?Legitimation, Name, and All Is Gone?: Bastardy and Bureaucracy in Shakespeare'sKing John

Abstract

In play where central concern is exercise of legitimate power-power between classes, between individuals, between nations, between crown and its subjects-the first appearance of Philip Bastard in act one engages nearly all claimants who vie for legitimacy during course of King John. With his first words, Bastard identifies himself to king as Your I, gentleman ( 1.1.30). His position as faithful subject to king normalizes his relationship to crown, and his claim to be a gentleman places him in struggle for aristocratic legitimacy with Robert Faulcon-bridge, who wants to deny Bastard patrimony that they both seek. The Bastard's first appearance comes immediately after King John all but declares war on France, weaving England's claims for legitimate action against its rival nation with Bastard's own assertion of strong possession (39). The scene of Bastard's introduction suggests that legitimation can normalize relationships and justify action, but late in act one Bastard recognizes tenuous status of legitimacy: Legitimation, name, and all is gone (248). Only after he realizes that he is King Richard Coeur-de-lion's illegitimate son does he begin to recognize privilege (261) that comes with bastardy. This article is concerned with nature of that privilege which derives from loss of very legitimacy that all parties seem to covet early in play. With its representation of who becomes nothing more than scribbled form, drawn with pen (5.7.32), King John appears interested in powerful claims of an emerging bureaucratic network of authority exemplified by Bastard's madcap (1.1.84) relationship to his past, his crown and his country.Critics of Shakespeare's bastard history play King John generally agree that socio-political apparatus absorbs subversive potential of Bastard Faulconbridge, despite real threat that his unnatural birth poses to systems of patriarchy that constitute culture of play.' Without reading play in relation to other plays in Henriad, an interpretation that traces Bastard's transformation from subversive threat to contained patriot who propitiates jingoistic discourse of source play The Troublesome Raigne seems convincing. Peter Womack's persuasive account of tension between local theater of London metropolis and imagined community that would come to define new English national is case in point. Reading Bastard as hybrid figure that is both rootless swaggerer and national champion, cynical and noble, illegitimate and royal (114), Wornack argues that he embodies contradiction between an identification with metropolitan forms of power that were marginal to centralized control and an identification with ambitions and illusions of national centre (115). Womack concludes that King John, and Shakespeare's first tetralogy more generally, demonstrates an absolutist theater in which monstrous many-head edness of multitude is evoked, in last analysis, in order to be resolved in, and so to substantiate, all-embracing oneness of monarch (138). It is telling, however, that Womack and other critics such as Virginia Vaughan, whose arguments about play tend to rely on this binary reasoning, are themselves not completely at ease with their conclusion. Womack ends his essay suggesting that the last analysis is not, in fact, end to early modern theatrical effect: Even if orientation ofthat identity prevented full expression of an autonomous 'national consciousness within text, experience in theatre will have made it possible to imagine that too (138). And Vaughan notes that subversion of patrilineal inheritance that was so clear in act one lingers in our minds as we watch so much being made of Henry's lineal claim to throne. …