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The Quandary of Legitimate Succession
Much of the action in King John is animated by issues related to legitimate birth and the right to inheritance. The play’s opening scene quickly introduces the audience to two key examples. One example relates to an inheritance case King John is asked to adjudicate between Philip and Robert Faulconbridge. Though they share a mother, the men have different fathers. Philip is the older son, but he is also a bastard, which his brother says makes him unable to inherit. However, John explains that Philip’s illegitimacy isn’t a legal barrier to his inheritance, both because they share a mother and because the elder Robert Faulconbridge accepted each son as his own. Hence, even though Philip the Bastard is an illegitimate son, he remains a legitimate heir. The second example introduced in the opening scene relates to King John. In a way, his problem is the opposite of the Bastard’s. His biological legitimacy is not in question, but his legal claim to the throne is. When Richard the Lionhearted died without children, the throne should have gone to his next-oldest brother or his children. Legally, then, the next in line was Geoffrey and his son Arthur. But before he died, Richard skipped over Geoffrey by entailing the throne to John.
The legal issue with John’s claim to the throne is widely known and accepted by the characters in the play. John’s own mother, Eleanor, is quick to remind her son that his right is not particularly strong. However, the legality of his claim isn’t the only factor to consider. There is also the matter of fitness to rule. In this case, John is clearly the favorite. Whereas Arthur may have the strongest legal claim to the throne, it’s more challenging to argue that he would make a stronger king. His youth makes him both emotionally immature and politically inexperienced. Then there is the fact that Arthur himself has no interest in being king; he is caught up in the political aspirations of other people, including the French King Philip and his own mother, Constance. Adding further to the question of legitimacy is the matter of religion. When Pandolf enters the play, we are introduced to the power of the pope, whose blessing is clearly required to bestow full legitimacy on a king. Yet Pandolf is also a political schemer, as becomes evident when he convinces Louis to pursue the English throne for himself, adding further chaos to the existing quandary of succession.
The Haphazard Unfolding of History
Whereas Shakespeare’s better-known history plays are shaped by a powerful sense of destiny, King John offers a view in which historical events unfold in a haphazard and therefore meaningless way. Far from cohering in a way that would suggest the working of something like fate, history in this play is a matter of chaotic and fumbling tragedy. Perhaps the most striking example of the haphazard unfolding of history is the submerged plot related to the raid on England’s monasteries. Needing money to fund the war with France, King John dispatches the Bastard to ransack the monks’ coffers. The Bastard performs this task offstage, and though we briefly hear that some commoners are upset about how the monasteries have been treated, Shakespeare keeps the matter in the background. Only at the end does it resurface, when we learn that a monk has poisoned John. To be sure, there is a relationship of cause and effect at work in this example. However, John’s initial order to the Bastard and his death much later are not connected in such a clear and obvious way that would suggest some larger coherence. Rather, the relation is somewhat indirect.
It may seem odd to claim that King John puts forward a chaotic view of history, given that the play does include two significant examples of prophesy. Prophecies are common elements in Shakespeare’s history plays, and like most prophecies in literature, they tend to promise one outcome but then materialize in a surprising way. The fact that these prophecies always come true suggests the deeper workings of destiny. A similar argument could be made about the two prophetic events that appear in act 4, scene 2. The first is Peter of Pomfret’s prophecy that John will give up his crown on the next Ascension Day. The second is the ominous vision of five moons that betokens ruin for the kingdom. The first prophecy comes true, as John himself notes when, on Ascension Day, he gives up his crown—not to abdicate, but so that Pandolf can recrown him in the pope’s name. Yet this event ultimately proves insignificant, since the king dies very soon after. It’s less clear whether the second prophecy bears out. Though there is some political disorder in the final acts, the crisis of succession seems generally resolved at the play’s end. In the end, then, the play’s prophetic events do little to suggest a coherent order to history.
The Complexity of Maternal Love
Maternal love plays a forceful and complex role in King John. The first maternal figure we meet in the play is Eleanor, the widowed mother of King John. Although she knows John doesn’t have the legal right to rule, she supports his claim to the throne out of a loving faith that he is the best choice. John’s chief rival is Arthur, the son of Eleanor’s second-born, Geoffrey, to whom the throne should have passed upon the death of her eldest son, Richard the Lionhearted. Arthur’s youth and inexperience is one reason Eleanor prefers John. The other reason is that Arthur is the son of her hated daughter-in-law, Constance, whom Eleanor believes to be an ambitious woman who wants to benefit from her son’s rise to power. In this way, rival mothers and their rivaling loves become entangled with politics. As the audience soon learns when we meet Constance in act 2, Eleanor isn’t wrong to criticize her ambition. Constance has rallied the French king to her son’s aid in an attempt to amplify her power and make political connections. Furthermore, when Philip abandons Arthur’s cause, Constance laments the situation wildly, suggesting that the loss may be hers more than her son’s.
However, even if it’s colored by her own ambition, Constance’s love for Arthur is also genuine. Shakespeare makes this clear in her final scene in the play, where the loss of her son literally and figuratively undoes her. When Constance enters in act 3, scene 4, her hair is unbound—a typical dramatic sign of female madness. But Constance repeatedly insists that she has not lost her mind. Rather, she has been undone by grief, which is a perfectly reasonable response for a woman who has lost her child. Her emotional outbursts in this scene generate great pathos in the audience. An additional, and perhaps unexpected, element of maternal love in this play relates to the Catholic Church. When Pandolf arrives in France to chide John for his failure to install the new archbishop of Canterbury, he does so in the name of “the church, our holy mother” (3.1.141). As it turns out, the Church is a vengeful mother that, when disobeyed, responds furiously with “a mother’s curse” (3.1.257) that directly influences the political matters at hand.
