My progress:
Shakespeare Reading Project
Henry VI, parts 1, 2, 3 and Richard III
Two Gentlemen of Verona
The Taming of the Shrew
Titus Andronicus
The Comedy of Errors
Love’s Labour’s Lost
Romeo & Juliet
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Richard II
King John
“King John” shouldn’t be the title. The title should be “Three Mothers and One Illegitimate Man”. King John barely registers in comparison to the wailing vicious women and Faulconbridge the Bastard. And unlike, say, Mercutio, who could be Faulconbridge’s brother, Faulconbridge does not go down in a blaze of glory, he’s not murdered. He triumphs. The final lines of the play are his. He’s such a cool character.
The only thing I know about King John is he is the Magna Carta guy – and Shakespeare never mentions it. And based on what we see here, John does not inspire confidence. He is woman-pecked all around. These mothers are at each others’ throats. The framing makes things complicated. The women are vivid and histrionic. There are a lot of speeches. Hubert is almost immediately corrupted by power. John asks Hubert to kill the child Arthur, and it’s almost shocking Hubert’s response. These one-word replies and one-word responses. It’s brutal. John is basically trying to get rid of his competition, but Arthur is a child. Like the two little princes in Richard III. Or, later, the horrific off-stage murder of MacDuff and his whole family. You can feel Shakespeare shuffling off the compulsive lyricism and rhetoric. You can definitely feel it in Faulconbridge’s vivid language. Faulconbridge uses slang, he’s direct. He can see how the world works, how Commodity rules all.
I’ve never seen King John in production. It’s not exactly a thrilling read. I feel like it’s not done all that much. Constance’s wailing ancient-Greek grief goes on for two pages. I know she’s sad, but it’s tiresome. The whole thing is a little declamatory, especially with a central character as uninteresting as John! Henry V takes up the rousing center of his own play. King John is a bore. Shakespeare couldn’t help himself. Maybe he knew Faulconbridge was the scene-stealer Mercutio was. Maybe he didn’t care. Berowne in Love’s Labour’s Lost is another precursor.
I don’t need scholars and experts to “help” me with my favorite plays. Like Midsummer, As You Like It, Much Ado, The Tempest: I know these plays very well. I can always learn more and I appreciate it, but Midsummer is so magic I honestly don’t CARE about the background. But with King John … I really need them. There’s a wealth of good information provided by my chosen scholars (i.e. the ones I happen to have in my current library), including the observation that Faulconbridge is a breakthrough for Shakespeare, making room for Falstaff, who is about to make his appearance.
Oh and I feel pretty proud of myself for piecing together a couple of scenes where Faulconbridge’s behavior was attention-getting even though he barely says anything. I’ll break it down below. Shakespeare here makes a character eloquent when he’s NOT speaking.
Quotes on the play
“Much of the verse [in King John] is so archaic that it suggests the Shakespeare of 1589 or so. And yet Faulconbridge the Bastard is Shakespeare’s first character who speaks with a voice entirely his own.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
“King John is his last frontal attack upon the historical heroic style. In Henry IV, he will work on the flanks; and though in Henry V he will make further forages over open ground he will understand and confess their futility.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare
“Constance in King John and Richard II in Richard II represent a combination of dramatic and lyrical writing. Shakespeare was learning to find a character suitable to a lyric style. Mark Van Doren notes that Constance is the last of Shakespeare’s wailing women.”
— W.H. Auden, 1946
“The theme of the play is excess, and the [“painting the lily”] passage perfectly expresses it … Pembroke and Salisbury … go on gilding their gold through four more speeches, shifting the metaphor … The statement of the fault commits the fault and indeed the two noblemen continue through the rest of the play as a chorus whose manner, like their matter, is too much.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare
“[King John’s] last lines are too accomplished; he succumbs like most of his colleagues in the play to a passion for conceits, to a thirst for the phrase that will end the search for all phrases.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare
“[Constance] is the last and most terrible of Shakespeare’s wailing women; she is the point to which the line that begins with Lucrece and extends through Richard III has been so straightly drawn.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare
“The style of Constance’s speeches is like that of Sonnet 135 — ‘Whoever hath her wish thou hast the Will” — which was written at about the same time.”
— W.H. Auden, 1946
“The Lady’s grief is very affecting. But a passion so violent cannot be borne long.”
— Dr. Johnson
“The conceits of Constance and the stuffiness of the prevailing style would keep the air of King John unbreathable were it not for the breeze that blows over fresh and strong from Philip Faulconbridge, the Bastard. No character in Shakespeare thus far has been more delightfully and unaccountable himself…[Faulconbridge] is, in other words, one of Shakespeare’s first evidences that he can create life without formula and without effort — life that overruns the play designed to contain it, capering off on by-paths under its own happy power…He is Shakespeare’s critic of the rant he has been writing, he is the force with whose aid Shakespeare stamps himself free from fustian, from the limitations of a too formal, heroic verse.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare
“Shakespeare is to return to [Faulconbridge’s] attacks in Hotspur, who will lead it for him still more brilliantly, and indeed will finish it so that it need never be undertaken in English again. Hotspur will be the full creature for whom Faulconbridge is still no more than a sketch… Meanwhile life has been created. And its abundance here is unique in literature.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare
“‘Look at them!’ Shakespeare seems to say as he places [King John and Faulconbridge] side by side, ‘a man is greater than a king!'”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare
“There are few if any more important passages in the early works of Shakespeare than the lines at the end of Act II of this play in which the Bastard pays his respects to the God of this World to whom all but a few rare characters bow down … Two of Shakespeare’s greatest sonnets, the 123rd and 124th, on Time and Policy … are nothing but the Bastard’s soliloquy in another key, or two other keys.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare
“I cannot escape the conviction that those words [‘Sweet, sweet, sweet poison for the age’s tooth’] come as directly from Shakespeare’s own heart as from the Bastard’s, that he too meant to deliver ‘sweet, sweet, sweet poison for the age’s tooth’.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare
^^ Maybe it’s not true but King John supposedly died – or it was believed he died – from eating too many peaces which had been poisoned.
^^ Reading this was a light-bulb moment for me.
“[Cardinal Pandulph] is a perfect preview of some of the totalitarians of our time.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare
“The Bastard is the king of the play.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare
“King John and Richard II form a transition from the Henry VI plays and Richard III to the great Henry IV plays and to Henry V, where Shakespeare is getting bored. Set battle pieces remain in King John … but they are absent in Richard II. In Henry V, battle scenes subside into the chorus … In King John and Richard II Shakespeare also drops the subplot, like Cade’s rebellion in Henry VI … There is a consequent loss of the sense of the whole of society … Shakespeare brings the subplot back in Henry IV.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare
“The real interest in King John and Richard II lies in Shakespeare’s development as a writer.”
— W.H. Auden, 1946 lecture
“In King John, the star is not the king.”
— W.H. Auden, 1946 lecture
On the speech in Act III, iii:
“This speech shows an enormous advance in Shakespeare’s technical skill. He gets away from conventional rhetoric, and the single word speeches – ‘death,’ ‘a grave,’ ‘enough’ — are very skillful.”
— W.H. Auden, 1946 lecture
“I don’t care for the Hubert-Arthur scene [IV.i]. Little kids onstage are impossible. They should be drowned.”
— W.H. Auden, 1946 lecture
“Faulconbridge is apparently unconscious of literary style, but he actually displays an enormous literary gift. Shakespeare is interested in how men of action should talk, not in conventional braggadocio. Out of this interest was to come the great development of his verse in the future.”
— W.H. Auden, 1946 lecture
“King John is the last of the historical plays we shall have to speak of, and we are not sorry that it is.”
— William Hazlitt, Characters in Shakespeare’s Plays
“There are … few characters on the stage that excite more disgust and loathing [than King John]. He has no intellectual grandeur or strength of character to shield him from the indignation on which his immediate conduct provokes.”
— William Hazlitt, Characters in Shakespeare’s Plays
“The character of the Bastard’s comic humor is the same in essence as that of other comic characters in Shakespeare; they always run on with good things and are never exhausted; they are always daring and successful. They have words at will and a flow of wit, like a flow of animal spirits.”
— William Hazlitt, Characters in Shakespeare’s Plays
On Faulconbridge’s speech, Act I, sc i:
“How much of English literature comes out of the Bastard’s monologue! In it one can hear, prophetically, Swift, Sterne, Dickens, and Browning, and a long tradition that reverberates still in the century now ending.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
“Shakespearean protagonists from Faulconbridge on [Richard II, Juliet, Mercutio, Bottom, Shylock, Portia] prepare the way for Falstaff by manifesting an intensity of being in excess of their dramatic contexts. They all suggest unused potentialities that their plays do not require of them. The Bastard ought to be king, because nobody else in King John is at all kingly. Richard II ought to be a metaphysical poet; Mercutio’s vitalism deserves to find some expression beyond bawdry; Bottom’s wonderfully good-humored, almost preternatural patience might weave an even more bottomless dream; Shylock’s desperate will to avenge insults could get beyond evil farce by forsaking literalism; Juliet and Portia warrant lovers more equal to them than Romeo and Bassanio … Shakespeare creates personalities who never could be accommodated by their roles …”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
“[Hamlet, Iago, Edmund, Lear, Edgar, Macbeth, Cleopatra] … give the sense that all plot is arbitrary whereas personality, however daemonic, is transcendent, and is betrayed primarily by what’s within. They have an interior to journey out from … they are more, much more, than what happens to them.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
Faulconbridge’s final lines:
“This speech seems to me poetically preferable to such effusions as John of Gaunt’s ‘this sceptred isle’ and Henry V’s ‘we happy few’ … the image of self-wounding is of a higher order than any in the other two speeches.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
“The spirit of Christopher Marlowe still dominates King John, and only Faulconbridge evades Marlowe’s preference for outwardness. John himself is in part a Marlovian cartoon, and unsatisfactory as such …”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
“King John is … engaged — one might say obsessed — with the imagery of the eye, a thematic emphasis that culminates in the famous scene (4.1.), invented by Shakespeare, in which the citizen Hubert of Angiers threatens, on John’s orders, to put out the eye of Prince Arthur, a rival claimant to the throne.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
Act 3, scene 4, Constance:
“…almost metaphysical praise of grief … anticipates the torture scene in Act 4, scene 1, and it is important to remember that at this point Arthur is neither dead nor even physically threatened. Yet in performance this is a ‘mad scene,’ anticipating Ophelia and Lady Macbeth.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
“… neither Eleanor nor Constance prevails. Instead, as with Elizabeth, the key question continues to be not who will be the power behind the throne, but who will be the legitimate and powerful ruler. The model remains male (John; his son Prince Henry; the heroic Bastard). Elizabeth would have seen herself in the line of kings, and not among the female consorts. But the theatrical power of these two strong women is very effective …”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
“Critics have also compared [Faulconbridge] to Shakespeare’s Mercutio, Autolycus, Jaques, Touchstone, and even Falstaff. In any case,he is not only a brave soldier but also a witty commentator, a freshingly deflating cynic. It is worth noting that, unlike any others in this distinguished Shakespearean roster, he not only survives, as Edmund, Mercutio, and Falstaff do not, but also retains central power and influence. Indeed, his ascendancy is such that the play will reward him, at the close, with its final, stirring, and patriotic lines, giving him theatrical pride of place over King John’s succeeding son, Prince Henry.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All
On Act III, sc i, 209-218:
“[This] passage resonates with many swear/forswear/oath moments in early comedies like Love’s Labour’s Lost, as well as with the constant Shakespearean theme of personal civil war (‘rebellion to thyself’). But there is, too, a verbal inkling of a later moment of ‘good’ rebellion in Pandulph, phrase ‘better conquest never canst thou make’ — the anticipation here is to Cornwall’s worthy servant in King Lear … Before we dismiss this echo as the merest accident, we might recall the circumstances: Cornwall is in the act of putting out Gloucester’s eyes. That Shakespeare should, when writing Lear, recall the cadence of his earlier warning, in a play that also threatens torture of an innocent man by blinding, seems a fair instance of subliminal association, if it is not a direct or deliberate reference. Indeed, if we are thinking along these lines, we might compare Arthur’s leap to his death in King John … to the suicidal ‘leap’ of the blind Gloucester from what he thinks is ‘Dover cliff’ — but is actually flat ground.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All
“…dynamic of rivalry between women is palpable in this play almost from the outset.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All
“A puzzling and uneven play. King John is a daring exploration into the murky depths of realpolitick. In Shakespeare’s earlier history plays – the Henry VI plays and Richard III — politics is treated as a branch of morals. The course of events, apparently jagged and complex, is shown to have a pattern and a direction that reveal a moral purpose coextensive with the will of God … This doctrine of providential history … begins to yield to something darker and more subtle in King John. Shakespeare is still concerned with politics, of course, but in tracing the link between politics and morals, he is less cocksure and doctrinaire.”
— Herschel Baker, Riverside Shakespeare
“In this play the eponymous hero is in fact an anti-hero whom we cannot admire and whom we find it easy to detest.”
— Herschel Baker, Riverside Shakespeare
“It is significant that [Faulconbridge’s] famous soliloquy (II.i) occurs so early in the play, for it is the start and not the end of the Bastard’s hard-bought worldly knowledge … Faulconbridge grows strong in self-awareness. In a world of knaves and fools that is governed by ‘Commodity’ he alone cuts through fraud and privileged error to assert the claims of valor, truth, and loyalty.”
— Herschel Baker, Riverside Shakespeare
“[Faulconbridge is] one of Shakespeare’s grand creations. In him, as Johnson said, levity and greatness are united. One sign of his distinction is a superb vitality, which has a language all its own … Slangy, coarse, and impudent, his language throbs with life … As Mark Van Doren has observed, poetry works like yeast in every line he utters.”
— Herschel Baker, Riverside Shakespeare
Quotes from the play
So much my conscience whispers in your ear
Which none but heaven, and you, and I, shall hear.
— ELEANOR, I.i.42-43
I am I, howe’er I was begot.
— FAULCONBRIDGE, I.i.175
And if his name be George, I’ll call him Peter;
For new-made honor doth forget men’s names;
’Tis too respective and too sociable
For your conversion.
— FAULCONBRIDGE, I.i.86-89
And not alone in habit and device,
Exterior form, outward accouterment,
But from the inward motion to deliver
Sweet, sweet, sweet poison for the age’s tooth,
Which though I will not practice to deceive,
Yet to avoid deceit I mean to learn,
For it shall strew the footsteps of my rising.
— FAULCONBRIDGE, I.i.210-216
… that pale, that white-faced shore,
Whose foot spurns back the ocean’s roaring tides
And coops from other lands her islanders,
Even till that England, hedged in with the main,
That water-wallèd bulwark, still secure
And confident from foreign purposes,
Even till that utmost corner of the West
Salute thee for her king.
— AUSTRIA, II.i.23-30
Give grandam kingdom, and it grandam will
Give it a plum, a cherry, and a fig.
There’s a good grandam.
— CONSTANCE, II.i.161-163
KING JOHN:
I bring you witnesses,
Twice fifteen thousand hearts of England’s brood–
FAULCONBRIDGE:
Bastards, and else.
KING JOHN:
To verify our title with their lives.
KING PHILIP:
As many and as well-born bloods those–
FAULCONBRIDGE:
Some bastards too.
— II.i.275-279
Faulconbridge is almost scary onstage. He subsides into silence quite a lot, but when he does speak, he stays on focus. Unshakable.
Cry ‘havoc,’ kings! back to the stained field,
You equal potents, fiery kindled spirits!
Then let confusion of one part confirm
The other’s peace. Till then, blows, blood, and death!
— FAULCONBRIDGE, II.i.357-360
‘Zounds, I was never so bethump’d with words
Since I first call’d y brother’s father dad.
— FAULCONBRIDGE, II.i.466-467
“Dad”. so colloquial, he cuts through the bullshit.
I do protest I never lov’d myself
Till now indeed I beheld myself
Drawn in the flattering table of her eye.
— DAUPHON, II.i.561-563
That smooth-faced gentleman, tickling Commodity,
Commodity, the bias of the world—-
The world, who of itself is peisèd well,
Made to run even upon even ground,
Till this advantage, this vile-drawing bias,
This sway of motion, this Commodity,
Makes it take head from all indifferency,
From all direction, purpose, course, intent.
And this same bias, this Commodity,
This bawd, this broker, this all-changing word,
Clapped on the outward eye of fickle France,
Hath drawn him from his own determined aid,
From a resolved and honorable war
To a most base and vile-concluded peace.
And why rail I on this Commodity?
But for because he hath not wooed me yet.
— FAULCONBRIDGE, II.i.373-388
The world STILL runs on Commodity. I “rail” on it too and want every billionaire who values commodity above all else to go down. The twist is … Faulconbridge recognizes how Commodity has not “wooed” him yet and so he too could be susceptible. This is self-awareness.
Mad world, mad kings, mad composition!
–FAULCONBRIDGE, II.i.569
Well, whiles I am a beggar, I will rail
And say there is no sin but to be rich;
And being rich, my virtue then shall be
To say there is no vice but beggary.
Since kings break faith upon Commodity,
Gain, be my lord, for I will worship thee!
–FAULCONBRIDGE, II.i.93-98
Amen, brother.
This juggling witchcraft with revenue.
–KING JOHN on Catholics, III.i.93-98
For I am sick and capable of fears,
Oppressed with wrongs and therefore full of fears,
A widow, husbandless, subject to fears,
A woman naturally born to fears.
— CONSTANCE, III.i.12-15
Here we go with the Faulconbridge thing I mentioned at the top. There’s all this negotiating going on and Faulconbridge, who really has no business being a part of any of it, is present. The French king and the Duke of Austria attacks the city of Angiers, on behalf of Arthur the child, and the rightful heir – or, who knows, I don’t get the family tree. England’s army arrives. There’s a standoff between three armies. There’s all this business where John’s niece is basically forced to marry the Dauphin, sight unseen, to create an alliance. Nobody knows who’s the rightful king, John or Arthur. John basically gives away territory. Faulconbridge is on the sidelines, looking on. For some reason, he homes in on the Duke of Austria, who is rude to him on first meeting: the Duke basically says to him, “And who the hell are you?” This tiny bit of disrespect seals Austria’s doom, but Austria has no idea.
So, Act II, sc.i, here’s the first interaction:
AUSTRIA:
Peace!
FAULCONBRIDGE:
Hear the crier!
AUSTRIA:
What the devil art thou?
FAULCONBRIDGE:
One that will play the devil, sir, with you,
And ‘a may catch your hide and you alone.
You are the hare of whom the proverb goes,
Whose valor plucks dead lions by the beard.
I’ll smoke your skin-coat an I catch you right.
Sirrah, look to ’t. I’ faith, I will, i’ faith!
Notice his imagery: the skin of a dead animal wrapped around Austria.
That’s the extent of the first interaction. Faulconbridge falls into silence for the next page and a half. You could even forget he was there. But Shakespeare knew: even in his silence, Faulconbridge is thinking. And seething.
At the end of the scene comes their second interaction. Faulconbridge, by the way, is the illegitiate son of Richard the Lion-Hearted, hence all the lion imagery.
FAULCONBRIDGE:
Saint George, that swinged the dragon and e’er since
Sits on ’s horseback at mine hostess’ door,
Teach us some fence! To Austria. Sirrah, were I at home
At your den, sirrah, with your lioness,
I would set an ox head to your lion’s hide
And make a monster of you.
AUSTRIA:
Peace! No more.
FAULCONBRIDGE:
O, tremble, for you hear the lion roar.
Then comes Act III, scene i. Constance goes off, and at one point Austria says to her, “Lady Constance, peace.” Naturally, this ratchets her up higher. She goes off on him and her speech ends with the line
Thou wear a lion’s hide! Doff it for shame,
And hang a calfskin on those recreant limbs.
Same imagery as Faulconbridge in the scene before, which Faulconbridge hears and leaps upon, quoting Constance.
AUSTRIA:
O, that a man should speak those words to me! [basically saying: thank God you’re a woman, I’d knock your block off if you were a man.]
FAULCONBRIDGE:
“And hang a calfskin on those recreant limbs.”
AUSTRIA:
Thou dar’st not say so, villain, for thy life!
FAULCONBRIDGE:
“And hang a calfskin on those recreant limbs.”
Shivers. Faulconbridge quotes Constance … twice. No matter what Austria says, the response is the same. The scene moves on and Faulconbridge subsides into silence. Austria does not know the danger he is in from these two brief altercations. The next time Faulconbridge speaks is a page later: and again it is in reply to Austria. In fact, every time Austria speaks, it is Faulconbridge who responds. The net is tightening.
AUSTRIA: [to Philip]
Do so, King Philip. Hang no more in doubt.
FAULCONBRIDGE:
Hang nothing but a calfskin, most sweet lout.
Again with the image of the calfskin. The scene moves on. 100 lines later, Austria speaks again and Faulconbridge is ON it:
AUSTRIA:
Rebellion, flat rebellion!
FAULCONBRIDGE:
Will ’t not be?
Will not a calfskin stop that mouth of thine?
I get this image of Faulconbridge standing totally still, never taking his eyes off Austria. Austria is all caught up in the events, unaware he is now a target. I feel like, if played right, even though Faulconbridge rarely speaks, he is the sole focus of the scene. 50 lines later, Faulconbridge exits the stage in the middle of a big melee. The following scene starts immediately after the previous scene, and Faulconbridge walks onstage holding the decapitated head of Austria. The “seed” for this was planted three scenes before, and it all played out with Faulconbridge barely saying a word, except for the same sentence with the same calf-skin threat. It’s truly quite frightening and beautifully constructed.
Bell, book, and candle shall not drive me back
When gold and silver becks me to come on.
— FAULCONBRIDGE, Act III.iii.12-13
“bell, book, and candle” was an extant saying, regarding to excommunication rituals. Marlowe uses it in Doctor Faustus.
KING JOHN:
He is a very serpent in my way,
And wheresoe’er this foot of mine doth tread,
He lies before me. Dost thou understand me?
Thou art his keeper.
HUBERT:
And I’ll keep him so
That he shall not offend your Majesty.
KING JOHN:
Death.
HUBERT:
My lord?
KING JOHN
A grave.
HUBERT:
He shall not live.
KING JOHN:
Enough.
I could be merry now. Hubert, I love thee.
Well, I’ll not say what I intend for thee.
–III.iii.59-67
Hubert says “sure I’ll do it” without having to think for even just a little bit of time.
Grief fills the room up of my absent child,
Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,
Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,
Remembers me of all his gracious parts,
Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form;
Then, have I reason to be fond of grief?
— CONSTANCE, III.iv.93-98
I adore the imagery: a perfect evocation of the weirdly haunted experience of grieving a person. I quoted this passage in my review of Went Up the Hill.
Evils that take leave,
On their departure most of all show evil.
— PANDULPH, III.iv.114-115
This line reminds me of a phrase my friend Shelagh and I reference often, the one about dragons screaming loudest as they are dying. And how this is what we are seeing … everywhere. Basically. However, Pandulph is a terrible character so take that into consideration.
A sceptre snatched with an unruly hand
Must be as boisterously maintain’d as gain’d.
— PANDULPH, III.iv.135-136
I mean, I think we’re seeing this play out as well today. You steal the throne you are not in the clear. Every day will be a fight to maintain.
If the midnight bell
Did with his iron tongue and brazen mouth
Sound on into the drowsy race of night;
If this same were a churchyard where we stand,
And thou possess’d with a thousand wrongs;
Or if that surly spirit, melancholy,
Had baked thy blood and made it heavy, thick,
Which else runs tickling up and down the veins,
Making that idiot, laughter, keep men’s eyes
And strain their cheeks to idle merriment,
A passion hateful to my purposes;
Or if that thou couldst see me without eyes,
Hear me without thine ears, and make reply
Without a tongue, using conceit alone,
Without eyes, ears, and harmful sound of words;
Then, in despite of brooded watchful day,
I would into thy bosom pour my thoughts.
— KING JOHN, III.iii.37-51
Therefore, to be possessed with double pomp,
To guard a title that was rich before,
To gild refin’d gold, to paint the lily,
To throw a perfume on the violet,
To smooth the ice or add another hue
Unto the rainbow, or with taper-light
To seek the beauteous eye of heaven to garnish,
Is wasteful and ridiculous excess.
— SALISBURY, IV.ii.9-16
I don’t think I realized “gild the lily” came from King John. Maybe it was a colloquialism at the time.
But if you be afeard to hear the worst,
Then let the worst, unheard, fall on your head.
— FAULCONBRIDGE, IV.ii.135-136
He is relentless. Fearless.
But as I traveled hither through the land,
I find the people strangely fantasied,
Possessed with rumors, full of idle dreams,
Not knowing what they fear, but full of fear.
— FAULCONBRIDGE, IV.ii.143-146
It is the curse of kings to be attended
By slaves that take their humors for a warrant.
— KING JOHN, IV.ii.208-209
Typical. A leader not accepting responsibility and blaming his followers.
I am amaz’d, methinks, and lose my way
Among the thorns and dangers of this world.
— FAULCONBRIDGE, IV.iii.140-141
Shall a beardless boy,
A cock’red silken wanton, brave our fields
And flesh his spirit in a warlike soil,
Mocking the air with colors idly spread,
And find no check?
— FAULCONBRIDGE, V.i.69-73
I wouldn’t want Faulconbridge as an enemy.
Come, come, sans compliment, what news abroad?
— FAULCONBRIDGE, V.vi.15
“Sans” again! Love’s Labour’s Lost, “sans sans”. Predicting the big “sans” from Jacques: “Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”
’Tis strange that Death should sing.
I am the cygnet to this pale faint swan,
Who chants a doleful hymn to his own death,
And from the organ-pipe of frailty sings
His soul and body to their lasting rest.
— PRINCE HENRY, V.vii.20-24
Ay, marry, now my soul hath elbow-room.
— KING JOHN, V.vii.28
And comfort me with cold. I do not ask you much.
I beg cold comfort.
— KING JOHN, V.vii.41-42
This England never did nor never shall
Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror
But when it first did help to wound itself.
— — FAULCONBRIDGE, V.vii.112-114
England helped wound itself. Sounds familiar. Heartbroken.
