OK. So today's lecture is about King John. I think King John's a fabulously interesting play, a very under read play and a play, I hope, on one of my aims in this lecture is to suggest to you some of the things I think King John is trying to ask about is trying to think about a remarkably sophisticated play in its themes and in the way it uses historical sources. And that's why his aren't to try and bring out. It was probably written in fifteen ninety five or maybe slightly earlier.
It isn't the first of Shakespeare's history plays, probably the second part of Henry. The sixth is the first history play that Shakespeare writes. But it is chronologically the earliest bit of mediaeval history that Shakespeare touches on so easy. These are events at the end of the 12th, beginning of the 13th century kingdoms not published until the First Folio in sixteen twenty three.
And then logically, it's the first in the history play category because as I just said, it's the chronologically earliest monarch of King John. So the question I'd like to frame this lecture around is Prince Arthur. I'll tell you a bit about Prince Arthur in a minute. But the question is, who killed Prince Arthur? Who killed Prince Arthur? But let's start by summarising the plot of the play. So King John is a sardonic and rather on heroic history play.
In which the question of rifle succession, the question of who is the rightful king, is subjected to a sustained deconstruction. So the play is all about claim and counter-claim about who should be the king of England. The main claimants are King John himself and the young Prince Arthur, his nephew. Each of the claimants has a powerful female advocate on one of the ways the play is structured is through these kinds of parallelism.
For John the Advocate, it's his mother, Elena, and Arthur, his mother, Constance. Also on John's side is the clever Philip Falconbridge, acknowledged as the illegitimate son of Richard the first. He is always called bastard them. Talk about him quite a bit in a minute on Arthur's side. Our King Philip of France, the Duke of Austria and the Doe fan. The two armies meet at the besieged town of Ojha in France.
And when it proved impossible to decide who is the real king, the rightful king, it's decided that they should enter an alliance marked with the dough from marrying Blanch. John's niece, Constance feels betrayed by this because obviously the Kings have stitched up an arrangement with which essentially cuts out Arthur. A leggat from the pope. Cardinal Pandolfi arrives. His business is to press the pope's choice for Archbishop of Canterbury when John refuses to agree to this choice.
The papal legate pound of excommunicate him. And then part of goes on to stir up the old war with the king of France and gets the battles started again. In the ensuing battle between the king of France and King John, the young Prince Arthur is captured. And Hubert is appointed to kill him, to kill Arthur. He's dissuaded because the child is so innocent. But Hubert nevertheless announces that Arthur is dead and the English nobles then desert.
John, hearing that the French have invaded and both Eleanor and Constance have died. There's a number of prophecies which tell John that the loss of his crown is imminent. The young Prince Arthur, who was not killed, is trying to escape and falls to his death from the walls. The discovery of his body confirms the Lord have turned against John. John makes peace with Pandolfi, the cardinal, but the DOE far refuses to end the wars.
The English lords are torn between the two sides. King John, who is holed up in Swit Swines, had Abbey is poisoned by a monk at his death. It's announced that Pando has brokered a peace and the nobles swear allegiance to their new king John son. Henry. Now, it's a messy and rather undignified story that surprisingly candid about the way that monarchical government is constructed rather than inherent. So it's a pragmatic rather than essential property.
Instead of any sustained idea about the Divine Love King, divine right of kings. So that idea about the rightful sovereign being, the one anointed by God. That philosophy which is hanging around, say, Richard the second. Instead of that, here we have a series of claim and counter-claim which makes any idea of kingship somehow ridiculous. At the beginning of Act two, the spokesman for the besieged town on Jerre is faced with the armies of King Philip of France and King John of England.
He holds to the letter of his allegiance. We are, he says, the king of England subjects for him and in his right. We hold this town. John replies, acknowledged then the king. And let me in. But received the disconcerting answer. This can we not? But he that proves the king to him, will we prove loyal? Philip King of France has a similar exchange with this same spokesman who is your king? And again, the reply comes the king of England when we know the king, the king is the king.
The circularity of the argument replaces an idea of succession with a sort of cyclical of obfuscation. And substitutes pragmatism for divine right. The signifier King has come hopelessly adrift from the signified here or it is floating around, potentially attaching itself to quite different factions. Questions about the notion of rightful kingship then are here deconstructed in the confusion of the battlefield.
And the play never, I think, makes it clear to us who is the rightful king or who we should think is the right king of England. In fact, it seems rather radically to suggest that there really isn't one. Nor does it even suggest who might be the better king. It presents actually a rather unenviable choice. John, on the one hand, is weak and indecisive. His rival Arthur may be innocent, but he's so he's presented as being extremely young, crying.
For example, when his mother and grandmother raised their voices in active scene one. So the play then doesn't engage with dynastic or divine right or with ability as criterion for judging, right for kingship. If we look at the intervention of Pandolfi, the pope's emissary, we can see that part of his purpose is to bring out the self-interest with which everyone in this play acts.
There is a scene in which he persuades the DOE fan that the death of Prince Arthur, the candidate around whom they're supposed to be fighting, that the death of Prince Arthur at John's hand would actually be preferable for the DOE found since he. He then could make a claim to the English throne by his wife, Blanch. It works as a miniature version of timey conversation, which is a minute mini version of the operational selfishness which governs King John.
Important, I think, to this idea of any this deconstruction, of any idea of just or rightful sovereignty is the play's important representation of its central character. The bastard? There is no equivalent figure in the sources for the play. The bastard, probably the powerplays most charismatic character, certainly its largest character in terms of the number of lines spoken.
Is an entirely Shakespearean invention. Knocking King John out of the centre of his own play, just as he dissenters him from the action. From the very first time he enters the stage, the bastard erupts into the first scene of the play. So he's brought in right at the beginning as an embodiment of its thoroughgoing theme of undermining linage dynasty and succession. Act one, scene one follows a brief exchange about Arthur's claim to the throne and the war with France.
So it follows that public political conversation with a strange domestic dispute. The dispute between two Falconbridge brothers about whether the younger one who's called Robert, is in fact his father's true heir, because the older one, Philip, is not, in fact, the son of his mother's husband. We can see immediately that this dispute encapsulates Domesticates, the play's major theme of rival claimants disrupted inheritance and the difficulty of adjudicating what really happened in the past.
And it also reinforces something interesting about King John. The play is unusually prominent role for mothers. As we know, mothers tend to be written out of Shakespeare's plays. Twenty years ago, the critic Mary Beth Rowse published an important article asking in its title, Where are the mothers in Shakespeare?
And it's still a good question. Again and again, in comedy and in tragedy, Shakespeare focuses on the relationship between fathers and daughters, between Aegeus and Hermia in Midsummer Night's Dream or Preventible and Desdemona in Othello or Prospero, Miranda in The Tempest. And for the most part, the mothers are absent and entirely silenced. We can see this work of erasure most graphically, perhaps in the quarter text of much ado about nothing.
Sixteen hundred. Clearly at some point in draughting the play Much Ado about Nothing. Shakespeare conceived of a role for hero's mother energy in the wife to Leonardo. There's a prominent role for a mother figure in Shakespeare sources for Much Ado, and she, in fact, in the sources is crucial in bringing Heroes reputation back from the calumny Don John has put it into.
So there's a prominent role for a mother character in the source of the play. And it seems that Shakespeare intended a mother in his play, too. But all we have of energy in are her ghostly traces to entry stage directions, including the one at the very opening of the play. But no speeches and no acknowledgement from any other character that she's actually there. Most editors then take the pragmatic decision to amend her out of the play at all.
So it's an interesting sort of textual example of how a mother figure sort of disappears before our very eyes. But we might think King John then singlehandedly is trying to make up for all this, bringing on three women pronounce Atley represented in their maternal capacities. We'll talk more about the formidable Queen Eleanor, who is the mother of King John and Constance, the mother of Prince Arthur.
In a minute. But here in this opening scene, talking about the paternity of Philip Falconbridge, the relevant figure is Lady Falconbridge, his mother. She enters the first act of the play to confirm what John and Eleanor already believe, that Philip is the illegitimate son of Richard the Lionheart. They've already confirmed this through knighting Philip and giving him the new name of Richard Plantagenet. Paternity then is declared here rather than proved.
But Lady Falconbridge, his role is to confirm that the bastard is indeed the son of Richard by long and vehement suit. She explains, I was seduced to make room for him in my husband's bed. Even therefore, at the moment, when paternity is established as being definitive of male identity, the bastard is new, christened with his father's patronymic. The entry of the mother allies, the bastard with John and with Arthur. All three are fatherless sons shaped by dominant female influence.
The bastard embraces his mother's news about his true paternity with considerable delight. It's part of the plays off key ethical framework from the start. To be the bastard son of the king is is a high status, higher status them to be the respectable son of the yeoman cub. It's also a country Gentry Falconbridge. So literal illegitimacy confirms legitimate status.
And a new identity, On2. Phillip Falconbridge, it signalled in the play by his new name, although perhaps significantly, nobody ever again calls him Richard Plantagenet. So he's named it in this opening scene. But it's never used in the play. He might now be thought to be a further claimant on the tenuous, tenuously held English throne, since he can now claim his ancestry to an undisputed king. Richard, the first. But that plot suggestion has never really developed in the play.
The bastard is the one character who might have made an effective king is one who never aspires to that role. Instead, cheerfully, he undermines often in asides, the claims of the other characters to behave in a way which is anything other than a legitimate.
So the purpose of introducing him seems to be to foreground and pre-emptively somehow to stymie issues of legitimacy and inheritance right at the start of the play and to make this clever, charismatic figure the embodiment of the play's queasy ethical shifts. It's typical, I think, of Kim Johns undermining of certainties that even illegitimacy here is not quite legitimate. As John himself points out, a bastard is somebody born to an unmarried mother.
Lady Falconbridge was married at the time, but just not to her baby's father. Technically, that does not make the baby illegitimate. It underlines the fact that Philip Falconbridge is bastardy is figurative, more than literal. And just as the charge of bastardy is used within the play to challenge the authority of different characters, there's a scene where Eleanor, for example, accuses Constance of baring Arthur illegitimately.
So to the character of the bastard works to destabilise or even sabotage the play's attempt to secure succession and an idea of rightful kingship. And that, I think, has an impact on the conclusion of King John, which I had to come to later. The role of the bus, I think, also foregrounds the act of writing history itself.
As a character whose identity is peculiarly marked by paternity and therefore by the past, but one who is invented for the present purposes of the play, the bastard can be seen as a figure for that act of historical reinvention. He's exactly the kind of sardonic, disengaged commentary figure. Shakespeare most enjoys inventing McHugh's show. We might think of in Romeo and Juliet Falstaff to some extent and for the first part of Henry, the fourth in a barber's in Antony and Cleopatra.
These are all figures with no real equivalent in their source texts and old characters at a kind of oblique angle to the drama, which in meshes the other characters. So the bastard is a kind of filter between the historical past and the players present and on authoritative or illegitimate historian or an embodiment of a kind of invented history on the stage. He operates something like embodied quotation marks, ionising what's happening before our very eyes.
And in this, you share something with the current drama to get to for the main focus of the lecture, Prince Arthur. Let's approach Arthur via Shakespeares. Sources. Shakespeare's main source for King John is Rafael Hollinshead compendium of historical material published as his chronicles. First in 15 77, the men in an expanded edition, which Shakespeare almost always uses in 15. Eighty seven. There is a slight complication about the sources for King John.
The existence of a quarter text published in 15 nine to one and called. It's called The Troublesome Reign of King John. The Troublesome Reign of King John. Critics are undecided about whether this represents a source for Shakespeare or a derivation from Shakespeare. Its outline is similar to Shakespeare's King John in many respects. But there are a couple of significant differences. One, which I'll go over quite quickly, is the two plays presentation of Catholicism.
The earlier play, The Troublesome Reign of King John, is much more concerned to present John as a kind of proto Protestant. It picks up sort of an analogical history, which thought of John as a version of Henry the eighth, the person who broke from papal authority, broke, broke decisively from papal authority and asserted a kind of English nationalism. So the troublesome reign follows that line of historical parallel, which sees John as a proto Protestant.
And it's a much more explicitly anti Catholic play than is Shakespeare's. So if you're interested in the question of Shakespeare and religion, how Shakespeare represents religion or more contentiously, what Shakespeare thinks about religion, this makes the comparison of Schaik of the Shakespeare play King John with this earlier troublesome reign of King John. Quite a useful source.
In the Shakespeare play, King John approaches questions of religious politics with the same pragmatism as he approaches any other kind of politics. He submits to Cardinal Pandolfi authority when it seems expedient rather than as in the troublesome reign, the earlier play, maintaining the challenge to the pope, as it were, an article of faith. So one area of difference between these two plays whose relationship is is difficult to pin down.
Is the representation of Catholicism. The second area of divergence between these two plays is the presentation of the death of Prince Arthur. A cluster of scenes in the middle of Shakespeare's play dilate around the question of author's death.
In Shakespeare's up three scene. So right in the middle of the play, that may suggest if you follow the idea that the middle of the play gives us some really important key event around which the play pivots here, we would have the capture of Prince Arthur, John's rival, in the battle with the forces of King Philip of France. So that happens in three to. In the next scene, John appoints Hubert's to kill his prisoner.
And meanwhile, in the French camp, Constance offers mother appears with her hair loose, a clear sign of female madness or female destruction on the early modern stage. We might think about the stage direction for Ophelia's entry in Hamlet, for example. And Constance is Rampton with grief for her lost son. Cardinal Pandolfi discusses privately with the Doe fan the inevitability and the benefit of Arthur's death.
John's hands. We then meet Hubert, who now has a letter apparently instructing him to kill Arthur and it's heating irons in a brazier to sizzle out the young prince's eyes. It's not entirely clear in narrative terms why he is doing this, since it would be torture rather than murder. Unlikely probably to kill the victim. It might therefore be interesting to compare this scene physically dramaturgical and thematically with the blinding of the Duke of Gloucester in King Lear.
That's what I'm going to be talking about in my next lecture. But others speak so innocently and sweetly to Hubert that he cannot carry out this mission. In a little exchange which anticipates Desdemona and and a fellow with the handkerchief, Arthur says he will bind Hubert's headache with it with his own handkerchief as he undertakes to protect Hubert Huber says he can't kill Arthur. He's too sweet to be killed. And the undertaker undertakes to protect him.
But to tell King John that he is dead. Hubert goes to see King John then in the next scene. John has had himself re crowned his nobles, tell him this makes his claim to the throne look much weaker rather than stronger. But John seems not to see this. And Hubert. So Hubert goes to see him, to tell him that Arthur is dead. And this is a scene full of markers that John's days are numbered. The nobles are antagonistic.
A messenger brings news that Eleanor and Constance have both died. The bastard brings news that the country is full of rumours that John will fall. And he brings in a prophet who says John will give up his crown before noon on the next Ascension Day. When Hubert tells John that Arthur is dead, that he's carried out his his wishes. John's nobles accuse him of murder. Accused John Marty's of murder and leave him plotting vengeance.
John berates Cuba for killing Arthur, and eventually Hubert admits that, in fact, he hasn't. So apparently, Repreve John tells him to run like mad to announce that Arthur is still alive, to stop the nobles going over to the opposition. The very next scene, we see Arthur disguised as a ship boy alone on stage, sort of walking unsteadily along the top of the walls, falling down or jumping down. Not quite clear which I'm dying on the stones.
The most prominent of John's noblemen find his body just as the bastard is trying to persuade them to return to John. And just before Hubert arrives with the now erroneous news that Arthur is still alive. Now, the synopsis I've given you is of the play's central six scenes, all of which are deeply concerned with the fate of Prince Arthur. This isn't one of those plot themes which we dropped for a while and then pick up, you know, a few scenes later.
All these scenes are concerned, centrally concerned with what's happening to Arthur. I hope you can see from the outline the ironies and, in fact, the pathos of Arthur's eventual death. So Arthur is allowed to escape, blinding, only to fall fatally. Moments later, and apparently unprompted from the walls of somewhere we don't quite know. We never knew had any walls until Arthur was up there walking on them.
Arthur Hubert has to flip from preparing to kill Arthur to pretending to have killed him, to admitting that he hasn't. And to finding out that he's dead anyway. It's hard to know quite what to make of this. I'm asked who kills Prince Arthur in Shakespeare's play? It isn't quite John, although the consequences of the death of Arthur might be seen to be part of John's downfall. I'll come to that in a minute. It's not really clear in Shakespeare's play.
Who does? Kill Prince Arthur? Only that he has to die. In the troublesome reign that earlier play, Hubert carries out John's instructions to blind Arthur with those heated irons. He still reports falsely that Arthur is dead. But after a subsequent fall from the walls, at least then has some justification. He was blind. I want to suggest that Shakespeare makes the question of who killed Arthur.
It's occluded causes and affects how he makes that question into a crucial illustration of something about how history works. And I want to suggest he gets the suggestion for this exploration from his source. We always talk about Hollinshead Chronicles under the name of their parent author, Rafael Hollinshead. But Hollinshead was Ed collector, kind of his historical M.C. for the great collaborative work of Tudor historiography that bears his name.
He was not its author. The material includes writers with quite different political opinions and also from quite different historical moments. It's a compendium, not a monograph. And this multi vocality, this sense that history is drawn from different voices is not suppressed in The Chronicles. There isn't a sort of editorial voice which tries to even that out. Often quite different interpretations of the same event are given without a definitive editorial judgement.
And the death of Prince Arthur is one of those moments of historiographical self-consciousness. Got to give you the passage from Hollinshead. It's quite a long, quite a long extract. But now touching the manner in very deed of the end of this. Also, writers make sundry reports. Nevertheless, certain it is that in the year next ensuing is removed from Farleigh under the castle or tower of Rule out of the which there was not any that would confess that ever he saw him go alive.
Some have written that, as he is said, to have escaped out of prison and proving to climb over the walls of the castle. He fell into the river of Spain and so was drowned. Other right that through very grief. And Langa, he pined away and died of natural sickness. But some affirm that King John secretly caused him to be murdered and made away. So as it is not thoroughly agreed upon in what sort? He finished his days, but verily King John was having great suspicion, either worthily or not.
The Lord knows yet how extremely soever he dealt with his nephew. He released and set at liberty diverse of those lords that were taken prisoners with him, namely Hugh Labrum and Savarin Amount Mallyon, the one to his great trouble and hindrance and the other to his game for Hugh LeBrun. Afterwards, Leveed and occasion saw was against him. But Savrin, the Malian continued ever after his loyal subject doing to him very agreeable surface as hereafter may appear.
So the account of the death of Prince Arthur that Shakespeare encounters then is deliberately here set up as a source of interpretive confusion. Writers make Sundari reports, some given account of a a bungled escape plan. Others about dying through natural causes. And, yes, others about John's own role in this. So writers make Sundram reports. What really happened? Only the Lord knoweth Arthur's death, thus gets to the heart of the historiographical enterprise.
Hollinshead admits that all we have is different reports. The truth. The event itself is fugitive and irrecoverable. And even though this is obviously the case with all historical events, it's here in the death of Arthur that it is foregrounded. Now, Shakespeare's work with this part of the source, I think is quite interesting to see. How does he absorb this sense of a composite and contradictory historical record onto the dramaturgy of an unfolding narrative play?
Or, to put it another way, how can the play respond to or translate this moment of historical uncertainty? Well, you might think that the sequence of events in the play around the death of Arthur that generated a few minutes ago go some way to explain this. Although the play doesn't quite give us the contradictory testimony about causation that The Chronicles acknowledges, it does muddy the waters about Arthur's death.
For one thing, Arthur's death is so heavily foreshadowed as to have really already happened right from the start of the play. We know Shakespeare's weakness for prattling young children. The historical author was 16 at the time of his death. But I think his presentation in this place suggests a younger child.
And so we know we know Shakespeare's weakness, such that we know really that if a young vocal, slightly precocious child is introduced into the play is generally in order that it can be murdered. Macduff Sun in Macbeth, Mimili, as in The Winter's Tale, the young princes in Richard the Third Arthur's death and is prefigure generically, at least for us who probably come to King John, which is not one of Shakespeare's best known or most popular plays after these more familiar examples.
But there are internal triggers for this inevitability to one of the most compelling speeches in King John is Constance's lament for her son, Arthur.
This is from Athletes in for grief, fills the room up of my absent child, lies in his bed, walks up and down with me, puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words, remembers me of all his gracious part, stuffs out his vacant garments with his form, thus have a reason to be fond of grief fare you well had you such a loss as I. I could give better comfort than you do.
It's a striking speech often picked up by biographic critics as a response to the death of Shakespeare's young son, Hamlet, in fifteen ninety six. Many of the datings of the play, the traditional date of the play is 50 Ninety-Six. Solely because of this reason, there's no other evidence for that. What was interesting here about it is that it actually pre-empts offers death. Constance's verbal lament and physical destruction is for a son who is taken in captivity, not a son who is dead.
And the fact that this moment is often elided with grief for a dad, Arthur, and criticism of the play makes clear how it functions politically anticipatory. We don't get another concern. Suppose Constance has got to do her grieving before she disappeared from the play. She is a past. King John's pragmatism is to get rid of characters when it's finished using them to get rid of them quite dispassionately,
which it does with Constance. So she's got to get it in early, I guess. But she's doing it here. The point is before Arthur has died. So in this, Constance's grief is like the other prophecies, omens and anticipations of the future of the play, perhaps most explicitly in the person of Peter of Pomfret, brought in to prophesy John's downfall. Arthur is already dead to the play at this point.
Then in a different version of his demise, which is analogous to those different narratives acknowledged in The Chronicles. We can see other almost deaths in the protracted story of office and across the scenes of the play, almost tortured to death by Hubert, reported as dead to John, mourned by the Lords before he is in fact, dead. This is the end of Pembrook. I'll go with the find the inheritance of a forced grave.
The blood which own the breadth of all this. I'll three foot of it does hold Bardwell the while. This must not be long. Sorry. This must not be thus born and heir long. I doubt. So these seem to me to be anticipatory versions of stories about historical narratives of Arthur's death, which are in some way the equivalent of the interpretative impasse. Shakespeare found in his Chronicle sources. The question of who kills off of that is not really clear.
And although John ends up somehow taking the blame, the play offers a number of opposing narratives, daringly juxtaposing chants, accident and malign agency in its depiction of Arthur on the walls. The stage direction for that foreseen three has enter Arthur disguised as a ship boy on the walls. As Avoda suggested, it's a puzzling turn of events. Firstly, why is Arthur disguised as a ship boy? There's no precedent in the sources and no particular reason for him to do so.
It's hard to tell quite where the scene takes place. According to the fiction of the play, this is somewhere in England. It's in the tower. In room. According to the historical sources that we just just heard. But neither location really explains the costume, nor does it explain why Arthur is dangerously on the walls of the prison town or castle. When the last time we saw him, Hubert had vowed to protect him.
But Arthur's death has been so foreshadowed in the play that it manages to come both as an inevitability and as a surprise. It's dramatically interesting in that it probably must use the upper stage in some way, the balcony or some similar space to indicate this dangerous elevation of Arthur at this point. So it's dramatically interesting in that use of the stage, but narratively anticlimactic since we already knew this was going to happen.
So there's something about a kind of rise and fall, which is both literal on the stage, which is something about the rhythm of the narrative of the play and which is a sort of their kassovitz kind of tragedy. No people in tragedy, people fall down. They don't usually mean they literally fall off of a wall and smash themselves on some stones underneath. But we do mean it here. And the scene has, of course, a kind of dark humour to it.
Arthur, teetering on the walls dressed as a ship boy is the play teetering on the edge of farce. Does the play drop also to the Stones at this point? And we can't really manage entirely straight face to tell a story in which someone who pretends he has killed someone comes to tell everyone he didn't really did it. And while he does so, discovers that they're all looking down at the mangled body of the supposed victim.
So the question of who kills Arthur is obscured by this curiously extended vision of his near death, fake death, resurrection and real death, which is of course, itself fake theatrical. It's hard to imagine a staging of the scene on the early modern stage, which makes the death of Arthur believable, which makes the drop from the walls believable.
Although some recent productions, what one of the RISC, for example, which gave it a kind of heart stopping, sort of sweaty palm version of Arthur walking right across the top of the stage. So if the question of who kills Arthur is muddy. So, too, is the issue of why he dies or at least what the consequences are. Critics, as I've said, often see the death of Arthur as the turning point in the play.
And it is to some extent the presenting reason, the presenting reason the Nobels have for deserting King John. But in what sense it brings about John's decline? I think it's questionable. Here, I want to just reach back to the issue of illegitimacy I discussed earlier if the character of the bastard and his acknowledgement as such in the play's very first scene set out King John's thoroughgoing challenge to models of patrilineal history.
Then he might also be seen to challenge models of historical sequence and causation. One of the ways King John seems to me a deconstructed kind of history play is that simple connexions of cause and effect are repeatedly disrupted or undermined. We expect the plot. One thing leading consequently inconsequentially to another from what we get is a story. One thing following sequentially onto another.
That's a distinction we've had before in these lectures from forced from me and Foster in aspects of the novel. And you'll remember that forces example in that case, which has become such a cliche of of narrative theory, is actually quite pertinent here. Remember, he gives us his example of a story. The king died and the queen died and his example of a plot. The king died and the queen died of grief. So the difference between plot and story is it's about why a death happens for foresta.
And that's the same here. The consequences of a death in our case, Arthuis are material to this discussion of King John. Does Arthur die and John fall because of it, i.e. a plot? Or does Arthur die and John fall, i.e. a story? As often in Shakespeare, I think we readers, we critics work hard to push story towards plot. So plot has a higher status for us than story. So we will often in is sort of interpose the causal the connective links which which make a plot from a story.
So we fill in causation to try and fill out a narrative of intent. So Arthur's death comes in at false in three. The play is coming towards its conclusion. It can be read as the catalyst for the nobles turning against King John. But in other ways, it doesn't seem to work really at all in King John as a plot admit, amid the confusion of the battle in Act five. John is persuaded to retreat to the abbey at Swines Head. He leaves the field complaining. Weakness possesses me.
And I am faint. Weakness possesses me. And I am faint. And then his enemies report that he had left the field so sick. So we think that John is in a decline of some of some sort here. But shortly afterwards, we hear from Hubert that the king is poisoned by a monk. And the bastard sort of standing in for the spectators at this point questions this rather improbable turn of events. Hubert confirms a monk, I tell you, I resolve resolved villain whose bowels suddenly burst out.
Now, this homicidal monk who has never heard of before, we never see and who apparently has no motivation beyond his own monkish villainy, is brought in by this plot simply to dispatch John. He's a kind of malign deus ex machina. The effects on John are rapid and irreversible. This is John's dying speech within me is a hell. And there the port poison is as a fiend, confined to tyrannise on unrepeatable, condemned blood. Now, why John's blood is condemnable is in particular is not made clear.
Nobody suggests in the play that this assassination is the consequence of anything John has done or part of a wider historical process. So there are lots of ways you could sort of make sense of this monk's actions. You could have said it was to do with John's attitude to the pope. He could have said he'd been put onto it by one of John's many enemies. There are lots of ways you could make make a plot out of that. But in fact, the play chooses not to.
So John's death is not caused by Arthur's death and it's not connected with Arthur, except perhaps in one way in the play's final scene. A brand new character enters in some ways, this has got to parallel with the discussion we had of Richmond in Richard the Third. But it's an even more pointed and belated introduction here in King John. Prince Henry, the son of John, is the self-styled Cygnet to this pale, faint swan.
Keeping Johns out of the frame until the players dying minutes certainly works to insulate him from its pervading atmosphere of ethical expediency and self-interest. But it also means that he's an entirely unknown quantity and unsettlingly hasty alternative to the power play of the preceding acts. Perhaps, though, Prince Henry is not really unknown.
It's not unreasonable to think that the second young child who like his predecessor in the play, Arthur, is characterised by weeping, will be played by the same actor who had fallen to his death from the walls in the previous act. Arthur thus rises to triumph over John, not causally, but in some sense, sequentially. Part of the strangeness of the structure of this play is the way an older generation gives way to the younger.
In a sequence in which only time not Merrett, not active causation governs the sequence. The question to who kills Prince Arthur? Already a fraught historiographical question in The Chronicles is given a new twist here in the planned performance. No. One, because he's not really dead. Just waiting backstage to put on a new costume and take up his place as the new king. But even this curiously theatrical sized version of regal succession is compromised in the play's final speech.
Inevitably, the last word goes to the bastard. That figure of compromised inheritance and disrupted lineage. He speaks the play's final words against the newly crowned Henry, who is weeping over the body of his father. When I leave it to you to think whether these last lines are ironic or straight, oh, let us pay the time. I'll try not to read it in a way which presupposes. I'll try and read it and stretch it forward.
Well, let us play. That is, pay the time but needful work since it has been before hand with our graves. This England never did nor never shall lie at the Proudfoot of a conqueror. But when it first did help to wound itself. Now these are princes are come home again. Come the three corners of the world in arms, and we shall shock them. Not shall make us rue if England to itself do rest.
But true. So focussed it on the death of Prince Arthur to try to analyse King John's pervading atmosphere of compromise in which the uncertainty about the rightful king cuts the play well loose from its ethical moorings.
But I've also wanted it to be a kind of case study about how Shakespeare adapt some of the questions of Tudor historiography, how prose history can be adapted into dramatic form, and how Hollin Chad's acknowledgement of competing historical narratives about the death of Arthur gets layered into the play's extended back and forth over why and how. And so what? Arthur dies. So this time next week, you might want to stay at home and listen to one of the previous lectures.
No lecture next week, but the week after that six week, we'll be discussing King Lear. And the focussing question I've got for King Lear is how sad is King Lear? Thank you.