[Transcriber's note: Guizot presents a history of John Lackland in "A Popular History of England, From the Earliest Times to the Reign of Queen Victoria", Volume I, Chapter VIII. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/61647/61647-h/61647-h.htm#Page_182. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_monarchs.]
King John.
(1596.)
In choosing the reign of John Lackland as the subject of a tragedy, Shakspeare imposed upon himself the necessity of not scrupulously respecting history. A reign in which, as Hume says, "England was baffled and affronted in every enterprise," could not be represented in its true colors before an English public and an English court; and the only recollection of King John to which the nation could attach any value—I refer to Magna Charta—was not a topic likely to interest, in any great degree, such a queen as Elizabeth. Shakspeare's play accordingly presents only a summary of the last years of this disgraceful reign; and the skill of the poet is employed to conceal the character of his principal personage without disfiguring it, and to dissemble the color of events without altogether changing it. The only fact concerning which Shakspeare has distinctly adopted a resolution to substitute invention for truth is the relation of King John to France; and assuredly, all the illusions of national vanity were necessary to enable Shakspeare to describe, and the English to witness, Philip Augustus succumbing beneath the ascendency of John Lackland. Such a picture might indeed have been presented to John himself when—living in total inactivity at Rouen, while Philip was regaining all his possessions in France—he vauntingly said, "Let the French go on; I will retake in a day what it has cost them years to acquire." All that which, in Shakspeare's play, is relative to the war with France, seems to have been invented in justification of this gasconade of the most cowardly and insolent of princes.
In the rest of the drama, the action itself, and the indication of facts which it was impossible to dissemble, are sufficient to give us a glimpse of a character into the inmost recesses of which the poet did not venture to penetrate, and into which he could not have penetrated without disgust. But such a personage, and so constrained a manner of description, were not capable of producing a great dramatic effect; and Shakspeare has therefore concentrated the interest of his drama upon the fate of young Arthur, and has devolved upon Faulconbridge that original and brilliant part in which we feel that he takes delight, and which he never refuses to introduce into any of his works.
Shakspeare has presented the young Duke of Bretagne to us at that age at which it first became necessary to assert his rights after the death of King Richard—that is, at about twelve years old. We know that at the period to which Shakspeare's tragedy refers Arthur was about twenty-five or twenty-six, and that he was already married, and an object of interest from his amiable and brilliant qualities, when he was taken prisoner by his uncle; but the poet felt how much more interesting the exhibition of weakness in conflict with cruelty became when exemplified in a child. And besides, if Arthur had not been a child, it would not have been allowable to put forward his mother in his place; and, by suppressing Constance, Shakspeare would, perhaps, have deprived us of the most pathetic picture that he ever drew of maternal love—one of the feelings of which he evinced the profoundest appreciation.
But, at the same time that he rendered the fact more touching, he lessened the horror which it inspires by diminishing the atrocity of the crime. The most generally received opinion is, that Hubert de Bourg, who had promised to put Arthur to death only that he might save him, had, in fact, deceived the cruelty of his uncle by false reports and a pretended burial; but that John, on being informed of the truth, first withdrew Arthur from the Castle of Falaise, in which he was confined under Hubert's guardianship, and transferred him to the Castle of Rouen, whither he proceeded at night, and by water, had his nephew conveyed into his boat, stabbed him with his own hand, tied a stone to his body, and threw him into the river. Such an image would naturally be rejected by a true poet. Independently of the necessity of absolving his principal personage of so odious a crime, Shakspeare perceived how much more dramatic and conformable to the general nature of man the cowardly remorse of John, when he perceived the danger in which he was plunged by the report of his nephew's death, would be, than this excess of brutal ferocity; and certainly, the fine scene between John and Hubert, after the withdrawal of the lords, is amply sufficient to justify his choice. Besides, the picture which Shakspeare presents had too strong a hold upon his imagination, and had acquired too much reality in his eyes, for him not to be conscious that, after the incomparable scene in which Arthur obtains his safety from Hubert, it would be impossible to endure the idea of any human being laying hands on this poor child, and forcing him again to undergo the agony from which he has just escaped.