On January 7, 1558, the English Middle Ages ended. On that day, the Duke of Guise defeated the English at Calais and reclaimed the city for the King of France.1 Mary I famously proclaimed that the loss was her deathblow and told her subjects that if they opened her corpse, they would find ‘Calais’ inscribed on the heart of her corpse.2 English monarchs had claimed territory in France since the Norman Conquest, and they had claimed the French Crown since 1328. Although English monarchs styled themselves Kings and Queens of France until 1800, the title became a romantic anachronism. Within a half-century after Mary’s death, English expansion shifted away from the European continent to the Atlantic and Indian Oceans.3 Losing France was an important precondition for England’s oceanic future, since it detached the country from the costly territorial wars that had shaped its foreign policy for centuries. Elizabeth’s forty-five-year reign witnessed the first political and economic phases of this transformation, and Shakespeare’s theater accompanied it with a vision of England’s new independence from an older European order.
Scholars have given Shakespeare a pivotal role in their accounts of the emergence of modernity from its medieval antecedents. By identifying the modern with the consolidation of divergent components within the nationstate, they often write as if English nation-building took place entirely within England. Doing so seriously distorts our understanding of what it means to be a nation. Shakespeare himself wrote within a broadly European context. He adapted continental sources for most of his comedies and tragedies, and even in his English history plays, he often depicts medieval political life in terms of conflicts between England and France. The narrative of modernity that his plays enact ends with a clearly bounded English state, but it begins with radically different models of sovereignty that are not nation-based, anglophone, or even insular. His history plays in particular invite us to interpret the emergence of modernity as a function less of the state’s increasing internal coherence than of its changing relationship to other European powers. In the process, the plays associate the end of the Middle Ages with the waning of dynastic and diplomatic practices that united ruling houses with conspicuous disregard for the cultural and linguistic characters of the territories they ruled. King John opens up enough rifts between medieval and early modern diplomatic practice to remind us that there has not always been an England as such, and that its political and cultural distinction from France was not an obvious truth but a historically contingent and ideologically loaded construction.
King John, which dramatizes England’s first major loss of French territory, can be read as his most complex commentary on his country’s sixteenth-century place in an emerging European state system.4 A major diplomatic revolution occurred in England’s relationship with France during Elizabeth’s reign. If Mary I was the last English monarch to hold land in France, Elizabeth I was the first to orchestrate a foreign policy without continental territorial ambitions.5 Rather than being an enemy, France became a qualified ally against Hapsburg expansion in Europe and the Atlantic. Elizabeth achieved this cautious alliance without contracting the kind of interdynastic marriage that had served as the lynchpin of European diplomacy since at least the tenth century. She certainly considered the possibility of such a marriage, and in the late 1570s came close to marrying the Duke of Alençon. But, in the end, she did not. The significance of her decision should not be underestimated. Rejecting a French marriage decisively removed England from the cycle of wars and treaties that, from a sixteenth-century perspective, compromised England’s independence. Above all, it enabled the eventual emergence of a national foreign policy detached from dynastic interests and shielded against the vagaries of biology.
The cultural fallout over England’s developing alliance with France, and more broadly, the shift from a dynastic to a state-based diplomacy surfaced strikingly on the English stage, where the new genre of the history play arose through revisionary recollections of the Middle Ages that commented implicitly on current events. One of the earliest plays in the genre, Shakespeare’s 1 Henry VI, for example, is redolent of Francophobia in its burlesque treatments of Joan of Arc and of Henry’s French consort, Margaret of Anjou, whose meddlings in English politics help trigger the Wars of the Roses.6 As Linda Gregerson has noted, such plays drive home a clear propagandistic message, one fully consonant with the opposition to the Anjou match voiced by John Stubbes, Sir Philip Sidney, and Edmund Spenser.7
But this conspicuously Francophobic topicality marks only the surface of the plays’ more important intervention in European diplomatic history. Like John Stubbs’ notorious Gaping Gulf, Spenser’s poetry, and Holinshed’s newly printed Chronicles on which they were based, the Elizabethan history plays redirected a discourse of foreign affairs once restricted to monarchs and their inner circle of advisors into a larger public arena. Traditionally, even Parliament avoided open discussion of the royal marriages that were the typical lynchpins of medieval peace settlements. Elizabeth made it clear that she did not want to see her Parliaments debate her marriage choices or questions about the succession. This underscores the revolutionary character of 1590s history plays as a medium that broadened the country’s interest in and knowledge of affairs of state. They mark an important stage in the diffusion of diplomatic literacy beyond the court, one with major implications for seventeenth-century politics.8
The diplomatic vision that these plays promote depended on a tendentious interpretation of the Middle Ages that contemporary medievalists are still working to overcome. The closer that writers drew to a concept of a nationstate in which sovereignty resided in the collective will of a people who shared a common culture and history, the more they read that concept back in the medieval past.9 Elizabethan writers narrated medieval events as if words like ‘England’ and ‘France’ possessed uncontested, transhistorical significance. Shakespeare’s history plays, for example, exploited the ambiguity of these words as designators of persons—‘France’ meaning the King of France and ‘France’ meaning the country across the Channel—to treat dynastic conflicts anachronistically as national ones. Dynastic intermarriage made it entirely possible that ‘France’—meaning a King of France—might have a legitimate claim to the English throne. But Shakespeare so closely associates ‘France’ with a distinctly foreign cultural geography that the idea of a Frenchman sitting on the English throne carried suggestions of complete political, legal, and social subjugation. French Kings ought to speak French and stay on their side of the Channel, and English Kings not only ought to speak English, but, like Shakespeare’s Henry V, should even have a hard time speaking French. But that is not how medieval dynastic politics worked.
No play exposes the contradictions between the expansionist continental agendas of medieval monarchs and Elizabeth’s defensive, even isolationist one more dramatically than King John. Critics have often commented on the play’s representational instabilities. King John is so contradictory in terms of plot, characterization, tone, and apparent political direction that it poses unique challenges to directors and actors. As Jean Howard and Phyllis Rackin note, ‘every attempt to resolve the action or make sense of it is immediately frustrated by the moral ambiguities of an episodic plot where success and failure ride on the shifting winds of chance.’10 The play seems to be moving in two different directions at once, toward a castigation of John and his associates as corrupt and toward an endorsement of them as defenders of England against foreign threats. The bastard Falconbridge, for example, begins as a vice figure driven by self-interest, but ends up as the quintessential English patriot boasting of his country’s independence: ‘Nought shall make us rue | If England to itself do rest but true’ (5.7.117–18). Nothing in the plot accounts for the change. Shakespeare’s portrayal of King John is just as contradictory. He appears as a child murderer with dubious claims to the throne, but he also champions England’s independence and denounces the Pope in soundly patriotic, albeit anachronistically Protestant, language: ‘no Italian priest | Shall tithe or toll in our dominions’ (3.1.153–4). John is simultaneously devious and incompetent, a usurper and a patriot, a murderer and a proto-Protestant.
While King John’s contradictions cannot be explained on the basis of its characters’ psychological developments, they do organize themselves around a central ideological tension between the dynastically motivated diplomacy of the Middle Ages and an emergent state-based diplomacy that would become one of the hallmarks of modernity. King John reminds us that the contradictions inherent in early modern state development did not manifest themselves only internally as the conflict between rival sectors of the emergent nation. They also manifested themselves in the relationships between and among dynastic states that experienced the modernizing process of consolidation and bureaucratic centralization at different rates and in radically divergent ways.
At the heart of King John’s contradictions is a very odd ideological feat: it turns what might look like a national disaster—the loss of England’s French territories—into a national triumph. It privileges the collapse of John’s trans-channel Angevin imperium as the beginning of England’s history as a fiercely independent nation standing against the other countries of Europe. This felix culpa is the paradox on which most of the play’s representational contradictions finally rest. The play confuses us because it presents John’s dynastic catastrophe—his loss of the massive territories consolidated by his father Henry II’s marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine—as the birth of a culturally, linguistically, and politically coherent England. In doing so, it also presents the felix culpa of John’s reign as an imperfect pretext for the happy losses of Elizabeth: the fall of Calais, her failure to marry the Duke of Anjou or any other continental suitor, and her de facto abandonment of dynastic politics.
To make sense of Shakespeare’s interventions in King John, I want to turn first to the Angevin world that his play represents. Nothing could have contrasted more emphatically with the highly centralized Tudor monarchy confined to the British archipelago than the sprawling trans-Channel constellation of kingdoms, duchies, counties, and fiefdoms claimed by John, his father Henry II, and his elder brother Richard I.11 England’s Henry II was born in what is today modern France. He inherited titles not only to his family’s duchy of Anjou but also to the duchy of Normandy and to the counties of Maine and Tourraine. He also achieved one of the Middle Ages’ most brilliant territorial alliances by marrying Eleanor of Aquitaine, the heir to most of France’s southwestern quarter. He then successfully pressed his claims to England and Ireland. Combined with shakier holds on Brittany and Toulouse, these lands gave Henry II the largest land mass controlled by a western European ruler since Charlemagne.12
Historians still struggle to give Henry’s assemblage of territories and subjects a name that does not impose on it anachronistic understandings of sovereignty, nationhood, colonization, and empire.13 To avoid the anachronistic implications of words like ‘nation’ or ‘empire’ in reference to the Angevin possessions, I will follow the example of the thirteenth-century chronicles, who spoke of Henry II’s imperium.14 Nothing united the Angevin territories into anythng remotely resembling a modern nation. They lacked a common language, political administration, legal system, military organization, coinage, and even foreign policy. ‘King of England’ was the first of Henry II’s titles, but only because a kingship conveyed greater heraldic glory than a dukedom. Unlike the kings in Shakespeare’s two tetralogies, Henry II was a French-born and French-speaking noble identified with the langue d-oïl culture of northern France.
Although Henry’s immediate successor Richard I was born in Oxford, he was arguably more francocentric in orientation than any other English monarch. As a small child, he moved to Aquitaine, where his mother Eleanor proclaimed him duke in 1174 and where he imbibed the Poitevin culture of troubadours in all its emphatically un-English richness. He succeeded his father as king of England in 1189, but spent only six months of his eventful ten-year reign on English soil. Much to the irritation of his subjects in England who had to help pay his bills, Richard spent most of his reign as a Crusader in the Middle East and as a prisoner in Germany. He died from gangrene after a minor skirmish in the Limousin and was buried, like his parents, at Fontevrault Abbey in Anjou. He asked that his heart be removed and buried not in England but in the Norman capital of Rouen as a final reminder of his fundamentally French orientation.15
Richard’s death led to a succession crisis that is the focus of Shakespeare’s play. Both Richard’s brother John and his nephew Arthur of Britanny—the son of Richard’s deceased elder brother Geoffrey—claimed title to the Angevin imperium. Precisely because John had been a younger son and never expected to rule, he had spent more of his time in England—the less politically significant portion of the realm—than in France. His greater familiarity with English domains helped to make him the preferred choice of the English barons, while Arthur was the preferred choice of barons in France. Although the conflict was always one over seigneurial prerogatives and allegiances rather than anything like modern national identities, this territorial accident had important consequences for later historiography, including the composition of Shakespeare’s play. John eventually lost everything on the French mainland, with the exception of Gascony, to the expansionist Capetian king Philip Augustus. While Philip Augustus emerged as the most powerful king in Europe, John ended his reign fighting off an invasion of England itself by Philip’s son, the future Louis VIII. John thus found himself in the dubious role of a King of England in the sense of someone who, unlike his father, ruled nothing but England and its western neighbors Ireland and Wales.16
Had Louis conquered England, the Capetians would have ruled exactly the same imperium that John’s Angevin ancestors had assembled. John himself died of dysentery during the campaign, but his leading supporters drove out the French and established John’s son Henry III on the throne for an almost sixty-year reign. Although the English would continue to assert claims to Gascony and other parts of France, and actually took much of the country during the Hundred Years War, John’s debacle marked the end of a truly trans-Channel imperium. When later Plantagenet kings like Edward III and Henry V reconquered territory that John lost, they were perceived primarily as English conquerors, not as French magnates with legitimate claims.
Throughout much of the period between John’s 1216 death and Mary I’s 1558 loss of Calais—in other words, as long as English monarchs still considered themselves entitled to lands in France—writers portrayed the Angevins favorably. Ranulf Higden’s assessment of Richard I was typical: the English had as much right to boast of Richard the Lion-hearted as the Greeks to boast of Alexander, the Romans of Augustus, the Bretons of Arthur, and the French of Charlemagne.17 Holinshed cited Richard ‘as a notable example to all princes’ and Speed honored him as ‘a noble prince’ who ‘showed his love and care of the English nation as also of Justice itself’.18 While medieval writers were a little more mixed in their treatment of Henry II and John, the Reformation turned both into heroes. Extirpating the cult of Thomas à Becket allowed propagandists to recuperate his murderer, Henry II, as a kind of proto-Protestant. John Bale and John Foxe honored John as a proto-Protestant martyr who suffered excommunication for his defiance of Innocent III over the appointment of Stephen Langton as Archbishop of Canterbury.19
But by the final years of Elizabeth’s reign—and several decades after the end of any real territorial ambitions on the Continent—admiration of the Angevins and their imperium yielded to contempt. Shakespeare’s contemporary Samuel Daniel condemned Richard as an absentee landlord who
exacted and consumed more of this kingdom than all his predecessors of the Normans had before him, and yet deserved less than any, having neither lived here, neither left behind him any monument of piety or any other public work, or ever showed love or care to this Commonwealth, but only to get what he could get from it.20
Shakespeare’s King John occupies a similar transition point in Angevin historiography. As a Tudor writer, Shakespeare stops short of the anti-monarchical republicanism that informed later negative accounts of John’s career. His target is not monarchy per se, but a monarchy that privileges dynastic interests over the welfare of a new kind of political entity: English subjects imagined as members of a distinct nation. In writing King John, Shakespeare brought a proto-nationalist historiography to bear on a dynastic imperium that subsumed the linguistic and cultural divisions that, by the late sixteenth century, had become aligned with the nation-state. By centering the plot on the succession contest and John’s subsequent loss of French territories, Shakespeare transformed John’s story into a meta-narrative about the clash between medieval dynasticism and a nascent understanding of Europe as a set of autonomous, competing states. In losing France, John fails as a medieval dynast. But in that failure, he opens the possibility for a new England, a fiercely independent nation proudly defying its European neighbors.
This historiographical meta-narrative about England’s emergence as an independent power in which politics, culture, language, and geographical space align underlies the play’s notorious inconsistencies in plot and characterization. When John, the Bastard, and their other allies epitomize the dynasticism that Shakespeare anachronistically associates with a betrayal of English interests, they are villains. When they champion those interests, they are heroes. More than any other Shakespearean history, King John is concerned less with individual characters than with England, its integrity as a political entity, and its place within an emerging European system. As the action unfolds, characters do not mature or develop in psychologically consistent ways. But England does. It outgrows the dynasticism that Shakespeare repudiates as one of the Middle Ages’ most dangerous legacies.
Whereas Foxe and Bale transformed John’s story into a condemnation of the medieval Church, Shakespeare uses it to condemn medieval diplomacy. The dramatic intrigue that unfolds in Acts I—III between Eleanor of Aquitaine, Constance of Brittany, and Blanche of Castile indicts interdynastic marriages that violated the boundaries that had become significantly more aligned by the late sixteenth century with national states. The succession crisis that opens the play comes about through a kind of matrimonial excess that binds French and English, Angevin and Capetian interests together in an explosive combination. Richard I’s death results in two claimants to the Angevin possessions. Eleanor of Aquitaine has one surviving son from her marriage to Henry II: John. But Arthur of Brittany, the son of John’s deceased elder brother Geoffrey and Constance, also has claim. From the play’s perspective, Angevin marriage diplomacy has created an imperium that is neither culturally, legally, nor politically coherent. Writing at times as if thirteenth-century succession principles were more stable than they actually were, Shakespeare suggests the trans-Channel titles belong by dynastic right to Arthur of Brittany. But he also suggests that Arthur is too francocentric in orientation to serve as a proper English king.
Throughout the play, the critique of interdynastic marriages manifests itself in a pervasive distrust of women as the vehicles, and sometimes the negotiating agents of such alliances.21 John and Arthur appear as men excessively dominated by their respective mothers, Eleanor of Aquitaine and Constance of Brittany. As long as both women are alive, John acts primarily as the inheritor and defender of a politically unstable French territorial empire. Matters become even more confusing when he negotiates an interdynastic marriage between his niece Blanche of Castile and the Dauphin, the heir to the French throne. But after he disclaims that treaty, and after Eleanor and Constance both die, John appears in the last two acts as a legitimate defender of England itself from foreign aggression. The disappearance of all three women—Eleanor, Constance, and Blanche—complements a shift from England’s initial entanglement in confusing continental alliances to its emergence as a coherent island kingdom. The play’s last two acts are insistently masculinist and homosocial in their direction.22 England establishes its independence as a sovereign power with the passing of Constance and Eleanor, and of the Angevin heirs they championed, Arthur and John. When Henry III triumphs at the end of the play surrounded by his English lords, the realm has escaped French and female domination.
Katherine Eggert has identified the fantasy of a realm governed by a powerful, charismatic king as symptomatic of a larger cultural disillusionment with Elizabeth I in the final decade of her reign. While Eggert centers her discussion primarily around a reading of Shakespeare’s Henry V, King John concentrates the history plays’ general anxieties about women’s rule on the specific problem of the foreign consort. One of the traditional justifications for interdynastic marriages was that women would use their natural powers as mediators to cultivate peace between the former belligerents, their husbands’ families and their own families of origin. Many historical queens fully embraced this role. Women like Marguerite d’Anjou, Isabel of Bavaria, Catherine de Medici, Henrietta Maria, and Marie Antoinette strove to foster benevolent relations between their countries of origin and the countries where they reigned as queens consort.23 Yet the dubious reputations that many of these women earned by such efforts suggest the political risks inherent in the role. What one faction welcomed as queenly mediation, another might condemn as foreign meddling. The more seriously a queen consort acted as an agent of reconciliation, the more she might be suspected of working for the enemy.
Throughout King John, Shakespeare uses the personal predicaments in which Eleanor, Constance, and Blanche find themselves to register the perceived inadequacy of interdynastic marriage as a diplomatic practice. Eleanor, whose marriage to Henry II epitomized the Angevin territorial expansion, finds herself as the mother of one claimant to the Angevin-English throne, King John, and the grandmother to the other, Arthur of Brittany. Although Shakespeare might have made her preference for an English king (John) over a Breton duke (Arthur) a point of English honor, Eleanor’s championship actually undermines the legitimacy of John’s rule.
In the opening scene, Eleanor’s behavior blurs what looks like a simple contrast between English and French claims. As long as only the male characters speak, French arrogance serves as a foil to English integrity:
As King of England, John acknowledges the rights of the King of France to rule within his territory. The Chatillion, or French envoy, seems about to return the courtesy, but then snubs John with the insinuation that his ‘borrowed majesty’ is really usurpation. Just when the contrast between English dignity and French impertinence seems to anticipate Henry V, however, Eleanor’s private conversation with John suggests that the French have the better case in their championship of Arthur:
KING JOHN Our strong possession and our right for us.
ELEANOR Your strong possession much more than your right,
Eleanor uses the language of conscience, heaven, and right only to ironize them in supporting the King’s strong but ethically problematic possession.
The more Eleanor speaks, the more she dissociates sympathy for John as an English king from respect for custom, law, and honor. Instead of fulfilling the traditional queenly role of mollifying hostilities, she exacerbates them. Like Lady Macbeth, Eleanor unsexes herself by helping John to destroy Arthur. The more she parodies the role of a protective mother in championing John’s illegitimate claims, the more she plays a perverse, and ultimately murderous, grandmother toward Arthur. After capturing Arthur and separating him from his mother, John assures him that his ‘grandam’ Eleanor loves him and that he himself will cherish him as dearly as a father (3.3.3, 4). Addressing Arthur tenderly as her ‘little kinsman’, Eleanor than pulls him aside for a private ‘word’ (3.3.18). But this apparent affection is merely a screen: Eleanor distracts Arthur so that John can plot his murder with his henchman.
As villainous as Eleanor and John prove to be, Constance and Arthur are not wholly sympathetic. In terms of the proto-nationalist vision that colors Shakespeare’s recreation of the Angevin past, a King of England ought to be unambiguously English. Arthur of Brittany’s status as a protégé of the Capetian King of France compromises his dynastic legitimacy. Shakespeare goes out of his way to introduce this conflict between dynastic and proto-nationalist canons of legitimacy, since the historical Arthur only claimed the Angevin territories on the French side of the Channel. By casting him as a legitimate but essentially foreign heir to the English throne, Shakespeare carries dynastic logic to what in the sixteenth century seemed a nightmarish conclusion: England’s possible reduction to a French satellite.
Just as one foreign mother, Eleanor, exacerbates John’s tyranny, another foreign mother, Constance, undermines Arthur’s credibility by embedding him in alliances with continental powers. John is corrupt and increasingly tyrannical, but Shakespeare identifies him primarily with England in his opposition to King Philip of France. Arthur may have a better claim to Angevin imperium, including England, but he depends completely on Philip and his imperial ally, the Duke of Austria. Constance’s first lines in the play thank France’s ally Austria for menacing not only John but England, imagined as a culturally and geographically independent power:
To the extent that Constance pleads for her son’s just dynastic inheritance, her gratitude is understandable. But Austria couches his offer of assistance to John entirely as an attack on England. Shakespeare builds Austria’s description of the country with its chalk cliffs spurning ‘the ocean’s roaring tides’ around the same isolationist topoi that he used in John of Gaunt’s speech in Richard II. But instead of speaking as a patriotic Englishman, Austria speaks as a foreigner intent on humbling England and its fiercely independent islanders. He is determined to crush the pride with which England ‘spurns back the ocean’s roaring tide’ and violate its ‘water-walled’ security. Even though Arthur has a legitimate claim to the throne, the dramatic context makes it patently clear that his kingship would reduce England to a puppet realm dominated by foreigners.
Despite all her maternal protestations, Constance of Brittany never worries that France and Austria’s patronage of Arthur might ultimately deprive him independence as an English sovereign. The alacrity with which she accepts their aid suggests either that she is naive or that she shares their fundamental disregard for English liberties. The historical Constance had diplomatic and genealogical ties with Britain. Although her father Conan IV was a Breton, her mother Margaret was a Scottish cousin of Henry II. But instead of using such connections to give Constance an English aura, Shakespeare ignores them. As sympathetic as Constance becomes as the mother of a murdered son, she shows no loyalty to England, a country she has never seen.
Throughout the misogynistic opening acts of King John, the presence of foreign dowagers complicates an already complicated succession question by blurring thirteenth-century vocabularies of dynastic right with a sixteenth-century discourse of national honor. To the extent that the play identifies Arthur as Richard the Lion-Hearted’s heir, John is a usurper. John’s mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, never lets us forget that fact, and her murderous connivance heightens his stigma as a usurper. But even John’s continental enemies refer to him as the King of England, in contrast to Philip of France, and in general he carries an aura of Englishness that Arthur, his Breton rival, lacks. Arthur’s mother, Constance, is potentially sympathetic as the mother of a son who is eventually murdered. But her transports and outbursts of grief and fury—so loved by Victorian audiences—undercut her moral authority by suggesting female intemperance and irrationality. More importantly, she exacerbates Arthur’s foreignness by encouraging his alliances with England’s traditional enemies, including the man who murdered Richard the Lion-Hearted. The misogyny inherent in both Eleanor’s and Constance’s characterizations reinforces the play’s running critique of medieval diplomatic convention. The tangle of gender, dynastic interest, and national loyalty ultimately indicts more than the meddling of two ambitious mothers. It suggests a fundamental inadequacy in the system of interdynastic marriages that established sovereign authority across the linguistic and cultural frontiers that, by the late sixteenth century, were important components of an emerging sense of the nation. King John develops the catch-22 choice between Arthur, a legitimate but effectively French heir, and John, an English usurper, as an inevitable consequence of the fevered dynastic politics that first created the Angevin imperium.
John and Philip temporarily resolve the conflict over the succession through a formal treaty epitomizing the mélange of national and dynastic interests that Shakespeare stigmatizes as inherently unstable. The 1200 treaty of Le Goulet developed from a plan first proposed to establish peace between Richard I and Philip II by marrying the Dauphin, the future Louis VIII, to one of Richard’s Spanish nieces.24 Richard died before the deal was completed, but Philip and John revived its essential features, including the Spanish marriage, a year later. Eleanor of Aquitaine journeyed to Spain to select one of her granddaughters for the match. After rejecting the elder Urracha on the grounds that her name would sound strange to northern French speakers, Eleanor settled instead on Blanche of Castile. Under the terms of the treaty, Philip acknowledged John as King of England, Duke of Normandy, Count of Anjou and Maine and all other Angevin territories on either side of the Channel. Philip also repudiated Arthur’s claim to all territories beyond his native Brittany, which he was to hold henceforth solely as a vassal of King John. John in turn gave the Dauphin the territories of Issoudun, Graçay, and portions of Berry as a dowry for Blanche. He also surrendered the Vexin, a contested portion of Normandy, directly to Philip.
Nothing about the Treaty of Le Goulet should have prevented it from establishing peace between the belligerents, except that neither Philip nor John was fully in control of his own realm. The langue d’oc regions to the south were especially fractious. When the Lusignan barons of Limoges rebelled against John, they appealed to Philip for assistance, which he readily gave. The war between the French and English kings resumed, and it never really ended. John scored a few major victories, but the French finally drove the English across the Channel and later invaded England itself with the ostensible aim of assisting English rebels allegedly suffering under John’s tyranny.
The Treaty of Le Goulet thus marked only a short respite in the troubles between the French and English Crowns that dated back to the reigns of Henry II and Richard I and that continued into the reign of John’s son, Henry III. But in King John, Shakespeare rewrites Le Goulet as a major turning point in the narrative, the beginning of the end of England’s territorial confusion with France.25 Even within Shakespeare’s fiction, the treaty initially makes both political and, at least to some extent, moral sense. An unnamed Citizen of Angiers first proposes it as a way of preventing John and Philip from destroying the city when its citizens refuse to acknowledge either Angevin claimant as its sovereign.26 Up to this point in the play, the Citizen has been a sympathetic character voicing the honest quandary of the city’s residents in their inability to choose between the rival claimants. Just at the point when cataclysm seems inevitable, he introduces the possibility of an interdynastic marriage as a way of staving off disaster. Shakespeare presents the Citizen as the consummate diplomat who finds a way to mediate seemingly irreconcilable positions in the interest of ‘peace and fair-faced league’ (2.1.427). Even the circumstance that other writers sometimes foregrounded as the central injustice of such treaties—the bride and groom’s incompatibility—fails to be a problem. The Dauphin Lewis and his Spanish-Angevin bride Blanche fall conveniently in love with each other at first sight.27
Yet the Citizen’s description of a negotiated settlement as ‘fair-faced’ league hints at a kind of hypocrisy that the play eventually stigmatizes as an inevitable component of any diplomatic exchange. Falconbridge sums it up in his role as comic chorus: ‘I was never so bethumped with words’ (2.1.466). The treaty-making exposes diplomacy as a kind of theater, yet another art that Shakespeare associates with the seductions and duplicity of language. As much as Shakespeare invites us to sympathize with the citizens of Angiers, their solution substitutes self-interest for a commitment to royal legitimacy. They do not care that the treaty excludes Arthur from his just inheritance; all they are interested in, albeit understandably, is their city’s safety.
By exposing John, Eleanor, and even Philip’s commitment to dynastic aspiration, the deal that the Citizen brokers occasions Falconbridge’s paean to commodity:28
Medieval diplomatic theory upheld treaty-making as a quasi-divine intervention in human affairs with the goal of establishing the Peace of Christendom. But as Falconbridge notes, there is nothing divine about this particular treaty. John has simply cut his losses in a vain effort to retain some French territory. Philip, who affected the play’s greatest show of sanctity by pretending to be ‘God’s own soldier’, driven by ‘zeal and charity’ to fight in Arthur’s interest, emerges as a hypocrite. Just as much as John, he has surrendered himself to ‘Commodity’, the insistently secular self-interest and expedience that Falconbridge sees as the actual ground of diplomacy.
In King John, the treaty is immoral and politically naive. Shakespeare drastically exaggerates the amount of land that John gives away as a dowry: ‘Then do I give Volquessen, Touraine, Maine, | Poitiers, and Anjou’ (2.1.527–8); the historical John only ceded one of these territories, the Volquessen, or Vexin. The deal falls apart one scene later, when Philip succumbs to papal pressure to repudiate the excommunicated King of England. Even one of the few good things that the treaty accomplishes, the happy union between Blanche and Lewis, takes a disastrous turn when Blanche finds herself torn between her conflicting loyalties to the belligerents: ‘Which is the side that I must go withal? … | Whoever wins, on that side shall I lose’ (3.1.327, 335). She cannot be faithful to her French husband, Lewis, without betraying her English uncle John, and she cannot support her uncle without violating the integrity of her marriage.
Blanche’s predicament exactly mirrors that of the citizens of Angiers. Like them, she cannot side unambiguously with either side of the quarrel. In short, the treaty fails to resolve anything.29 Unlike Eleanor and Constance, the younger Blanche does not appear as a meddling, domineering mother. But even as misogyny yields to pathos, Shakespeare continues to develop his critique of interdynastic marriage as a basis of European statecraft. The play’s few innocent characters, like Blanche and the citizens of Angiers, find themselves trapped as pawns between the rival powers. Blanche’s tragedy in particular suggests that traditional diplomacy is not only corrupt, hypocritical, and ineffectual, but also destructive in its impact on the men and women whose lives are brokered by unscrupulous dynasts. The predicament in which Blanche finds herself serves as a synecdoche for the dangers inherent in the marital diplomacy that first brought about the Angevin confusion of French and English interests. The old dynastic, trans-Channel imperium denied its subjects the possibility of full political and even psychological coherence by demanding loyalty to sovereigns, and sometimes even multiple sovereigns, whose aspirations did not coincide with their subjects’ own welfare.
The treaty’s failure signals the beginning of John’s collapse and the end of the Angevin imperium. Having given up the Angevin heartlands of Maine, Anjou, and Touraine, John soon finds himself driven out of France altogether and retreating to England. His murder of Arthur is a pyrrhic victory, since the crime so alienates him from his English subjects that they rebel against him and encourage a French invasion to expel him from the throne.
In terms of the play’s central paradox, however, the invasion also allows John at last to appear as an unambiguously English king rather than as a trans-Channel dynast. Instead of compromising England’s independence through treaties with Frenchmen, he and his retainers find themselves fighting to preserve England itself. The Dauphin Lewis is no Henry Bolingbroke. In swearing allegiance to him, Salisbury, Pembroke, and the other rebels betray not only their king but their country. If they placed the Dauphin on the English throne, he would eventually rule a Capetian imperium that mirrored its Angevin predecessor and reproduced its instabilities. Once more, one man would find himself in the impossible position of heading a vast collection of kingdoms, duchies, counties, and provinces on both sides of the Channel with no common linguistic, cultural, or political traditions. Once again, the only basis for such a conglomeration of polities would be the fortunes of interdynastic marriage. As Lewis himself proclaims, ‘I, by the honor of my marriage bed, | After young Arthur, claim this land for mine’ (5.2.93–1). The only thing that might justify his de facto annexation of England to the French throne is his marriage to Blanche, a Spanish woman descended from an Angevin king. His ambitions carry the logic of interdynastic marriage to its conclusion: a French seizure of the English throne.
The proto-nationalist language dominating the play’s final acts suppresses the fact that the men occupying the English throne since the Conquest were arguably more French then English. This convenient amnesia establishes an anachronistic distinction between the components of John’s realm on opposite sides of the Channel. Surrendering Anjou, Maine, Touraine, and the Vexin might have been a strategic error and even a humiliation, but it left English sovereignty—imagined as something that both embraces and transcends the personal authority of the English monarchy—intact. The same would not be true if Lewis were to take England itself. Shakespeare imagines that as an ultimate national catastrophe that would surpass anything yet suffered under John’s incompetent and tyrannical regime.
In warding off the invasion, Falconbridge and the other Angevin supporters appear less as John’s partisans and more as defenders of an English nation imagined as entirely distinct from the Angevin imperium. When Falconbridge confronts Lewis and the papal emissary Pandulph, his predictions of an English victory anticipate the full-bodied patriotism of Henry V:
Falconbridge uses hyperbole and sharp antitheses to augment the force of his boast: what could be more tactically futile than a French assault on English soil, since John has punished the French not just on French soil, but in the private chambers of their own homes? The language is so charged that it skirts over the fact that John has shown no evidence of valor. Just when did his ‘victorious hand’ chastise the French in their own chambers? That might have been said of the historical John after his success at the battle of Mirabeau, but that was an unusual bright spot in a dismal military career.30 In Shakespeare’s version, Mirabeau matters primarily as the site of Arthur’s capture. The boyduke’s subsequent murder rests uneasily beside Falconbridge’s paternal image of John as an eagle protecting its nest. But such objections matter little in the face of a French invasion. What Falconbridge offers is less an accurate recollection of John’s reign than a celebration of him as an embodiment of England’s independence as a sovereign nation.
Falconbridge, in fact, must work hard to keep John from spoiling the patriotic fantasy.31 In return for the promise of a negotiated peace, for example, John surrenders his crown to Pandulph and then receives it back again as a token that he holds his ‘sovereign greatness and authority’ from the Pope (5.1.4). Falconbridge repudiates this gesture and its implications of a sovereignty contingent on papal favor:
In yet another burst of familiar Elizabethan jingoism, Falconbridge spurns the papal legate and the effeminate French alike for insulting a warlike English nation. Like similar passages elsewhere in Shakespeare’s histories and other Elizabethan plays, the speech opts for war over peace in strikingly gendered language that discredits anything short of an ultimate military victory as a failure of English masculinity.
Falconbridge’s militarism finally carries the day. After a monk conveniently poisons John, England is freed from feminine and effeminate influences and can bask in the wholly masculine authority of Henry III. Henry inherits only a fraction of his father’s original imperium, but nobody minds. In proclaiming that ‘England never did, nor never shall, | Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror’ unless it somehow betrays itself, Falconbridge ends the play on a cautiously triumphant note. What anxiety he might have about the future centers on England’s internal welfare and not its pretensions to a continental imperium. John’s French losses are his son’s gain. Freed from the encumbrances of a French apanage, Henry III is a wholly English king whose relationship to the Continent is military and defensive. Shakespeare never mentions his French mother Isabelle d’Angoulême, or the fact that John’s courtship of her triggered a major revolt among his French barons. Nor does he say anything about Henry’s langue d’oc wife Eleanor of Provence or about the Savoyard and Lusignan relatives who dominated his court. Shakespeare writes instead as if John’s reign marked an absolute separation of French and English interests that created England’s national sovereignty.
King John thus transforms the political tragedy of the last Angevin king into an etiology for England’s place within a European community of nation-states. From the play’s perspective, England’s greatness depends on its insularity. It must remain both militarily and diplomatically impregnable, ‘That waterwalled bulwark, still secure | And confident from foreign purposes’, whose fierce independence the Duke of Austria and other French partisans so bitterly resent. If this popular diplomatic vision radically rewrote the medieval history that Shakespeare encountered in Holinshed and other Tudor chronicles, it also projected an interpretation of contemporary politics that rested uneasily beside Elizabeth’s foreign policy, especially for the first two-thirds of her reign. She was finally no more fully ‘confident from foreign purposes’ than the historical Henry III. Although she gradually accepted the loss of Calais, she had opened her diplomatic career at Cateau-Cambrésis with a desperate effort to retain it. Over the next several decades, she entered into serious negotiations to establish an alliance with France based on yet another Anglo-French marriage, the exact kind of interdynastic union that, according to Shakespeare, had entangled French and English interests throughout the Middle Ages.
Those marriages failed to come about, possibly more through diplomatic chance than through monarchical deliberation. But by the time King John was first staged and Elizabeth was in her last decade, she had accepted the role of the fiercely independent Virgin Queen and escaped the xenophobic misogyny that the play concentrates on Eleanor of Aquitaine and Constance of Brittany. In King John, women must disappear before Henry III can step into his role as an uncompromised defender of English interests, because they are all foreign consorts binding England’s destiny to continental intrigues. In order for Elizabeth to maintain the good will of Shakespeare and his audience, she did not have to disappear, but she did have to ward off the contaminating legacy of Eleanor of Aquitaine and other medieval queens. In the process, Shakespeare and his queen gave birth to the possibility of a modern European state system, in which countries would no longer relate to each other as branches of an extended dynastic family but as independent sovereign states. It would take a series of European civil wars and revolutions before that model could be fully established throughout the Continent, but Elizabeth’s reign and Shakespeare’s theater of state mark an important moment in its prehistory.
