King John Memory and the Past Quotes

These lines from near the beginning of King John express a basic truth about the past: we can't know exactly what happened. If we can't even know exactly who our own father is, then how can we hope to understand the great complexities of history?

Many of the events in King John find echoes in events from Shakespeare's day, or in events from earlier, that people were talking about in Shakespeare's day. Because Queen Elizabeth was a Protestant, and kept England an officially Protestant country during her war with Catholic Spain, people in Elizabethan England contextualized her activity by looking back to Henry VIII, Elizabeth's father, who was the first English king to break decisively with the Catholic Church. Even though King John didn't actually break with the Church, his conflict with Pope Innocent III made people in Shakespeare's day see him as a precursor to Henry VIII and, hence to Queen Elizabeth. King John's words in this passage sound especially familiar to the ideas put forward by Parliament in the 1534 Act of Supremacy, which asserted that there was no higher authority on English land than the king.

This passage has pretty much the same historical resonances as the one before it. Members of Shakespeare's original audience would have seen King John's conflict with Pope Innocent III as a foreshadowing of Henry VIII's break with the Church, and their own Queen Elizabeth's Protestant stance against Catholic Spain. In fact, these lines have more in common with the rhetoric of Shakespeare's Reformation Period than they do with the thinking at the time of the historical King John.

Of course, the incident from the conflict between Spain and England that would be freshest in the minds of Shakespeare's audience would be the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, which happened only two or three years before King John was first performed. During that battle, the English narrowly avoided getting trounced by a massive Spanish fleet thanks to a combination of naval prowess and a lucky storm that destroyed many Spanish ships. It's pretty much impossible to hear these words by King Philip of France (whose name even recalls that of King Philip of Spain, England's enemy during Shakespeare's day) and not think of the Spanish Armada incident.

And yet, despite all these references to the ongoing conflict between England and Spain, Shakespeare hasn't simply loaded his play up with anti-Catholic references; in fact, there are several moments in the play that could be read the other way. Check out these lines by King John, in which he protests the excessive eagerness of servants who rush to carry out their master's orders without double-checking to be certain what he wanted.

It seems possible that many of Shakespeare's original audience members would have heard this as a reference to the murder of Thomas Becket by King Henry II (King John's father). Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was an old friend of King Henry, but they had had a falling out. One day, in a fit of rage, King Henry shouted out how he wished somebody would get rid of Becket for him. Well, some knights overheard him, and they did get rid of Becket—by murdering him in his cathedral. (You can read more about this incident here.)

Because of this incident, Thomas Becket became a symbol of the conflict between monarchs and the Church; he was even made a saint by the Catholic Church. Of course, it's very hard to say what Shakespeare was specifically going for in this passage. Is it designed to make John look bad, or good, or neither? What's your take?

Another aspect of Shakespeare's play that makes it hard to interpret as anti-Catholic is its treatment of the murder of Arthur. In the years before King John was first performed, one incident that had European Catholics outraged was Queen Elizabeth's order to have her cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots, executed in 1587. This was actually a major provocation that lead to the battle with the Spanish Armada, which came in 1588. Elizabeth wanted Mary dead because she viewed her as a rival for the throne—in much the same way that John feared Arthur, who was also a family member. Do Salisbury's words reflect badly on Elizabeth's act? Or does the fact that Salisbury is a traitor to England suggest that anyone who disagreed with the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots is a traitor, as well?

In Shakespeare's day, many Catholics viewed King John's submission to Pope Innocent III as a pivotal moment in English history. In their view, from that time forward, England had always legally belonged to the Pope. Thus, King Henry VIII never had the right to separate from Rome in the first place, because to do so constituted an act of rebellion.

Does this logic sound familiar? It's very similar to the argument that Cardinal Pandolf makes to King Philip in Act III about not remaining friends with King John: because he swore allegiance to the Church first, he isn't free to do as he pleases afterwards. As usual, it's very hard to figure out Shakespeare's attitude to all these matters.

These lines by the Bastard are directly relevant to Shakespeare's own day. By promoting the idea that it's extremely bad to be invaded by a foreign power, and that such an invasion must be resisted, the Bastard could be seen as speaking to the Englishmen who resisted the Spanish Armada, telling them to remain vigilant against such threats in the future.

Like the previous quotation from the Bastard, these words by Salisbury must have been especially relevant to Elizabethan England, surrounded as it was by hostile enemy nations. That said, if Shakespeare did want to deliver a political message through his play, Salisbury would be a strange spokesman, since he is a traitor, after all. What do you make of this fact?

Throughout the whole play, these lines (the very last in the play) seem to draw the most obvious parallel between the era when King John takes place and the era in which it was performed. The Bastard here is admitting that England almost got conquered by Louis the Dauphin, but he says that that was only because it had "wound[ed] itself" first through civil war. Provided that the English stick together, he says, they will never be at risk of being conquered by a foreign enemy. The message for Shakespeare's contemporaries seems to be clear: put their quarrels aside and stick together, because that's the only way they will be able to resist foreign enemies like Spain that menace them.