Act 5, Scene 7

The orchard of Swinstead Abbey.

[Enter PRINCE HENRY, SALISBURY, and BIGOT.]
Prince Henry
2528 It is too late: the life of all his blood
2529 Is touch'd corruptibly, and his pure brain,—
2530 Which some suppose the soul's frail dwelling-house,—
2531 Doth, by the idle comments that it makes,
2532 Foretell the ending of mortality.
[Enter PEMBROKE.]
Earl of Pembroke
2533 His Highness yet doth speak; and holds belief
2534 That, being brought into the open air,
2535 It would allay the burning quality
2536 Of that fell poison which assaileth him.
Prince Henry
2537 Let him be brought into the orchard here.—
2538 Doth he still rage?
[Exit BIGOT.]
Earl of Pembroke
2539 He is more patient
2540 Than when you left him; even now he sung.
Prince Henry
2541 O vanity of sickness! fierce extremes
2542 In their continuance will not feel themselves.
2543 Death, having prey'd upon the outward parts,
2544 Leaves them invisible; and his siege is now
2545 Against the mind, the which he pricks and wounds
2546 With many legions of strange fantasies,
2547 Which, in their throng and press to that last hold,
2548 Confound themselves. 'Tis strange that death should sing.—
2549 I am the cygnet to this pale faint swan,
2550 Who chants a doleful hymn to his own death;
2551 And from the organ-pipe of frailty sings
2552 His soul and body to their lasting rest.
Earl of Salisbury
2553 Be of good comfort, prince; for you are born
2554 To set a form upon that indigest
2555 Which he hath left so shapeless and so rude.
[Re-enter BIGOT and Attendants, who bring in KING JOHN in a chair.]
King John
2556 Ay, marry, now my soul hath elbow-room;
2557 It would not out at windows nor at doors.
2558 There is so hot a summer in my bosom
2559 That all my bowels crumble up to dust;
2560 I am a scribbled form, drawn with a pen,
2561 Upon a parchment; and against this fire
2562 Do I shrink up.
Prince Henry
2563 How fares your majesty?
King John
2564 Poison'd,—ill-fare;—dead, forsook, cast off;
2565 And none of you will bid the winter come,
2566 To thrust his icy fingers in my maw;
2567 Nor let my kingdom's rivers take their course
2568 Through my burn'd bosom; nor entreat the north
2569 To make his bleak winds kiss my parched lips,
2570 And comfort me with cold:—I do not ask you much;
2571 I beg cold comfort; and you are so strait,
2572 And so ingrateful, you deny me that.
Prince Henry
2573 O, that there were some virtue in my tears,
2574 That might relieve you!
King John
2575 The salt in them is hot.—
2576 Within me is a hell; and there the poison
2577 Is, as a fiend, confin'd to tyrannize
2578 On unreprievable condemned blood.
[Enter the BASTARD.]
Philip the Bastard (Faulconbridge)
2579 O, I am scalded with my violent motion
2580 And spleen of speed to see your majesty!
King John
2581 O cousin, thou art come to set mine eye:
2582 The tackle of my heart is crack'd and burn'd;
2583 And all the shrouds, wherewith my life should sail,
2584 Are turned to one thread, one little hair:
2585 My heart hath one poor string to stay it by,
2586 Which holds but till thy news be uttered;
2587 And then all this thou seest is but a clod,
2588 And module of confounded royalty.
Philip the Bastard (Faulconbridge)
2589 The Dauphin is preparing hitherward,
2590 Where heaven he knows how we shall answer him;
2591 For in a night the best part of my power,
2592 As I upon advantage did remove,
2593 Were in the washes all unwarily
2594 Devoured by the unexpected flood.
[The KING dies.]
Earl of Salisbury
2595 You breathe these dead news in as dead an ear.
2596 My liege! my lord!—But now a king,—now thus.
Prince Henry
2597 Even so must I run on, and even so stop.
2598 What surety of the world, what hope, what stay,
2599 When this was now a king, and now is clay?
Philip the Bastard (Faulconbridge)
2600 Art thou gone so? I do but stay behind
2601 To do the office for thee of revenge,
2602 And then my soul shall wait on thee to heaven,
2603 As it on earth hath been thy servant still.—
2604 Now, now, you stars that move in your right spheres,
2605 Where be your powers? Show now your mended faiths;
2606 And instantly return with me again,
2607 To push destruction and perpetual shame
2608 Out of the weak door of our fainting land.
2609 Straight let us seek, or straight we shall be sought;
2610 The Dauphin rages at our very heels.
Earl of Salisbury
2611 It seems you know not, then, so much as we:
2612 The Cardinal Pandulph is within at rest,
2613 Who half an hour since came from the Dauphin,
2614 And brings from him such offers of our peace
2615 As we with honour and respect may take,
2616 With purpose presently to leave this war.
Philip the Bastard (Faulconbridge)
2617 He will the rather do it when he sees
2618 Ourselves well sinewed to our defence.
Earl of Salisbury
2619 Nay, 'tis in a manner done already;
2620 For many carriages he hath despatch'd
2621 To the sea-side, and put his cause and quarrel
2622 To the disposing of the cardinal:
2623 With whom yourself, myself, and other lords,
2624 If you think meet, this afternoon will post
2625 To consummate this business happily.
Philip the Bastard (Faulconbridge)
2626 Let it be so:—And you, my noble prince,
2627 With other princes that may best be spar'd,
2628 Shall wait upon your father's funeral.
Prince Henry
2629 At Worcester must his body be interr'd;
2630 For so he will'd it.
Philip the Bastard (Faulconbridge)
2631 Thither shall it, then:
2632 And happily may your sweet self put on
2633 The lineal state and glory of the land!
2634 To whom, with all submission, on my knee,
2635 I do bequeath my faithful services
2636 And true subjection everlastingly.
Earl of Salisbury
2637 And the like tender of our love we make,
2638 To rest without a spot for evermore.
Prince Henry
2639 I have a kind soul that would give you thanks,
2640 And knows not how to do it but with tears.
Philip the Bastard (Faulconbridge)
2641 O, let us pay the time but needful woe,
2642 Since it hath been beforehand with our griefs.—
2643 This England never did, nor never shall,
2644 Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror,
2645 But when it first did help to wound itself.
2646 Now these her princes are come home again,
2647 Come the three corners of the world in arms,
2648 And we shall shock them: nought shall make us rue,
2649 If England to itself do rest but true.
[Exeunt.]

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Notes

TLN 2529cultural context
“his pure brain,— Which some suppose the soul's frail dwelling-house,—”
The idea that the body is only a temporary shelter for the immortal soul was a commonplace of both classical philosophy (Plato, Phaedo 81c-82b) and Renaissance Christian thought. The word 'some suppose' signals that Prince Henry is voicing a view he knows is contested — the soul's exact relationship to the brain was a live medical and theological debate. A fevered or dying brain, losing its rational grip, was thought to let the soul begin its departure early.
TLN 2541archaic vocab
“O vanity of sickness! fierce extremes In their continuance will not feel themselves.”
'Vanity of sickness' means the strange, deceptive quality of extreme illness — the way it plays tricks. 'Fierce extremes in their continuance will not feel themselves' means that when pain or fever is intense enough and prolonged, the sufferer stops feeling it: the nerve becomes numb, or the mind dissociates. Prince Henry is explaining why his dying father can now sing — not because he is recovering, but because the agony has gone so deep that feeling itself has collapsed.
TLN 2549classical allusion
“I am the cygnet to this pale faint swan, Who chants a doleful hymn to his own death”
The 'swan song' was a classical belief that the otherwise silent swan sings one beautiful song just before it dies. Prince Henry calls himself the 'cygnet' — the young swan — to his dying father's 'pale faint swan.' The image works two ways: the dying king sings in his delirium (the swan song), and the young prince, still silent and untested, is the heir who comes after.
TLN 2554archaic vocab
“set a form upon that indigest Which he hath left so shapeless and so rude”
'Indigest' means a formless, chaotic mass — something not yet given shape or order. Salisbury tells the young Prince Henry that he is born to give form to the 'shapeless and rude' state John leaves behind him. The word echoes Genesis and classical cosmology, where creation began as a disordered void ('indigest' translates Ovid's Latin 'indigestaque moles,' the unordered heap of matter before the world was made). The implication is that Henry III's kingship will be an act of creation out of chaos.
TLN 2556archaic vocab
“now my soul hath elbow-room; It would not out at windows nor at doors.”
Carried out into the open air of the orchard, the dying John says 'now my soul hath elbow-room' — it has room to move at last; 'elbow-room' is space to stretch freely. The next line looks back to how cramped he was before: his fevered soul 'would not out at windows nor at doors' — pent up inside his burning body indoors, it could find no way out. Now, in the open, it finally has room.
TLN 2576biblical allusion
“Within me is a hell; and there the poison Is, as a fiend, confin'd to tyrannize On unreprievable condemned blood.”
John describes the burning poison in his body as a devil confined to hell — but the hell is inside him, and his blood is the 'condemned' soul suffering its torment. 'Unreprievable' means without possibility of reprieve or pardon, as a soul damned beyond mercy. The image equates John's physical agony with spiritual damnation: a king who ordered the murder of his nephew and surrendered to a foreign pope dies feeling damnation already begun in his own body.
TLN 2582rhetorical device
“The tackle of my heart is crack'd and burn'd; And all the shrouds, wherewith my life should sail, Are turned to one thread, one little hair”
John describes his life as a ship whose rigging is almost entirely destroyed. 'Tackle' is the collective word for a ship's ropes and cordage; 'shrouds' are the ropes that support the mast. Both are 'crack'd and burn'd' — destroyed by the fever — until all that holds him to life is 'one thread, one little hair.' It is one of the play's finest extended metaphors: John, whose reign lurched from crisis to crisis like a ship in a storm, dies as his last rope frays.
TLN 2593historical topical
“Were in the washes all unwarily Devoured by the unexpected flood.”
'The washes' are the tidal flats and muddy channels of The Wash, the large bay on the east coast of England between Lincolnshire and Norfolk. These tidal estuaries flooded rapidly and unpredictably; an army crossing them could be swallowed when the tide came in faster than expected. The loss of part of the Bastard's force to this flood is a historical detail recorded in the chronicles: John himself lost his baggage train, treasure, and part of his army to The Wash in October 1216, a disaster that preceded his death at Newark.
historical Holinshed's Chronicles
TLN 2604cultural context
“you stars that move in your right spheres, Where be your powers?”
In the Ptolemaic astronomy that Shakespeare's audience took for granted, each planet and the fixed stars moved on a set of concentric transparent spheres revolving around the earth. A star 'in its right sphere' was in its proper course and would exert its proper influence on earthly affairs. The Bastard challenges the rebel lords — who have switched sides and returned to the crown — to prove that their re-alignment is genuine by showing their 'powers,' i.e. their actual military force. He is telling them: now that you are back in your proper orbits, behave accordingly.
TLN 2612historical topical
“The Cardinal Pandulph is within at rest, Who half an hour since came from the Dauphin, And brings from him such offers of our peace”
Cardinal Pandulph is the Pope's legate — his official representative — who earlier in the play excommunicated John and pressured France to invade. Now, with John having submitted to Rome and recognized papal authority, Pandulph is negotiating the French withdrawal. He is the play's supreme operator: the same man who started the war is now brokering the peace, and the English lords are making that peace through him rather than directly. The scene implies that Rome, not England, holds the real levers of power.
historical King John, the Pope, and the Interdict
TLN 2629historical topical
“At Worcester must his body be interr'd; For so he will'd it.”
King John died at Newark in October 1216 and was buried in Worcester Cathedral, at his own request, between the shrines of Saint Oswald and Saint Wulfstan — both venerated Anglo-Saxon bishops whose holiness he apparently hoped would intercede for his soul. Burial near a saint's relics was a common act of piety for medieval kings. John's tomb effigy in Worcester Cathedral is the oldest surviving royal effigy in England.
historical Holinshed's Chronicles
TLN 2643rhetorical device
“This England never did, nor never shall, Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror, But when it first did help to wound itself.”
The Bastard's closing speech is the play's most famous passage and its moral: England has never been conquered by an outsider except when internal division made it vulnerable. The French invasion only got as far as it did because the English lords revolted and invited the Dauphin in — England wounded itself first. The lesson is blunt: national unity, not military force alone, is England's true protection. The Bastard speaks what no other character in the play has managed to be — purely patriotic, without a personal agenda.