King John Women and Femininity Quotes

In this passage, Queen Eleanor reacts angrily to the Bastard's statement that he can't be 100% sure that his mother was faithful to her husband. (The Bastard really shouldn't be saying this, since at this point, he's totally trying to claim that he was Robert Falconbridge, Sr.'s son, so that he can inherit the guy's land.) By the way, we've gotta say it: Eleanor is kind of a hypocrite, seeing as later in the play, she herself accuses Constance of giving birth to a "bastard."

King John's speech here conveys some pretty offensive attitudes toward women. The first is the assumption that all "husbands / That marry wives" are at risk of being cheated upon. The second is the way he phrases the law that says that any child born from a man's wife will be considered that man's child: he compares this to a farmer getting to claim any "calf, bred from his cow" as his.

So, yes, he is comparing a wife to a cow, and a husband to a farmer. The fact that this calf/cow expression was actually a common one in Shakespeare's day doesn't get King John off the hook: as a king, couldn't he have found a better way of phrasing things? In any case, King John doesn't seem to think too highly of women; we don't hear any mention of him having a wife throughout the whole play, and it's only in Act V that we learn he has a son, Henry. Go figure. (By the way, where the heck did that son come from?)

Given the standards of female virtue in King John's time (and in Shakespeare's, too), it makes sense that Lady Falconbridge would want to emphasize that she was "seduc'd" by a "long and vehement suit"—it would be completely unacceptable for her to say that she had had an affair with Richard willingly. And yet, don't the closing words of her speech suggest a darker possibility? The idea that Richard "urg'd" himself past her "defence" almost makes it sound as if the Bastard was conceived as the result of a rape. Unfortunately, we have no way of knowing for sure what happened—mainly because Shakespeare doesn't tell us.

The Bastard's words here are pretty much the reverse of Louis's words to Salisbury in Act V, Scene 2, lines 43-53—or close to it, anyway. Louis's words to Salisbury boiled down to something like this: "When you're crying like that, you're not behaving in a way that's appropriate for a man; still, because you're doing it, I can only assume that you have a good reason for it." Here, the Bastard's argument could be phrased, "When you slept with Richard the Lionheart, you weren't behaving in a way that's appropriate for a woman; still, since it was Richard the Lionheart who seduced you, that's a good enough reason for me." Here, as in Eleanor's speech from the previous quotation, the description of Richard's seduction has a violent aspect to it that may shade into what we would now consider rape. This doesn't necessarily mean Lady Falconbridge was raped (it's very unclear what actually happened), but it does show much less respect for women's choices than we would expect today.

This verbal duel can be seen as the female counterpart to the insults that the Bastard unleashes against the deceased Robert Falconbridge in Act I, Scene 1, lines 128-133. There, the Bastard was judging masculinity based on the prowess of your (ahem) "will." Here, Eleanor and Constance accuse each other of falling short of the standards of fidelity to your husband that were expected of women at the time.

These lines show how Blanche is used as a pawn in the political machinations of her uncle, King John, and of King Philip of France. This becomes clearest in the unexpected pairing of the most intimate aspects of Blanche's life (represented by her "bridal bed") with something that is not intimate to her at all—something that has nothing to do with her at all, in fact: the vast territories of land, like "Anjou, and fair Touraine, Maine, Poictiers," which will "gild" that very bed. Of course, Blanche's personal qualities factor into the arrangements, too; her "beauty, education, blood" are all selling points. What do you make of the fact that her "education" is counted as a selling point? Is her education tainted by the fact that it seems mainly there to give her husband more pleasure, rather than being something done for Blanche's own sake?

In these lines, Blanche shows off her intelligence. On the one hand, she recognizes that she has no real power; as a woman, she will have to knuckle under and go with whatever her uncle decides. Still, she succeeds in working into her speech a subtle dig at Louis by saying that the best she can say about him is that nothing about him "should merit any hate." Yeah, real big compliment there, and she just dropped that bomb in public.

Here, Constance sums up her general sense of powerlessness when she learns that King Philip is going to marry his son Louis to King John's niece Blanche, thus ending his support for Arthur's bid for the kingship. It's striking how many of Constance's problems relate to her position as a woman. As a "widow" who is "husbandless," she lacks the person who is supposed to defend her, according to the social customs of the day. On top of that, she describes herself as a "woman, naturally born to fears." What do you think she means by this? Is it a commentary on the inherent nature of women, or on the situation that women inevitably find themselves in, in a society such as hers, particularly when they're involved in power struggles? Would you want to live with the kind of violence and backstabbing these people lived with?

Constance's madness could be viewed in terms of traditional stereotypes about women as irrational and prone to violent emotion. But Shakespeare gives Constance some strong comebacks to criticism of this sort. Her first comeback is against Pandolf, who, as a clergyman, really can't know what it's like to have children and in her opinion should therefore refrain from judging her. Her second comeback is against King Philip, and it comes when she gives a detailed account of how her grieving fills up the space left by her "absent child." Her account is so powerful that, at the end of it, she's even able to defend herself by saying that she has "reason to be fond of grief." Thus, in her view, her irrational behavior is actually rational. Do you find Constance's arguments here convincing?

We included this quotation under the theme of "Men and Masculinity," but we think it's worth repeating here, too. That's because, like some of the other quotations we've seen in this section, it shows that the play doesn't portray all stereotypically male qualities as good, and all stereotypically female qualities as bad (or vice-versa)—even if some of the characters in the play happen to think that way. Why do we say this? Because everything in the play is setting us up to root for young Arthur, and hence to wish for Hubert to experience a compassionate change of heart. And if that means Hubert will be acting in a "womanish" way, then acting in a "womanish" way can't be bad. Here, as elsewhere in the play, we can see how Shakespeare's play encourages us to take a broad perspective—meaning that we can't uncritically attribute any of the individual characters' views to Shakespeare himself.