"Madam, I was not old Sir Robert's son:
Sir Robert might have eat his part in me
Upon Good Friday, and ne'er broke his fast."
And it is quite in Shakespeare's spirit when the son, after her confession, thus consoles his mother:—
"Madam, I would not wish a better father.
Some sins do bear their privilege on earth,
And so doth yours."
In later years, at a time when his outlook upon life was darkened, Shakespeare accounted for the villainy of Edmund, in King Lear and for his aloofness from anything like normal humanity, on the ground of his irregular birth; in the Bastard of this play, on the contrary, his aim was to present a picture of all that health, vigour, and full-blooded vitality which popular belief attributes to a "Love-child."
The antithesis to this national hero is Limoges, Archduke of Austria, in whom Shakespeare, following the old play, has mixed up two entirely distinct personalities: Vidomar, Viscount of Limoges, at the siege of one of whose castles Richard Cœur-de-Lion was killed, in 1199, and Leopold V., Archduke of Austria, who had kept Cœur-de-Lion in prison. Though the latter, in fact, died five years before Richard, we here find him figuring as the dastardly murderer of the heroic monarch. In memory of this deed he wears a lion's skin on his shoulders, and thus brings down upon himself the indignant scorn of Constance and Faulconbridge's taunting insults:—
"Constance. Thou wear a lion's hide! doff it for shame, And hang a calf's-skin on those recreant limbs. Austria. O, that a man should speak those words to me! Bastard. And hang a calf's-skin on those recreant limbs. Aust. Thou dar'st not say so, villain, for thy life. Bast. And hang a calf's-skin on those recreant limbs."
Every time the Archduke tries to get in a word of warning or counsel, Faulconbridge silences him with this coarse sarcasm.
Faulconbridge is at first full of youthful insolence, the true mediæval nobleman, who despises the burgess class simply as such. When the inhabitants of Angiers refuse to open their gates either to King John or to King Philip of France, who has espoused the cause of Arthur, the Bastard is so indignant at this peace-loving circumspection that he urges the kings to join their forces against the unlucky town, and cry truce to their feud until the ramparts are levelled to the earth. But in the course of the action he ripens more and more, and displays ever greater and more estimable qualities—humanity, right-mindedness, and a fidelity to the King which does not interfere with generous freedom of speech towards him.
His method of expression is always highly imaginative, more so than that of the other male characters in the play. Even the most abstract ideas he personifies. Thus he talks (iii. I) of—
"Old Time, the clock-setter, that bald sexton Time."
In the old play whole scenes are devoted to his execution of the task here allotted him of visiting the monasteries of England and lightening the abbots' bursting money-bags. Shakespeare has suppressed these ebullitions of an anti-Catholic fervour, which he did not share. On the other hand, he has endowed Faulconbridge with genuine moral superiority. At first he is only a cheery, fresh-natured, robust personality, who tramples upon all social conventions, phrases, and affectations; and indeed he preserves to the last something of that contempt for "cockered silken wantons" which Shakespeare afterwards elaborates so magnificently in Henry Percy. But there is real greatness in his attitude when, at the close of the play, he addresses the vacillating John in this manly strain (v. I):—
"Let not the world see fear, and sad distrust,
Govern the motion of a kingly eye:
Be stirring as the time; be fire with fire;
Threaten the threatener, and outface the brow
Of bragging horror: so shall inferior eyes,
That borrow their behaviours from the great,
Grow great by your example, and put on
The dauntless spirit of resolution."
Faulconbridge is in this play the spokesman of the patriotic spirit. But we realise how strong was Shakespeare's determination to make this string sound at all hazards, when we find that the first eulogy of England is placed in the mouth of England's enemy, Limoges, the slayer of Cœur-de-Lion, who speaks (ii. I) of—
"that pale, that white'-fac'd shore,
Whose foot spurns back the ocean's roaring tides,
And coops from other lands her islanders,
... that England, hedg'd in with the main,
That water-walled bulwark, still secure
And confident from foreign purposes."
How slight is the difference between the eulogistic style of the two mortal enemies, when Faulconbridge, who has in the meantime killed Limoges, ends the play with a speech, which is, however, only slightly adapted from the older text:—
"This England never did, nor never shall,
Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror.
. . . . . . . .
Come the three corners of the world in arms,
And we shall shock them. Naught shall make us rue,
If England to itself do rest but true."
Next to Faulconbridge, Constance is the character who bears the weight of the play; and its weakness arises in great part from the fact that Shakespeare has killed her at the end of the third act. So lightly is her death treated, that it is merely announced in passing by the mouth of a messenger. She does not appear at all after her son Arthur is put out of the way, possibly because Shakespeare feared to lengthen the list of sorrowing and vengeful mothers already presented in his earlier histories.
He has treated this figure with a marked predilection, such as he usually manifests for those characters which, in one way or another, forcibly oppose every compromise with lax worldliness and euphemistic conventionality. He has not only endowed her with the most passionate and enthusiastic motherly love, but with a wealth of feeling and of imagination which gives her words a certain poetic magnificence. She wishes that "her tongue were in the thunder's mouth, Then with a passion would she shake the world" (iii. 4). She is sublime in her grief for the loss of her son:—
"I will instruct my sorrows to be proud,
For grief is proud, and makes his owner stoop.
To me, and to the state of my great grief,
Let kings assemble;
. . . . . .
Here I and sorrows sit;
Here is my throne, bid kings come bow to it.
Seats herself on the ground."
Yet Shakespeare is already preparing us, in the overstrained violence of these expressions, for her madness and death.
The third figure which fascinates the reader of King John is that of Arthur. All the scenes in which the child appears are contained in the old play of the same name, and, among the rest, the first scene of the second act, which seems to dispose of Fleay's conjecture that the first two hundred lines of the act were hastily inserted after Shakespeare had lost his son. Nevertheless almost all that is gracious and touching in the figure is due to the great reviser. The old text is at its best in the scene where Arthur meets his death by jumping from the walls of the castle. Shakespeare has here confined himself for the most part to free curtailment; in the old King John, his fatal fall does not prevent Arthur from pouring forth copious lamentations to his absent mother and prayers to "sweete Iesu." Shakespeare gives him only two lines to speak after his fall.
In this play, as in almost all the works of Shakespeare's younger years, the reader is perpetually amazed to find the finest poetical and rhetorical passages side by side with the most intolerable euphuistic affectations.