John’s crimes and defaults could not be concealed; nevertheless he is exhibited as becoming at the last a champion of England against foreign encroachment, and it would have spoilt that effect to bring in his differences with the barons on constitutional points. It is true that the Great Charter had not yet become a popular rallying cry, but knowledge of its existence can hardly have been confined to antiquarian scholars. This, however, is not to the purpose here; and in truth the anachronism of the cannon is only a conspicuous example of a kind fairly common in Shakespeare. Thus King Henry V. is made to speak of the Grand Turk as holding Constantinople a full generation too soon. To return to our theme, the treatment of public affairs and negotiation in Shakespeare is wholly subordinate to stage effect, the Elizabethan stage effect which depended largely on rhetorical set speeches in the more serious passages, and it is therefore rudimentary from a political point of view. Shakespeare knew the conceits of the fashionable epistolary style well enough, and could make sport with them. But when princes and their ministers discourse on affairs of state, contentiously or otherwise, we have no play of dialectic or development of argument. Every speaker gives his own view with little regard to conviction or reply, the matter being taken just as it came to hand in the chronicle or other authority relied upon, and the manner worked up more or less according to the importance of the scene and personages and the opportunity given by the situation. Recrimination is not uncommon, but there is no real critical discussion. Still less is there any indication of what Shakespeare himself thought of the merits. At the beginning of ‘Henry V.’ we find the King’s clerical advisers deliberately encouraging a foreign war of ambition to divert an attack on swollen church revenues,[1] and the Archbishop of Canterbury giving transparently bad reasons (as at this day they seem to us) for the English claim to the crown of France. There is no suggestion of anyone seeing anything wrong in such conduct; not that this is any ground for inferring that Shakespeare approved it. He followed his chronicle, here as elsewhere, mistakes and all. Perhaps the nearest approach to a live negotiation on the stage is the conference of Hotspur, Glendower, and Mortimer over the map of England, already partitioned in their imagination, in the third act of ‘Henry IV.,’ Part I. The scene is admirably contrived to bring out Hotspur’s reckless ambition and Glendower’s pride, and for that very reason there is no scope for Italian subtilties. Hotspur blurts out his objection to the proposed boundary without reserve or preparation of any kind:— Methinks my moiety, north from Burton here, In quantity equals not one of yours: See how this river comes me cranking in, And cuts me from the best of all my land A huge half-moon, a monstrous cantle out.