this play that, following an endless succession of staged and rhetorical battles, the political situation at the end of Act 3 has effectively returned to where it was at the start of Act 1: with England and France at war, the succession uncertain, and the status of England itself more "undetermined" than ever.

II. "England keep my bones": Arthur's Fall and the Ground of Nationhood

It is significant, then, that here at the halfway point of King John the play moves from the Continent back to the bounded isle of England, there to remain for the final two acts. Having retaken Angers and entrusted his Continental territories to his mother, John returns to England with the captured Arthur in tow, so that, as Philip declares, "bloody England [has] into England gone" (3.4.8). The return to England in Acts 4 and 5 underlies the emerging construction of an English nationhood that might withstand King John's skepticism. This skepticism does not abate; if anything, it intensifies, as the plot shifts from a conflict over Angers to a French invasion of England and a civil war between John and his nobles. But it does change, evolving from a critique of values into a deeper questioning of the epistemological basis of understanding itself. The complex interrelation between King John's skeptical outlook and its development of a materially defined nation comes to the fore in the fourth act, where the death of Arthur serves as the dramatic locus of this heightened skepticism, as the play's other characters struggle to interpret and comprehend an occurrence that is essentially inexplicable, even absurd. It is this same event, however, that opens the way to a different, land-based nationhood. For even as the play continues to call into question John's monarchical right, the providential arc of history, and the grounds of judgment and action, it begins to make the case for a different source of communal identity founded less on fickle human agency or uncertain divine intervention than on the soil of the island itself.

The young prince's fatal plunge from a castle wall surely ranks as one of the strangest moments in all of Shakespeare. Its dramatic singularity has little to do with gore or tragic pathos but lies rather in the sheer suddenness and inexplicability with which it occurs, in its brutally accidental nature. Ironically, perhaps no event is as expected and feared by the play's other characters as Arthur's demise—specifically, they predict, at the hands of his murderous uncle (see 3.4.76–105, 131–40). Yet when his death actually does come to pass, it transpires in such an unexpected manner that, even by the end of the play, no one but the audience knows the truth of it.³⁶ While John does indeed order his nephew's execution (3.3.19–69), in the famous dungeon scene that opens Act 4 things fail to go to plan, as Hubert, after a tense exchange with Arthur, is at last dissuaded from blinding and murdering him thanks to the boy's artful pleas and overpowering innocence. Against all odds, Arthur manages to avoid certain death and to secure his own release, so that, when he appears two scenes later atop the castle walls in the act of making his escape, there is an oddly hopeful yet eerie sense that the unfortunate prince from the chronicles has perhaps circumvented his tragic historical fate:

Enter arthur [duke of brittaine]

on the walls [disguised as a ship-boy]

arthur

The wall is high, and yet will I leap down.

Good ground, be pitiful, and hurt me not.

There's few or none do know me; if they did,

This ship-boy's semblance hath disguised me quite.

I am afraid, and yet I'll venture it.

If I get down and do not break my limbs,

I'll find a thousand shifts to get away.

As good to die and go, as die and stay.

        [He leaps down]

O me! My uncle's spirit is in these stones.

Heaven take my soul, and England keep my bones!

                [He] dies.

(4.3.1–10)

As in the dungeon where he beseeches Hubert to spare him, Arthur here similarly entreats the English stones for pity as he prepares to leap, but, unlike Hubert, the insensible earth remains unmoved by the boy's eloquence and ends his royal life with a savage swiftness. Arthur's fall emblematizes the skepticism at King John's core, as well as the menace of nihilism lurking at its periphery, for it is hard to ignore the shocking absurdity of this death—a great, disorienting plummet that threatens to rupture any sense one might still have of some larger design in this play. Like history itself, Shakespeare seems to suggest, such things simply happen.

Yet this bleak moment signifies more than it seems. Even before Arthur's fall, his death (whether anticipated, presumed, or misperceived) serves as a focal point for the play's skeptical exploration of nationhood, thanks to its symbolic importance to the other characters and their struggle to make sense of it. Fittingly, Arthur's corpse becomes a charged sign about which these characters debate and quarrel, as they endeavor to interpret what his death means for both themselves and their imperiled nation. None knows the truth of his demise, but this does not prevent anyone from conjecturing. The deceased prince thus comes to serve a purpose similar to the live one: for where Arthur was once a passive medium through which his ambitious relatives pursued their plots, his body now becomes an interpretative nexus about and upon which others construct competing narratives of nationhood. Here the play's skepticism assumes a more epistemological bent, as characters strive to direct the nation on the basis of their various explanations of Arthur's death while Shakespeare highlights the improbability of ever arriving at a firm ground of "knowing." This skeptical dynamic appears in the scene preceding Arthur's fall, where John's disgruntled nobles witness a private exchange between the king and Hubert, who falsely tells John that Arthur has been executed. Scrutinizing their conversation from afar with an attentive courtier's eye, the Earl of Pembroke arrives at a probable, yet incorrect, idea of Hubert's thoughts: he accurately interprets Hubert's "close aspect" as indicative of "a much troubled breast" (4.2.72–73), but inaccurately ascribes the cause of that inner turmoil to the man's supposed murder of Arthur (when its true cause is Hubert's anxiety over lying to John). Here Shakespeare appeals to Sextus's Second Mode of skepticism, which is concerned with the differences of perception arising from variations among people.³⁷ Like John himself, Pembroke is already primed to regard Hubert as a villain, so that the man's "abhorred aspect" (l. 225) and nervous demeanor quickly become sure signs of his guilt.³⁸ Thus, when John attempts to misinform the lords that Arthur has died of an illness, they rightly believe he is lying and storm off to find the prince's body. Yet they fail to see the lie behind the lie—that is, Hubert's, who believes Arthur to still be alive. And no one, not even Hubert, can see the even more obscure truth behind this double falsehood—that the young boy's death has been entirely accidental.

The bodily remains of this unsettling accident shape the action of the following scene, where the lords, the Bastard, and Hubert all contend with one another over the corpse's meaning, and where King John's skepticism reaches its crisis point. As if to reinforce a bond between the prince's body and the English land, multiple people throughout the play invoke the image of Arthur's grave, beginning with the boy himself ("I would that I were low laid in my grave"[2.1.164]); John refers to it when insinuating his desire for Arthur's death (3.3.66); and, when the indignant lords break with John, they do so specifically to "find th'inheritance of this poor child, / His little kingdom of a forcèd grave" (4.2.97–98). Both they and the Bastard are thus shocked to discover Arthur's body unburied and "cast into the streets" (5.1.39), where its sheer, unceremonious materiality appals them. "The earth had not a hole to hide this deed," Pembroke declares (4.3.36), tellingly mistaking the corporal sign for the unseen "deed," just as all the lords read Arthur's corpse as a confirmation of their worst fears: that John ordered his murder (true) and that Hubert performed it (false), an imagined crime that they decry as

        the very top,The height, the crest, or crest unto the crest,Of murder's arms […] the bloodiest shame,… … … … … … … … … … … … ….        so sole and so unmatchable.

(ll. 45–47, 52)

The lords' moral hyperbole here suggests that Arthur's corpse may in fact be oddly welcome to them, as it passively invites an interpretation of Hubert's villainy that, in this play of indistinguishable doubles and ambiguities, seems at last to establish a clear divide between right and wrong, good and evil. The Earl of Salisbury takes the unburied body as a clear call to vengeance: "Murder, as hating what himself hath done, / Doth lay [the body] open to urge on revenge" (ll. 37–38). Once more, then, the perceptive, realist lords reach a sensible and even likely interpretation, but the strange history in which they act continually insists upon the disjuncture between what humans reasonably apprehend to be true and the murky truth itself.

The Bastard alone seems sensitive to this distinction, for his reaction is more uncertain than that of the lords, as appears when Salisbury asks his opinion of the gruesome spectacle:

Sir Richard, what think you? You have beheld.Or have you read or heard; or could you think,Or do you almost think, although you see,That you do see? Could thought, without this object,Form such another?

(ll. 41–45)

While Salisbury suggests that the sight of Arthur is so terrible that the mind might reject it in a kind of uncomprehending seeing, the Bastard's reply suggests that the lords may be allowing their imaginations to do their seeing for them: "It is a damnèd and a bloody work," he grants, "The graceless action of a heavy hand—/If that it be the work of any hand" (ll. 57–59). That closing "If" is crucial, a conditional pause that momentarily reveals a more positive dimension of King John's skepticism than has heretofore been seen. The Bastard's unique perspective allows him to consider possibilities of narration and causation that elude the other characters; his cautionary "If" is the closest anyone ever gets to the truth of Arthur's death.³⁹ The possibility that this death might have been unintentional is lost on Salisbury, who can only parrot the Bastard's words back at him incredulously: "If that it be the work of any hand? / We had a kind of light what would ensue: / It is the shameful work of Hubert's hand" (ll. 60–62). The Bastard resists such hollow conviction, however, and, in refusing to affirm this perfectly probable yet untrue explanation—in refusing to accept the lords' vague "light" as sufficient grounds for revenge and rebellion—the Bastard's "If" becomes a remarkable act of skeptical charity. For it is that "If"—that suggestion that there could be no murderer at all, that the story might be radically different from what anyone supposes—that saves Hubert's life when he unexpectedly enters mid-scene. The Bastard, forcing the vengeful lords to leave at sword-point before they can murder the innocent jailkeeper, defends Hubert not because he knows a truth the lords do not, but because he knows that he does not know, and that he might do a great wrong should he convince himself that he does. The skeptical force that has driven the action of King John from its outset appears here in a more benevolent form, with doubt becoming a vital ethical praxis in a world of seeming groundlessness.

It is in this same scene—where skepticism, materiality, and national identity all meet—that Shakespeare begins to imply something beyond doubt: namely, a geographical and even geological nationhood capable of resisting King John's skepticism. This new idea is evident in the fatally intimate relationship between Arthur and the "Good ground." For it is that earth, not John or Hubert, that ends the prince's life and to which he addresses both his final words and his corpse: "O me! My uncle's spirit is in these stones. / Heaven take my soul, and England keep my bones!" King John deviates from Holinshed and the historical record in relocating the site of Arthur's death from France to England, and, while The Troublesome Reign includes a similar scene depicting Arthur's fall, there the boy makes no reference to the earth but instead directs his dying words to his mother.⁴⁰ Shakespeare thus goes out of his way to connect Arthur with the English "stones"—a connection already hinted at in the recurrent references to his grave—so much so that this ground comes to resemble something like a character in its own right. The emphasis on English land in the second half of King John has been noted by Shrank who writes that "the use of [the term] 'England' to refer predominantly to its monarch falls away, to be replaced by its growing tendency to define a territory, a land that consumes the bodies of those who fight over it," so that the nation begins to be "imagined corporally" as the "characters start to link their identity and loyalty to their native soil."⁴¹ I would go a step further and suggest that Shakespeare represents the land as a semi-animate being, one that, amid the often empty rhetoric and senseless doings of King John's human actors, increasingly takes on agency in determining both the course of the play and English history. It is, after all, this crude, inorganic "character"—what Jane Bennett has termed a vital actant—that kills off John's rival to the empire and, in so doing, ruthlessly solves the central problem of succession that has vexed the realm since King John began.⁴² The unsettlingly dynamic, disruptive quality of the English land and sea is apparent throughout King John, as when the Channel sinks a French fleet (3.4.1–3), or when the Dauphin's forces are wrecked on Goodwin Sands (5.3.9–11), or when the Bastard's troops are "devourèd" in the Lincoln Washes (5.6.40–42)—each of these an instance of a material, nonhuman, English actant intervening in the course of human events. Indeed, Arthur's death involves the additional suggestion of the young prince serving as a kind of sacrifice to the vital "stones" of England itself, for this death turns out to be surprisingly productive insofar as it catalyzes the island's separation from its French territories and leaves the way open for John's line to continue with Henry III—a monarch whose dominion, unlike his father's, would be confined to the shores of the British Isles. In claiming Arthur's life, therefore, the English stones, supposedly imbued with the animate but fatal spirit of John himself (4.3.9), take a crucial step toward consolidating a new and better defined English nationhood.⁴³ And in spite of his own misfortune, Arthur's last words provide implicit support for this effort, as he bequeaths his royal bones not to France or the empire but to the actant land of "England." Thus, even as England faces an impending invasion and revolt, the close of Act 4 finds King John emerging from its skeptical crisis armed with a firmer conception of the nation. For by uniting with that good if volatile ground, the so-called Duke of Brittany's bones become both a symbolic and a material foundation for an English state that is at once separated from its Angevin ties and yet retains the historical memory of those roots in its very bedrock.

III. "That water-walléd bulwark": The Island Nation

When King John was still a boy, he was supposedly nicknamed "Lackland" since, being the youngest of Henry II's sons, it was thought unlikely that he would ever inherit his father's imperial territories.⁴⁴ Yet after John spent the seventeen years of his reign in a vain attempt to hold the Angevin Empire together, and ultimately forfeited nearly all its Continental possessions to Philip Augustus, his childhood nickname came to assume a more damning implication. According to Holinshed, by the end of John's Norman campaigns from 1200 to 1204, "of all the townes within [his Continental territories], there remained none vnder the English obeisance, saue onelie Rochell, Tours, Niorth, and a few other. Thus Normandie which king Rollo had purchased and gotten 316 yeares before that present time, was then recouered by the French men, to the great reproch and dishonour of the English."⁴⁵ Over the next decade, John would make multiple attempts to reconquer these lost territories, but the fate of his diminished empire was sealed at the Battle of Bouvines on 27 July 1214, when he was overwhelmingly defeated by Philip; he was never again to return to the Continent with an army behind him. The king's final years were thus spent in England, where his own magnates, disgusted and unsatisfied by his disingenuous concessions in the Great Charter of 1215, offered the crown to Louis the Dauphin, who invaded England the following year. This First Barons' War was brought to an end only with John's death, at which point his nine-year-old son, Henry III (reigned 1216–72), was placed on the throne. By the end of John Lackland's reign, therefore, he had overseen the reduction of his father's once great empire to a mere island realm.

In Shakespeare's play, this territorial loss and reconfiguration take place in the final two acts, where the move from the Continent to England is paralleled by a new focus on the island itself as constitutive of English identity. Back in Act 2, John had offered France the majority of his imperial provinces as part of his niece Blanche's dowry (2.1.528–33), but the resumption of war negated this arrangement and prompted him to leave his refortified territories in the hands of Eleanor (3.3.1–2). John thus receives a triple blow in Act 4 when he learns not only of Louis's imminent invasion but also of his mother's death and the undefended state of his Continental possessions: "What, Mother dead? / How wildly then walks my estate in France!" (4.2.127–28). As an Elizabethan audience would have known, John was never to recover that lost "estate." Yet, far from tempering the ruinous midpoint of Lackland's career, King John emphasizes and valorizes it, for the Angevin Empire's dissolution and the contraction of England into an island state are key to the play's articulation of a land-based nationhood. Shakespeare largely neglects John's common associations with Magna Carta and the Robin Hood folktales, downplaying, too, his popular status in the Protestant imagination as a proto-Henry VIII who dared to defy the papacy.⁴⁶ Instead, as has been seen, King John focuses on the volatile political evolution of England itself; inspired by his reading of Holinshed and others, Shakespeare would likely have known that it was in fact because of John's territorial losses that England was again reduced to a bounded island. As John Gillingham writes, if the Angevin rulers began as "French princes who numbered England amongst their possessions … from the 1220s onwards the centre of gravity was clearly in England; the Plantagenets had become kings of England who occasionally visited Gascony."⁴⁷ This paradigmatic reorientation toward the English island, and the so-called "loss of Normandy" that enabled it, actually came to be viewed positively by many English writers from the seventeenth century on, with the Angevin Empire's "French possessions [often being regarded as] an encumbrance which endangered the sound development of a genuinely English polity."⁴⁸ Later historians such as Thomas Babington Macaulay could thus assert that "there is, to speak strictly, no English history" during the Norman and Angevin periods due to their "French Kings of England":

The Conqueror and his descendants to the fourth generation were not Englishmen: most of them were born in France: they spent the greater part of their lives in France: their ordinary speech was French: almost every high office in their gift was filled by a Frenchman: every acquisition which they made on the Continent estranged them more and more from the population of our island. … Had the Plantagenets, as at one time seemed likely, succeeded in uniting all France under their government, it is probable that England would never have had an independent existence.⁴⁹

For Macaulay and others, England "owe[d] her escape from such calamities" precisely to John's infamous loss of this Plantagenet empire, a veritable felix culpa for the English state.⁵⁰ Nothing less than "the fortunate incapacity of John," as William Stubbs put it, enabled England "to cut herself free from Normandy" and thereby to begin the evolution from a French "feudal kingdom" into a fledgling "nation" in her own right.⁵¹

Despite its skepticism, therefore, King John, no less than Shakespeare's other histories, clearly participates in the writing of the Elizabethan nation, and the England it portrays is ultimately defined by island soil. This idea is introduced early on in the play, when the Duke of Austria delivers a surprising panegyric to the English isle that bears a close resemblance to that other great Shakespearean speech in praise of island exceptionalism, John of Gaunt's encomium to

        this little world,This precious stone set in the silver sea,… … … … … … … … … … … … … … ….This blessèd plot, this earth, this realm, this England.

(Richard II, 2.1.45–46, 50)⁵²

In pledging his support to Arthur, Austria gives a distinctly lopsided account of the worth of those lands to which Arthur claims his "right":

        to my home I will no more returnTill Angers and the right thou hast in France,Together with that pale, that white-faced shore,Whose foot spurns back the ocean's roaring tidesAnd coops from other lands her islanders,Even till that England, hedged in with the main,That water-wallèd bulwark, still secureAnd confident from foreign purposes,Even till that utmost corner of the westSalute thee for her king.

(King John, 2.1.21–30)

Here, the Angevin Empire's Continental holdings are vastly overshadowed by Austria's paean to the natural fortress of England, a military idealization that emphasizes the island's natural defensive potential and ability to keep its inhabitants "secure / And confident from foreign purposes." This notion of a divinely demarcated fortress protected by "the ocean's roaring tides" recalls England's recent victory over the Spanish Armada—an event alluded to more explicitly when Philip bemoans the loss of his own "armada" to "a roaring tempest on the flood" (3.4.1–2). Indeed, the precarious political situation of Elizabethan England can plainly be seen in Shakespeare's interpretation of the loss of Normandy: in 1558 the French seized Calais and at last finished what they had begun in 1204, leaving England for the first time in centuries with no Continental holdings.⁵³ Given Elizabeth's characteristic aversion to military intervention, there was little chance England would recapture Calais—or any other European territory—in Shakespeare's lifetime. If her reign was pervaded by the rhetoric of empire, the actual prospect of English expansion on the Continent or even sustained involvement there was always one Elizabeth approached with extreme caution.⁵⁴ The establishment and maintenance of order within the island(s) itself were of far greater importance to the queen and her council, who feared constantly that England might, as the Bastard puts it, be undone by foreign "powers from home and discontents at home" (4.3.152). In their view, writes Susan Brigden, "England's security lay in the creation of a united and Protestant British Isles which could stand alone, ready to resist invaders. Divine providence had set the islands apart from the rest of the world by encircling seas, 'a little world by itself.'"⁵⁵

It is this same "little world" that Shakespeare reveals and endorses in King John, tracing the idea back to the seeming catastrophe of Lackland's reign. For the nascent national ideology of Shakespeare's day centered precisely on the singularity of England as a Protestant island state, an externally threatened and naturally separated "water-wallèd bulwark" that God had providentially "set in the silver sea."⁵⁶ Alex Law, noting that nationalism is "typically rooted in claims about land … and soil," characterizes England's particular variety as "maritime island nationalism," which "derives its force from an island mentality that conceives Britain or, more usually, England, as an 'island race,'" an elect people set in a paradisal garden "bounded by clearly defined watery borders."⁵⁷ As both Austria's and Gaunt's speeches indicate, this idea of precise bounds, with the promise of coherence, unity, and protection they conferred, was crucial to the appeal that island nationalism held for Elizabethans (and for many British voters down to the present day).⁵⁸ Jonathan Scott similarly defines English nationalism as a political formation in which "the tropes of island, island nation, oceanic destiny and empire were central," so that this fundamental "island idea" came to encapsulate the national ideals of "internal unity; military security; global mobility and reach. Above all it implied separation," specifically from mainland Europe.⁵⁹ This core myth of insularity and separateness sprung from and deepened England's sense of its Protestant exceptionalism (and vulnerability), even as it catalyzed the nation's colonial efforts to subdue and consolidate its archipelagic neighbors into a purportedly more unified island whole, so that what Maley terms the early modern "island-empire of England," or "Atlantic archipelago," was "fundamentally an anti-European phenomenon."⁶⁰ It is these central dynamics that come to the fore in Shakespeare's play. In a way, the story of John had always been one of England's divorce from Europe. Yet, whereas earlier Tudor writers such as Foxe and Bale framed this separation in religious terms—as a proto-Protestant break with the Church of Rome—Shakespeare presents it geographically, putting the early nation before the church, as it were, and thus staging an origin for that "island idea" that would remain central to English nationalism for the next four centuries.⁶¹ King John does this by staging the loss of Normandy as a seminal event in the nation's development, insofar as the Angevin Empire's death allows for the birth of "This England" on a new material basis. This is the conceptual end result of that Cartesian skepticism that has determined the unruly logic of King John all along: the consolidation of England into an island state, an isolated and material cogito that only emerges once the play has discarded nearly all other sources of Englishness. Too often, Shakespeare suggests, multiple kings vie for the same throne; English barons ally with French invaders; churchmen use sophistic rhetoric in pursuit of worldly goals; and history reveals supposedly distinct peoples to be merely bastardized versions of one another. By the end of King John, the island itself appears to be not merely the rival of these other candidates but the de facto winner in Shakespeare's search for a stable source of English identity.

The island nationalism introduced in Austria's speech is principally developed in the final act of the play, once "bloody England [has] into England gone" and "that utmost corner of the west" has been overrun by forces from the Continent. If England's identity was threatened before by its empire's French heritage and territory, the island itself now seems in danger of turning French through its barons' revolt and the Dauphin's invasion, which the native populace greets enthusiastically: "Have I not heard these islanders shout out / 'Vive le Roi!' as I have banked their towns?" boasts Louis (5.2.103–4). This existential threat is countered, however, by a new nationalist rhetoric that depends upon the imagery of the land. When the Bastard urges John to defend himself, he appeals to the native strength and honor of the English ground:

Shall we, upon the footing of our land,Send fair-play orders, and make compromise,… … … … … … … … … … … … ….

        Shall a beardless boy,A cockered silken wanton, brave our fieldsAnd flesh his spirit in a warlike soil?

(5.1.66–67, 69–71)

Later, Salisbury uses similar language to lament that he and the other rebellious lords, as "sons and children of this isle" (5.2.25), are now unnaturally opposed to their parental island "nation":

        O nation, that thou couldst remove;That Neptune's arms who clippeth thee aboutWould bear thee from the knowledge of thyselfAnd gripple thee unto a pagan shore,Where these two Christian armies might combineThe blood of malice in a vein of league,And not to spend it so unneighbourly.

(ll. 33–39)

While Salisbury envisions the island transported "unto a pagan shore" where English and French "might combine" in a holy crusade, such a union would tellingly involve the loss of England's "knowledge of [it]self"; he thus misreads the nation's future, which depends not on an alliance with a foreign shore but on a separation from its French "neighbor." This point is well understood by the Bastard though, who boasts that John, far from joining in any "vein of league," will "whip this dwarfish war, these pigmy arms, / From out the circle of his territories" (ll. 135–36), and who lambasts the lords: "And you degenerate, you ingrate revolts, / You bloody Neros, ripping up the womb / Of your dear mother England, blush for shame" (ll. 151–53). The Bastard here frames the barons' rebellion as a "degenerate" or unnatural treason against their maternal nation, thereby aligning English identity once more with the island's own soil.

The much-debated ending of King John thus finds England at a crossroads, torn between the loss of a grand but unwieldy imperium and the hope of a less vast but more secure nation. Like so much of this play, the final outcome is seemingly arbitrary: Louis wins the battle, and John is poisoned by a monk; but the English lords return, and the French reinforcements are drowned; yet when half the Bastard's forces drown, too, the reporting of this news proves fatal to John; however, just as all seems lost, Pandolf arrives with terms of peace, and Louis sails back to France. England, if not the empire, is saved (though by what agent, if any, remains unclear), and John's son—a boy of about Arthur's age, coincidentally—is crowned King Henry III. Given so haphazard a series of events, the conclusion appears no less skeptical than the rest of this troublesome play. Yet such a view ignores the profound reversal that has occurred since Act 1: no longer part of a trans-Channel empire, the now territorially distinct England has become an island nation at last set apart from its French ancestors and circumscribed by its shorelines. The wider world in which it resides may still be mad, but, by the end of King John, England, in an almost Hegelian fashion, has come to possess a more stable national selfhood grounded upon the land and forged through a negative opposition to its French Other.⁶² When Salisbury prophesies that Henry will "set a form upon that indigest / Which he [John] hath left so shapeless and so rude" (5.7.26–27), he judges correctly in terms of political consolidation and reform—despite his own Barons' War in the 1260s, the long-lived and pious Henry would be a more successful ruler than his father. Yet once more Salisbury seems to misunderstand island nationhood and, like many of King John's characters, to overestimate the impact of individuals on history. While the empire at the start of the play might well be termed a "rude" and "shapeless" "indigest," the nation that remains at its end is anything but, awaiting only the stamp of a legitimate monarch to confirm its delineated form. Again, it is the Bastard who recognizes this new state of affairs most clearly, when, kneeling before the young king, he swears fealty both to Henry and to the land:

And happily may your sweet self put onThe lineal state and glory of the land,To whom with all submission, on my knee,I do bequeath my faithful services.

(ll. 101–4)

The island to which the Bastard here pledges his faith forms the foundation of that newly defined national self to which the English can at last be "true," as his famous closing lines suggest:

This England never did, nor never shall,Lie at the proud foot of a conquerorBut when it first did help to wound itself.Now these her princes are come home again,Come the three corners of the world in armsAnd we shall shock them. Naught shall make us rueIf England to itself do rest but true.

(ll. 112–18)

As in the first tetralogy, Shakespeare here endorses an ideal of national unity centered upon a loyal aristocracy: when her noble "princes" no longer fight among themselves or against their king, England will be invincible. Crucially, however, and in line with the insular nationalism of his day, Shakespeare frames this invincibility in exclusively defensive and bounded terms, with the Bastard emphasizing how England, "that utmost corner of the west," will "rest" safe from attack and conquest by the other "three corners of the world" now that her nobles have "come home"—a "home" clearly understood to refer not to a sprawling empire but to a more clearly defined island nation.

IV. "I come one way of the Plantagenets": The Bastard Nation

At the same time, and as has been seen, King John characterizes this insular political community as a decidedly bastard nation, an island whose inhabitants recognize theirs to be a hybrid culture and embrace this hybridity as a source of strength. Better-known plays such as Henry V and Cymbeline also explore England's tumultuous history of cross-cultural conquest and assimilation, particularly by emphasizing its archipelagic or British roots as well as its Roman ones.⁶³ King John, by contrast, focuses primarily on the intersections between post-Conquest England and France in order to dramatize the problem of inaugurating a distinctly English identity in the context of an empire governed by Angevin kings and Norman barons. It is hardly a coincidence, then, that the play's patriotic hero (insofar as it has one) is not John but the Bastard, for England itself is insistently represented as the bastard offspring of France. The close but problematic genealogical relationship between these two states is memorably articulated in Henry V, where the French lords marvel at the military prowess of Hal's English invaders, who are, after all, merely the bastard "sprays" of the lords' own Norman forefathers:

dauphin

O Dieu vivant! Shall a few sprays of us,

The emptying of our fathers' luxury,

Our scions, put in wild and savage stock,

Spirt up so suddenly into the clouds

And over-look their grafters?

bourbon

Normans, but bastard Normans, Norman bastards!

(3.5.5–10)

Shakespeare's English are indeed "Norman bastards," a mixture of old French warrior blood and that even older "wild and savage stock" of pre-Conquest Albion. Yet Shakespeare throughout his career plays upon bastardy's sixteenth-century connotations of moral pollution, social disruption, and general errancy precisely in order to subvert such traditional associations and to reimagine illegitimacy as a particularly English figure, one characterized by dynamism, vitality, self-fashioning, and freedom from cultural constraints.⁶⁴

Nowhere is this radical reassessment of bastardy more apparent than in the figure of the Bastard himself. One of Shakespeare's first truly individualized characters, the Bastard has an enigmatic role in King John that assumes new significance when viewed in terms of his relation to English nationhood and particularly to the land.⁶⁵ Indeed, English land, bastardy, and legitimacy are all introduced in the play's opening scene, where John and Arthur's contest over the kingship is juxtaposed against that of the Bastard and his younger brother, Robert Falconbridge, over inheritance. When John is accused of having usurped his "borrowed majesty" (1.1.4), even his mother admits that only his "strong possession" of the throne makes him king (ll. 39–40), as King Richard's will naming John his heir (2.1.191–92) cannot trump the right of primogeniture supporting Arthur's claim. This debate is interrupted by the Bastard, who asks John to judge whether he or Robert is the rightful inheritor of their father's land. While the Bastard claims it as the firstborn, Robert objects that Philip Falconbridge is the illegitimate son of King Richard and that the late knight, learning this, bequeathed the land to his younger son in his will. Both John and Eleanor recognize Cœur de Lion's features in the Bastard (1.1.88–89), yet John still decides the case in his favor on the grounds that Lady Falconbridge bore him after marriage, thereby technically making him the firstborn. As has often been noted, by privileging primogeniture in this strict fashion, John rules according to a principle diametrically opposite to his own shaky claim to the throne, which, like the younger brother's, is based on a will rather than order of birth. Regardless, the Bastard ultimately chooses to forsake his land in exchange for the honor of being recognized as Richard's son, once Eleanor makes him the following offer:

Whether hadst thou rather be: a Falconbridge,And like thy brother to enjoy thy land,Or the reputed son of Cœur-de-lion,Lord of thy presence, and no land beside?

(ll. 134–37)

By abandoning the Falconbridge land, the Bastard opts for a nobler prize, the chance to become "Lord of thy presence" and occupy a truer, more honorable selfhood. Philip Falconbridge thus swears loyalty to his royal relatives and is rebaptized Richard Plantagenet, summing up the exchange to his brother in simple terms: "My father gave me honour, yours gave land" (l. 164).

Significantly, then, the Bastard's renunciation of land in Act 1 prefigures England's own liberating loss of land in Act 5. It is precisely this material reduction, Shakespeare suggests, that allows for the possibility of becoming "Lord of [one's] presence" (cf. 2.1.367), a true representative of oneself as opposed to an overextended nebula or mere proxy. The erratic but steadfast Bastard—he who, like England itself, "come[s] one way of the Plantagenets" (5.6.12)—serves as a model of post-Angevin, post-Norman Englishness, a self-conscious break from a French past and a rerooting of English identity in island ground, for Shakespearean bastardy is similarly characterized by a painful but emancipating severance from conventional ties, accompanied by a willful ownership of one's hybrid nature. Despite his unlawful origins, the Bastard proves to be John's most faithful servant, even as he retains his self-aware, ironic sense of the play's innumerable hypocrisies and absurdities. And like many of Shakespeare's energetic illegitimates, the Bastard owns and revels in his identity—"I am I, howe'er I was begot" (1.1.175)—emerging ultimately as the play's exemplum of an English patriot: culturally mixed, critical but loyal, pugnacious but obedient, and, above all, bound to the island. Alone among the English lords, the Bastard, having chosen his allegiance, remains true—and what he remains true to, as has been seen, is less this king or that than the emergent nation itself. The "England" he invokes in the play's closing lines is a radically different entity from that to which Châtillon, the French ambassador, refers in its opening ones (1.1.4). Reduced from a Franco-English empire to a mere island state, England, like the Bastard, has claimed a self to which it can be true and in so doing has become lord of its own presence. Insofar as this national selfhood is a conscious mixture of English and French ancestry, England is clearly a bastard nation, a fact doubly emphasized when the French lord, Melun, justifies saving the English barons' lives: "For that my grandsire was an Englishman" (5.4.42). But through the abandonment of Continental land, King John ultimately grounds this English bastard heritage in the island, that "water-wallèd bulwark," which both defines and protects the nation's true identity.

Together with its reconceptualization of England as a circumscribed island nation, therefore, King John also portrays it as an incontrovertibly bastard one, thereby both providing a stable foundation (epistemologically and literally) for the English state, while also incorporating the increasingly evident fact of England's racial and historical hybridity. The nation that emerges from Shakespeare's Cartesian skeptical experiment is thus a complex but robust combination of geographical rootedness on the one hand and cultural flexibility on the other—a nascent nationalism that avoids being either too skeptically indeterminate or too naïvely purist. Such a formulation would go on to have considerable influence on the representation of England in Shakespeare's later works. Though not often as extreme as in King John, skepticism clearly remains a hallmark of Shakespearean drama, especially the tragedies. And the endorsement of England as an elect island nation, as well as the emphasis on the unusual merits and dangers of bastardy, recurs in plays ranging from the Henriad and Cymbeline to The Tempest and King Lear. One might object, of course, that plays such as 1 Henry VI and Henry V display, if anything, enthusiastic support for English expansion, and specifically for the heroic conquest of that old enemy, France. Yet it is worth recalling the decidedly tragic note in the Epilogue to Henry V, which soberly reminds us that, despite Henry V's short-lived triumph, Henry VI's subsequent reign was so plagued by civil strife "That they lost France and made his England bleed" (l. 12). It would seem, then, that England risks losing both itself and its security when it unwisely and rashly ventures too far beyond its island shores.⁶⁶ Whether it follows that Shakespeare consistently expresses an anti-imperialist or isolationist position is doubtful and must remain a question for another time. The real achievement of King John is its compelling, if fraught, dramatization of an imagined historical origin-point for that conception of secure island nationhood at the heart of Elizabethan national ideology. In the mad and skeptical Angevin world of the play, Shakespeare depicts a fledgling nation struggling to know itself, and, whatever England's imperialist future, by the final lines this essential first step of national selfhood has been achieved. Thanks to its loss of Continental territory and its acknowledgment of itself as a bastard nation, the English isle of King John, by determining what it is not, at last arrives at a surer knowledge of what it is.