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What now, my son! Have I not ever said
How that ambitious Constance would not cease
Till she had kindled France and all the world
Upon the right and party of her son? (1.1.31–34)
In the play’s opening scene, King John and his mother, Eleanor, discuss the news that King Philip of France has chosen to support Arthur’s rival claim to the English throne. Eleanor knows that John doesn’t have the legal right to rule, which, after her eldest son’s death, should have gone to her second son, Geoffrey, and his children. Even so, she has chosen to support John. Her choice may stem from the fact that Geoffrey has died, leaving behind a son she believes is too young and weak to rule. Yet it may also stem from her preference for her own child. This latter reading is supported by the lines quoted here, where Eleanor speaks critically of Arthur’s mother, Constance, whom she considers an ambitious woman who wants to ride her son’s coattails to power. Eleanor hates her daughter-in-law, and this hatred strengthens her allegiance to her own son.
If thou that bid’st me be content wert grim,
Ugly and slanderous to thy mother’s womb,
Full of unpleasing blots and sightless stains,
Lame, foolish, crooked, swart, prodigious,
Patched with foul moles and eye-offending marks,
I would not care, I then would be content,
For then I should not love thee; no, nor thou
Become thy great birth, nor deserve a crown.
But thou art fair, and at thy birth, dear boy,
Nature and Fortune joined to make thee great. (3.1.43–52)
Constance addresses these lines to her son, Arthur. This speech comes soon after she learns that King Philip has allied himself to King John and thereby abandoned his support for Arthur’s claim to the English throne. Her fury leads to this—and several other—emotional outbursts in which she laments their situation. Yet it’s noteworthy that, despite being said out of love, Constance’s words turn out to be quite harmful to Arthur. He listens quietly, weeping to himself as his mother says she wishes he were physically or spiritually deformed so she would love him less and therefore feel less pain at his ill fortune. Arthur clearly feels enormous pressure from his mother, who, seen from a certain vantage, may be talking to herself here rather than to her son. Indeed, her lament about his misfortune seems to be more about her own loss of opportunity.
I am not mad. I would to God I were,
For then ’tis like I should forget myself.
O, if I could, what grief should I forget!
Preach some philosophy to make me mad,
And thou shalt be canonized, cardinal.
For, being not mad but sensible of grief,
My reasonable part produces reason
How I may be delivered of these woes,
And teaches me to kill or hang myself.
If I were mad, I should forget my son,
Or madly think a babe of clouts were he.
I am not mad. (3.4.48–59)
In these lines, spoken during her final scene in the play, Constance responds to Pandolf’s assertion that she’s gone mad in the wake of Arthur’s capture by the English. She insists that she is perfectly sane, implying that the intensity of her grief is an entirely reasonable response to the loss of her child, whom she believes she’ll never see again. But the reasonable nature of her response is also the problem. She is, she says, so acutely “sensible of grief” that the only logical solution is to contemplate suicide. Even though such an extreme response may appear mad, it’s simply the result of the crushing pain of maternal love and loss.
