The contemporary reference in Anthony Munday's Death of Robert, Earl of Huntingdon (printed in 1601, but commissioned by Philip Henslowe in February 1598), to "Hubert, thou fatall keeper of poore babes"2 must relate to Shakespeare's play rather than the Troublesome Raigne or the historical sources in which Arthur is a youth rather than the much younger child of Shakespeare's play. Since this did not appear in print until the 1623 Folio, the implication is that it had sufficiently impressed itself in the playgoing consciousness by the close of the sixteenth century as to make the reference easily recognizable. Further evidence that the play was regularly staged during this period can be adduced from the fact that it's included in a document dated 12 January 1669 that lists plays "formerly acted at Blackfriars and now allowed of to his Majesties Servants at the New Theatre," which, given that the King's Men did not acquire Blackfriars until 1608, suggests the play's continued stage popularity into the early seventeenth century.
There is, however, no subsequent record of any public performance, until it was revived at Covent Garden in 1737, and evidence suggests that this was after a long period of neglect. This revival was due to the rumored imminent production of a more stridently anti-Catholic adaptation by Colley Cibber, which prompted David Garrick to stage his version at Covent Garden. Defending his adaptation, Cibber wrote in the Daily Advertiser in February 1737 that "many of that Fam'd Authors Pieces, for these Hundred Years past, have lain dormant, from, perhaps, a just Suspicion, that they were too weak, for a compleat Entertainment."3 Similarly, the playbill for the 1745 Drury Lane production proclaimed that it was "Not acted 50 years."
However, from this point onward, and until the third quarter of the nineteenth century, King John becomes a popular, or at least regular, element of the patent houses' repertoires. In the 120 years following the Covent Garden revival, it appeared in at least fifty-eight seasons in either London or the provinces or both, and in three seasons there were rival London productions. During the eighteenth and early to mid-nineteenth centuries the play attracted some of the foremost actors of the day, including Garrick (as both John and the Bastard), Sheridan (who originally played John to Garrick's Bastard), Mrs. Cibber, Mrs. Barry, Mrs. Yates, Mrs. Siddons, John Philip Kemble, and Charles Kemble.
Charles Kemble subsequently staged his own version at Covent Garden in 1823, and by 1830 the play was sufficiently well known for it to receive a burlesque treatment.4 William Charles Macready, who had made his first appearance in the play in Charles Kemble's company, produced the play himself at Drury Lane in 1842. Shortly afterward, the Theatres Regulation Bill of 1843 ended the duopoly of the London patent theaters and Samuel Phelps (who had earlier played Hubert with Charles Kemble) mounted his own production at Sadler's Wells in 1844 and 1851, and at Drury Lane in 1865 and 1866. Charles Kean also mounted some of the early nonpatent productions of King John at the Princess' Theatre in 1852 and 1858, as well as in American tours in 1846 and 1865. Following Phelps's 1866 production, however, it appears to lapse in popularity once more and does not appear again on the London stage until Herbert Beerbohm Tree's West End revival at Her Majesty's Theatre in 1899, although it was produced at Stratford by Osmond Tearle in 1890.
In the twentieth century, the play was presented at the Old Vic three times in the eight years following the First World War--in 1918, 1921 and 1926--and then appears with less and less frequency in the Old Vic's repertoire: 1931 (with Ralph Richardson as the Bastard); 1953 (directed by George Devine, with Richard Burton, and as part of a project to stage all of the plays in the First Folio), and in 1961. At Stratford there is a similar pattern, with seven productions directed by Michael Benthall between 1901 and 1948, and another in 1957 directed by Douglas Seale, before the five RSC versions discussed in detail below. In the provinces, the play was presented at the Old Vic, Leeds in 1941 (with Sybil Thorndike as Constance), and at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre (with Paul Scofield as the Bastard) in 1945. There was also a BBC radio version in 1944 (again with Ralph Richardson as the Bastard), and a BBC television production in 1984, directed by David Giles. In 2001, however, the play experienced a double revival with both a Northern Broadsides production and Gregory Doran's RSC production at The Swan in Stratford. Josie Rourke directed it again for the RSC's Swan Theatre in 2006; Doran and Rourke discuss their productions in "The Director's Cut."
In summary, therefore, King John has enjoyed a chequered stage history, arguably the most variable in stage popularity in the whole Shakespearean canon: popular at the turn of the sixteenth century, it then exits the stage for a century and a half before returning as a staple of the London patent houses' repertoires for some hundred years from the mid-eighteenth century, before seeing its popularity wane in the late nineteenth century and then virtually collapse in the twentieth. What accounts for these shifting fortunes?
One answer lies in the various shifts in styles of acting and theatrical production over the past four hundred years, as well as certain features of the play itself, notably its declamatory style, its emotional range and its episodic nature, which lend themselves well or ill to those fashions. Given these features, especially the play's predominantly declamatory style and its wide emotional range, it's little wonder that in periods which combined, in varying degrees, both "sensibility" and a declamatory style of acting, namely from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, it was relatively popular. Contemporary accounts of productions during this hundred years offer the striking impression of the approbation of the depiction of intense emotion in particular scenes, rather than a particular actor's conception or rendition of a character as a whole, suggesting that the third characteristic discussed above--the play's episodic nature--may also be contributory to its success in this period.
In the 1745 Drury Lane production, Garrick played John to Susannah Cibber's Constance in a rendition both emphatic and passionate.5 Similarly, according to contemporary accounts of her performance, Susannah Cibber also seized the opportunity to impress her audience with a number of set pieces in which she displayed an impressive range of emotion, passion, and emphasis,6 although again it's a particular episode that stands out: in her last, grief-crazed speech she pronounced the words "O Lord! My boy!... with such an emphatical scream of agony as will never be forgotten by those who heard her."7 When, in 1783, at the request of George III, Sarah Siddons succeeded Mrs. Cibber in the part,
she was ere long regarded as so consummate in the part of Constance, that it was not unusual for spectators to leave the house when her part in the tragedy of "King John" was over, as if they could no longer enjoy Shakespeare himself when she ceased to be his interpreter.8
As the nineteenth century progressed, however, tastes shifted toward a more natural, realistic style of acting. In Macready's rendition of John in his own 1842 production at Drury Lane, he used a range of contrasting tones and tempos.9 Such shifts in tempo are in some ways reminiscent of accounts of Edmund Kean's "anarchy of the passions,"10 although in retaining an overall dignity of delivery, Macready was combining the Romantic and radical techniques of Kean with the more dignified legacy of John Philip Kemble.11 In particular, Macready appears to have achieved a certain degree of "naturalness" or of "the colloquial" in his acting, without descending to what Coleridge saw in Kean's acting as the vulgarity of "rapid descents from the hyper-tragic to the infra-colloquial."12 Indeed, according to theatrical historian Alan S. Downer, Macready's style, "refined by science and psychology ... underlies the whole tradition of naturalism, of Stanislavsky and his heirs."13 Hence, Macready arguably helped establish the modern system of acting, with its emphasis upon unity of design rather than upon episodic set pieces: "If this was due in part to the spirit of the age, it was due in larger part to Macready's example and practice."14
By these standards, and some fifty years after Macready's pioneering work, Herbert Beerbohm Tree's 1899 revival must have seemed remarkably dated, and distaste for the old-fashioned declamatory style, together with a telling iconoclasm for its famo
us practitioners, is revealed in at least one contemporary review:
The hysterical grief of Miss Julia Neilson's Constance seems overdone.... Mrs. Siddons used to shed real tears as Constance--at least so she said; but that was in the sentimental age.... I sometimes think Mrs. Siddons must have been what the Americans call "a holy terror."15
Indeed, the part of Constance, which Sarah Siddons so relished because of the emotional range she saw in it,16 has proved highly problematic for actresses ever since, since to play this role has meant risking the double bind either of being accused of "hysterical grief," as in Julia Neilson's case, or of lifeless understatement of the poetic force of the language. In Douglas Seale's 1957 Stratford production, Joan Miller attempted to play the role with less emphasis on Constance's ranting tirades and greater depth given to her "latent psychosis." The result was generally not well received, with the Daily Telegraph reviewer remarking, for example, that she "conveyed little more than that she was rather cross."17 On the other hand, Susan Engel in Deborah Warner's 1988 RSC production and Claire Bloom in David Giles's 1984 BBC production were both apparently successful in rendering Constance acceptable to a late-twentieth-century audience by playing the part relatively calmly, and effectively questioning whether Constance is actually crazed at all.18 This impression appears to be confirmed by contemporary reviews, so that, for example, Irving Wardle in The Times praised Susan Engel for rendering "the almost unplayably formalized rhetoric into living speech."19
However, the Giles and the Warner productions shared an important feature: intimacy with the audience. The Giles production, being for television, allows full-face close-up photography and audible amplification of quiet delivery. Similarly, The Other Place, where Warner mounted her live production, was the smallest and most intimate of all of the RSC's Stratford theaters of the time, and allowed only a tiny audience, which was forced to sit in close proximity to the actors. This suggests that playing Constance successfully in a more restrained fashion accessible to a modern audience requires such intimacy.
1. 1957, Douglas Seale production. Joan Miller attempted to play the role with less emphasis on Constance's ranting tirades and greater depth given to her "latent psychosis."
Of the two 2001 productions, the critical reception of the Northern Broadsides' Constance suggested that the figure was still not quite at home in the early-twenty-first-century theater, with Charles Spencer in the Daily Telegraph opining that Northern Broadsides' "Marie Louise O'Donnell is so stridently histrionic as the grieving Constance ... that she entirely fails to touch the heart with some of the most poignant and potent poetry in the play,"20 while Kate Bassett in the Independent was even more trenchant: "Marie Louise O'Donnell is ludicrous as the pretender's mother, swishing around like a furious, punctured balloon."21 Playing Constance in a cooler, more psychoanalytic fashion acceptable to modern audiences requires a realistic, perhaps cinematic acting style that may appear excessively understated unless it is presented in an intimate theater setting, or indeed on film. More generally, complaints about the declamatory nature of the play are rife in the criticism of live performances in the twentieth century, suggesting a reason for its lack of popularity. Thus, a contemporary reviewer of the 1957 Old Vic production commented: "No-one in King John ever speaks. They all declaim."22
The play's popularity during the early to mid-nineteenth century was also due in some measure to the development in English culture of a taste for extreme historical--indeed "archaeological"--accuracy in the treatment of the subject matter of drama, combined with the spectacular use of costume, stage effects, and supernumeraries. The Shakespeare productions of, in particular, Charles Kemble, William Charles Macready, and Charles Kean, presented costumes and settings that were heavily researched on the basis of scholarship, historical documents, funerary sculpture, and so on. They typically used literally hundreds of supernumeraries in battle scenes and culminated in spectacular final scenes. In part, this trend was commercially based: faced with increasing competition from the nonpatent theaters with their pantomimes and burlesques, the patent theaters had begun in the early nineteenth century to look for new ways to draw the crowds, and so "for all their pieties about only playing the classical repertoire--no burlettas or performing dogs--they relied more and more on 'low' spectacle."23
More generally, however, there developed in the mid to late nineteenth century a love of the spectacular, alongside the widespread availability of inventions such as the magic lantern and the stereoscope, paralleled on a grander scale by huge, walk-in, three-dimensional panoramas and dioramas that were popular in London until at least the end of the third quarter of the nineteenth century. Thus, toward the end of William IV's reign, and certainly by the beginning of the second decade of Victoria's (as witnessed by the Great Exhibition in 1851), the English were accustomed first to grandeur and ostentation in their architecture and domestic furniture, and second to looking at the world through pictures rather than through the use of imagination. Thus, the love of the spectacular in the theater, which combined both of these elements, was simply one manifestation of a more general phenomenon in English society.24 King John lent itself well to the pictorial treatment that could be meted out in lavish, spectacular productions, since the very "serial discontinuity"25 of its episodic structure, together with its medieval subject matter made it ideal for a theatrical magic lantern show that would bring in the crowds. James Robinson Planche, historical advisor to Charles Kemble's 1823 Covent Garden production, recalls with satisfaction the opening night performance:
When the curtain rose, and discovered King John dressed as his effigy appears in Worcester Cathedral, surrounded by his barons sheathed in mail, with cylindrical helmets and correct armorial shields, and his courtiers in the long tunics and mantles of the thirteenth century, there was a roar of approbation, accompanied by four distinct rounds of applause.26
In Macready's 1842 Drury Lane production, in addition to recovering the painstaking historical researches of Planche to inform the costume design, fourteen intricate, massive, highly researched painted sets were designed by William Telbin, and huge numbers of supernumeraries were employed.27 There were fifty-nine persons on stage in the opening scene of the play, as opposed to the six mentioned in the stage directions of the 1623 Folio.28 Charles Kean's productions at the Princess' Theatre in 1852 and 1858 followed suit and upped the bidding in terms of historical accuracy, so that the throne room in Act 1 Scene 1, for example, was an exact replica of the hall in Rochester Castle; Kean also made use of large numbers of supernumeraries and used Macready's promptbook to inform his stage directions.29
By the time of Tree's 1899 production, however, tastes were beginning to shift again, and may have been given a helping hand by Tree's excessive archaeological-spectacular extravaganza. In an effort to outdo the previous spectacular productions of Kemble, Macready, Phelps, and Kean, Tree included highly researched costumes designed by Percy Anderson, sumptuous sets, vast numbers of supernumeraries, and not only a Magna Carta tableau introduced by Kean but also a further fifteen tableaux (with a resulting significant cut in the text). The walls of Angiers were complete with massive Norman archways, a moat, battlements, crenellated parapet walls, corbels, and, in the distance, a faithful painted representation of the medieval chateau of Angiers.30 Tree's production was distrustful of the text, reliant on props rather than acting conviction, and sentimental. As such, it contradicted virtually all of the precepts of modern theater as they were emerging at the turn of the nineteenth century: overemphasis of archaeological realism was increasingly coming to be seen as artifice and the spectacular as form without content.
Other theatrical trends were also afoot in the early twentieth century which prejudiced against the continuation of the spectacular, most noticeably the rise of the repertory system.31 Since the basis of the repertory system was a move away from "commercial drama" toward a smaller, more experimental mode of theatrical production, there was no place at all for the high Victorian mode
of the spectacular. King John's episodic nature was now a theatrical handicap as the focus of attention shifted from exterior picture show to a more restrained and austere style. Freed from the shackles of historical realism and the distractions of the spectacular, the English theater of the early twentieth century moved toward a greater concentration on the inner coherence of the play and of its characterization.
Absence of any reference to the two things a modern spectator can be guaranteed to know about King John: his legendary relationship with Robin Hood and his signing of Magna Carta at Runnymede in 1215 seem like glaring dramatic omissions today. Shakespeare died twelve years before the 1628 Petition of Right and over sixty years before the 1679 Habeas Corpus Act, each of which looks directly back to clause 39 of the charter of 1215.32 Most importantly, however, Shakespeare could not have known that, within thirty years of his death, England would be plunged into a bloody civil war that was effectively a dispute over the significance of the document, or that the sentiments and even the language of Magna Carta would be used in framing the state and national constitutions of the United States a century and a half later. Palmer sums it up pithily: "As for Magna Carta, the Elizabethans had never heard of it."33 It is noteworthy that both Kean and Tree should have felt the need to insert the signing of Magna Carta into their nineteenth-century productions in the form of tableaux, although the decline in taste for the dramatic spectacular and the general upward trend in respect for the original text during the twentieth century have not allowed this expedient solution. It seems likely that the lack of reference to Magna Carta has contributed to the play's decline in popularity.
2. 1899, Herbert Beerbohm Tree's production, with Tree himself as John. Tree included highly researched costumes designed by Percy Anderson, sumptuous sets, and vast numbers of supernumeraries.