cherous. He
breaks faith with King John, to whom he has vowed to kill the Prince.
Later in the act, King John, thinking that the murder has been done,
breaks faith with Hubert, by driving him from his presence. In the last
act, the English nobles, who have been treacherous to John, betray their
new master, the French King. King John is a broken man, unable to make
head against misfortune. He betrays his great kingly idea, that the Pope
shall not rule here, by begging the Legate to make peace. At this point
death sets a term to treachery. A monk treacherously poisons John at a
moment when his affairs look brighter. The play ends with the Bastard's
well-known brag about England--

"Naught shall make us rue
If England to itself do rest but true."

This thought is one among many thoughts taken by Shakespeare from the
play of _The Troublesome Raigne_, and taken by the author of that play
direct from Holinshed's _Chronicles_.

Comedy deals with character and accident; tragedy with passionate moods
of the soul in conflict with fate. In this play, as in nearly all
poetical plays, the characters that are most minutely articulated are
those commoner, more earthy characters, perceived by the daily mind, not
uplifted, by brooding, into the rare state of passionate intellectual
vision. These characters are triumphant creations; but they come from
the commoner qualities in Shakespeare's mind. He did them easily, with
his daily nature. What he did on his knees, with contest and bloody
sweat, are his great things. The great scheme of the play is the great
achievement, not the buxom boor who flouts the Duke of Austria, and
takes the national view of his mother's dishonour.

Shakespeare, like other sensitive, intelligent men, saw that our
distinctive products, the characters that we set most store by, are very
strange. That beautiful kindness, high courage, and devoted service
should go so often with real animal boorishness and the incapacity to
see more than one thing at a time (mistaken for stupidity by stupid
people) puzzled him, as it puzzles the un-English mind to-day. A reader
feels that in the figure of the Bastard he set down what he found most
significant in the common English character. With the exceptions of Sir
Toby Belch and Justice Shallow, the Bastard is the most English figure
in the plays. He is the Englishman neither at his best nor at his worst,
but at his commonest. The Englishman was never so se