Lines 31–81: The Bastard reports that the war with France is going badly: Kent has yielded apart from Dover Castle, and London has welcomed the dauphin. The nobles refuse to listen to John and have gone to offer their services to the enemy; his few friends are all amazed. John asks if the lords wouldn’t return after hearing that Arthur was alive but Richard replies that they found his dead body. John says that “villain Hubert” told him he was alive and Richard replies that Hubert believed he was. He encourages John to behave proudly like a king and set a good example to his followers: “Show boldness and aspiring confidence.” John tells him the Pope’s legate has been with him and they’ve made peace—he’s going to dismiss the dauphin’s army. Richard is dismayed: “O inglorious league!” and thinks they should still make their arrangements to fight, in case the Cardinal fails: it should not be said that they didn’t try to defend their country. John tells him to organize everything, but privately fears that the French may be superior in strength.
ACT 5 SCENE 2
Lines 1–118: Lewis accepts the services of Salisbury and the other rebel English lords. Salisbury swears to keep faith with him, regretting the need for war, grieving that they should follow a foreign lord and fighting their fellow countrymen, wishing their two Christian armies might join arms against a pagan enemy. Lewis praises those noble sentiments, which do him honour, but is amazed at his tears—“such manly drops.” He tells him to overcome them since he will “thrust [his] hand as deep / Into the purse of rich prosperity” as Lewis will himself. The Cardinal enters and Lewis thinks he has come to authorize their actions. Pandulph greets him and immediately says that John is now reconciled with Rome so the French should pack up their gear and go home. Lewis refuses, claiming that it’s too late and he’s “too high-born” to be told what to do. The Cardinal started this war and taught him what was right and he now intends to go on. Now that Arthur’s dead, by virtue of his marriage to Blanche, he claims the throne of England for himself. It’s he not Rome who has done and paid for everything and he believes he can win easily. The Cardinal complains this is a superficial view of things. They hear a trumpet sound.
Lines 119–183: The Bastard enters wanting to know if the Cardinal has succeeded in persuading the dauphin. Pandulph says the dauphin refuses to lay down his arms. Richard is delighted and makes a stirring speech on John’s behalf saying that they are prepared. Recalling how they defeated the French in France he asks whether it’s not more likely they’ll be successful here on their own land. He has special words of anger and scorn for the rebel lords, “you degenerate, you ingrate revolts, / You bloody Neroes …,” who would destroy their own land and telling them to blush for shame. Lewis is dismissive, saying he knows the Bastard can “outscold us” but he hasn’t got time to listen to “such a brabbler.” Richard taunts him that he will be beaten like his drums and claims that John used the Cardinal for “sport” rather than “need.” He threatens them that “warlike John” is at hand with “bare-ribbed Death” at his “forehead” who will feast upon “thousands of the French.” Each defies the other and they prepare to fight.
ACT 5 SCENE 3
To the sounds of battle, John asks Hubert for news. Hubert thinks it’s going badly for the English and John reports feeling ill. A messenger enters from Richard telling John to leave the battlefield and to tell him which way he’s going. John replies to Swinstead Abbey. The messenger tells him to cheer up; the French supplies have been shipwrecked on the Goodwin Sands and they’re retreating. John repeats how ill he feels and tells them to take him straight to Swinstead.
ACT 5 SCENE 4
Salisbury, Bigot, and Pembroke on the battlefield are surprised by how much support John has but have learned that he’s ill. The English success, though, is down to Richard: “That misbegotten devil Falconbridge.” Melun enters and warns them that they have been betrayed, that if the French win the dauphin has sworn to cut off their heads and he advises them to make peace with John. They cannot believe it but Melun asks why, since he is facing death himself, he should lie to them. He begs them to remove his body to some quiet place to die. They believe him and are glad that they need be traitors no longer but can return to King John.
ACT 5 SCENE 5
Lewis is reflecting on French successes of a long day of battle when a messenger arrives to say that count Melun is dead, the English rebel lords have returned to John, and French supplies have been lost on Goodwin Sands. Lewis is dismayed by the turn of events but promises to be up before dawn to continue the fight in the morning.
ACT 5 SCENE 6
Hubert seeks Richard with bad news: John has been poisoned by a monk. Richard asks who’s left to tend the king and Hubert tells him Prince Henry with the rebel lords who have returned to John. Prince Henry has asked for them to be pardoned. Richard says that he has lost half his army in the Wash and barely escaped himself and asks Hubert to take him to the king.
ACT 5 SCENE 7
Lines 1–51: Prince Henry is discussing his father’s serious condition with Salisbury and Bigot. Pembroke enters, saying that John wishes to be brought out into the cool air. He asks if his father is still raging and Pembroke replies that he is calmer now and has just been singing. Prince Henry grieves for his dying father, wondering at the illness’ strange effect on his mind. Salisbury comforts him, telling him it’s his fate to resolve the confused situation of the times. John is brought into the orchard, relieved to be outside. He is burning inside and desires coolness but complains that none of them will help him. Prince Henry wishes his tears would help his father but John complains they’re too hot.
Lines 52–122: Richard rushes in eager to see John, who says he has just enough strength to hear his news. Richard says the dauphin is coming and he has lost half his army, but Salisbury tells him that John is dead. Richard says he will wait just long enough to avenge John and then follow him to the grave. He asks the stars for aid. Salisbury says he obviously doesn’t know that Cardinal Pandulph is resting inside, who came half an hour ago to say that he had concluded an honorable peace with the dauphin. Richard thinks he’ll be more inclined when he sees them ready to fight but Salisbury says it’s already concluded; the dauphin has already sent his troops home and left the Cardinal to arrange the rest with Richard, himself, and the other lords. Richard agrees; Prince Henry should accompany his father’s body to Worcester for burial. Richard offers his “faithful services / And true subjection” to the prince, and the other lords follow suit. Prince Henry wishes he could thank them but can only do so with his tears. Richard says they should grieve as befits the time, but England shall never be conquered, now that all are loyal again. Nothing will make them sorry “If England to itself do rest but true.”
KING JOHN
IN PERFORMANCE:
THE RSC AND BEYOND
The best way to understand a Shakespeare play is to see it or ideally to participate in it. By examining a range of productions, we may gain a sense of the extraordinary variety of approaches and interpretations that are possible—a variety that gives Shakespeare his unique capacity to be reinvented and made “our contemporary” four centuries after his death.
We begin with a brief overview of the play’s theatrical and cinematic life, offering historical perspectives on how it has been performed. We then analyze in more detail a series of productions staged over the last half century by the Royal Shakespeare Company. The sense of dialogue between productions that can only occur when a company is dedicated to the revival and investigation of the Shakespeare canon over a long period, together with the uniquely comprehensive archival resource of promptbooks, programme notes, reviews, and interviews held on behalf of the RSC at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon, allows an “RSC stage history” to become a crucible in which the chemistry of the play can be explored.
We then go to the horse’s mouth. Modern theater is dominated by the figure of the director. He or she must hold together the whole play, whereas the actor must concentrate
on his or her part. The director’s viewpoint is therefore especially valuable. Shakespeare’s plasticity is wonderfully revealed when we hear the directors of two highly successful productions of each play answering the same questions in very different ways.
FOUR CENTURIES OF KING JOHN: AN OVERVIEW
Shakespeare’s King John, with its pageantry and anti-Catholicism, appears to have been a popular play during the Elizabethan and early Jacobean periods. This is evidenced by its mention in Francis Meres’ commonplace book Palladis Tamia (1598), in which he claims that “As Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for Comedy and Tragedy among the Latines: so Shakespeare among the English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage.”1 The inaccurate attribution to Shakespeare in the 1611 and 1622 reprints of the anonymous, strongly anti-Catholic Troublesome Raigne of King John (almost certainly one of Shakespeare’s key sources), was either a genuine mistake or a deliberate attempt to deceive, but whichever is the case it suggests a degree of popular familiarity with Shakespeare’s play in the first two decades of the seventeenth century.
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 famous 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
King John & Henry VIII Page 14
