King John & Henry VIII (23 page)

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.

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,

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:

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.