What manner of legend it was that underwent this apotheosis may be gathered from two dramas, one of them certainly unknown to Shakespeare, the other the immediate basis of his work. The English Reformers saw in the worst of the Plantagenets an early Protestant,-an unsuccessful precursor of Henry VIII. ; and in Bale's incoherent Kyng Johan (c. 1545) the lineaments of the historic John wholly disappear in a single trait enforced with almost frenzied emphasis : his defiance of the Roman 'Antichrist.' Doctrinal theology played little part in shaping the Elizabethan drama; but the Protestantism of the Protestant religion'flourished as bravely in the playhouse as in the conventicle; and the events of 1588, which thrilled every fibre of the national self-consciousness, threw a heightened passion and inspiration, with which religion had very little to do, into the national protest against Rome. Nearly at the same moment the genius of Marlowe revealed the dramatic potency of protest, and filled the stage with imitations of the Titanism of Tamburlaine and Faustus. Both influences had told strongly upon the anonymous author of The Troublesome Reign of King John.1

In the prefixed lines “To the Gentlemen Readers' he expressly invites applause for his hero as a Protestant Tamburlaine :

You that with friendly grace of smoothed brow
Have entertaind the Scythian Tamburlaine,

And given applause unto an Infidel;
Vouchsafe to welcome (with like curtesie)
A warlike Christian and your Countreyman.
For Christ's true faith indur'd he many a storme,
And set himselfe against the Man of Rome,
Untill base treason (by a damned wight)
Did all his former triumphs put to flight.

The appeal was well calculated, and it was enforced by a bold manipulation of history. The sympathy of the spectators was enlisted at the outset by the extravagance of the French claim. The historical Philip had claimed for Arthur only continental provinces; the dramatic Philip demanded England and Ireland also. But the scheme presented one grave difficulty : the English and Protestant Tamburlaine had to be introduced finally submitting to the 'Man of Rome.' The writer was far from ignoring this difficulty, and he called in all his dramatic resources to meet it. He invests John's act with the pathos of tragic error, makes him yield in a moment of physical and mental collapse (my heart is mazed, my senses all foredone '), and lets him, at the point of death, recognise the calamitous consequences (since John did yield unto the Priest of Rome, nor he nor his have prospered on the earth'), and cry with David: 'I am not he shall build the Lord an house,' but that other, sprung of him, 'whose arms shall reach unto the gates of Rome.' But a bolder expedient remained. If John was no Tamburlaine, his brother Richard lived in the popular imagination as a hero of the same colossal mould ; and though Richard could not well be brought in in person to aid his successor, an unknown inheritor of his thews and lion-heart might be raised up to play that rôle. It is plain from the title-page that the dis

as

1 Queen Elinor, in the open- the dead Richard

*the ing lines of the play, speaks of scourge of infidels,' a phrase

covery of King Richard Cordelions Base Son’ was one of the most popular features of the old play, and it must be allowed to be a happy device ; for which the writer found, at most, scattered suggestions in the Chronicles. The spectators saw a new Richard arise from obscurity, taught by mystic whisperings of birds and boughs that he is Richard's son ;2 they saw him vow vengeance upon Richard's two arch-enemiesunited in a single grotesque effigy,—and solemnly 'offer Austria's blood for sacrifice unto his father's ever - living soul'; they saw him renew the fabulous prowess of Richard in the field, fight with 'King Richard's fortune hanging from his helm,' flame amazement in the corrupt monasteries, and triumphantly retrieve the disasters wrought by John's fatal submission. Thus Caurdelion still rules England ‘from his urn’; his spirit, like Cæsar's, lives to overthrow the enemies of his country. It is true that in execution all this fell much short of its vigorous conception.

For the rest, The Troublesome Reign makes no attempt to enlarge the somewhat rigid categories of

Marlowesque character. There is no tenderness,
obvious as the openings for it were in the story of
Arthur as told by Holinshed. Holinshed's Arthur is
not, it is true, Shakespeare's gentle boy, but a headstrong
youth that wanted good counsel, and abounded too
much in his own wilful opinion’; and the older drama-
tist retains this character, making him vigorously inter-
vene in the debate between the kings in defence of his
rights. But neither his death nor the grief of Constance
approaches pathos, and he pleads with Hubert for
his eyes in verses which struggle fatuously for sub-
limity on the Icarus-wings of sounding Latinisms and
mythical allusions. Constance herself has termagant
touches which ally her to the Margaret of the Conten-
tion and the True Tragedy. She already, however,
presents the germ of Shakespeare's Constance, an
honour we can hardly assign to the Constance of
history, who repudiated her second husband and
married a third in the very year in which her dramatic
counterpart gives Austria 'a widow's thanks for
championing her son (Stone's Hol. p. 53).
older writer treats history in general with a more than
Shakespearean daring. To him is due (to take one
interesting example, the complete perversion of the
events which preceded Magna Charta. The gather-
ing of the barons at St. Edmundsbury was in reality
the occasion of their league to extort the charter
from John: the old playwright has brought it into
connexion with Lewis's invasion, and made him the
recipient of their oaths.

The Troublesome Reign thus provided the entire King John. material of King John. Shakespeare has followed his

original almost scene for scene, retaining the outer mechanism of the plot unchanged, or at most dismissing into the background events which the earlier dramatist exhibited with genial prolixity on the

Shakespeare's

stage. But he has essentially altered the significance of the action, and immensely strengthened and vitalised what he retained. We may say, generally, that, while the Troublesome Reign is patriotic, Protestant, and Marlowesque, King John is the work of a man whose patriotism was more fervent, whose Protestantism was less fanatical, and who had definitely broken through the charmed circle of Marlowe. Shakespeare entirely adopts the bold device of his predecessor for saving the unpatriotic surrender of John. The Bastard plays an even more imposing part, and his energy pervades and animates the whole drama. As a character he belongs altogether to Shakespeare. The earlier Falconbridge's alternate accesses of mysticism and horseplay disappear in the brimming vitality of this frank and burly Plantagenet. Shakespeare's Bastard discovers his father not from rustling leaves, but by the contrast between his own giant frame and that of his mannikin brother, slays Austria without invoking his father's shade, and does battle without the ægis of his father's fortune. The grounds of his animosity to Austria are indeed rather hinted than explained. And with these mystic touches disappears the horseplay of the scene in the monastery. But the character of Falconbridge is put to uses of which the earlier writer did not dream. His prototype is indeed already in some sense the mouthpiece of England, and rudely anticipates the magnificent closing assurance that

This England never did, nor never shall,
Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror,
But when it first did help to wound itself.

1 Four scenes are omitted, are presented in the earlier play. or replaced by a mere allusion, On the other hand, one of the e.g. the Bastard's visitation of greatest scenes, John's 'suggesthe monasteries. Similarly, the tion' of Arthur's death, is barely five moons,' reported in iv. 2., hinted in the Troublesome Reign.