Shakespeare was fascinated by law, which permeated Elizabethan everyday life. The general impression one derives from the analysis of many plays by Shakespeare is that of a legal situation in transformation and of a dynamically changing relation between law and society, law and the jurisdiction of Renaissance times. Shakespeare provides the kind of literary supplement that can better illustrate the legal texts of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. There was a strong popular participation in the system of justice, and late sixteenth-century playwrights often made use of forensic models of narrative. Uncertainty about legal issues represented a rich potential for causing strong reactions in the public, especially feelings concerning the resistance to tyranny. The volume aims at highlighting some of the many legal perspectives and debates emplotted in Shakespearean plays, also taking into consideration the many texts that have been produced during the latest years on law and literature in the Renaissance.
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King John or the Proliferation of the Word of Authority
If up to a few years ago the Elizabethan period was nostalgically studied according to founding orthodox ideologies, such as “the great chain of being” and the “Elizabethan world picture,” such a myth of the Arcadian and pastoral past has been dismantled, bringing to the surface symptoms of unrest and anticipations of the many contemporary crises in society.
One of the many tragic dimensions arises “in the displacement of meaning, in the disturbance within the present of ‘another’ time […] that, in consequence, is always in some way historical, pivoted upon a crisis of times and so of models.”37
The word acquires a cultural mobility of necessary signification for the integration of literature within history and within cultural politics. Such an integration is realized both as a dynamic interaction and as a potentiality of pragmatic intervention of language upon the extra-textual reality.38
According to such statements, King John becomes the emblem of the search for “the infinite potentialities of dissent inscribed in Shakespearean language, which can be re-inscribed into our daily praxis of social and political conflicts.”39 The tragic element in King John is constituted by the recession of the concepts of obedience and loyalty, undermined by the inadequacy of power; and it is represented by the gap between a divine and mythic concept of authority and its application to the historical context, to the quarrel between the two sovereigns.
The starting position of King John resembles that of Richard III: no legitimate supremacy can be established in a politically volatile period. The cause of the difficulty in this case is a loophole in the regulation defining royal succession.40
From the opening lines the theme of the desecration of the term “majesty” is introduced:
Chatillon: […] the borrowed majesty, of England here.
Elinor: A strange beginning: borrowed majesty!41 (1.1.4–5)
However, the focal point for our analysis is constituted by the dialogue between Constance and Salisbury in Act III, scene I: this is the moment in which Constance is informed of the previous alliance between the two kings, an alliance that makes the promises of help of her brother, king Philip, useless. The “divine” social order represented by the monarchy is unveiled as human/too human, as an artificial and fictional construction (from “majesty” to “counterfeit,” from “faith” to “falsehood change”), disclosing an anxiety that becomes a linguistic anxiety, making evident its partial and purely signifying nature. An extremely modern way to place us in front of and within language is thus demonstrated in order to unveil the play’s ambiguous and multi-layered structure.
The play upon contrasting words (“form/formless,” “order/orderless”), used as a counterpoint to the rapid changing of alliances within the text, is a frequent rhetorical device employed by Shakespeare (bear in mind also the famous “fair is foul and foul is fair” in Macbeth), and it underlines the semantic multi-valences of words and of actions in a context of political corruption. The linguistic confusion, which is also a theological interrogation, indicates a previously existing moral confusion.
Constance represents the “resistance to theory” or the resistance to topical concepts of “policy,” majesty and honour. The juxtaposition between “seeming” and “being” expressed by Hamlet occupies a considerable part here too. Constance’s duty is to unveil the other side of the public message, diametrically opposing meaning to meaning.
All the discourse directed to Salisbury is in fact played upon the contrast between “word” and “sign:” the word is “misspoke” and “misheard,” it is a “vain breath” which causes a lack of faith. “Believe me, I do not believe thee:” the essence of the word (the idea of “truth”) becomes “false,” transforming the concepts of “truth” into “seeming” and of “falsehood” into “being.” The epistemological stability of medieval knowledge is made redundant by the use of a rhetoric where the trope of irony and the trope of the unutterability of meaning prevail. After all, the “nostalgia for the lost unity, the univocal correspondence between words and things is the aspiration for the imaginary, a desire to return to simplicity and certainty in a world that comes before symbolic difference, a world that is without visible power, since power itself is a relation of difference.”42
If “humanism can be defined in the first instance as a rhetorical practice that resists theory conceived of as an epistemological project,”43 Constance’s verbal confutation is used precisely to underline the concept of linguistic imprecision. Such a subversion of “policy” through the dilation of verbal sense corresponds to the general humanistic attitude of the Scholastic critics as a formulation of universal principles, and it corresponds to the emergence of rhetoric in its aspect of attention to the linguistic dimension of communication.
The word thus becomes epistemologically unstable. Constance is the figure of the humanist who undermines the stability of language and, at the same time, attempts to resist such an instability. The word is divorced from its practical application, creating a semantic gap: “signs” (gestures, actions) vs. “words”.
It is not so, thou hast misspoke, misheard,
Be well advised, tell o’er thy tale again.
It cannot be, thou dost but say ‘tis so.
I trust I may not trust thee, for thy word
Is but the vain breath of a common man:
Believe me, I do not believe thee, man,
I have a king’s oath to the contrary.
[…]
Be these sad signs confirmers of thy words?
Then speak again, not all thy former tale,
But this one word, whether thy tale be true. (3.1.4–26)
This juxtaposition occurs also between the “tale,” that is, an account, narration, or linguistic articulation, and the “word.” Within this structural binary opposition an even more hidden subversion is situated, since it is realized within the meaning itself of “word” that from time to time represents the meaning of true or false.
Constance repeatedly exhorts Salisbury to make his “word” and “truth” coincide, but the truth, the real essence of the term, cannot be attained since it slides once again to the level of “false,” making any attempt to attain a stable and founding meaning redundant.
Another element, emerging from this incessant alternation between the levels of linguistic truth and falsehood, is the narrative, or the “tale.” The tale is a necessarily artificial organization of the “word” and consequently it puts an emphasis on fictionality: the tale implies a narrator’s awareness of both the resistance of language to signify and of the resistance of the listener to the “suspension of disbelief.” In such a way the principle of counterfeit, and consequently Constance’s exhortation to make the “tale” “true,” is transformed into a contradiction in terms and an exhortation to an impossible mimesis. Following Aristotle’s dialectic, it can be maintained that the téchné, or productive knowledge, aware of the application of rhetorical artifice, clashes against the theoria, or speculation, the mise en abîme of meaning through rhetoric itself. The movement is from social consensus (adherence to the “policy” dictates and to the sovereign’s decisions) to epistemological menace (the redundancy of the sovereign’s orders through dialectic/rhetorical subversion). The use of irony becomes an exemplary practice to unveil the epistemological/ethical multi-valence of meaning.
Just as Constance questions the official meaning of the message, controverting term with term, in the same way the two opposing struggles for royalty lead to a vacancy in power and to a suspension of loyalty and adherence. Constance does nothing but give voice to this ambiguity of power that is affirmed and denied at the same time. We are witnesses to a reaction of discomfort towards authority, which is in primis expressed as linguistic anxiety. In an “out of joint” world, where the univocal power of authority is broken, causing loyalty problems in the subjects (which king to believe in?), “strength and signification” are separated so that the separation itself (between sign and meaning) becomes the linguistic condition par excellence: the new strength of language lies precisely in its non-signification. The form (the dilation of meaning and carnivalesque, desecrating play) is opposed to the (theological and signifying) strength of linguistic articulation.
We witness the melancholic pathos of speech that turns on its own axis searching for a missing referent, attaining in this way a neutralization of meaning through form. The message (energeia) of power is in fact neutralized by a linguistic invasion, by a deconstructing play, which undermines the very basis of its own significance, becoming a historical-metaphysical menace to its own foundations. As soon as the sacred concept of royalty is annihilated by the conflict between the two opposing kinds of legality, a subverting element, here mainly expressed as linguistic subversion, insinuates itself into the gap in power. A “Holy day” is transformed into a “wicked day, day of shame,” “war” is mutated into “peace” and vice versa, and “little valiant” into “great villainy:” everything is “painted” and “counterfeit” so that at the end we have a total coalescence of opposites: “odoriferous stench” and “sound rottenness.” In such diametrical oppositions signification lingers in a linguistic void of the absence of the referent, of a methodical menace that is a denunciation of the frailty of meaning and of the relation between signifier and signified. The linguistic confusion points to a previous moral confusion and is a theological interrogation. It is a bombastic use of the word based upon the rhetoric that is a symptom of the ad infinitum openness of significance, a symptom of the anarchy of the message once it is freed from the imprimatur of power.
Constance’s linguistic anxiety mirrors the perplexity of the citizens: “the split between legitimacy and actual power was always a potential malfunction in the developing Absolutist State.”44 In other words, the struggle between the two legitimacies questions the concept of legitimacy itself, overtly opposing it to the rights of those who can take and maintain power. In practice we are dealing with a crisis of authority that becomes absence and obsession with the divine sign of royalty, mutating into a problematic sign, a desperate symbol of the end of theological optimism that does not express the universe any longer but rather shows it as separate and insecure. In this way the subjects fill the gap in power and claim the right to argue about the principle of loyalty, and to discuss and to theorize on the formation of regal power. “In King John and Richard II Shakespeare invites us to question the capacity of individual will to determine the destination of the crown and of other landed estates,” asserts Watt in his Shakespeare’s Acts of Will.45
Citizen: He that proves the king,
To him will we prove loyal. Till that time
Have we rammed up our gates against the world. (2.1.270–273).
“The conflict before the walls of Angiers is between traditional lineal succession and individual will, but the subject matter of the issue between King Philip and King John concerns nothing less than the proper descent of the English crown.”46 The citizens take active part in this contest, and are not mere bystanders. The result is the passage of authority from monarch to commoners.
The loyalty of the citizens is put up for auction and offered to the best bidder: “One must prove greatest: while they weigh so even, / We hold our town for neither; yet for both” (2.1.332–333). This is a declaration of the decline of a universe based on the oral (or implied) transmission of principles and the emergence of the written code: bear in mind how the generational betrayal of the concept of monarchy by divine right changes into the necessity of written pacts, even to...
