"I am amaz'd, methinks, and lose my way
Among the thorns and dangers of the world"—
while he watches Hubert's face. Hubert stands the test (the emotional test that none but an Englishman would apply), he picks up the body. Instantly the Bastard is touched to a tenderness that lifts Hubert to a spiritual comradeship with him—
"How easy dost thou take all England up."
This tragedy of the death of a child causes nearly all that is nobly poetical in the play.
All the passionately-felt scenes are about Arthur or his mother. Some have thought that Shakespeare wrote the play in 1596, shortly after the death of his little son Hamnet, aged eleven. The supposition accuses Shakespeare of a want of heart, of a want of imagination, or of both wants together. He wrote like every other writer, from his sense of what was fitting in an imagined situation. It was no more necessary for him to delay the writing of Prince Arthur till his son had died than it was for Dickens to wait till he had killed a real Little Dorrit by slow poison.
There is a great change in the manner of the poetical passages. The poetry of the Henry VI plays is mostly in bright, sweetly running groups of rhetorical lines. In King John it is either built up elaborately into an effect of harmony several lines long, or it is put into a single line or couplet.
The rhetoric is compressed—
"That shakes the rotten carcase of old Death,"
and
"O death, made proud with pure and princely beauty,"