K. John. Then God forgive the sin of all those souls,

That to their everlasting residence,
Before the dew of evening fall, shall fleet,
In dreadful trial of our kingdom's king!

K. Phi. Amen, amen!-Mount chevaliers! to arms!

Bast. St. George, that swindg'd the dragon, and e'er since

Sits on his horseback,* at mine hostess' door,
Teach us some fence ?-Sirrah, were I at home,
At your den, sirrah, [to AUSTRIA.] with your
lioness,

I'd set an ox-head to your lion's hide,
And make a monster of you.

Enter

Alarums and Excursions; then a Retreat. a French Herald, with Trumpets, to the Gates.

F. Her. You men of Angiers, 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,
Whose sons lie scatter'd on the bleeding ground;
Many a widow's husband groveling lies,
Coldly embracing the discolour'd earth;
And victory, with little loss, doth play
Upon the dancing banners of the French;
Who are at hand, triumphantly display'd,
To enter conquerors, and to proclaim
Arthur of Bretagne, England's king, and yours!
Enter an English Herald, with Trumpets.
E. Her. Rejoice, you men of Angiers, ring
your bells;

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

Commander of this hot malicious day!

Sits on his horseback. Shakspere might have found an example for the expression in North's Plutarch,-one of his favourite books; "he commanded his captains to set out their bands to the field, and he himself took his horseback."

Their armours, that march'd hence so silverbright,

Hither return all gilt with Frenchmen's blood; There stuck no plume in any English crest, That is removed by a staff of France;

Our colours do return in those same hands
That did display them when we first march'd
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.
Hubert. Heralds, from off our towers we
might behold,

From first to last, the onset and retire
whose equality

Of both your armies ;

By our best eyes cannot be censured: Blood hath bought blood, and blows have answer'd blows;

Strength match'd with strength, and power confronted power:

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.

Enter, at one side, KING JOHN, with his Power ; ELINOR, BLANCH, and the Bastard; at the other, KING PHILIP, LEWIS, AUSTRIA, and Forces.

K. John. France, hast thou yet more blood to cast away?

Say, shall the current of our right roam on,b Whose passage, vex'd with thy impediment, Shall leave his native channel, and o'erswell With course disturb'd even thy confining shores, Unless thou let his silver water keep

A peaceful progress to the ocean?

K. Phi. England, thou hast not saved one drop of blood,

In this hot trial, more than we of France; Rather, lost more: And by this hand I swear,

a Hubert. Without any satisfactory reason the name of this speaker has been altered by most modern editors to Citizen. The folio distinctly gives this, and all the subsequent speeches of the same person, to the end of the Act, to Hubert. The proposition to the kings to reconcile their differences by the marriage of Lewis and Blanch would appear necessarily to come from some person in authority; and it would seem to have been Shakspere's intention to make that person Hubert de Burgh, who occupies so conspicuous a place in the remainder of the play. In the third Act John says to Hubert,

That sways the earth this climate overlooks,
Before we will lay down our just-borne arms,
We'll put thee down, 'gainst whom these arms
we bear,

Or add a royal number to the dead;
Gracing the scroll, that tells of this war's loss,
With slaughter coupled to the name of kings.

Bast. Ha, majesty! how high thy glory towers,
When the rich blood of kings is set on fire!
O, now doth death line his dead chaps with steel;
The swords of soldiers are his teeth, his fangs;
And now he feasts, mousing" the flesh of men,
In undetermin'd differences of kings.
Why stand these royal fronts amazed thus?
Cry, havoc, kings! back to the stained field,
You equal potents, fiery-kindled spirits!
Then let confusion of one part confirm

The other's peace; till then, blows, blood, and death!

K. John. Whose party do the townsmen yet admit ?

K. Phi. Speak, citizens, for England; who's your king?

Hubert. The king of England, when we know the king.

K. Phi. Know him in us, that here hold up his right.

K. John. In us, that are our own great deputy, And bear possession of our person here; Lord of our presence, Angiers, and of you.

Hubert. A greater power than we denies all this;

And, till it be undoubted, we do lock

Our former scruple in our strong-barr'd gates,
Kings, of our fear; until our fears, resolv'd,
Be by some certain king purg'd and depos'd.

a Mousing. This figurative and characteristic expression in the original was rendered by Pope into the prosaic mouthing, which, up to our Pictorial edition, usurped its place. We restored the reading, which is now generally adopted.

b Kings, of our fear. The change of this passage is amongst the most remarkable of the examples which this play furnishes of the unsatisfactory nature of conjectural emendation. Warburton and Johnson, disregarding the original, say, "Kings are our fears." Malone adopts Tyrwhitt's conjecture-" King'd of our fears; "--and so the passage runs in most modern editions. If the safe rule of endeavouring to understand the existing text, in preference to guessing what the author ought to have written, had been adopted in this and hundreds of other cases, we should have been spared volumes of commentary. The two kings peremptorily demand the citizens of Angiers to acknowledge the respective rights of each,-England for himself, France for Arthur. The citizens, by the mouth of Hubert, answer,

"A greater power than we denies all this." Their quarrel is undecided-the arbitrement of Heaven is wanting.

"And, till it be undoubted, we do lock

Our former scruple in our strong-barr'd gates,
Kings, of our fear,"

on account of our fear, or through our fear, or by our fear, we hold our former scruple, kings,

"until our fears, resolv'd,

Be by some certain king purg'd and depos'd."

Bast. By heaven, these scroyles" of Angiers
flout you, kings;

And stand securely on their battlements,
As in a theatre, whence they gape and point
At your industrious scenes and acts of death.
Your royal presences be rul'd by me;
Do like the mutines of Jerusalem,5

Be friends a while, and both conjointly bend
Your sharpest deeds of malice on this town:
By east and west let France and England mount
Their battering cannon charged to the mouths;
Till their soul-fearing clamours have brawl'd
down

The flinty ribs of this contemptuous city:
I'd play incessantly upon these jades,
Even till unfenced desolation

Leave them as naked as the vulgar air.
That done, dissever your united strengths,
And part your mingled colours once again;
Turn face to face, and bloody point to point :
Then, in a moment, fortune shall cull forth
Out of one side her happy minion;

To whom in favour she shall give the day,
And kiss him with a glorious victory.
How like you this wild counsel, mighty states?
Smacks it not something of the policy?

K. John. Now, by the sky that hangs above our heads,

I like it well;-France, shall we knit our powers, And lay this Angiers even with the ground; Then, after, fight who shall be king of it?

Bast. An if thou hast the mettle of a king, Being wrong'd, as we are, by this peevish town, Turn thou the mouth of thy artillery,

As we will ours, against these saucy walls: And when that we have dash'd them to the ground,

Through and by had the same meaning, for examples of which see Tooke's Diversions of Purley (vol. i. p. 379); and so had by and of- as "he was tempted of the devil," in our translation of the Bible; and as in Gower,

"But that arte couth thei not fynde
Of which Ulisses was deceived."

a Scroyles; from Les Escrouelles, the king's evil.

b Soul-fearing. To fear is often used by the old writers in the sense of to make afraid. Thus, in Sir Thomas Elyot's Governor, "the good husband" setteth up "shailes to fear away birds." In North's Plutarch, Pyrrhus "thinking to fear" Fabricius, suddenly produces an elephant. Shakspere has several examples: Antony says,

"Thou canst not fear us. Pompey, with thy sails." Angelo, in Measure for Measure, would

"Make a scare-crow of the law, Setting it up to fear the birds of prey." But this active sense of the verb fear is not its exclusive meaning in Shakspere; and in the Taming of the Shrew, he exhibits its common use as well in the neuter as in the active acceptation:

"Pet. Now, for my life, Hortensio fears his widow. Wid. Then never trust me if I be afcard.

Pet. You are very sensible, and yet you miss my sense: I meant Hortensio is afeard of you."

Is near to England; Look upon the years
Of Lewis the Dauphin, and that lovely maid:
If lusty love should go in quest of beauty,
Where should he find it fairer than in Blanch?
If zealous love should go in search of virtue,
Where should he find it purer than in Blanch?
If love ambitious sought a match of birth,
Whose veins bound richer blood than lady
Blanch?

Such as she is, in beauty, virtue, birth,
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 a she;b
And she a fair divided excellence,
Whose fulness of perfection lies in him.
O, two such silver currents, when they join,
Do glorify the banks that bound them in:
And two such shores to two such streams made
one,

Two such controlling bounds shall you be, kings,

* Complete of. So the original. Hanmer changed this reading to,

"If not complete, O say, he is not she," which is to substitute the language of the eighteenth century for that of the sixteenth.

The original reads as she-evidently a misprint.

To these two princes, if you marry them.
This union shall do more than battery can,
To our fast-closed gates; for, at this match,
With swifter spleen than powder can enforce,
The mouth of passage shall we fling wide ope,
And give you entrance; but, without this
matcb,

The sea enraged is not half so deaf,
Lions more confident, mountains and rocks
More free from motion, no, not death himself
In mortal fury half so peremptory,
As we to keep this city.
Bast.

Here's a stay,

That shakes the rotten carcase of old death
Out of his rags! Here's a large mouth, indeed,
That spits forth death, and mountains, rocks,
and seas;

Talks as familiarly of roaring lions,
As maids of thirteen do of puppy-dogs!
What cannoneer begot this lusty blood?

He speaks plain cannon, fire, and smoke, and bounce;

He gives the bastinado with his tongue;
Our ears are cudgel'd; not a word of his,
But buffets better than a fist of France:
Zounds! I was never so bethump'd with words,
Since I first call'd my brother's father, dad.

Eli. Son, list to this conjunction, make this
match;

Give with our niece a dowry large enough:
For by this knot thou shalt so surely tie
Thy now unsur'd assurance to the crown,
That yon green boy shall have no sun to ripe
The bloom that promiseth a mighty fruit.
I see a yielding in the looks of France;
Mark, how they whisper: urge them, while
their souls

Are capable of this ambition;

b

Lest zeal, now melted, by the windy breath

a Here's a stay. This little word has produced large criticism. Johnson would read flaw; another emendator, Becket, would give us say. Malone and Steevens have two pages to prove, what requires no proof, that stay means interruption.

b Zeal, now melted. There is great confusion in what the commentators say on this image. Johnson thinks Shakspere means to represent zeal, in its highest degree, as congealed by a frost; Steevens thinks "the poet means to compare zeal to metal in a state of fusion, and not to dissolving ice;" Malone affirms that "Shakspere does not say that zeal, when congealed, exerts its utmost power; but, on the contrary, that when it is congealed or frozen it ceases to exert itself at all." All this discordance appears to us to be produced by not limiting the image by the poet's own words. The "zeal" of the King of France and of Lewis isnow melted "--whether that melting represent metal in a state of fusion or dissolving ice: it has lost its compactness, its cohesion; but

"the windy breath

Of soft petitions,"

the pleading of Constance and Arthur,-the pity and remorse of Philip for their lot,-may "cool and congeal" it "again to what it was "-may make it again solid and entire 29

Of soft petitions, pity, and remorse,
Cool and congeal again to what it was.
Hubert. Why answer not the double majesties
This friendly treaty of our threaten'd town?
K. Phi. Speak England first, that hath been
forward first

To speak unto this city: What say you?

K. John. If that the Dauphin there, thy
princely son,

Can in this book of beauty read, I love,
Her dowry shall weigh equal with a queen :
For Anjou, and fair Touraine, Maine, Poictiers,
And all that we upon this side the sea
(Except this city now by us besieg'd,)
Find liable to our crown and dignity,

Shall gild her bridal bed; and make her rich
In titles, honours, and promotions,
As she in beauty, education, blood,
Holds hand with any princess of the world.
K. Phi. What say'st thou, boy? look in the
lady's face.

Lew. I do, my lord, and in her eye I find
A wonder, or a wondrous miracle,

The shadow of myself form'd in her eye;
Which, being but the shadow of your son,
Becomes a sun, and makes your son a shadow:
I do protest, I never lov'd myself,
Till now infixed I beheld myself,
Drawn in the flattering table of her eye.

[Whispers with BLANCH.

Bast. Drawn in the flattering table of her eye!

Hang'd in the frowning wrinkle of her brow!— And quarter'd in her heart!-he doth espy

Himself love's traitor: This is pity now, That hang'd, and drawn, and quarter'd, there should be,

In such a love, so vile a lout as he.

Blanch. My uncle's will, in this respect, is mine.

If he see aught in you, that makes him like,
That anything he sees, which moves his liking,
I can with ease translate it to my will;
Or, if you will, to speak more properly,
I will enforce it easily to my love.
Further I will not flatter you, my lord,
That all I see in you is worthy love,
Than this, that nothing do I see in you,
Though churlish thoughts themselves should be
your judge,

That I can find should merit

any

hate.

K. John. What say these young ones? What say you, my niece?

Blanch. That she is bound in honour still to do

a

What you in wisdom still vouchsafe to say. K. John. Speak then, prince Dauphin; can you love this lady?

Lew. Nay, ask me if I can refrain from love; For I do love her most unfeignedly.

K. John. Then do I give Volquessen, Touraine, Maine,

Poictiers, and Anjou, these five provinces,
With her to thee; and this addition more,
Full thirty thousand marks of English coin.
Philip of France, if thou be pleas'd withal,
Command thy son and daughter to join hands.
K. Phi. It likes us well. Young princes,
close your
hands.

Aust. And your lips too; for, I am well as

sur'd,

That I did so, when I was first assur'd.b

K. Phi. Now, citizens of Angiers, ope your

gates,

Let in that amity which you have made;
For at saint Mary's chapel, presently,
The rites of marriage shall be solemniz'd.
Is not the lady Constance in this troop?
I know, she is not; for this match, made up,
Her presence would have interrupted much :
Where is she and her son? tell me, who knows.
Lew. She is sad and passionate at your
highness' tent."

с

K. Phi. And, by my faith, this league, that we have made,

Will give her sadness very little cure.

Brother of England, how may we content
This widow lady? In her right we came;
Which we, God knows, have turn'd another way,
To our own vantage.

K. John.
We will heal up all,
For we'll create young Arthur duke of Bretagne,
And earl of Richmond ;-and this rich fair town
We make him lord of.-Call the lady Con-
stance;

Some speedy messenger bid her repair To our solemnity: I trust we shall, If not fill up the measure of her will, Yet in some measure satisfy her so, That we shall stop her exclamation. Go we, as well as haste will suffer us, To this unlook'd-for unprepared pomp. [Exeunt all but the Bastard.-The Citizens retire from the walls. Bast. Mad world! mad kings! mad composition!

John, to stop Arthur's title in the whole, Hath willingly departed with a part:

And France, whose armour conscience buckled

on,

Whom zeal and charity brought to the field,
As God's own soldier, rounded in the ear
With that same purpose-changer, that sly devil;
That broker that still breaks the pate of faith;
That daily break-vow; he that wins of all,
Of kings, of beggars, old men, young men,
maids ;-

Who having no external thing to lose

But the word maid, cheats the poor maid of that; That smooth-faced gentlemar, tickling commodity,

Commodity, the bias of the world; b

с

The world, who of itself is peised well,

Made to run even; upon even ground;
Till this advantage, this vile drawing bias,
This sway of motion, this commodity,
Makes it take head from all indifferency,
From all direction, purpose, course, intent:
And this same bias, this commodity,
This bawd, this broker, this all-changing word,
Clapp'd on the outward eye of fickle France,
Hath drawn him from his own determin'd aid,
From a resolv'd and honourable war,
To a most base and vile-concluded peace.-
And why rail I on this commodity?

But for because he hath not woo'd me yet:
Not that I have the power to clutch my hand,
When his fair angels would salute my palm:
But for my hand, as unattempted yet,
Like a poor beggar, raileth on the rich.
Well, 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:
Since kings break faith upon commodity,
Gain, be my lord! for I will worship thee! [Erit.