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Again: In the play the people of Angiers stoutly refuse to own either John or Arthur as their king, until the question shall have first been decided in battle between them; whereas in fact Anjou, Touraine, and Maine declared for Arthur from the first, and did not waver at all in their allegiance. The drama also represents the imprisonment and death of Arthur as occurring in England; while in fact he was first put under guard in the castle of Falaise, and afterwards transferred to a dungeon in the castle of Rouen, from whence he was never known to come out alive. These, however, are immaterial points in the course of the drama, save as the latter has the effect of bringing Arthur nearer to the homes and hearts of the English people; who would naturally be more apt to resent his death, if it occurred at their own doors. Other departures from fact there are, which may easily be justified, as being more than made up by a gain of dramatic truth and effect. Such, for instance, are the freedoms taken with Constance, who, in the play, remains a widow after the death of her first husband, and survives to bewail the captivity of her son and the wreck of his hopes; but who, in fact, after a short widowhood was married to Guy of Thouars, and died in 1201, the year before Arthur fell into the hands of his uncle. breach of history every way justifiable, since it gives an occasion, not otherwise to be had, for some noble outpourings of maternal grief and tenderness. And the mother's transports of sorrow might well consist with a second marriage, though to have represented her thus would have impaired the pathos of her situation, and at the same time have been a needless embarrassment of the action. It is enough that so she would have felt and spoken, had she been still alive; her proper character being thus allowed to transpire in circumstances which she did not live to see.

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But, of the justifiable departures from fact, the greatest consists in anticipating by several years the papal instigations as the cause of the war in which Arthur was taken prisoner. For in reality Rome had no hand in setting on

that war; it was undertaken, as we have seen, by Philip of his own will and for his own ends; there being no rupture between John and the Pope till some time after Arthur had disappeared. But the laws of dramatic effect often require that the force and import of divers actual events be condensed and massed together. To disperse the interest over many details of action involves such a weakening of it as poetry does not tolerate. So that the Poet was eminently judicious in this instance of concentration. The conditions of right dramatic interest clearly required something of the kind. United, the several events might stand in the drama; divided, they must fall. Thus the course of the play in this matter was fitted to secure as much of actual truth as could be told dramatically without defeating the purpose of the telling. Shakespeare has many happy instances of such condensation in his historical pieces.

The reign of King John was specially remarkable as being the dawn of genuine English nationality, such as it has continued substantially to the present day. And the faults and crimes of the sovereign seem to have had the effect of testing and so toughening the national unity; just as certain diseases in infancy operate to strengthen the constitution of the man, and thus to prepare him for the struggles of life. England was then wrestled, as it were, into the beginnings of that just, sturdy, indomitable self-reliance, or selfhood, which she has ever since so gloriously maintained.

The Poet's vigorous and healthy national spirit is strongly manifested in the workmanship of King John. Falconbridge serves as a chorus to give a right political interpretation of the events and action of the play. To him, John impersonates the unity and majesty of the nation; so that defection from him tends to nothing less than national dissolution. Whatever he may be as a man, as King Patriotism has no way but to stand by him at all

hazards; for the rights and interests of England are inseparably bound up with the reverence of his person and the maintenance of his title. The crimes of the individual must not be allowed to peril the independence and life of the nation. Thus, in Falconbridge's view, England can only rest true to herself by sticking to the King against all comers whatsoever. And such, undoubtedly, is the right idea of the English State, and of the relation which the Crown bears to the other parts of her political Constitution. No philosophy or statesmanship has got beyond Shakespeare in the mastery of this principle. And this principle is the moral backbone of the drama, however the poetry of it may turn upon other points.

As for the politics of the piece, these present a rather tangled and intricate complication, which it would hardly pay to trace out in detail; at least, the doing so would strike something too wide of my usual method and purpose in these discourses. Besides, the ground in this respect is well covered by Gervinus, who has worked through the process with great ability indeed, though, as it seems to me, at a rather unconscionable length.*

The characterization of King John corresponds very well, in the degree of excellence, with the period to which I have on other grounds assigned the writing. Much of it, and indeed nearly all, at least in the germs and outlines, was taken from The Troublesome Reign; and the use of

* Here is a brief portion: "John, imprudent once in resting on false supports, is so now in the wicked removal of weak enemies, and in the dangerous provocation of strong opposition. He contrives the murder of the harmless Arthur, and irritates the already-disturbed Church by fresh extortions. The legate Pandulf, a master of Machiavelian policy, watches these errors, and builds upon them the new unhallowed league between France and Rome; with cold blood he speculates how Arthur's death may be occasioned by a French invasion, and this again may be advanced by the accusation produced by the murder. This practical prophecy is fulfilled: the country becomes unruly: the King's evil conscience is roused; suspiciously he has himself crowned a second time, and this makes his nobles suspicious also. The murder of Arthur comes to their hearing; they revolt from the King. A new antinational league is formed between the English vassals on the one side and

the borrowed matter discovers a mark-worthy exercise of judgment in much retrenching of superfluities, in not a little moral purging and refining, in skilful recasting of features, and in many ennobling additions.

The delineation of the English barons is made to reflect the tumultuous and distracted condition of the time, when the best men were inwardly divided and fluctuating between the claims of parliamentary election and actual possession on the one side, and the rights of lineal succession on the other. In such a conflict of duties and motives, the moral sense often drawing sharply at odds with urgent political considerations, the clearest heads and most upright hearts are apt to lose their way; nor perhaps is it much to be wondered at if in such a state of things self-interest, the one constant motive of human action, gain such headway at last as to swamp all other regards. The noble and virtuous Salisbury successfully resists this depraving tendency indeed, yet the thorns and dangers of the time prove too much for his judgment. From the outset he is divided between allegiance to John and to Arthur, till the crimes and cruelties of the former throw him quite over to the side of the latter. Humanity outwrestles nationality in his breast, and this even to the sacrifice of humanity itself, as matters turn his scrupulous preference of moral to prudential regards draws him into serious error; which, to be sure, his rectitude of purpose is prompt to retrace, but not

France and the Pope on the other; and the French Dauphin prepares on his part a treacherous death for the traitors to England. Meanwhile the fearful and perplexed John loses his old courage and confidence so far, that he takes his land as a fief from the Pope, and enters into a shameful treaty of subjection to the most virulent of his enemies. The King has forgotten his former vigour, which the enemy has now learned from him; he turns his hardened zeal against poor prophets, only to benumb his superstitious fear; his energy is gone. The unnaturalness of all these complicated alliances is now speedily manifested; the league between England and the Papacy, that between the Papacy and France, that between France and the English vassals, all are broken up, without attaining the object of one of them: they change throughout into the natural enmity which severed interests necessitate."

till the mistake has nearly crippled his power for good. His course well illustrates the peril to which goodness, more sensitive than far-sighted, is exposed in such a hard tussle of antagonist principles. In the practical exigencies of life, doing the best we can for those who stand nearest us is often nobler than living up to our own ideal. So there are times when men must set up their rest to stand by their country, right or wrong, and not allow any faults of her rulers to alienate them from her cause. Sometimes the highest sacrifice which Providence requires of us is that of our finer moral feelings, nay, even of our sense of duty itself, to the rough occasions of patriotism. Is it that our own salvation may even depend on willingness to be lost for the saving of others? All this is rarely exemplified in Salisbury, who, by the way, was the famous William Longsword, natural son to Henry the Second, and so half-brother to John. It is considerable that our better feelings stay with him even when the more reckless spirit and coarser nature of Falconbridge carry off our judgment.

The King, as he stands in authentic history, was such a piece of irredeemable depravity, so thoroughly weakheaded, rotten-hearted, and bloody-handed, that to set him forth truly without seeming to be dealing in caricature or lampoon, required no little art. The Poet was under the necessity, in some sort, of leaving his qualities to be inferred, instead of showing them directly: the point was, to disguise his meannesses, and yet so to order the disguise as to suggest that it covered something too vile to be seen. And what could better infer his slinking, cowardly, malignant spirit, than his two scenes with Hubert? Here he has neither the boldness to look his purpose in the face, nor the rectitude to dismiss it; so he has no way but to "dodge and palter in the shifts of lowness": he tries by hints and fawning innuendoes to secure the passage of his thought into effect, without committing himself to any responsibility for it; and wants another to be the agent of

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