beautiful life is spilt without anyone or anything being the better for it. John dies in misery, but so does Constance, who is guiltless. "There is one end of one and all." A theologian would have his answer to the feelings raised by this heart-breaking spectacle, a modern pessimist would have his; but Shakspere's is equally remote from both. He simply shows us the world going on again, ready for a new departure; nor does any writer fill us with such a sense of the extravagance and the inexhaustibility of nature. Shakspere, however, did not write in order to evoke these moral reflections; he wrote in order to ease his mind of the burning poetry, the patriotism, the gorgeous scenery that crowded it. Nor does he ever supply us with direct choric meditation upon the religious issues of his dramas. It is very seldom that we seem to detect any of the characters speaking the whole mind of the author. Even his most reverend personages have to give and take like others, and we hear of them as fallible or grotesque. In Measure for Measure, "the old duke of dark corners," the agent of justice and redress, the cowled providence of the play, even he hears of himself on the lips of Lucio; and of Prospero himself we have the views of Caliban. In Shakspere, as in life, the wise never have it all their own way, and we are rather relieved that they do not. In King John there is a certain approach to a chorus in the person of the Bastard Faulconbridge. He is the keenest-witted and almost the only honest person in the play; an honest buccaneer, he worships "commodity" for himself; he is the loyal servant of the tyrant; he goes pillaging and blustering like any other buccaneer of his day. Yet no one else, unless it be the injured Constance, sees the wildly shameful and solemnly infernal injustice of Arthur's treatment by the kings. He cries— "Mad world! Mad kings! Mad composition!" And again 'From forth this morsel of dead royalty The life, the right, and truth of all this realm Yet the speaker goes on to bear his own part in the tragi-comedy; he identifies his "commodity" with his master's; loyalty and self-advancement work to one end; and at the close of the chaotic warfare, where justice seems nowhere, and righteousness fled to heaven, the Bastard reappears to speak for a moment with the heart of the lion his father, with the accent of courage, fidelity, and hope "And happily may your sweet self put on The lineal state and glory of the land! Nought shall make us rue If England to itself do rest but true." King John, though written before Shakspere had gone half-way through his poetic career, and long before he had entered upon the period of Othello and Lear, is in its way as passionately poetical as Romeo and Juliet, which is earlier yet. It is quite possible, indeed, to lay too much stress upon the different periods of Shakspere's genius. He had the power of saying great things from the first, and from the first he was ready to be interested in high passions and high actions. From the first also, no doubt, he was a patriot; and from the moment that he began to speak about England, he could not help his language rising to his theme. The peculiarity of King John is, that it is the first play in which both the personal and the patriotic interests are found at their height. In Richard III., which perhaps was written a year or two before, the interest is centred upon the title-character ; in Richard II., written about the same time as King John, the element of passion in comparatively feeble. But in King John we never know which to expect next, the thrill of patriotism or the thrill of pathos. We have— "This England never did, nor never shall, Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror But when it first did help to wound itself." But we also have Arm, arm, you heavens, against these perjured kings! A widow cries, Be husband to me, heavens !" in a strain that is no unworthy forecast of the passion of Lear "You heavens give me patience; patience I need! You see me here, you gods, a poor old man, As full of grief as age, wretched in both!" a piece of austerity which might have come from Sophocles. This play, we have said, was written before Shakspere was half through his poetic career; but its exact date is conjectural. The first edition in which it appears is the Folio of 1623, and the first allusion to it is found in the well-known list of Meres, in his Palladis Tamia, or Wit's Treasury, published twenty-five years before, in 1598. There is, however, certain internal evidence which tends to fix the date of its production, if not of its composition, about 1596; so that the plays nearest to it in time are the Merchant of Venice, Midsummer Night's Dream, and Richard II. But to gauge the force of this evidence we must remember the following facts about the origin of the play : In 1588, when the great Armada was defeated, there appeared a play in which Greene and other dramatists of his quality are credited with a share, called The Troublesome Raigne of King John of England. Full of patriotic touches, this old play was to furnish Shakspere with nearly the whole of the raw material for his King John. But when did Shakspere appropriate this material? Most probably he waited till 1596, eight years later; and the reason why he should have chosen that year must be sought in the national history. In 1596 the English fleet made a triumphant raid upon the town of Cadiz, and returned in August of the same year. It is very likely indeed that Shakspere thought of this expedition when he wrote the lines in the second act of our play, which begin "And all the unsettled humours of the land, Rash, inconsiderate, fiery voluntaries." The audience, with Cadiz in their minds, would have been stirred by these verses; and there was every reason why the poet should have chosen that year to put on the stage his transmutation of the old play. The patriotic moment had come round again; the blow to the Papist and the foreigner had been repeated; the hits against Rome, which appear in the old play, could be used again with fresh point. There was the same sigh of relief breathed as had been breathed in 1588 at the crippling of the hereditary foe; and the lofty closing pean of the older play "Let England rest but true within herself, And all the world can never wrong her state... If England's peers and people join in one, Nor pope, nor France, nor Spain, can do them wrong," could be echoed by Shakspere with a certainty of a response. King John, then, was probably produced in the late autumn or in the winter of 1596. There is one other piece of conjectural evidence worth naming. Shakspere's son Hamnet died in August of that year; and perhaps the lament of Constance over her son Arthur may owe some of its poignancy to this trouble. The Chronicles of Holinshed were the ultimate source for the facts of King John; but the old play furnished Shakspere with these facts already cast into rough dramatic form, and saved him mechanical labour. Some of his finest situations are borrowed from it, with very slight changes. Now and then he even borrows words. Nor is the old play unworthy of having been used by Shakspere. Tedious, rough, slipshod in style, and composite in authorship, it contains flashes of the fire which seems to have touched as with live coals from the altar the lips of even the least of the Elizabethans. No mere versifier, for instance, could have written "Welcome the balm that closeth up our wounds, Or, better still "Twice should not Titan hide him in the west, Controlled the manage of proud Angiers' walls, The Troublesome Raigne, therefore, is worth reading, not only as showing Shakspere's inimitable way of treating his materials, but for its own sake. It is fully reprinted in Mr. Fleay's erudite edition of King John. In teaching a historical play of Shakspere, it is as well |