John; and immediately afterwards we come | Austria, the real dignity of strong natural to the formal assertion by France of the "most lawful claim" of "Arthur Plantagenet""To this fair island, and the territories; To Ireland, Poictiers, Anjou, Touraine, Maine." As rapid as the lightning of which John speaks is a defiance given and returned. The ambassador is commanded to "depart in peace;" the king's mother makes an important reference to the "ambitious Constance;" and John takes up the position for which he struggles to the end, "Our strong possession, and our right, for us." The scene of the Bastard is not an episode entirely cut off from the main action of the piece; his loss of "lands," and his "new-made honour," were necessary to attach him to the cause of John. The Bastard is the one partisan who never deserts him. The second act brings us into the very heart of the conflict on the claim of Arthur. What a Gothic grandeur runs through the whole of these scenes! We see the men of six centuries ago, as they played the game of their personal ambition-now swearing hollow friendships, now breathing stern denunciations;-now affecting compassion for the weak and the suffering, now breaking faith with the orphan and the mother;-now "Gone to be married, gone to swear a peace;" now keeping the feast "with slaughtered men;"-now trembling at, and now braving, the denunciations of spiritual power;-and agreeing in nothing but to bend "their sharpest deeds of malice" on unoffending and peaceful citizens, unless the citizens have some "commodity" to offer which shall draw them "To a most base and vile-concluded peace." With what skill has Shakspere, whilst he thus painted the spirit of the chivalrous times,-lofty in words, but sordid in acts,given us a running commentary which interprets the whole in the sarcasms of the Bastard! But amidst all the clatter of conventional dignity which we find in the speeches of John, and Philip, and Lewis, and affections rises over the pomp and circumstance of regal ambition with a force of contrast which is little less than sublime. In the second act Constance is almost too much mixed up with the dispute to let us quite feel that she is something very much higher than the "ambitious Constance." Yet, even here, how sweetly does the nature of Arthur rise up amongst these fierce broils,-conducted at the sword's point with words that are as sharp as swords,-to assert the supremacy of gentleness and moderation:— "Good my mother, peace! I would that I were low laid in my grave; This is the key-note to the great scene of Arthur and Hubert in the fourth act. But in the mean time the maternal terror and anguish of Constance become the prominent objects; and the rival kings, the haughty prelate, the fierce knights, the yielding citizens, appear but as puppets moved by destiny to force on the most bitter sorrows of that broken-hearted mother. We have here the true characteristic of the drama as described by the philosophical critic,-" fate and will in opposition to each other." Mrs. Jameson, in her very delightful work, 'The Characteristics of Women,' has formed a most just and beautiful conception of the character of Constance : "That which strikes us as the principal attribute of Constance is power-power of imagination, of will, of passion, of affection, of pride: the moral energy, that faculty which is principally exercised in self-control, and gives consistency to the rest, is deficient; or rather, to speak more correctly, the extraordinary development of sensibility and imagination, which lends to the character its rich poetical colouring, leaves the other qualities comparatively subordinate. Hence it is that the whole complexion of the character, notwithstanding its amazing grandeur, is so exquisitely feminine. The weakness of the woman, who by the very consciousness of that weakness is worked up to desperation and defiance, the fluctuations of temper and the bursts of sublime passion, the terrors, the impatience, and the tears, are all most true to feminine nature. The energy of Constance, not being based upon strength of character, rises and falls with the tide of passion. Her haughty spirit swells against resistance, and is excited into frenzy by sorrow and disappointment; while neither from her towering pride nor her strength of intellect can she borrow patience to submit, or fortitude to endure." How exquisitely is this feminine nature exhibited when Constance affects to disbelieve the tale of Salisbury that the kings are "gone to swear a peace;' or rather makes her words struggle with her half-belief, in very weakness and desperation! "Thou shalt be punish'd for thus frighting me, A widow, husbandless, subject to fears; through the medium of her own personal wrongs: "Good father cardinal, cry thou, amen, To my keen curses: for, without my wrong, There is no tongue hath power to curse him right." Reckless of what may follow, she, who formerly exhorted Philip, 66 Stay for an answer to your embassy, Lest unadvised you stain your swords with blood," is now ready to encounter all the perilous chances of another war, and to exhort France to fall off from England, even upon her knee "made hard with kneeling." This would appear like the intensity of selfishness, did we not see the passion of the mother in every act and word. It is thus that the very weakness of Constance the impotent rage, the deceiving hope become clothed with the dignity that in ordinary cases belongs to And, though thou now confess thou didst but patient suffering and reasonable expectations. jest I may not go without you to the kings. Const. Thou mayst, thou shalt, I will not go with thee: * * * here I and sorrows sit; Here is my throne, bid kings come bow to it." The pride of grief for a while triumphs over the grief itself: "Arm, arm, you heavens, against these perjured kings!" She casts away all fear of consequences, and defies her false friends with words that appear as irrepressible as her tears. When Pandulph arrives upon the scene, she sees the change which his mission is to work, only Soon, however, this conflict of feeling-almost as terrible as the "hysterica passio" of Lear -is swallowed up in the mother's sense of her final bereavement : "Grief fills the room up of my absent child, Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me, O Lord! my boy, my Arthur, my fair son ! My life, my joy, my food, my all the world! My widow-comfort, and my sorrows' cure!" Matchless as is the art of the poet in these scenes;-matchless as an exhibition of maternal sorrow only, apart from the whirlwind of conflicting passions that are mixed up with that sorrow ;-matchless in this single point of view when compared with the 'Hecuba' which antiquity has left us*, and with the 'Merope' which the imitators of the Greek drama have attempted to revive; * In the Troades' of Euripides. 7 the 66 -are we to believe that Shakspere intended | showing us, as it were, the sting which that our hearts should sustain this laceration, wounds, and the slaver which pollutes, of the and that the effects should pass away when venomous and loathsome reptile. The Constance quits the stage? Are we to believe "Come hither, Hubert. O my gentle Hubert, that he was satisfied that his "incidents We owe thee much"should be various and affecting," but "independent on each other, and without any tendency to produce and regulate the conclusion?" Was there to be no 66 unity of feeling" to sustain and elevate the action to the end? Was his tragedy to be a mere dance of Fantoccini? No, no. The remembrance of Constance can never be separated from the after-scenes in which Arthur appears; and, at the very last, when the poison has done its work upon the guilty king, we can scarcely help believing that the spirit of Constance hovers over him, and that the echo of the mother's cries is even more insupportable than the "burn'd bosom" and the "parched lips," which neither his "kingdom's rivers" nor the "bleak winds" of the north can "comfort with cold." Up to the concluding scene of the third act we have not learnt from Shakspere to hate John. We may think him an usurper. Our best sympathies may be with Arthur and his mother. But he is bold and confident, and some remnant of the indomitable spirit of the Plantagenets gives him a lofty and gallant bearing. We are not even sure, from the first, that he had not something of justice in his quarrel, even though his mother confidentially repudiates "his right." In the scene with Pandulph we completely go with him. We have yet to know that he would one day crouch at the feet of the power that he now defies; and he has therefore all our voices when he tells the wily and sophistical cardinal "That no Italian priest Shall tithe or toll in our dominions." But the expression of one thought that had long been lurking in the breast of John sweeps away every feeling but that of hatred, and worse than hatred; and we see nothing, hereafter, in the king, but the creeping, cowardly assassin, prompting the deed which he is afraid almost to name to himself, with the lowest flattery of his instrument, and By Heaven, Hubert, I am almost ashamed To say what good respect I have of thee-" king vanish. If Shakspere had not exercised make our flesh creep. The warrior and the his consummate art in making John move had made the suggestion of Arthur's death thus stealthily to his purpose of blood-if he what John afterwards pretended it was"the winking of authority "—the “humour” "Of dangerous majesty, when, perchance, it frowns," we might have seen him hemmed in with revolted subjects and foreign invaders with something like compassion. But this exhibition of low craft and desperate violence we can never forgive. At the end of the third act, when Pan dulph instigates the Dauphin to the invasion of England, the poet overleaps the historical succession of events by many years, and makes the expected death of Arthur the motive of policy for the invasion :— "The hearts Of all his people shall revolt from him, And kiss the lips of unacquainted change; And pick strong matter of revolt, and wrath, Out of the bloody fingers' ends of John." Here is the link which holds together the dramatic action still entire; and it wonderfully binds up all the succeeding events of the play. In the fourth act the poet has put forth all his power of the pathetic in the same ultimate direction as in the grief of Constance. The theme is not now the affection of a mother driven to frenzy by the circumstances of treacherous friends and victorious foes; but it is the irresistible power of the very helplessness of her orphan boy, triumphing in its truth and artlessness over the evil nature of the man whom John had selected to destroy his victim, as one "Fit for bloody villainy, Apt, liable, to be employed in danger." It would be worse than idle to attempt any lengthened comment on that most beautiful scene between Arthur and Hubert, which carries on the main action of this play. Hazlitt has truly said, "If anything ever was penned, heart-piercing, mixing the extremes of terror and pity, of that which shocks and that which soothes the mind, it is this scene." When Hubert gives up his purpose, we do not the less feel that "The bloody fingers' ends of John" have not been washed of their taint :“Your uncle must not know but you are dead," tells us, at once, that no relenting of John's purpose had prompted the compassion of Hubert. Pleased, therefore, are we to see the retribution beginning. The murmurs of the peers at the "once again crown'd,"-the lectures which Pembroke and Salisbury read to their sovereign,—are but the preludes to the demand for "the enfranchisement of Arthur." Then come the dissembling of John, "We cannot hold mortality's strong hand,”— and the bitter sarcasms of Salisbury and Pembroke: "Indeed we fear'd his sickness was past cure. Indeed we heard how near his death he was, Before the child himself felt he was sick." "This must be answer'd" is as a knell in John's ears. Throughout this scene the king is prostrate before his nobles;-it is the prostration of guilt without the energy which too often accompanies it. Contrast the scene with the unconquerable intellectual activity of Richard III., who never winces at reproach, seeing only the success of his crimes and not the crimes themselves, as, for example, his answer in the scene where his mother and the widow of Edward up braid him with his murders, "A flourish, trumpets! strike alarums, drums! Let not the heavens hear these tell-tale women Rail on the Lord's anointed." The messenger appears from France::-the mother of John is dead;-"Constance in a frenzy died;" the "powers of France" have arrived "under the Dauphin." Superstition is brought in to terrify still more the weak subject king, who is already terrified with " enemies" and "adverse foreigners." The "prophet of Pomfret " and the "five moons affright him as much as the consequences of "young Arthur's death." He turns upon Hubert in the extremity of his fears, and attempts to put upon his instrument all the guilt of that deed. Never was a more striking display of the equivocations of conscience in a weak and guilty mind. Shakspere is here the true interpreter of the secret excuses of many a criminal, who would shift upon accessories the responsibility of the deviser of a wicked act, and make the attendant circumstances more powerful for evil than the internal suggestions. When the truth is avowed by Hubert, John does not rejoice that he has been spared the perpetration of a crime, but he is prompt enough to avail himself of his altered position : : "O haste thee to the peers." Again he crawls before Hubert. But the storm rolls on. The catastrophe of Arthur's death follows instantly upon the rejoicing of him who exclaimed, “Doth Arthur live?” in the hope to find a safety in his preservation upon the same selfish principle upon which he had formerly sought a security in his destruction. In a few simple lines we have the sad dramatic story of Arthur's end : "The wall is high; and yet will I leap down:Good ground, be pitiful, and hurt me not!— There's few, or none, do know me; if they did, This ship-boy's semblance hath disguised me quite. I am afraid; and yet I'll venture it." his characters and situations to the empire How marvellously does Shakspere subject all of common sense! The Arthur of the old play, after receiving his mortal hurt, makes a long oration about his mother. The great dramatist carries on the now prevailing feeling of the audience by one pointed line : "O me! my uncle's spirit is in these stones." scene. If any other recollection were wanting, these | It is this instinctive justice in Faulconbridge, simple words would make us feel that John was as surely the murderer of Arthur, when the terrors of the boy drove him to an inconsiderate attempt to escape from his prison, as if the assassin, as some have represented, rode with him in the dim twilight by the side of a cliff that overhung the sea, and suddenly hurled the victim from his horse into the engulfing wave; or as if the king tempted him to descend from his prison at Rouen at the midnight hour, and, instead of giving him freedom, stifled his prayers for pity in the waters of the Seine. It is thus that we know the anger of "the distemper'd lords "is a just anger, when, finding Arthur's body, they kneel before that "ruin of sweet life," and vow to it the "worship of revenge." The short scene between Salisbury, Pembroke, the Bastard, and Hubert, which immediately succeeds, is as spirited and characteristic as anything in the play. Here we see "the invincible knights of old" in their most elevated characterfiery, implacable, arrogant, but still drawing their swords in the cause of right, when that cause was intelligible and undoubted. The character of Faulconbridge here rises far above what we might have expected from the animal courage and the exuberant spirits of the Faulconbridge of the former acts. The courage is indeed here beyond all doubt: "Thou wert better gall the devil, Salisbury: But we were scarcely prepared for the rush "If thou didst but consent To this most cruel act, do but despair, That ever spider twisted from her womb Put but a little water in a spoon, this readiness to uplift the strong hand in what he thinks a just quarrel,—this abandonment of consequences in the expression of his opinions,—that commands our sympathies for him whenever he appears upon the The motives upon which he acts are entirely the antagonist motives by which John is moved. We have, indeed, in Shakspere none of the essay-writing contrasts of smaller authors. We have no asserters of adverse principles made to play at see-saw, with reverence be it spoken, like the Moloch and Belial of Milton. But, after some reflection upon what we have read, we feel that he who leapt into Coeur-de-lion's throne, and he who hath "a trick of Coeur-de-lion's face," are as opposite as if they were the formal personifications of subtlety and candour, cowardice and courage, cruelty and kindliness. The fox and the lion are not more strongly contrasted than John and Faulconbridge; and the poet did not make the contrast by accident. And yet with what incomparable management are John and the Bastard held together as allies throughout these scenes. In the onset the Bastard receives honour from the hands of John,— and he is grateful. In the conclusion he sees his old patron, weak indeed and guilty, but surrounded with enemies, and he will not be faithless. When John quails before the power of a spiritual tyrant, the Bastard stands by him in the place of a higher and a better nature. He knows the dangers that surround his king "All Kent hath yielded; nothing there holds out But Dover castle: London hath received, Be stirring as the time; be fire with fire; |