King John, page 36
138 Makes nice of is not fastidious about
stay … up support
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133 misplaced John] Rowe; mis-plac’d-Iohn F
140 So be it The equivalent of ‘Amen’. Pandulph uses the Geneva translation of ‘Amen’ in arguing for the divinely ordained eventuality of Arthur’s demise, an odd choice for a Catholic prelate
146 lays you plots lays strategems by which you will benefit, devises plans for your advantage rather than his own
147–8 Cf. 4.2.104–5, ‘There is no sure foundation set on blood, / No certain life achieved by others’ death.’ Noble compared Genesis, 9.6, ‘Whoso shedeth mans blood, by man shal his blood be shed.’ The figure used is antimetabole (the repetition of words in a converse order thereby sharpening their sense). See Oxf1
149 borne carried out; with a pun on ‘born’ (so evilly begotten)
152 check challenge, attack (see 2.1.123n.)
reign rule; with a pun on ‘rein’ = hold back, restrain (hence playing on check). A check-rein is a strap which prevents a horse from lowering its head (see OED combinations for ‘check’).
153–9 No … John Pandulph’s predictions come true at 4.2.182–6. Cf. Holinshed, 166a.
153 exhalation comet; meteor
155 customed customèd
156 pluck away go beyond (in order to find the deeper significance)
his its
157 meteors any bright phenomenon appearing in the sky, thought to be portentous (as opposed to the natural exhalation in 153); cf. 1H4 2.4.310–23, ‘do you see these meteors? Do you behold these exhalations? … What think you they portend?’
prodigies portents
158 Abortives monstrous births
159 denouncing calling down
161 hold … prisonment i.e. John will consider himself secure so long as Arthur is imprisoned.
hold consider, believe
himself John
his Arthur’s
165 his John’s
166 kiss … change embrace new-found opportunity
167–8 John’s subjects will find ample reason for rebellion in his bloody deeds. See Dent, F244, ‘I sucked (picked) not this (To suck, pick) out of my fingers’ ends’. See also Ard2: ‘“To pick out of (one’s own) fingers’ ends” = to use one’s mother-wit about [cf. Gammer Gurton’s Needle: ‘I picke not this geare, hearst thou, out of my fingers endes; / But he that hard it told me’ (v.ii); … Shakespeare departs from this use. Perhaps he knew the Heroicall Devises of C. Paradin (1591; S.R. Aug. 1590) in which a full-page picture of a hand with needles under the fingernails and blood streaming forth is explained: When Dionysus the Tyrant was expelled, his daughters were ravished, then put to death “by driving sharpe needles or pinnes under the nayles of their fingers” (p. 126). Shakespeare has a tyrant-revolt context, alters a set phrase, and ll. 166, 167–8 seem to follow Paradin.’
167 matter (1) reason, ground for doing something (OED n.1 13); also suggesting (2) corrupt matter, pus (OED n.1 4)
169 Methinks I see Pandulph parallels John of Gaunt in the way he introduces his vision of the future, ‘Methinks I am a prophet new inspired’ (R2 2.1.31).
hurly tumult, commotion, strife
on foot having begun
173 Offending charity sinning against Christian love; Honigmann sees a possible allusion to the Roman Catholic belief that ‘closing the monasteries ends all charity’. Following Onions, he notes also E.K.’s gloss in S.C., that ‘“sweete Saint Charitee” was the Catholiques comen othe”.’ Cf. Ophelia’s Valentine’s Day song and its lyric ‘By Gis and by Saint Charity’ (Ham 4.5.58).
174 call decoy bird, decoy or call-bird (as in bird-hunting); call-to-arms. OED n. 3c cites this line.
175 train attract, entice, allure
176–7 little snow … mountain Cf. Dent, S595, ‘Like a snowball, that rolling becomes bigger’.
179 wrought shaped, made
their of the English
180 top-full of offence brimful of grievances, i.e. John’s crimes
181 whet on arouse, incite; cf. 3H6 1.2.36, ‘And whet on Warwick to this enterprise’.
182 Strong reasons echoing Pandulph’s strong matter in 167
makes singular verb after a plural subject (see Abbott, 333, 335); could be understood as ‘makes for’
4.1.0.1 Executioners Ard2 notes Shakespeare’s changing of Holinshed’s ‘tormentors’ to Executioners, thereby increasing their criminal function.
1–5 This indirect method of capturing Arthur only adds to the poignancy of the unjust scenario operative here. Hubert by himself is sufficient to bind the boy. The increased number of would-be torturers intensifies the sense of terror and injustice.
1 irons ‘instruments used for branding or cauterizing’ (OED n. 8). Klause notes parallel images in two works of Southwell, where there are ‘redd hott yrons’ (Epistle, 19v, 82v, 199v) as well as a reference to blinding by the burning out of eyes (126v); cf. also the plan to remove Mary Queen of Scots, with ‘Irons … hot that were layd in the fier to … give the Queene of Scots her deaths wound’ (Supplication, 40). No production is recorded as giving Arthur auburn hair to match the colouring of the politically analogous Mary.
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180 offence.] Ard2 (Knight); offence, F 4.1.0.2] Oxf
2 arras hanging screen of rich tapestry fabric, formerly placed round the walls of household apartments, often at such a distance from them as to allow of people being concealed in the space between (OED 2). See Polonius in Ham 3.4.6ff.
5 chair In the RSC Stratford-upon-Avon (2000) production this chair had already served as a throne and would become a litter for the dying John. Its meaning here is a seat of torture, which should be a seat of power. Indeed, John’s seat of power is for him not free from mental torment.
6 warrant This entire scene of the ‘murder’ of an innocent rival royal draws upon R3 1.3, particularly with its reference to the warrant needed by the Executioners headed to the Tower for the murder of the innocent Clarence. The word warrant itself echoes 2.1.116 and 3.1.184.
8 Young lad How old is Arthur? Historically, he was at least 15. In the play, if he is a lad he is more than a child and less than a young man. Eleven seems about right, paralleling as it does rather elegantly the age of Henry III when he succeeds his father, John, and still allowing for the poignancy felt by Constance at Arthur’s anticipated loss. OED lad n.1 2 quotes Latimer in 1552: ‘First he is a childe; afterward he becommeth a ladde; then a yong man, and after that a perfect man.’
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7 scruples! Fear] Rowe; scruples fear F 7 SD] Ard2 subst.
10 As little prince ‘Considering my great title, heir to the crown of England, I am at present as little a prince as may be’ (Ard1).
11 sad sober, rather than our modern depressed, but here both are appropriate
16 wantonness caprice, whim (OED 1g, citing this instance); that is, depressed by amorous frustration in the manner of the Rosaline-besotted Romeo, or indeed by actual overindulgence
By my Christendom ‘as I am a Christian’ (OED Christendom 1b, citing this line)
17 So if
kept sheep an unkingly desire earlier expressed by Henry VI in 3H6 2.5.43
20 My uncle The term of relationship reminds us of the situation in R3 3.1.101ff., where nephew Edward and uncle Gloucester are each ‘afraid of me, and I of him’ (21).
practises plots, lays schemes or plans, esp. for an evil purpose (OED v. 9)
23–4 I would … son The poignancy of this hypothesis reminds the audience of the fact that Arthur long ago lost his father, Geoffrey, and for all the support of his mother presumably feels that loss acutely; it also reminds the reader of how unusual a need this is in the canon, Hamlet apart, given the frequent and significant absence of mothers in Shakespeare’s plays.
25 prate idle talk. Cf. 2 Murderer’s reply to Gloucester and the Duke’s concern that Clarence’s eloquence will move the killers to pity: ‘Tut, tut, my lord, we will not stand to prate’ (R3 1.3.349).
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23 indeed] F2; in deede F 25, 32 SDs] Capell
27 be sudden echoing exactly Gloucester’s command to Clarence’s killers, ‘be sudden in the execution’ (R3 1.3.345)
sudden prompt, immediate (OED a. 3a)
dispatch make away with, kill (him) (OED v. 4)
29 sooth truth
30 watch echoing with ironic force Hubert’s own use of the word as a command to the executioners at 5
31 warrant guarantee; evoking the Executioner’s use of the word at 6
32–3 bosom … Arthur Mistress Quickly may have been partly recalling these lines as well as the notion of the Roundtable in her celebrated wise error in H5 2.3.9–10.
33 rheum OED 1b defines as poetical, ‘Used for: Tears’, citing R2 1.4.6–9, ‘the northeast wind … Awaked the sleeping rheum and so by chance / Did grace our hollow parting with a tear.’ The tears seem to be Hubert’s, as he responds to the love and vulnerability of Arthur, but it is not impossible that the tears are Arthur’s, which, perceived by Hubert, prevent the torture/murder; Hubert’s mine (36) would indicate that the tearful passion is catching. If we accept the rheum as belonging to Hubert, then it is moisture growing towards fully formed tears, which will subsequently drop / Out (35–6). Ard2 sees a pun on ‘room’: ‘Arthur’s words take room in Hubert’s bosom (l. 32), so that no room for the idea of torture remains (l. 34).’
34 dispiteous pitiless, merciless (OED a. 2, citing this instance)
torture personified
35 be brief be quick. Evidence of KJ as a subsequent stimulus to Shakespeare’s imagination occurs when Othello, another would-be killer, one troubled with the rheum and embarrassed at his tearfulness, urges Desdemona to be brief in her prayers, after having made much ado about a handkerchief.
36 eyes … tears The sacrificing (and cannibalizing) Miriam in Nashe’s Christ’s Teares, referring to her six-year-old son as an ‘infant’, distinguishes between her eyes and her hands (hands which are called ‘executioners’: ‘Myne eyes are womanish, my hands are manly. Myne eyes will shed teares … they will regard … the tender youth, the quiet lying like a Lambe’ (Works, 2.72, 75).
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33 SD1] Rowe subst. SD2] Rowe
42 knit tied, bound
handkerchief Handkerchiefs are significant in Shakespeare. Arthur’s is described by its origin, ‘a princess wrought it me’, and Othello’s similarly, ‘a sibyl … sewed the work’ (Oth 3.4.72–4). Arthur is here in the nurturing role of Desdemona. Nashe’s Unfortunate Traveller has one of the disputants observed by Jack Wilton (the latter has cast considerable influence on the character of the Bastard) ‘wipe his mouth with his handkerchief’ (Works, 2.250).
46 watchful minutes Beaurline notes use at R2 5.5.50–2.
47 Still and anon continually
heavy time Cf., again, Clarence, the innocent royal victim, recalling another conversation with the agent of his troubles, in which they ‘cited up a thousand heavy times’ (R3 1.4.14), where ‘heavy’ means ‘important’, ‘grave’, while Arthur’s heavy, as OED a.1 V 19 states, citing this line, is ‘moving slowly, sluggish’.
48 grief recalling his mother’s elaborate personification of the idea in the previous scene, 3.4.93ff.
49 good love generous deed, act of kindness (Cam2); favour (Oxf1).
love loving service (Riv2)
50 lain Braunmuller notes that F’s ‘lyen’ is paralleled in Ham 5.1.163 in Q2 but not in F, and also the implication that ‘Arthur and Hubert, prison and jailor, shared a room, or as Elizabethan custom had it, a bed.’
* * *
38 effect.] Rowe; effect, F 50 lain] F4; lyen F
52 sick service If taken as a compound expression the meaning here is ‘service to a sick man in his bed-chamber’ (Ard1). The expression is an abbreviation for ‘at your service when you are sick’. Cf. torture at 34 being shown the door from the rheum/room.
53 crafty feigned, duplicitous. Cf. Northumberland in 2H4 Ind.37 lying ‘crafty-sick’.
54–64 cunning … innocence The sequence of handkerchief, cunning, put out, tears, quench and innocence appears in Oth 3.4 and 5.2, leading to the murder of the innocent Desdemona.
57 The phrasing is repeated in the Bastard’s concluding speech/aria at 5.7.112–13, ‘This England never did, nor never shall / Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror’.
58 sworn yet another of the double-binding oaths in the play
60 iron age Ovid writes in the first book of the Metamorphoses, the favourite classical text of the recidivistic Shakespeare, of the increasingly negative succession of ages from gold to silver to bronze to iron: ‘Of yron is the last / In no part good and tractable as former ages past. / For when that of this wicked age once opened was the veyne / Therein all mischief rushed forth, then Fayth and Truth were faine / And honest shame to hide their heades: for whom stopt stoutly in, Craft, Treason, Violence, Envie, Pryde, and wicked Lust’ (Golding, 1.143–8). That the torturing implements should themselves be of iron is therefore only appropriate.
61 heat heated; a common past participial abbreviation in Shakespeare. See Abbot, 342. Recent editors note Malone’s illustration from the Geneva version of Daniel, 3.19: ‘hee charged and commaunded that they should heate the fornace at once seuen times more than it was wont to be heat.’ There may be/may have been an optimistic stimulus to the audience’s response to Arthur’s situation with this episode narrated by Daniel of the innocent Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego who survive binding and being put in the ‘hote fyrie fornace’ by King Nebuchadnezzar.
63 quench Note the interlinked vocabulary of tears, quench, fire, innocence, and the previous rheum, handkerchief, brief as evidence of Shakepeare’s subsequent autoplagiarism in Othello. See 54–64n.
*his its. Capell was the first to correct F’s ‘this’. Perhaps the ease with which h-, th- could be misread in secretary hand created the problem (RP).
* * *
63 his] Capell; this F
64 matter … innocence water as the constituted material of Arthur’s tears, the sign of Arthur’s gentleness
matter Dyce’s conjecture of ‘water’ is especially attractive, drawing out the image of fire extinguished in tears.
66 But for containing only because it contains (Riv2)
68 An if if
70–1 somewhat elliptical for ‘I would not have believed him; I will believe no tongue but Hubert’s’ (Ard1)
72 out extinguished; see OED a. 22a, but many editors suggest ‘extracted’ (OED a. 19). The former fits well with the notion of eyes being ‘quenched’ (63).
75 *boist’rous-rough Theobald first added a hyphen to create the compound expression. In the previous scene Pandulph describes Arthur’s fate at the hands of John with the same term: ‘A sceptre snatched with an unruly hand / Must be as boist’rously maintained as gained’ (3.4.135–6) (noted by Beaurline); boist’rous means ‘violent’ or ‘violently fierce’ (cf. 3H6 2.1.70–1, ‘O Clifford, boist’rous Clifford, thou hast slain / The flower of Europe for his chivalry’); later in KJ (4.1.94), ‘painfully rough’. In Golding’s analysis of the Iron Age the winds are described as ‘boystrous blasts’ (1.66). The many references to the sea and its turmoil include ‘the shipman’ who hoists his sails in the midst of new-found confusion, which may have prompted Shakespeare to have Arthur, the victim of iron age behaviour, choose his ship-boy’s semblance (4.3.4).
* * *
64 matter] water (Dyce2) 67 stubborn-hard] Theobald; stubborn hard F 71 forth!] Ard2; foot: F SD1] Ard2 SD2] Capell subst. 74 SD] Oxf 75 boist’rous-rough] Theobald subst.; boistrous rough F
76 stone-still common Elizabethan expression earlier used by Shakespeare in Luc to describe Collatine, ‘Stone-still, astonished with this deadly deed’ (1730).
79 quiet … lamb Editors note this proverbial expression (Dent, L34), suggestive of both innocence and sacrifice, as frequent in Shakespeare. Nashe’s Miriam in Christ’s Tears describes her six-year-old son’s attitude as ‘the quiet lying like a Lambe’ (Works, 2.75).
84 within possibly back behind the arras from which they have just come (see Within the arras, 2), but more likely back to an inner room
let … him ‘trust me to deal with him’, as in TN 2.3.130–1, ‘For Monsieur Malvolio, let me alone with him’ (Ard1)
85 from … deed The Executioner in his revulsion is like his predecessor the Second Murderer of Clarence in R3 1.4.27ff. Smallwood and Beaurline note Holinshed’s reference to those who were to blind Arthur, who ‘rather forsook their prince and country than they would consent to obey the King’s authority’ (quoted in Bullough, 4.32). In Troublesome Reign both executioners show reluctance: ‘We goe [before binding Arthur] though loath’ (Pt 1, 12.1325). In KJ only one of the executioners expresses a moral conscience.
from away from
* * *
77 God’s] Oxf; heauen F 80 wince] F2; winch F 84 SD] this edn 85 SD] Cam; Exit / Pope
91 mote (OED 1) particle of dust, esp. one of the innumerable minute specks seen floating in the sunbeam; an irritating particle in the eye or throat. The phrase ‘a mote in the eye’ is often used figuratively: (1) (with allusion to Matthew, 7.3) a relatively trifling fault observed in another person by one who ignores a greater fault of his own (cf. OED beam n.1 3c); (2) a cause of irritation or annoyance. OED beam n.1 3c cites Latimer, 1555: ‘Learn from your own beams to make allowance for your neighbour’s motes’. That is, if Hubert had the experience of even the slightest ocular irritation he would refrain from the excruciating blinding of Arthur. The biblical echo of the mote and the beam carries with it the idea of unfairness.
