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Summary
John and Hubert meet on the battlefield. A messenger enters and reports that Louis’s expected reinforcements have been wrecked at sea. Feeling distraught and weak, the king departs to meet the Bastard.
Salisbury, Pembroke, and Bigot meet elsewhere on the field, astonished that King John’s forces have proven so powerful. Count Melun, a French nobleman, enters. He is wounded, and he urges the English lords to turn back from the path of their rebellion and seek mercy from John. Melun reports that if the French win that day, Louis has ordered the English lords to be beheaded. The English are astonished, but Melun insists that he is telling the truth; he will die soon and has no reason to deceive them. Salisbury believes Melun and thanks him. He urges his companions to return to John.
Meanwhile, at the French camp, Louis remarks on the strength of the English army. A messenger arrives to report Melun’s death, the English lords’ departure, and the sinking of his army’s reinforcements. Louis is dismayed at the news; with support no longer on the way, his chances of victory are now very slim indeed.
Night has now fallen, and Hubert and the Bastard encounter each other in the darkness. Hubert reports that the king has been poisoned by a monk. He adds that the English lords have returned to John, bringing his son Prince Henry. The Bastard replies that he has lost his men, who were drowned in the rising tide on the flatlands. He then asks Hubert to escort him to the king’s side.
Back at the English court, Prince Henry discusses his father’s health with Salisbury and Bigot. Pembroke reports that John can still speak. Henry mourns the fact that his father’s mind has been destroyed by the sickness, even while his body still seems in good health. John is brought in, babbling semi-coherently. The Bastard arrives, and he reports that, because his own forces drowned, Louis now approaches unimpeded. Just then, King John dies. Henry marvels at the transitive nature of the world, where a king can so quickly turn to “clay.” The Bastard swears to avenge the king’s death and, turning to the lords, orders them to assemble their forces to repel the French. However, Salisbury reports that Pandolf recently visited them with an offer of peace from the dauphin. Discussion then shifts to John’s burial, and the Bastard swears to serve Henry. The other lords follow suit. The Bastard speaks of the suffering they have endured and comments that England has only ever been in danger of conquest when it was divided against itself. Now that the lords have restored their allegiance to the English king, England is strong again.
Analysis
Throughout the play there have been several figurative references to sickness, in which characters have described the kingdom as suffering from a metaphorical illness. This motif returns in act 5, scene 3, where King John, in his distress, now suddenly claims to feel sick. He describes his discomfort in terms of a fever. At the beginning of this short scene he declares, “This fever that hath troubled me so long / Lies heavy on me. O, my heart is sick!” (5.3.3–4). Then, just a few lines later, he reemphasizes the same language: “Ay me! This tyrant fever burns me up” (5.3.14). At this point in the action, his illness seems primarily metaphorical and hence linked to the general feeling of anxiety he says has “troubled [him] so long.” However, this moment directly foreshadows the sickness that will shortly plague him and cause his death. As we learn in scene 6, John has been poisoned by a monk, which causes him to suffer an intense fever that he later describes in a near-crazed state: “There is so hot a summer in my bosom / That all my bowels crumble up to dust” (5.7.30–31). The figurative fever now manifests literally and kills the king.
Critics have sometimes noted the puzzling underemphasis of John’s ploy to ransack the monasteries, which appears only as a minor plot in this play. John initially called on the Bastard to collect the wealth of the monasteries back in act 2, and we later learn, briefly, that some commoners felt upset by this action. The minimal attention to this plot is curious, since it was one of the defining moments of King John’s reign—aside, of course, from the even more defining moment when he signed the Magna Carta, which is never mentioned at all in this play. However, an argument can be made that Shakespeare subordinates this plot as an intentional part of the play’s design. As shown in the debacle surrounding Arthur’s assassination, King John is not a man with much political foresight; he failed to anticipate the negative reaction of his courtiers and the commoners. It seems equally plausible that he foresaw no issues arising from the plunder of England’s monasteries. The poisoning therefore comes as a complete shock to the king, who had evidently thought it was safe to take shelter at an abbey. And yet the suddenness of the event speaks volumes about John’s lack of political savvy.
In the play’s final moments, the tragedy of the king’s death is balanced by the sense of a newly restored peace. With France’s army having backed down, everyone now eagerly pledges allegiance to Prince Henry, who is soon to become King Henry III. Additionally, Shakespeare punctuates the Bastard’s rise to prominence by granting him the final lines of the play. There, he discourses grandly on the importance of unity, which he says is the foundation of any kingdom’s strength. Now that unity has indeed been restored, he foresees that England will now enter a period of lasting peace. Of course, many of Shakespeare’s history plays end with a similar sense of future peace, though in most cases the audience recognizes such peace as being illusory. For instance, Henry VI, Part 3 ends with King Edward IV celebrating peace, not knowing that his ambitious brother Richard is lurking in the shadows, waiting to kill his way to the Crown. The dramatic irony admittedly isn’t as strong at the end of King John. Even so, a certain ambiguity hangs in the air, perhaps subtly anticipating the infamous Wars of the Roses during Henry VI’s reign, when increasing internal divisions will lead the kingdom to wrack and ruin.
