King John became, in the mid-nineteenth century, a privileged site for the articulation of a newly burgeoning historicism, but this movement was not univocal. Not only were there competing versions of what a properly historical account of King John’s reign would include, but there were also, predictably, burlesques that parodied the play and its association with historical realism. The same year that the Kemble–Planché King John was produced, the Royal Coburg Theatre, a minor theatre prohibited by the licensing act from performing Shakespeare’s plays, mounted a costume extravaganza, William the Conqueror; or, The Battle of Hastings, that claimed in its playbills to have used the same printed authorities cited by Planché.1 Later in the spring of the same year, the Coburg produced Magna Charta; or, The Eventful Reign of King John, a melodramatic rendering of the reign that also emphasized the accuracy of its arms, armour, heraldic trappings and costuming. Unlike the legitimate version of King John staged at Covent Garden, this version of the reign made, as the title indicates, Magna Carta the central event of the reign (Moody, 118–20). While offering an alternative perspective on the reign, Magna Charta only confirmed the ascendancy of theatrical antiquarianism. However, Planché’s response to William the Conqueror was predictably mocking, and it is evident that his pursuit of historical accuracy, bolstered by authentic authorities and solid scholarship, was in part a move to reinforce the hold of the two patent theatres on the production of legitimate Shakespeare.

  In 1837, a burlesque of King John appeared at the newly opened St James’s Theatre. Written by Gilbert Abbott A’Beckett, the published burlesque includes an engraving of the comic actor Henry Hall wearing the outfit described in the list of costumes as his second suit: ‘Breast plate, with spike in centre, and spikes on his knees and elbows – helmet, with a weather-cock, and N.E.S.W. on it’ (see Fig. 12).2 This costume is, of course, a parodic response to the vogue for accurate armour initiated by Planché, and the ridiculous weathercock destroys the effect of historical verisimilitude.1 The weathercock not only identifies King John as volatile and fickle like the weather, but it also suggests that theatrical antiquarianism is a fashion trend rather than the expression of a fundamental truth. Radically compressed into a single act of seven scenes, the burlesque reduces the play to the initial embassy, the conflict at Angiers, Constance’s sorrow, King John’s temptation of Hubert, Hubert’s encounter with Arthur, the French invasion and King John’s death scene in the orchard. The debate about the Bastard’s paternity and the description of the extra moons, often cut in performance, are included, the first presumably for its sexual suggestiveness and the second for the opportunity to indulge in fantastical nonsense. Hubert reports:

  Tonight, my lord, they say twelve moons were seen,

  Three pink, three orange, half-a-dozen green,

  And in addition to this crowd of moons,

  There have been five and twenty fire-balloons.

  (18)

  King John responds to this garish portent with gibberish: ‘Oons! – moons! – balloons!’ By fastening on an episode frequently cut, the burlesque here insists on the oddity of Shakespeare, and the King’s response seems to defy interpretation. At the same time, A’Beckett retains language that reliably references its pre-text, as when King John enters reeling from an overdose of gin: ‘Ah, now I’ve elbow room, what is it hinders, / My active soul from jumping out of windows? / My pulse against my breast is fiercely prancing, / Like when a kettle boils the lid is dancing’ (21) (cf. KJ 5.7.28–31). The domestic simile is deflationary, as is the oxmoronic phrase ‘fiercely prancing’, but the upshot is not nonsense. In the same way, King John’s statement of principle in the first scene, ‘Possession is nine points, you know, and then, / Look at these fists, don’t five and five, make ten?’ (8) is a recognizable reworking of ‘Our strong possession, and our right for us’ (KJ 1.1.39). Alluding to the familiar proverb, King John suggests that the advantage conferred by present possession is made complete by the capacity to inflict violence, but this serious point unravels as the image of royal fisticuffs sinks in. In slangy contemporary language A’Beckett’s King John lays bare the mystification of ‘right’ that preoccupies the opening of Shakespeare’s play: what we get instead is a jokey invocation of ‘might is right.’

  12 Henry Hall as King John in Gilbert Abbot A’Beckett’s 1837 burlesque King John (With the Benefit of the Act), by W. Newman, 1837

  The burlesque divides its characters into ‘Natives’ and ‘Foreigners’, but interestingly the rebel barons are omitted and with them the question of Magna Carta. The character list mocks the obsession with genealogy that finds expression not only in Shakespeare’s history plays but also in the new fashion for accurate heraldry in their staging. King John is listed as ‘Successor to Richard the second’. King Philip is ‘Successor to his predecessor’, Lady Constance is ‘Wife to her son Arthur’s father, and mother to Arthur’s father’s son’ and Lady Elinor is ‘John’s father’s widow, and Arthur’s uncle’s mother’. Needless to say, the burlesque offers none of the emphatic patriotism that had become a regular part of the stage tradition associated with Shakespeare’s play; though Pandulph appears briefly in scene 3, where he is dismissed with a song, the anti-Catholic theme is undeveloped. The Bastard’s final speech is cut, replaced by a song sung by the suddenly revived King John, to the tune of the final aria in Bellini’s La Sonnambula (1827). This sudden resurrection destroys John’s claim to be a proper tragic subject, and his song concludes, ‘Let us hope now that all is right!’, a sentiment repeated by the chorus in the final words of the performance. An expression of optimism, these words also punningly refer to questions of legitimacy before insouciantly waving them off.

  The mockery evident in A’Beckett’s burlesque registers a minority opinion. A limited success in performance and print, his version of King John did not make a dent in the fashion for antiquarian Shakespeare productions, and King John continued to play a central role in the development of an antiquarian or archeological aesthetic. Macready’s production in October 1842 at Drury Lane vastly expanded on the possibilities first explored by Kemble–Planché. Contemporaries were struck by the production’s successful use of spectacular elements. The resplendent and historically accurate costumes pioneered by Kemble and Planché remained central, but Macready added elaborate scenery by William Telbin and filled the stage with supernumeraries (Shattuck, 11–12). As a critic in The Times put it, ‘Mr. Macready has brought before the eyes of his audience an animated picture of those Gothic times which are so splendidly illustrated by the drama. The stage is thronged with the stalwart forms of the middle ages, the clang of battle sounds behind the scenes, massive fortresses bound the horizon’ (quoted in Shattuck, 11). Charles Shattuck’s account of the staging of 2.1 illustrates Macready’s tendency to pack the stage: the opening trumpets call thirty-six players to the stage. The arrival of Chatillon and his escorts brings the number to forty-six. When King John and his followers arrive, the number swells to eighty-two; when six citizens of Angiers appear above the gates of the city, the full total of eighty-eight is reached (Shattuck, 25). Telbin’s scenes contributed to the impression of spectacle, and many of the reviews comment on their successful integration. As a review in the Athenaeum puts it: ‘The scenery is not a mere succession of bright prospects and sumptuous interiors; it has a pictorial character in accordance with the action’ (quoted in Shattuck, 11). The picturesque or the pictorial is cited again and again as a central achievement of Macready’s production.

  John Forster, admittedly a friend and supporter of Macready, wrote a review in the Examiner that celebrates the play and the production in extravagant terms: ‘We have had nothing so great as the revival of King John. We have had no celebration of English History and English Poetry, so worthy of a National Theatre. Among Shakespeare’s kingly chronicles, John stands apart. It is the earliest in time, and on the whole we think the foremost in genius. It contains every material of his histories of later date, with an element that allies it to his grander portraitures of general human passion. The heart heaves and throbs beneath the coat of mail.’1 Forster had advocated for the theatre from an early age, and in Macready’s production of King John he found the perfect vehicle for his argument. An exceptional play produced in a way that displays the full resources of the stage, Macready’s King John is to Forster the perfect synthesis of history and poetry, a full realization of the notion of a national theatre. Importantly, Forster praises the production for its combination of the affective and the historical: ‘The heart heaves and throbs beneath the coat of mail.’ While this recognizes a key aspect of the play, it also presents an image of imperial British masculinity appropriate to the mid-nineteenth century.

  Forster’s account of the production illuminates the way in which theatrical antiquarianism is understood to work: ‘The stage is filled with that gorgeous and thronged array which filled the poet’s imagination. It is no longer a formless fancy, this Chronicle of John.’ The notion that Macready has realized the author’s original vision is an important development; the suggestion that the imagined world of the play instantiates a plentitude that has hitherto escaped representation has a number of implications. First, the pursuit of theatrical antiquarianism is authorized by a resort to the author himself, not the mere facts of history. Second, and somewhat paradoxically, the notion of an integrated vision is simultaneously tied to authorial consciousness and to the idea that the medieval world represented an organic whole, a social integrity that would be disrupted by the emergence of modernity. There is no doubt that Forster celebrated the production for its articulation of medievalism: ‘The rude heroic forms of the English past; the gothic and chivalric grandeur of the Middle Age; the woes and wars of a barbarous but an earnest time, with its reckless splendour, its selfish cruelty, and its gloomy suffering are in this revival realized.’ But Forster does not celebrate the medieval; there are reasons enough to be grateful that it is in the past; the volatility of the play’s action make it ‘the very picture of that age: its selfish insincerity, its rude devotion, its servile slavery’. The implications are clear: whatever the deficits of modernity, it makes sincerity a virtue, refines religion and embraces liberty. While Forster offers a mixed assessment of the medieval past, he understands it as a distinct period, an integrated whole (even if violence and warfare are endemic). At the same time, he celebrates the aesthetic unity achieved by the artist’s vision: ‘And above all, in every movement of the tragedy, there is Mind at work, without which wealth of material is nothing.’

  Forster’s emphasis on integration was clearly shared by Macready himself. Putting aside the ‘wealth of material’ that made the production so distinctive, Macready was deeply committed to a particular conception of the character of King John. Feeling that other actors had played up the patriotic aspect of John to the detriment of his darker side, Macready in his earlier outings had played the King as a villain. But in the 1842 revival he hit upon a solution to the problem of John’s moral ambiguity: ‘John almost as hero-king, yet incipiently vicious, through Acts I, II, and half of III; John as coward-king and villain thereafter’ (quoted in Shattuck, 48). By dividing the character in this fashion, Macready risked bifurcating the play: the production used various sound effects and lighting elements to reinforce the transformation (Shattuck, 27). At the same time, the character of the Bastard, whom Victorian critics had celebrated as an English hero, was presented as a rude, swaggering opportunist through the first three acts before undergoing his own transformation. As Forster observes of the play: ‘None of these characters is cast in an unyielding mould.’ Though Macready’s playing of the King was well received, the part of the Bastard, performed by James Anderson, met with resistance: ‘his manner was coarse, his voice overstrained, and his action exaggerated’; ‘the bluster was overdone’; ‘too much of the bully and swaggerer’ (Shattuck, 52). As Shattuck observes, this reaction was in part produced by familiarity with Charles Kemble’s earlier, gentlemanly version of the character, but it was also a result of having a figure that had been identified as a ‘flagbearer of national patriotism’ presented as an ‘unhousebroken rudesby’ (Shattuck, 52).

  Macready’s production significantly extended the theatrical antiquarianism pioneered by the Kemble–Planché version of the play, but it also offered a nuanced take on the question of nationalism. While Macready’s text remained significantly trimmed, at 1,830 lines it reduces the original 2,570 by 740 lines, but expands on Kemble’s acting version of 1,690 (Shattuck, 10). Importantly, Macready cuts a short passage, of unknown origin, that had been included in the Kemble editions:

  And above all exterminate those Slaves,

  Those British Slaves whose prostituted souls

  Under French Banners move vile Rebellion

  Against their King, their Country, and their God.1

  Inserted in order to emphasize the perfidy of the rebel barons and further reinforce the virtue of national unity, its disappearance reduces the stridency of the play’s final act. Macready also restored Peter of Pomfret, and with him the strong hint of the supernatural found in Shakespeare’s original. In both cases, Macready shows a greater fidelity to Shakespeare’s original text than do his immediate theatrical predecessors.

  The stage tradition that ran from Kemble–Planché to Macready and Kean established King John as a major cultural artefact, but it is not divorced from the textual history of the play. Admittedly, the fact that the play appears only in the Folio and that, as Dodd observes, ‘the text is remarkably correct’ (73), means that the received text has not been subjected to significant alteration. As a consequence, much of what is interesting in the play’s print history concerns the apparatus or other paratextual elements that reveal the way in which King John in print responds to the exigencies of particular moments and specific audiences. Pope notably decided to include passages from Troublesome Reign in order to clarify the Bastard’s hatred for Austria; the first of these, twelve lines long, was inserted following 3.1.131; the second is a shorter passage of three lines that replace 3.2.4, a change that was accepted by Theobald, Hanmer, Warburton, Johnson and the Variorum of 1773 (Var, 188, 236). The annotations that came to adorn reading editions of Shakespeare display a wider variety. George Steevens, in his headnote to the play, asserts, ‘Hall, Holinshed, Stowe, &c. are closely followed not only in the conduct, but sometimes in the expressions of the following historical dramas; viz. Macbeth, this play, Richard II. Henry IV. 2 parts, Henry V. Henry VI. 3 parts, Richard III. And Henry VIII.’1 Though he does not provide much from Holinshed, Steevens cites Holinshed in order to clarify the titles Austria and Limoges (55–6). He also adds a note to Johnson’s gloss on Pembroke’s speech, ‘This “once again” … Was once superfluous’ (KJ 4.2.3–4). To Johnson’s paraphrase, ‘This one time more was one time more than enough’, Steevens appends: ‘It should be remembered that king John was at present crowned for the fourth time’ (88). Perhaps this makes Pembroke’s criticism of the re-coronation more trenchant; it certainly asserts the relevance of historical fact to a reading and interpretation of the play. This approach assumes a new prominence in the edition of Edmond Malone; as Margreta de Grazia points out, Malone’s commitment to a postivistic sense of fact led him not only to correct the various inaccuracies of Rowe’s life of Shakespeare but also the ‘factual errors in the historical plays’.2 Malone’s edition of King John offers, in a note on the poisoning of the King, one conspicuous example:

  Not one of the historians who wrote within sixty years after the death of King John, mentions this very improbable story. The tale is, that a monk, to revenge himself on the king for a saying at which he took offence, poisoned a cup of ale, and having brought it to his majesty, drank some of it himself to induce the king to taste it, and soon afterwards expired. Thomas Wykes is the first who relates it in his Chronicle, as a report. According to the best accounts John died at Newark, of a fever.1

  It is fair to assume that readers and scholars were aware of Shakespeare’s loose relationship to the historical record; what is fascinating is that Malone finds it necessary to call attention to this in a footnote. Steevens, who had a rivalrous relationship with Malone (and just about everybody else), continued his editorial labours, producing a revised and augmented edition in 1793, but his final notes and corrections appeared in the edition published in 1803 by Isaac Reed. In what may well be Steevens’s final note on King John, the line ‘At Worcester must his body be interred’ (5.7.99) is given this annotation: ‘A stone coffin, containing the body of King John, was discovered in the Cathedral Church of Worcester, July 17, 1797.’ The note suggests that Prince Henry’s assertion has been vindicated by the most recent archeological discoveries, but the peculiarity of this insistence becomes even more obvious in the light of the details concerning the discovery of King John’s remains. The mystery regarding King John’s body was created and resolved by eighteenth-century antiquarianism. The ancient monument with a funeral effigy of King John is located in the choir of Worcester Cathedral, and its existence had never been in doubt. The question that emerged concerned the precise location of the monarch’s body. Eighteenth-century antiquaries, aware that the body had been disturbed during the Reformation era, theorized that the tomb had been moved from its original position between the sepulchres of St Wulfstan and St Oswald to its present location in the choir – some maintained that the body had also been moved, while others opined that it had been left in its initial resting place. Against the argument that the tomb had been moved, a third position maintained that the tomb had always been in its present location. The decision in 1797 to open the tomb was motivated by some combination of antiquarian curiosity and ecclesiastical ambition (it was rumoured that the Dean hoped to relocate the tomb in order to improve access to the altar). Shockingly, when the tomb of King John was opened, the underlying coffin was discovered to contain the body of King John. An account of the exhumation by Valentine Green, an engraver and antiquarian who had published a history of Worcester, concludes, based on the condition and positioning of the decayed body, that the tomb and body had indeed been repositioned. He ends his description with a soaring defence of the exhumation as having effectively destroyed ‘ingenious speculation, founded on specious possibilities, out of the ruins of which hath been raised a positive truth, that has forever closed the lips of conjecture, and happily placed an ancient fact, beyond the reach of future doubt’.1 As should now be clear, what Steevens identifies as a newly ‘discovered’ fact is entirely otiose: the precise location of John’s body within the cathedral has no bearing on the accuracy of Prince Henry’s directive, nor does the note specify what made this discovery of interest. But, in its brevity and its chronological specificity, the note insists on the link between Shakespeare’s King John and the most recent antiquarian research. It also insists that the Shakespearean text refers to a concrete, external reality, a gesture designed to ward off the suggestion that the plays are mere fiction. Fascinatingly, the connection forged by Steevens was, over a century later, consecrated by the New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: The Life and Death of King John (1919), which has as its frontispiece a photograph of the ‘Tomb of King John, Worcester Cathedral’.