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Antimetabolic King John.

Lawrence Danson, among others, has demonstrated that certain rhetorical tropes as Elizabethans

understood them characterize and order some Shakespeare plays. The action of Coriolanus, forexample, amounts to a kinetic combination of two tropes--metonymy and synecdoche (142-62).

To these tropes might be added hyperbole in Cymbeline, the "Ouer reacher" (or "lowd lyar")according to the sixteenth-century English literary critic George Puttenham (191-93).

Repeatedly, Posthumus Leonatus, Imogen, Iachimo, and other characters of this romantic

tragicomedy apply the prefixes of "out" and "o'er" to many words to convey straining ideas of unparalleled beauty, virtue, courtesy, or betrayal and degradation. Hyperbole so created registers

what might be called a dramaturgy of hysteria, occasioned by characters' attempts to live in and

make sense of a fractured dramatic world made up of pagan Britain, Classical Rome,

Renaissance Italy, and Jacobean court. Given these and other precedents (such as that of GeorgeWright), I a rgue in what follows that a chiastic trope, antimetabole, represents a microcosm of 

the experience of watching and interpreting Shakespeare's King John. More specifically, themany antimetabolic tropes of King John condense and translate for auditors and readers thevarious mirrorings and impasses of this chronicle history that help create its characteristicindeterminate meaning. [1]

In an introductory section of the recent Oxford Shakespeare Life and Death of King John, editor

A. R. Braunmuller remarks that an analysis of the plot of the play "'built around the question of 

who should be King of England' [...] produces an X-shaped, or chiastic, pattern similar to that in

Richard II: like Richard, King John declines; like Bolingbroke, the Bastard 'rises'" (72).

Braunmuller further asserts that "Shakespeare's factual material falls into two parts (almost

'halves'), and those two parts parallel other binary divisions: John triumphant and the Bastard

detached in the first part, John indecisive and the Bastard confident in the second, for example,

or domination by the older generation in the first and by the younger in the second, or female

characters in the first, no female characters in the second, or lords loyal in the first part and

disloyal in the second. Each division occurs or is announced or culminates in [scenes ii and iii of 

act IV], which might also be imagined as the 'crossing' of the chiastic structures I have already

mentioned" (76). [2] Adrien Bonjour in an influential article first described and explored chiastic

(intersecting) rising and falling patterns in this history play. The chiasmus of dramatic action that

Bonjour, Braunmuller, and other commentators such as James Calderwood (351) attribute to

King John seemingly materializes in the dialogue of Louis the Dauphin and Cardinal Pandulph.

"But what shall I gain by young Arthur's fall?" Louis asks. "You, in the right of Lady Blanche

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your wife,/ May make all the claim that Arthur did" (III.iv.141-43). [3] Figured here in Arthur's

fall and Blanche and Louis's projected rise is the X of chiasmus. What becomes important for

assessing Bonjour's and Braunmuller's claims about chiastic design in Shakespeare's plotting of 

King John is our realization that this rise never occurs. [4] Arthur does die in the course of 

events, but John's son, Prince Henry, rather than Blanche or Louis becomes England's new

monarch. Such schematic chiasmus is less than figurative; it is illusory. This fact suggests that

any analysis of chiasmus in King John ought to involve first of all the play's language, which on

occasion deceives theater audiences and literary critics as well as onstage characters as to the

true nature of historical plotting.

Omitted in Bonjour's and Braunmuller's applications of chiasmus to the play is an account of the

repeated chiastic rhetorical tropes of the play and their reproduction, or registering, in small of 

the playgoer's or reader's dramatic experience--an experience different in kind from an

intersecting rising and falling pattern of action or character development. Rhetorically, chiasmus

signals a "balance created by the inversion of one of two parallel phrases or clauses: 'Destroying

others, by himself destroy'd' (Pope, An Essay on Man)" (Frye, Baker, and Perkins 100). Phrased

another way, chiasmus creates "a type of balance in which the second part is balanced against the

first but with the parts reversed, as in Coleridge's line, 'Flowers are lovely, love is flowerlike'"

(Holman and Harmon 84). Derived from the Greek, chiasmus literally means "to mark with an

X" or "to place crosswise." The Greek letter chi or X thus captures visually the rhetorical

phenomenon called chiasmus. "The implication is that the two part s of a chiastic whole mirror

each other as do the parts of the letter X" (Murfin and Ray 44). If one slightly separates parts of 

the letter X, e.g., [greater than][less than] , the notion that X symbolizes one chiastic clause

mirroring the other becomes clearer. Immediately one realizes that Bonjour's and Braunmuller's

idea of chiastic plotting in King John bears no resemblance to the standard definition of 

rhetorical chiasmus: the falling character King John and the rising character Philip Faulconbridge

theoretically could be said to cross paths at one point (thus forming an X), but the notion of 

mirroring conveyed by the non-intersecting segments of [greater than][less than] is foreign to

this statement. Grasping the essential meaning and working of rhetorical chiasmus as well as its

difference from other kinds of chiasmus will prove useful in grasping its  ideational functions in

King John.

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That Shakespeare lavishly incorporated a schoolbook knowledge of a great variety of rhetorical

figures in plays written before 1595 needs little demonstration. Eammon Grennan remarks that

"where the language of [Shakespeare's source The Troublesome Reign] is more or less

straightforward exposition, that of King John is a display of stylistic acrobatics more extravagant

than those of Love's Labour's Lost [...] Much of [King John] reads like illustrations to a

Renaissance handbook of rhetoric" (32, 33). In this respect, chiastic tropes typically abound in

King John. "Shall Louis have Blanche and Blanche those provinces?" (III.i. 3), Constance asks.

"O, if thou teach me to believe this sorrow,/ Teach thou this sorrow how to make me die"

(III.i.29-30), she complains. "Peace be to France, if France in peace permit/ Our just and

lineal entrance to our own" (II.i.84-85), John pronounces early in the play. The first verse of this

last example most succinctly illustrates the trope antimetabole; the italicized words create the

ABBA pattern of the trope. "Peace be to England, if that war return/ From France to England,

there to live in peace" (II.i.89-90, my italics), King Philip of France replies to King John, who

has traveled with troops to France to assert his claim to the land. In this example, playgoers hear

the trope's function of altering the meaning of a term by playing one usage off against another

one: the "peace" in Philip's benediction "Peace be to England" becomes less open and

uncalculated when repetition redefines it as the "peace" advantageous to France resulting from

John's withdrawal of his soldiers to England and their disarmament. Philip's antimetabole masks

the guileful conversion of "war" to its antonym. A chiastic figure, antimetabole involves "the

repetition of words in successive phrases in reverse: 'One should eat to live, not live to eat'

(Moliere)" (Frye, Baker, and Perkins 39). Sister Miriam Joseph explains that "antimetabole is

akin to logical conversion in that it repeats words in converse or der, often thereby sharpening

their sense" (305). Strictly speaking, one must say that antimetabole is not the same as chiasmus,

but "much like chiasmus, which is a form of repetition using reverse grammatical order but not

the same words" (Holman and Harmon 29). Thus the Witches' chant in Macbeth--"Fair is foul,

and foul is fair" (I.i. 11)--exemplifies antimetabole--not chiasmus. At best, one could say that

their speech constitutes a chiastic trope.

Shakespeare's contemporaries most likely did not make this precise modern distinction between

chiasmus and antimetabole but instead conflated the two concepts. Puttenham, for example,

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omits chiasmus from his descriptive catalogue of rhetorical tropes, focusing instead upon an

extended treatment of antimetabole, which he translates as "the Counterchaunge." "Ye have a

figure which takes a couple of words to play with in a verse," Puttenham writes of antimetabole,

"and by making them to change and shift one into others place they do very pretily exchange and

shift the sence, as thus:

We dwell not here to build us boures,

And halles for pleasure and good cheare:

But halles we build for us and ours,

To dwell in them whilest we are here."

(208)

These mouth-filling verses actually contain two antimetaboles, one enclosed within the other:

within the pattern of "dwell"--"halles"--"halles"--"dwell" auditors detect that of "build"--"halles"-

-"halles"--"build." The four verses with so many intervening words make this double

antimetabole seem looser, more diffused, than the earlier-cited, pithy textbook examples of the

trope. Puttenham's awareness of the shorter, compact antimetabole becomes apparent, however,

in his next example: "We wish not peace to maintaine cruell warre,/But we make warre to

maintaine us in peace." (Puttenham's other examples of compact antimetabole suggest that the

early modern understanding of the trope allowed for imprecision in the repetition of the key

terms). [5] Shakespeare appears to have been familiar with Puttenham's definition of 

antimetabole. Near the end of Cymbeline, the playwright (in his only use in the canon of the

term) employs Puttenham's English word for antimetabole. Concerning the joyful looks that are

exchanged by Imogen, Posthumus, her brothers, and the Roman Lucius, King Cymbeline

comments that "the counterchange/ Is severally in all" (V.v.396-97). Nona Fienberg's persuasive

demonstration of the importance of antimetabole for the structure and meaning of Cymbeline

gives the use of the word "counterchange" rhetorical relevance for both its context of utterance

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and for the play as a whole.

What distinguishes King John rhetorically from other early plays is the high frequency of 

antimetabole in both the precise and looser forms understood by Puttenham. [6] While

antimetabole begins informing characters' speeches early in act I of King John, the playwright

restricts the trope mainly to acts II and III: sixteen of the twenty-two appearances of the trope

occur in this section of the play (four appear in act IV and one each in acts I and V). [7] One

could say that the third and fourth terms of the ABBA pattern of antimetabole form a mirror

image of the first two. This mirroring occurs in King John not only within but also between

antimetaboles. Juxtaposing previously quoted illustrations of the trope demonstrates this fact.

KING JOHN

Peace be to France, if France in peace permit

Our just and lineal entrance to our own;

KING PHILIP

Peace be to England, if that war return

From France to England, there to live in peace.

This double rhetorical mirroring registers the political impasse of the play occasioned by John's

and Arthur's contested claims to the English throne. (For King Philip in the above-quoted

dialogue is speaking on Arthur's behalf). The impasse reflected in John's and Philip's opposing

antimetaboles supersedes and renders inconsequential the particularized meanings of the word

"peace." Concerning the two antimetaboles involving the word "peace," Alexander Leggatt

 judges that "by the time the two kings have finished with it, the word 'peace' has lost its

significance, and becomes an empty flourish. The symmetry of such exchanges becomes

mechanical, predictable, even comic" (4). In King John, more often than not the mirror function

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of antimetabole leaves the final impression of ideational gridlock  rather than the improved or

more specified meaning of individual terms. In his notorious speech on Commodity (II.i.562-99),

the Bastard resolves that

[...] 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.

(II.i.594-97)

Rather than particularizing the meaning of the words "rich," "beggar," or "beggary," this early

modern (rather than precisely termed modern) antimetabole conveys the impression of a mind

paralyzed, of a thought process compulsively repeated until the intellect locks in a chamber that

the trope provides. A conceit in The Tragedy of  King Richard II similar to the Bastard's in King

John helps us understand that antimetabole rather than, say, the Bastard's poetic conceit is

primarily responsible for the impasse in his thinking. In his memorable act-five soliloquy, King

Richard laments that

Sometimes am I king;

Then treasons make me wish myself a beggar,

And so I am. Then crushing penury 

Persuades me I was better when a king;

Then am I kinged again, and by and by

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Think that I am unking'd by Bullingbrook,

And straight am nothing.

(V.v.32-38)

Like the Bastard, Richard seems to be intellectually running in place, stuck in a perpetual-motion

idea. But because antimetabole does not enclose his king-beggar conceit, his mind breaks an

impasse and he concludes that he is nothing. This thought then leads to a profoundly existential

generalization, rich with tragic resonance:

But what e'er I be,

Nor I, nor any man that but man is,

With nothing shall be pleas'd, till he be eased

With being nothing.

(V.v.38-41)

Antimetabole precludes a similarly liberating (albeit depressing) imaginative train of thought.

The mirroring of antimetabole that seems to clarify meaning yet actually does not do so

encapsulates Shakespeare's dramatic method early in King John, where the bastard Philip

Faulconbridge and young Robert Faulconbridge debate vigorously the question of their

paternity and the inheritance of old Sir Robert

Faulconbridge's wealth and lands. There, characters conceive this debate in terms of departure

from and conformity to mirror images. "Compare our faces and be judge yourself," the Bastard

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wittily says with regard to whether the younger Robert Faulconbridge or himself is Sir Robert's

natural son:

If old Sir Robert did beget us both

And were our father, and this son like him,

O old Sir Robert, father, on my knee

I give heaven thanks I was not like to thee.

(I.i.79-83)

The bastard Philip's sudden non sequitur amounts not only to an admission that he does not

physically resemble Sir Robert but thus also to an apparent, perplexing abandonment of his

argument that he ought to inherit the nobleman's title and goods. Philip's face mirrors the

remembered features of a dead English hero. The Bastard "hath a trick of Coeur-de-Lion's face"

(I.i.85), Queen Eleanor straightway asserts. "Mine eye hath well examined his parts/ And finds

them perfect Richard" (I.i.89-90), John agrees. By getting onstage observers to see that his face

mirrors that of his actual father, Richard the Lion-Hearted, the Bastard seems to have forfeited

his claim. In fact, he goes on to say that the thin face (a "half-face") of his half-brother Robert

reflects that of thin-faced old Sir Robert (I.i.92-94). King Philip of France and Constance argue

in act II that Arthur should be king of England according to the law of  primogeniture, the right of 

the eldest (or elder) brother to inherit. Arthur is Geoffrey's son, and Geoffrey was John's elder

brother. Little Arthur's face is an acknowledged mirror of his father Geoffrey's. "Look here upon

thy brother Geoffrey's face" (II.i.99), King Philip, pointing to Arthur, tells John:

These eyes, these brows, were moulded Out Of his;

This little abstract doth contain that large

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Which died in Geoffrey, and the hand of time

Shall draw this brief into as huge a volume.

That Geoffrey was thy elder brother born,

And this his son; England was Geoffrey's right,

And this is Geoffrey's; in the name of God

How comes it then that thou art called a king,

When living blood doth in these temples beat

Which own the crown thou o'ermasterest?

(II.i. 100-9)

"My bed was ever to thy son as true/ As thine was to thy husband," Constance tells Eleanor, "and

this boy/ Liker in feature to his father Geoffrey/ Than thou and John" (II.i. 124-27). If the

precision of the reflection of a child's features in a supposedly authoritative royal face becomes

the criterion for succession, Arthur, in Constance's opinion, has a greater claim than John does.

Yet Arthur's father Geoffrey died before John's father did and--more important--John reigns by

virtue of Richard I's will. "Thou advised scold," Eleanor answers Constance, "I can produce/ A

will that bars the title of thy son"

(II.i.191-92). According to Shakespeare's source (Holinshed's Chronicles), Richard the Lion-

Hearted stipulated that his brother John should be king. Constance angrily plays upon the

meaning of Eleanor's word "will" by insisting that "A will--a wicked will,/ A woman's will, a

cankered grandam's will" (II.i.193-94) bars Arthur from the royal title. The debate in the play

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over whether facial resemblance or a monarch's will legitimizes the successor replicates the

terms of the Faulconbridge half-brothers' disagreement over who ought to inherit. [8] But there

the case is different. Not only does Robert Faulconbridge's face most nearly resemble old Sir

Robert's, but the father also named this younger brother in his will as his heir (I.i.114-15). John,

however, disallows both these claims, bowing solely to the law of primogeniture and the notion

that any son a woman bears after marriage legitimizes that child as her husband's son. [9] The

riddling taunt, addressed to young Robert, by which John concludes his articul ation of this

highly questionable decision indicates that the King knows his verdict flies in the face of the

truth:

Sirrah, your brother is legitimate;

Your father's wife did after wedlock bear him.

And if she did play false, the fault was hers,

Which fault lies on the hazards of all husbands

That marry wives. Tell me, how if my brother [Richard I],

Who as you say took pains to get this son,

Had of your father claimed this son for his?

In sooth, good friend, your father might have kept

This calf bred from his cow from all the world;

In sooth he might. Then if he were my brother's,

My brother might not claim him, nor your father,

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Being none of his, refuse him. This concludes:

My mother's son did get your father's heir;

Your father's heir must have your father's land.

(I.i.116-29)

Robert Faulconbridge's shocked response to this outrageous speech introduces the terms of the

later opposition between a legal will and an unbridled natural will (Eleanor's) (II.i. 192-94).

"Shall then my father's will be of no force! To dispossess that child which is not his?" Robert

asks. "Of no more force to dispossess me, sir,! Than was his will to get me, as I think" (I.i. 130-

33), the Bastard impudently puns, forming a shared antimetabole that through its mirroring

focuses the impasse dictatorially broken by John.

Yet despite this breaking, the impasse remains. Unlike Robert Faulconbridge, the bastard Philip

is, after all, John's blood relative, the son of John's brother Richard I. Moreover, if primogeniture

becomes John's criterion for awarding a title and estate to the Bastard, then the same principle

could plausibly be invoked to confer the crown upon Arthur. Compounding the impasses in King

John between legitimacy and illegitimacy are shiftings of shape--"counterchanges," to use

Puttenham's term--between characters. Here again, the dynamics of "the

Counterchaunge"--antimetabole--coalesce and reinforce Shakespeare's method. Antimetabole's

ABBA operation suggests the collapse of two values, especially those represented by the B term,

into a single entity. This phenomenon recurs within the characterological dimension of King

John, in which Austria for example by wearing Richard the Lion-Hearted's lionskin shifts shapes

to, in a sense, become the dead former king. The illegitimate Faulconbridge momentarily shifts

shapes with the legitimate Faulconbridge in the figurative relationships of this speech of the

Bastard's:

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Madam, an if my brother had my shape

And I had his, Sir Robert's his like him,

And if my legs were two such riding-rods,

My arms such eel-skins stuffed, my face so thin,

That in mine ear I durst not stick a rose,

Lest men should say, "Look where three-farthings goes,"

And to his shape were heir to all this land,

Would I might never stir from off this place.

I would not give it every foot to have this face;

It would not be Sir Nob in any case. [10]

(I.i.138-47)

The Bastard figuratively enacts this counterchange only so that he might assert his natural

difference from young Robert and his superiority. Elsewhere the collapse of two identities into

one is less symbolic. By royal fiat, Philip Faulconbridge shifts shape with his father Richard the

Lion-Hearted to become Sir Richard Plantagenet. "From henceforth bear his name whose form

thou bearest," John tells the Bastard:

Kneel thou down Philip, but rise more great;

He knights the Bastard

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Arise Sir Richard and Plantagenet. [11]

(I.i.160-62)

That this counterchange of identities possesses a nonsymbolic truth is indicated by Queen

Eleanor's reaction to Philip's witty acceptance of the title:

Brother, by th' mother's side, give me your hand;

My father gave me honour, yours gave land.

Now blessed be the hour by night or day

When I was got, Sir Robert was away.

QUEEN ELEANOR

The very spirit of Plantagenet!

I am thy grandam, Richard; call me so.

(I.i.163-68)

The queen's exclamation informs us that the spirit-possession prevalent elsewhere in King John

(Braunmuller 50-53) figures in this epiphany. The audacious spirit of Richard the Lion-Hearted

blazes from the Bastard. [12] Finally, Lady Blanche of Spain and the Dauphin Louis shift shapes

in Hubert's recommendation of their marriage:

Such as she is in beauty, virtue, birth,

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Is the young Dauphin every way complete.

If not complete of, say he is not she,

And she again wants nothing to name want,

If want it be not, that she is not he.

He is the half part of a blessed man,

Left to be finished by such as she,

And she a fair divided excellence,

Whose fullness of perfection lies in him.

In verse containing an unorthodox antimetabole (one intersected by a fifth term) (II.i.435-37, my

italics), Hubert celebrates the sacrament of Christian marriage in which two beings merge as one.

(II.i.433-41)

But this merger never occurs. Like Octavia later in Antony and Cleopatra, Blanche finds herself 

pulled simultaneously in opposite directions by allegiances to her husband and a blood relative.

Blanche's impasse is typical of the dramaturgy of King John, a feature of the play replicated by

antimetabole. Concerning Blanche's dilemma, Grennan concludes that "as she faces the dreadful

implications of her position she becomes an eloquent emblem of impasse" (26)--all the impasses

thus far of the play wrought by the intensifying series of reversal of expectation. When her

husband of a few hours, Louis, urges his father King Philip to submit to Cardinal Pandulph's

order that the French attack John's forces, Blanche begs the Dauphin, "go not to arms/ Against

mine uncle" (III.i.308-09). "Which is the side that I must go withal?" she pathetically asks.

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I am with both; each army bath a hand,

And in their rage, I having hold of both,

They whirl asunder and dismember me.

Husband, I cannot pray that thou mayst win;

Uncle, I needs must pray that thou mayst lose;

Father, I may not wish the fortune thine;

Grandson, I will not wish thy wishes thrive.

Whoever wins, on that side shall I lose-

(III.i.327-36)

Assured loss before the match be played.

Blanche's dilemma feels like a figurative dismemberment that reflects--in fact, in one sense is

indirectly caused by--the rending of the Body Politic occasioned by John's ill rule and doubtful

title. Readers' and auditors' repeated experience of processing the antimetaboles of the play

generally ends with impasse, a fact that helps them to become more aware of impasses such as

Blanche's. The arrows in the following diagram chart the reader's experience of processing the

four-term ABBA pattern of an antimetabolic trope-

A[right arrow]B

B[right arrow]A

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--with the signature return in the fourth A term to the first A term. The course of the arrows with

the return to the original A term visually represents the antimetabolic rhetorical effect of 

containment, of the enclosure or knotting of the values or ideas making up the trope. In the

words of Joseph Candido, "the feeling of psychological enclosure that derives from being tainted

by a corrupt, debased, or illegitimate stock--whether real or imagined--is one of the most

strongly realized aspects of King John and does, quite clearly haunt the title character" (17).

Antimetabole is thus essentially suited for conveying ideational indifference, claustrophobia, or

stalemate.

Pandulph's decree creates an impasse not only for Blanche but for King Philip also. The French

monarch finds himself trapped between two religious vows, one with John signified by a

handclasp, based upon the holy marriage between his son and John's niece, and an older one,

made to the Roman Catholic church to wage war on its behalf against its enemies. Threatened by

the Cardinal with excommunication, he not surprisingly chooses to do battle with John. That the

French lose this fight accords with the reluctance of Philip's choice and the monumentality of his

predicament. His religious impasse on this occasion compounds an earlier, political dilemma

before the gates of Angers. There, King Philip found himself at stalemate with John over the

issue of England's rightful king (and Angers's rightful lord). Through heralds, both Philip and

John order Hubert and Angers's citizens on the walls to open the city gates to himself.

Shakespeare similarly patterns each herald's speech and makes them both virtually the same

length to suggest an equality of royal claim and thus deadlock: [13]

FRENCH HERALD

You men of Angers, open wide your gates

And let young Arthur Duke of Bretagne in,

Who by the hand of France this day hath made

Much work for tears in many an English mother,

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Whose sons lie scattered on the bleeding ground;

Many a widow's husband grovelling lies,

Coldly embracing the discoloured earth;

And victory with little loss doth play

Upon the dancing banners of the French,

Who are at hand, triumphantly displayed,

To enter conquerors and to proclaim

Arthur of Bretagne England's king and yours.

ENGLISH HERALD

Rejoice, you men of Angers, ring your bells;

King John, your king and England's, doth approach,

Commander of this hot malicious day.

Their armours that marched hence so silver-bright

Hither return all gilt with Frenchmen's blood;

There stuck no plume in an English crest

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That is removed by a staff of France;

Our colours do return in those same hands

That did display them when we first marched forth,

And like a jolly troop of huntsmen come

Our lusty English, all with purpled hands,

Dyed in the dying slaughter of their foes.

Open your gates and give the victors way.

(II.i.300-24)

Each herald bases the right to rule on raw force, the content of these respectively twelve- and

thirteen-line speeches. But as Hubert, speaking from the walls, shrewdly notes, force has

wrought an impasse:

Heralds, from off our towers we might behold

From first to last the onset and retire

Of both your armies, whose equality

By our best eyes cannot be censured.

Blood hath bought blood, and blows have answered blows;

Strength matched with strength, and power confronted power.

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Both are alike, and both alike we like.

One must prove greatest. While they weigh so even,

We hold our town for neither, yet for both.

(II.i.325-33)

An antimetabole of a Citizen of Angers has predicted this stalemate involving force. "Till you

compound whose right is worthiest," he warns Kings Philip and John, "We for the worthiest hold

the right from both" (II.i.281-82). But armed force cannot resolve this impasse, nor can an appeal

to different religious vows or a marriage between Blanche and Louis. The circular nature of the

four terms of the Citizen's antimetabole, with "right" returning to and locking into "right"

(without the clarification of either word) conveys the stalled claustrophobic debate over rightful

kingship at issue at this moment in the play. Hubert clinches the resolution of Angers through an

antimetabole. "A greater power [God] than we denies" the exclusive claims of Arthur's

supporters and of John to the throne:

And till it be undoubted, we do lock 

Our former scruple in our strong-barred gates.

Kings of our fear, until our fears resolved

Be by some certain king, purged and deposed.

(II.i.368-72)

Hubert's antimetabole implies that the citizens of Angers, like kings, confidently (they trust

God's power) rule (control) their rebel fear of devastation, and that they will remain such

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monarchs until either Philip or John in some way resolves their dispute and thus their fears. In

this case, the effect of balance latent in antimetabole materializes to register successfully

Hubert's anxiety over remaining uncommitted to one king or the other while communicating the

resolution of the people of Angers, that they are masters of their passions and the political

situation.

The barren self-enclosing nature of characters' experience in King John is reflected in an

ingenious antimetabole of Louis the Dauphin's. In Blanche's eye, Louis tells his father that he

professes to find "a wondrous miracle":

The shadow of my self formed in her eye,

Which being but the shadow of your son,

Becomes a sun and makes your son a shadow.

(II.i.499-501)

The egotism of the Dauphin's conclusion that he never loved himself "Till now infixed I

beheld myself,/ Drawn in the flattering table of her eye" (II.i.503-04) betrays this antimetabole's

function of self-compliment. The reflected image of himself that Louis sees in Blanche's pupil is

of course the "shadow"--the reflection--of King Philip's son, but the unorthodox introduction of a

fifth term in this trope introduces a homonymic pun on "son"/"sun" and suggests that the image

is so miraculous that it becomes a legitimate offspring of the Dauphin, simultaneously his son,

Philip's grandson, and a new French sun king--a being so dazzling that he by comparison makes

Philip's flesh-and-blood son the equivalent of a shadow. Here, the repetition of terms in

antimetabole sharpens the meaning of a common word--"son"--by suggesting that a son is a

miraculous "sun" to a father and mother, and it does so by actually melding the two words. The

Dauphin vainly compliments himself while he publicly praises the beauty of Blanc he's eyes,

capable of making his reflected image suns. In this instance, antimetabole reveals ironically the

speaker's self-love as well as (perhaps more than) his ability to coin preciously a tribute to the

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power of his lady's eyes. The implication of fertility in his begetting a son/sun in Blanche's eyes

 jars with that of the barrenness of self love, a barrenness replicated by the self-contained, even

self-consuming, experience of hearing and processing in succession the antimetabole's four

terms.

Time and again in King John, antimetabolic language obfuscates and thus throws into doubt

what has been made clear, a dramatic fact in the play graphically illustrated during Constance's

flyting with Queen Eleanor in act II. Accusing Eleanor of cruelly preferring her son John's weak 

claim to the throne over the claim of her "eldest son's son" (II.i.177), the boy Arthur, Constance--

the child's mother--tells King John

That [Arthur] is not only plagued for [Eleanor's] sin,

But God hath made her sin and her the plague

On this removed issue, plagued for her,

And with her plague her sin; his injury

Her injury the beadle to her sin,

All punished in the person of this child

And all for her. A plague upon her!

(II.i.184-90)

The italicized words here focus the four characteristic terms of two closely related antimetaboles.

When the first of the second antimetabole's four terms, "sin" (II.i.187), concludes the

grammatical unit in which the four terms of the first antimetabole appear, the two tropes overlap,

or interlock . This technique further compresses the already condensed antimetaboles,

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intensifying the emphasis of the tropes' restatement of a clearly expressed idea. Alluding to "the

Catechism's version of the second Commandment (in the Book of Common Prayer),"

Constance has straightforwardly insisted in accordance with Exodus 20:5 that the sins of the

grandmother Eleanor afflict her grandson Arthur (Braunmuller 148):

Thy sins are visited in this poor child;

The canon of the Law is laid on him,

Being but the second generation

Removed from thy sin-conceiving womb.

(II.i.179-82)

Auditors clearly grasp Constance's belief that God has made Eleanor and her sin Arthur's plague,

but this understanding gets lost in the dizzying effect of the interlocked antimetaboles that restate

the biblical idea. Braunmuller wrestles gamely to extract intelligible meaning from what sounds

like double or circular talk. According to this editor, Arthur is plagued for her, "and with her

person torment (plague) the sin she committed." This gloss of the phrase "And with her plague

her sin" is--like the phrase itself--anything but clear. The utterance "his injury/ Her injury the

beadle to her sin" is glossed to mean "Constance's wrong (injury) harms Arthur (becomes his

injury) and thus rebounds to punish, as a parish constable (beadle) would punish her original sin"

(Braunmuller 148). The condensation, the ellipses necessary to fashion an auricularly striking

antimetabole, nevertheless creates a persisting uncertainty of referent and meaning. In short, the

double antimetabole under analysis by its confusion of meaning and impression of circular

discourse undercuts the notion that God is using and tormenting Arthur to make Eleanor pay for

her sins. King Philip's portrayal of Constance's complaint as a series of "ill-tuned repetitions"

(II.i.197) includes a negative judgment upon her antimetabolic speech.

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At other times in the play, the tendency of antimetabole to obscure potentially intelligible

meaning appears calculated to do so by the speaker. Like the Archbishop of Canterbury in the

later play Henry V (I.ii.33-95), Cardinal Pandulph spins a dark argument that King Philip of 

France's original oath sworn to be the Catholic Church's champion precludes, in fact invalidates,

any later oath sworn to a monarch judged heretical and cursed by the church (III.i.263-97). [14]

This inky argument depends upon Pandulph's equivocating with the words "swear" and

"forsworn" until all sense seems lost in this craftily introduced clinching antimetabole:

But thou dost swear [in your oath of allegiance to a heretical king] only to be forsworn [to your

original Catholic vow],

And most forsworn [to your first Catholic vow] to keep what thou dost swear [to heretical John].

Therefore thy later vows against thy first

Is in thyself  rebellion to thyself.

This antimetabolic double-speak focuses the depressing no-win situation in which Philip stands,

a king who for valid political reasons wants to ally himself with England through the proposed

dynastic marriage of his son Louis and John's niece Blanche but finds himself blocked by the

powerful Pandulph. In other words, this antimetabole performs its function in King John of 

condensing and underscoring an impasse between politico-religious issues.

(III.i.286-89)

Cardinal Pandulph utters the next significant antimetabole in the play when he attempts to

invigorate Louis, depressed by the loss of Angers to the English, by Arthur's death, and by

Constance's mad despair. In verses that anticipate similar poetry of Macbeth (V.v.19-28), Louis

laments,

There's nothing in this world can make me joy.

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Life is as tedious as a twice-told tale,

Vexing the dull ear of a drowsy man,

And bitter shame hath spoiled the sweet word's taste,

That it yields naught but shame and bitterness.

(III.iv. 107-11)

The slightly modified antimetabole appearing at the end of the Dauphin's speech of depression

doubtlessly suggests, formally at least, the antimetabolic chiasmus in Pandulph's response to it:

Before the curing of a strong disease,

Even in the instant of repair and health,

The fit is strongest. Evils that take leave,

On their departure most of all show evil.

What have you lost by losing of this day?

(III.iv.112-16)

The Cardinal's chiastic trope renders paradoxical the principle expressed in Louis's antimetabole

(that an object can only yield the quality contaminating it); Pandulph, on the contrary, claims that

the last vestige of evil seems most evil but actually is a sign of impending goodness. By means

of a chiastic figure, the Cardinal condenses memorably, persuasively, the less memorable, more

prosaic Machiavellian argument that the loss of Arthur will benefit Louis and France when

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Englishmen blame John for the boy's death and fall away from him. This is what does and does

not happen in the last episodes of King John. While John's nobles desert him in disgust for John's

imagined role in Arthur's loss, the bastard Faulconbridge remains loyal, to the potential

preservation of England. What Pandulph could not have foreseen when he coined his arresting

trope is a fierce Englishman's heroic devotion to the political rather than mortal body of John.

[15] The French at play's end depart from England before a battle can be fought, but the

Bastard's stirring speech of defiant patriotism makes it likely that they would be beaten back 

from any subsequent invasion. In a principle of irony that applies to other antimetaboles in the

play, Pandulph's chiastic statement about good and evil comes true in a form he never could have

imagined nor will ever know when the evil of King John congeals as a fatal sickness that impels

the Bastard's allegiance to an emerging good King John as England or the Body Politic. This

transformation and emergence seems like a punishment of Pandulph's amorality and policy, for

the Bastard's devotion to the Body Politic promises to obstruct the thoroughness of Catholic

attempts to subjugate the land. Nevertheless, the political situation at the end of the play

undercuts this sure conclusion. The Bastard's devotion to England will thwart Catholic

suppression only if the English barons likewise devote themselves fiercely to defy Catholicism, a

scenario rendered doubtful by the self-interested basis of their ch anging allegiances in the play,

as Christopher Colmo has shown. Shakespeare's audience knew that history for many years

would not endorse the religious dimension of the Bastard's cry of the heart. [16] The actual

irresolution of the play's conclusion suits with the ambiguity, the indeterminacy, of Pandulph's

trope, in which a body can be evil and good at virtually one and the same moment.

This paradox involving good and evil informs in one way or another several antimetaboles

appearing between Pandulph's above-analyzed trope and the end of the play. When Pandulph

hears Louis confess his fear that he shall lose his "life and all, as Arthur did" (III.iv.144), in a

confrontation with John and the English, the Cardinal exclaims,

How green you are and fresh in this old world!

John lays you plots. The times conspire with you,

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For he that steeps his safety in true blood

Shall find but bloody safety and untrue.

(III.iv.145-48)

The Cardinal's antimetabole articulates what might be called the Macbeth principle--that the

outrageous evil of a ruler ultimately provokes a respondent goodness in an oppressed citizenry

when, in disgust, they take up arms against the corrupt monarch. Such is the reaction of the Scots

under Malcolm's leadership. On a lesser scale, this paradoxical principle explains Cornwall's

servant's reaction to Cornwall's blinding of Gloucester in King Lear (III.vii.78-82). Pandulph, in

his continuation of the above-quoted speech, asserts that "this act [John's imprisonment of 

Arthur], so evilly borne, shall cool the hearts"

Of all his people and freeze up their zeal,

That none so small advantage shall step forth

To check his reign, but they will cherish it.

(III.iv.149-52)

Michael Manheim asserts that "we hear much about Richard III as true predecessor of Macbeth;

we should perhaps hear more about [King] John" (134). Reese characterizes John as at times "a

sort of meaner Macbeth" (261). Like Macbeth, John seeks inward peace--here "safety"--in the

self-destructive resolve to obliterate any potential claimant of the throne, no matter how remote

or strongly imprisoned. The amoral Cardinal Pandulph has coined a second consecutive trope

about the mysterious complementarity of good and evil. And as was true before, it does not

accurately predict or describe future events in King John. John's evil causes aristocrats to

dissociate themselves from him, but it does not cause them to rise up to kill him. Thus the

Cardinal's above-quoted antimetabole participates in--in fact, contributes to--the indeterminate

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meaning of King John.

Harold Bloom has argued that the play's division into two distinct parts--acts I, II, and III and

acts IV and V--is not a flaw (58). With the onset of act IV, antimetabole becomes relatively

scarce in the play, restricted to five appearances (see note 7). The most significant of these are

the first and fourth passages. Threatened with the white-hot rod of Hubert, Arthur exclaims,

Let me not hold my tongue. Let me not, Hubert,

Or Hubert, if you will, cut out my tongue,

So I may keep mine eyes.

(IV.i.99-101)

Arthur's antimetabole accentuates the difference between holding and losing one's tongue, more

specifically between not holding (using) one's tongue in a barter to save one's eyes by offering to

lose it. This paradox refigures the larger phenomenon in King John of the Body Politic's inability

to remain whole without sacrificing one or more of its members (King John himself, its head).

As was true in the cases of Pandulph's and Constance's chiastic tropes, the significance of 

Arthur's antimetabole is neither intended by nor within the ultimate comprehension of its

speaker. Unlike Pandulph and Constance, however, Arthur never becomes the victim of an irony

of the antimetabole's strange fulfillment. More important, his antimetabole is the opposite of 

Pandulph's and Constance's tropes in its impassioned, heart-felt language and content. A plain,

direct diction rather than a mannerist, artificial language makes up Arthur's antimetabole. John

W. Blanpied has characterized the poetic style of the first three acts of the play as "a polished

public style" (102) that contrasts with the "private, nervous, confused" style of the last two acts, a

style that is often "naked" (109). This difference is consistent with the markedly lower

proportion of textbook tropes in the latter two acts of King John, where passionate need and

desperate wishes seem to preclude the mental composure and the intellectual distance from a

situation necessary for the fabrication of highly stylized, patterned rhetorical conceits.

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Later, when Hubert confronts a remorseful John with his sealed written order for Arthur's death,

John complains,

O, when the last account 'twixt heaven and earth

Is to be made, then shall this hand and seal

Witness against us to damnation.

How oft the sight of means to do ill deeds

Makes deeds ill done! Hadst not thou been by,

A fellow by the hand of Nature marked,

Quoted, and signed to do a deed of shame,

This murder had not come into my mind.

(IV.ii.216-23)

The condensed gnomic antimetabole in this passage attempts to validate King John's shifting of 

the blame for the commissioning of the boy's death to Hubert. If Hubert's face were not so ugly,

so ill-made, John would never have thought to harm the child. In John's view, ill-shaped men are

naturally disposed to do ill deeds. John's phrase "Makes deeds ill done" literally means that the

king's noting of Hubert's ugly face was enough to ensure the future performance (the "making

done") of a "deed ill"--an evil deed. But the transferral of the adjective "ill" behind the word

"deeds" (to form the antimetabole) creates a secondary reading of the phrase (one that

Braunmuller regards as the primary meaning): John laments that often the sight of the means to

do "poorly or unskilfully accomplished acts" makes the deeds performed by these agents poorly

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or unskillfully done (Braunmuller 226). Ironically, John in this second reading of the

antimetabole describes what in fact has happened, what in fact has saved Arthur's li fe: Hubert's

sight of the red-hot poker by which he would blind Arthur becomes the site of his and Arthur's

dialogue about his cruelty and natural pity--a site and dialogue so powerful that they

"unskillfully" move Hubert toward his commissioned, barbaric deed. Moved by pity, he does the

deed so ill that he fails to follow through with it. Instead, he does something good: he preserves

Arthur and conceals him. Thus King John's antimetabole as worded undercuts its primary

meaning by suggesting that judging temperament or character by the naturalness of appearance is

a dangerous or misleading axiom. Sometimes the most ill-favored are full of the milk of human

kindness. John's antimetabole is therefore true and not true, a microcosm of the play itself.

Such indeterminacy (as has been noted) blurs the conclusion of King John. In terms of 

Reformation stereotypes, antipapal John and papal Pandulph appear opposites, yet their

characters disturbingly become indistinguishable, as playgoers realize that the god Commodity

determines the amoral actions of each. John challenges the Pope when doing so serves his

exchequer, and he submits to his rule when doing so dissolves the French threat in England.

Cardinal Pandulph sets the Dauphin Louis to invade England by implying that (with Arthur dead

and John deposed) his marriage to Lady Blanche made the English crown the Dauphin's; but

once Pandulph comes to terms with John, Prince Henry will become Henry Ill as Louis defies

Pandulph and the compact, resolves to fight for the crown, but mysteriously withdraws and

returns to France. Moreover, the order implied by the Bastard's kneeling allegiance to Prince

Henry is undercut by the fact that the Prince is a child and that he "is only the son of an unlawful

king, and [that] those who had read Holinshed knew that during Henry III's long reign England

was anything but settled and happy under the monarch" (Philip Edwards 121; Robert Jones,

"Truth in King John" 415). The Bastard's grim prediction of war between France and England

comes to nothing, and this character's hard-earned understanding of fighting in a national cause

never gets played out. So history, in Shakespeare's view, produces no monument, reaches no

memorable climax or resolution. It churns to nothing, through dynamics encapsulated variously

by the rhetorical trope antimetabole. [17] In keeping with Eammon Grennan's previously quoted

 judgment that the language of the anonymous play The Troublesome Reign of King John

(published 1591) is "more or less straightforward exposition," antimetabole is not conspicuous in

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the frequently rhymed poetry of the principal literary source of Shakespeare's King John. In fact,

it occurs in the former play only once, when King John says, "Thus right triumphs, and John

triumphs in right " (Pt. 1, 1089; Troublesome Raigne 101). By contrast, "Counterchange," mainly

in rhetorical but also in other dramatic senses, serves in Shakespeare's play to convey his vision

of the radical instability of politics--a place-shifting politics that in his view becomes

synonymous with history.

Maurice Hunt (maurice_hunt@baylor.edu), professor of English and department chair at

Baylor University, is the author of Shakespeare's Romance of the Word (1990),

Approaches to Teaching The Tempest and Other Late Romances (1992), Shakespeare's

Labored Art (1995), and The Winter's Tale: Critical Essays (1995). He is currently editing

Cymbeline for the New Shakespeare Variorum for the Modern Language Association.

Forthcoming publications include essays on the language of Much Ado About Nothing

(Studies in Philology) and on the phenomenon of labor in Spenser's Faerie Queene (Studies

in English Literature).

Notes

(1.) Emrys Jones has judged that "even within single episodes the action [of King John] often has

an oddly indecisive quality, a tendency to start and stop, seeming not to get anywhere or at least

not in a straightforward way, sometimes indeed going into reverse as if wanting to cancel itself 

out" (233).

(2.) Braunmuller concludes that "the action of King John exhibits both chiastic and two-part

patterns; it has a direct, strong opening, a complex transition between its two parts, and a

conclusion mingling signs of finality with disturbing hints of a return to the status quo ante and

an unspoken promise of the troubles to come in Henry III's reign" (78).

(3.) All quotations of King John are taken from Braunmuller's edition of the play. Quotations of 

Shakespeare plays other than King John are taken from G. Blakemore Evans, The Riverside

Shakespeare.

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(4.) J. L. Simmons notes that "Adrien Bonjour's view [of a] pattern [. . . ] 'decline of a hero--rise

of a hero' is a little more satisfactory, but the play really shows no such geometrical lines" (69).

(5.) "It seemes your offices are very litle worth,/ Or very few of you worthy of offices." Or again,

"In trifles earnest as any man can bee,/ In earnest matters no such trifler as hee" (Puttenham 208-

09).

(6.) For a description of other classical rhetorical figures (sometimes taken from Puttenham)

informing King John, see Christopher Z. Hobson 98-101.

(7.) I.i. 130-33, II.i.84, II.i.89-90, II.i.185-86, II.i.187-88, II.i.281-82, II.i.371-72, II.i.435-37,

II.i.500-0l, II.i.594-97, III.i.70-71, III.i.187-88, III.i.212-14, III.i.214-15, III.i.286-87, III.iv.110-

11, III.iv.147-48, IV.i.99-100, IV.ii.30-31, IV.ii.32-34, IV.ii.219-20, V.iv.37-38.

(8.) See William H. Matchett 232-33; John R. Elliot 74-75; Robert B. Pierce 130-31; Virginia M.

Vaughan, "Between Tetralogies: King John as Transition" 414, and "King John: A Study in

Subversion and Containment" 66-67; Phyllis Rackin 188-89; and Elihu Pearlman 65.

(9.) Robert Lane notes that John's decision to prefer the older, though illegitimate Faulconbridge

is "contrary to his own title, resting as it did on the will of Richard I" (467).

(10.) As regards Robert Faulconbridge's skinny arms and legs and his thin face, M. M. Reese

claims that "Shakespeare here owed something to the actor who almost certainly played the part,

the grotesquely thin John Sincklo, the 'mere anatomy' and 'father of maypoles'" (270).

(11.) "Robert C. Jones imagines that, after killing Austria, the Bastard wears his father's lion-skin

"thereafter through the play to keep his identification with Cordelion all the more vividly in view

for us" (Valiant Dead 64). This possibility would visually reinforce the counterchange of 

identities.

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(12.) Robert Jones remarks that "this 'perfect' reincarnation of an idealized hero exposes the

imperfections of the world around [the Bastard]" ("Truth in King John" 401-02). Emrys Jones

defines the spirit of Plantagenet animating the Bastard: "Being the issue of Coeur-de-Lion's

'commanding love,' he is himself  imperiously natural in feeling, uninhibited, spontaneous,

humorous, straightforwardly against art and guile and worldly compromise" (247).

(13.) According to L. A. Beaurline, the heralds' "symmetrical communiques [purport] to be

straight from the field, but their pompous ceremonial language and over-confident declarations

of victory cancel each other out" (25).

(14.) "Quoting E. A. J. Honigmann, Sidney C. Burgoyne points out that Pandulph in this speech

to King Philip "'propounds the doctrine of equivocation, hated by Protestants'" (235). Also see

Roy Battenhouse 145. Burgoyne makes a strong case for Pandulph's becoming the most

powerful character in King John. In this regard, also consult Harold Bloom 61.

(15.) For a good description of the presence of the medieval and early modern doctrine of the

monarch's two bodies in Shakespeare's King John and its relevance for the play, consult Marie

Axton 109-11. But cf. Barbara H. Traister 96-98.

(16.) The best argument for an ironic perspective on the Bastard's play-concluding, rousing

affirmation of England is made by David Scott Kastan, "'To Set a Form upon that Indigest':

Shakespeare's Fictions of History" 14-15. (Kastan originally made this claim in Shakespeare and

the Shapes of Time 52-54). In this vein, also see Barbara Hodgdon 22-25, 31-32, 33-43.

(17.) David Womersley argues that absolute standards of value do not exist in King John (501-

02), while Ronald Berman notes that "the prevailing uncertainty of King John is a consequence

of the relativism which informs it" (55). Also see Manheim 128 and Rackin 62, 66, 182, 183.

Works Cited

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Historical Society, 1977.

Battenhouse, Roy. "Religion in King John: Shakespeare's View." Connotations 1.2 (1991): 140-

49.

Beaurline, L. A., ed. King John. New Cambridge Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,

1990.

Berman, Ronald. "Anarchy and Order in Richard III and King John." Shakespeare Survey 20

(1967): 51-59.

Blanpied, John W. Time and the Artist in Shakespeare's Histories. Newark: U of Delaware P,

1983.

Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. New York : Penguin Putnam, 1998.

Bonjour, Adrien. "The Road to Swinstead Abbey: A Study of the Sense and Structure of King

John." ELH 18 (1951): 253-74.

Braunmuller, A. R., ed. The Life and Death of King John. The Oxford Shakespeare. 1989.

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Burgoyne, Sidney C. "Cardinal Pandolph and the 'Curse of Rome.'" College Literature 4 (1977):

232-40.

Calderwood, James L. "Commodity and Honour in King John." University of Toronto Quarterly

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Candido, Joseph. "Blots, Stains, and Adulteries: The Impurities in King John." Curren-Aquino

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Colmo, Christopher. "Coming Home: The Political Settlement of Shakespeare's King John."

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Curren-Aquino, Deborah T., ed. King John: New Perspectives. Newark: U of Delaware P, 1989.

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Elliot, John R. "Shakespeare and the Double Image of King John." Shakespeare Studies 1

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Evans, Blakemore G., ed. The Riverside Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.

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