Constance and the Claims of Passion

Lady Constance’s grief in Shakespeare’s King John has elicited strong reactions from critics, ranging from those who find her emotional display appalling to those who find it compelling. In 1725 Alexander Pope decried Constance’s extravagant mourning as “unworthy of Shakespeare’s genius.”1 Forty years later, Samuel Johnson held it up as evidence of the bard’s keen insight into the anatomy of melancholy: “Distress, while there remains any prospect of relief, is weak and flexible, but when no succor remains, is fearless and stubborn, angry alike at those that injure, and at those that do not help, careless to please where nothing can be gained and fearless to offend when there is nothing further to be dreaded. Such was this writer’s knowledge of the passions” (85). In 1817 William Hazlitt descanted on this theme. Like Johnson, he found Shakespeare’s portrayal of a grieving mother to be true to nature. Yet, his choice of words suggests that the ‘natural’ emotion of motherly sorrow is itself problematic: “The excess of maternal tenderness, rendered desperate by the fickleness of friends and the injustice of fortune, and made stronger in will, in proportion to the want of all other power, was never more finely expressed than in Constance” (191). Even as he asserts the aptness of Shakespeare’s portrayal of Lady Constance, Hazlitt’s use of the word “excess” implies that maternal mourning, however natural, is in itself immoderate. In his formulation, the excess stems not from the playwright’s art or lack thereof, as in Pope, but rather from an overabundance of motherly affection itself. More recently Hershel Baker has taken the part of the French King who complains that Constance is “as fond of her grief as of [her] child” (3.4.92). Baker writes that “Philip’s comment on this appalling woman’s rhetoric (which has endeared the role to many actresses) is one every reader will endorse” (766). Echoing Baker, Kenneth Muir describes the role as “a[n] impressive vehicle for an actress, no doubt, although in my experience most audiences feel that the lady doth protest too much” (83). A.R. Braunmuller, like Muir and Baker, aligns himself with the play’s male authorities in assuming that Constance is mad. He accuses her of “logic chopping” when she makes the case-according to contemporary theories about grief and madness-that she is not mad (63). Joseph Candido views Constance as the play’s “most compelling female character” (95), but he casts her grief in a negative light when he also refers to it as excessive:

Constance’s grief is “expressive and excessive pain over a son’s pathetic demise” (95). When does pain become excessive? A similar concern over excess haunts performance criticism of the role. Carol J. Carlisle examines how three different actresses have played the part of Constance: Sarah Siddons in the late eighteenth, early nineteenth-century, Helen Faucit during the Victorian age, and most recently Claire Bloom. She summarizes the critical responses to their performances over the centuries as follows: the “difficult task Shakespeare set for the actresses” playing Constance was “[t]o represent her everchanging, ever-extreme emotions with ‘harmony and propriety,’ to keep from crossing the ‘boundary between poetry and frenzy,’ to avoid becoming either too sentimental or too shrewish” (144). These critical responses to Constance raise a number of questions. How do we know that Shakespeare wanted Constance to be portrayed with “harmony and propriety” as Carlisle assumes? If, as Baker and Muir maintain, the role is an excellent “vehicle” for an actress, then why is it so readily dismissed as tedious instead of considered essential to the dramatic architecture of the play? Why is there such consistent concern over the propriety, poetry, and naturalness of an emotional experience-grief-that Philip Fisher rightly identifies as a vehement state?2 Why is there such prevailing concern over “excess” with respect to the character, whether it is artistic excess on Shakespeare’s part, natural excess on the part of a mourning mother, or theatrical excess on the part of an actress? Why is Constance’s grief so consistently described as excess rather than abundant or necessary? Why do the critical responses to the play sound so much like the critical responses of the characters in the play? In this chapter I address these questions by arguing that Shakespeare’s vehemently grieving widow is a descendant of the mourning Virgin Mary of medieval English drama. Perhaps our inability to “see” her tragic heroism, as Weill puts it (56), derives from the critical tendency to repeat rather than examine the discursive practices of the play. The anonymous play The Troublesome Raigne has long been established as an important analogue for King John.3 But there are significant differences between their respective portrayals of Constance, whose role in Shakespeare’s play is significantly more developed than in The Troublesome Raigne. As Juliet Dusinberre muses, “It is intriguing to consider why Shakespeare expanded Constance’s part” (39). A closer look at the specific nature of that expansion may answer this question in terms of the dramatic significance of Constance’s mourning in the architecture of the play and in the context of the complex web of ideas about grief in late sixteenth-century England. Shakespeare’s play is 363 lines shorter than The Troublesome Raigne, yet Constance has 168 additional

lines; moreover, nearly half of these lines are added in her final scene of mourning (3.4).4 Both plays depict Constance as an ambitious widow who cries out for vengeance against King John, whose alliance with France, forged through the marriage of his niece Blanche to the Dauphin cuts off her son Arthur’s hopes for the throne of England. In The Troublesome Raigne Arthur’s legitimacy, and therefore his right of inheritance, remains an open question. But in King John, Arthur is undeniably Geoffrey’s son, a detail that confirms him as claimant to the throne. Arthur’s legitimacy lends moral weight to Constance’s indignation; her political aims cannot be separated from her desire to preserve her son’s life. For as the Elizabethan audience was well aware from the recent execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, any claimant to the throne was always in danger of being accused of treason. Mark Heberle’s attack on Constance in this regard seems unwarranted. He decries Constance’s response to the pact between John and Philip as “a nearly hysterical reiteration of [the dynastic] claim by his mother, who claims to be protecting his rights rather than her own desire for power” (35). Heberle accuses Constance of selfishness even in her manner of death: “Constance’s demise belies her name and seems oddly selfish, leaving her imprisoned son behind her, and we might wonder whether she died of grief simply for Arthur’s sake or for the sake of the crown that had been lost by his capture” (38). Like many critical responses to Constance, Heberle’s interpretation aligns itself with the discursive practices of the play, which embody early modern England’s profound ambivalence toward mourning women, and especially mourning widows. In King John as Arthur’s future grows more precarious, Constance’s distress becomes more intense, and in her final scene she dominates the stage with her grief. This prolonged scene of mourning contrasts with the parallel moment in The Troublesome Raigne, where a mere “Two words will serve” for Constance’s sorrow (Part 1.2.line 1163). These significant differences point to an earlier dramatic analogue for Shakespeare’s portrayal of a grieving mother. The dynamic of Shakespeare’s play, in which a mother stages her grief as a correlative of her son’s tragic fate, suggestively aligns Arthur and Constance with an earlier son-mother pairing, in which a widowed mother participates in her son’s suffering through the performance of mourning, and for an extended scene reigns over the dramatic action. Shakespeare’s Constance, in the extremity of her sorrow, evokes the medieval English Mater Dolorosa whose Compassion, as I argued in Part One, was central to the dramatic architecture of the Corpus Christi plays. In this light it is also significant that criticism of the Virgin’s Lament in medieval English drama echoes that of Constance. Discomfort surfaces over the Virgin’s extravagant grief, with a concomitant desire to see it portrayed as artistically restrained rather than vehement. A generation ago Rosemary Woolf compared the representations of the Virgin’s Laments in the four cycle plays, explaining that, the York is like the N-Town, only more “pleasing” because the author “allows the elaborate and harmonious form to impose a shape upon the content of distress, so that the Virgin does

not appear distracted and uncontrolled [as in the N-Town] but has rather the reserves of dignity befitting her to pre-eminence” (English Mystery Plays, 265). Peter Travis, like Woolf, prefers the Virgin of the Chester cycle because, “In contrast to the other cycles, the sufferings of the Virgin in Chester are carefully controlled. She does not swoon (as she does twice in the N-Town) and she is mercifully led away by John before her son’s death, with John’s consoling assurance the Christ shall rise victoriously in three days” (Dramatic Design, 187). Whereas Travis and Woolf dislike the N-Town Virgin’s “hysterical” sorrow, Alexandra Johnston defends its depiction as “emotionally real”. Describing the moment in the play when Mary clings to the cross, Johnston writes: “there is nothing controlled here, nothing cerebral. The character of Mary is completely given over to hysterical grief” (“Emotional Realism,” 89). Johnston’s moving essay combines a wealth of scholarly knowledge with her unique personal experience of having acted the role. She makes the important point that “this Mary provided for the mature women of East Anglia a mediatrix standing beside the throne of God with whom they could uniquely identify” (97). But this portrayal of grief is no more natural or real than that of the other cycles: all of them draw upon the practice of residual female lament, itself a performative rendering of the anguished process of mourning. Like critiques of Constance’s grief these discussions either criticize depictions of the Virgin’s grief as excessive or defend them as natural. I propose that these parallels in critical discourse are not coincidental; rather they are themselves a product of the discursive practices of the English Reformation. The resonance of Constance’s laments with those of the Virgin Mary of medieval English drama suggests Shakespeare’s early concern with the relationship between the rites of the past and the identity of the emerging English nation. Like the Virgin Mary in post-Reformation England, Constance stands precariously between the worlds of the living and the dead, worlds that no longer hearken to her cries. In comparing Shakespeare’s Constance with the Virgin Mary of the medieval English cycles, I hope to suggest a general rather than a specific kind of influence. The question of how Shakespeare and his contemporaries might have encountered medieval drama remains elusive, and, as other critics have shown, the strongest evidence of their knowledge comes from the plays themselves.5