The tomb of King John enters the textual history of the play in 1803 and thus anticipates Planché’s decision to cite the effigy at Worcester Cathedral as an authority for his antiquarian production twenty years later, but temporal priority is not the point here. Instead, the sequence reveals a cross-fertilization between textual and theatrical traditions, to their complex intertwinement. Theatrical antiquarianism reached a culmination in Beerbohm Tree’s production of 1899, described by one reviewer as ‘a picture of life under the Angevin kings as correct and splendid as is ever likely to be realized’,1 and it has been suggested that his ‘fancy staging … in its very excess may have killed the play’ (Beaurline, 19). There is no doubt that Beerbohm Tree’s production at Her Majesty’s Theatre presented an opulent version of theatrical antiquarianism at the moment when a variety of trends were pointing in different, and new, directions, but placing the production as the last effloresence of a moribund tradition is misleading. As Michael Best observes, Beerbohm Tree’s commitment to pictorialism and spectacle is hardly an aesthetic dead end: the values he embraced were to achieve powerful realization in the new medium of film. That his production of King John was the subject of the first Shakespeare film is not, then, a simple accident of history, but an indication that Beerbohm Tree was aware that film might provide a powerful platform for his artistic vision.

  In a later essay, Beerbohm Tree laid out the principle undergirding his productions: ‘I take it that the entire business of the stage is – Illusion’ (Beerbohm Tree, 57). This commitment to illusion entailed an embrace of all available theatrical technology. Indeed, Beerbohm Tree even suggested that a careful study of Shakespeare’s stage directions would reveal that ‘Shakespeare not only counted upon the potentialities of his own theatre to give point and life to his text, but that he also, with the prophetic eye of a genius, foresaw the time when a later stage would achieve for him, in the way of scenery, costumes, and effects, what the playhouse of his own day was powerless to accomplish’ (305). The connection between illusionism and antiquarianism is not automatic, but there was a general argument that the avoidance of anachronism in the staging of historical drama was crucial to the creation of illusion (Booth, 21). ‘The archaeologising of spectacle’ on the Victorian stage was, according to Michael R. Booth, ‘closely akin to display, a visual flourish of scholarship and resources combined’ (22). Beerbohm Tree’s King John displayed its resources unstintingly: a total of 385 supernumeraries appearing onstage; the employment of three scene painters to create twelve distinct sets; two tableaux, one of which included live horses; lavish, historically accurate costumes; and sophisticated lighting and sound effects.

  Though it is often claimed that this magnificent display came at the expense of the play, the production ran to 1,810 lines, only twenty lines fewer than Macready’s version. Beerbohm Tree also reshaped the play to make it conform to the three-act structure that was then the norm, and cut 5.3, 5.5 and 5.6. While his cuts streamlined the action, especially in Act 5, his addition of extra-textual elements increased the running time of the performance. Of these, the two that receive most comment are a pair of tableaux, the first presenting the battle at Angiers and the second showing King John sealing Magna Carta (see Fig. 13). These tableaux embody Beerbohm Tree’s pictorial aesthetic, and unsurprisingly both were captured in publicity photographs. The battle scene, however, is a plausible extension of the play’s action. Beerbohm Tree, citing the Chorus in Henry V, held that Shakespeare bridled at the constraints of the Tudor–Stuart stage. Given the resources, Beerbohm Tree did not hesitate to make ‘imaginary puissance’ concrete; instead of ‘talk of horses’ he provided real horses. The signing of Magna Carta is an interpolation of another order. Though Shakespeare’s play was enirely silent on the topic of Magna Carta, Beerbohm Tree’s remedy was not without precedent. Robert Davenport’s King John and Matilda (c. 1628–9), a play that builds on the earlier Huntingdon plays by Anthony Munday and (perhaps) Henry Chettle, makes conspicuous reference to it, and Cibber’s Papal Tyranny also includes an allusion to the Great Charter.1 However, Beerbohm Tree’s inclusion of stylized ceremony in which King John affixes his seal to the famous document is of an entirely different order.

  13 King John and the handing over of the Magna Carta in Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s 1899 production

  Arguably, by the end of the nineteenth century, Whig historiography had established the centrality of Magna Carta not only to the reign of King John, but to the entirety of English history. As Henry Hallam announced in 1872, Magna Carta was ‘beyond comparison the most important event in our history.’1 Under these circumstances, a commitment to historical accuracy might well dictate the inclusion of an episode treating Magna Carta. While the tableau has been understood as spectacle, the fact that it is a dumb-show is also relevant. It allows Beerbohm Tree to display a historical fact as punctual, vivid, existing beyond the rhetoric of praise and blame. Such rhetoric was supplied, however, by the programme, which included ‘a list of ten of the most important provisions from the Charter’s sixty-one clauses, calling them “the Ten Commandments of our existence as a free people” ’.2 The patriotic message of the play was especially evident in the staging of the Bastard’s concluding speech, presented against a background of chanting monks and a rising sun, described by Beerbohm Tree as ‘symbolizing the bright future in store for England after all her troubles’ (quoted in Kachur, 34). Maud Beerbohm Tree, Herbert’s wife, sounds a slightly defensive note when she insists, ‘let us be grateful for King John, and go to see it all we can, for it is a page of English History set in glorious motion, of which we may be proud and never tired’ (quoted in Hirvela, 172).

  Though Beerbohm Tree’s production was a critical and commercial success, King John did not maintain its cultural prominence as the twentieth century dawned. As Braunmuller puts it, ‘The play’s stage history in the twentieth century is a melancholy record of fewer and fewer productions’ (92). Beaurline offers a similarly bleak assessment: ‘The days of the extravaganza were numbered, and King John, indelibly marked with a sumptuous theatrical style, almost disappeared from the stage’ (21). In truth, the play continued to be staged, but often with intervals of several years between performances, and, more importantly, none of the productions before the 1960s appears to have made much of an impact. During the same period, the play did not circulate in the broader culture; allusions to the play are infrequent; quotations rare. Waith provides a downbeat assessment: ‘King John is a play which, in our time, there have been few to love and very few to see’ (192). Given the play’s long run of popularity through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this shift in visibility cries out for explanation. Waith suggests that the twentieth century has done the play a disservice by focusing on theme and political readings; these elements, he suggests, have been emphasized at the expense of the play’s delineation of character and affect, a point that he supports by citing the increasing interest in the Bastard and corresponding discomfort and embarrassment in response to Constance. The notion that productions more attentive to the affective force of the play would attract new audiences has merit, but there is little reason to think that changes in staging will return King John to a place of centrality in Shakespeare studies, to say nothing of the world of Anglophone theatre and literature.

  Beyond the sphere of high culture, where King John’s place in the Folio guarantees that the play will be edited and performed by festivals that aim to produce all of Shakespeare, there is little evidence that King John has been taken up and circulated. Unlike Falstaff, Hamlet, Juliet, Lady Macbeth or any of the other figures who populate the pantheon of Shakespearean characters, Shakespeare’s King John has made almost no mark on contemporary culture. The King John familiar from popular culture is largely attributable to Scott’s Ivanhoe (1820) and the twentieth-century versions of the Robin Hood story, especially the film The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), that presented John as a scheming but ineffective prince eager to usurp the throne of Richard the Lionheart. This interpretative tradition has been remarkably resilient, and as recently as 2011, Paul Giamatti played a sadistic and petulant King John in Ironclad, an action adventure film depicting the seige of Rochester Castle. The popular image of King John as weak, cruel and slightly ridiculous owes little to Shakespeare’s play, a play that for most of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was thought to provide scope for a tragic interpretation of John. Instead, as W.C. Sellar and R.J Yeatman’s 1066 and All That (1930) puts it, ‘When John came to the throne he lost his temper and flung himself on the floor, foaming at the mouth and biting the rushes. He was thus a Bad King’ (24). Though the characters and the characterizations of Shakespeare’s play seem to have largely been forgotten, there is at least one consequential instance in which the play itself has been taken up to form a central element in the plot of a novel.

  At Freddie’s (1980), a theatre novel by Penelope Fitzgerald, tells the story of the Temple School in London run by the titular Frieda ‘Freddie’ Wentworth. Set in 1961, and semi-autobiographical, the novel presents a sustained engagement with King John, identifying it as an important part of the shabby, cramped culture of post-war Britain. An early scene in which Unwin, Freddie’s put-upon accountant, implores her to cut costs, provides an important detail:

  On the wall above her head there was fixed a piece of painted canvas which Unwin did his best not to look at. The words upon it, written in foot-high letters and scrolled with gilt, read NAUGHT SHALL MAKE US RUE IF ENGLAND TO ITSELF DO REST BUT TRUE. They were the closing lines of King John and the canvas had hung above the proscenium of the Old Vic for the production of 1917. Lilian Baylis had refused to take it down until the Kaiser had admitted defeat.

  (16)

  Lilian Baylis was the enormously influential manager of the Old Vic theatre in London, and she had indeed produced a wartime version of King John and adopted the famous motto from the play.1 Freddie thus becomes the inheritor of a particular tradition of national Shakespeare, but of course the meaning of the motto shifts with its translation from the revived Old Vic to the down-at-heel Temple School. Indeed, the narrative suggests that Freddie wields ‘Shakespeare’ as a weapon to disarm dissent and that the demand for loyalty positioned behind her desk is less about patriotism than personal fealty.

  Central to the novel’s plot is a performance of King John that includes two of the school’s students playing the role of Arthur. The potential obscurity of King John, already registered in the narrator’s identification of the source of the motto, is made explicit: ‘audiences are not likely to have much grip on Shakespeare’s King John. They hardly know what to expect, except perhaps something about Magna Carta, which doesn’t figure in the play at all’ (89). The director avoids reading ‘any accounts of the old performances, in order to keep his mind clear’, but arbitrarily decides that King John ‘must be played in Edwardian costume’ (89–90). And when the play opens, part of the audience is attracted by ‘rumours of kinky sets and costumes’ (167). The performance is a success, but what sets it apart is not the modern costuming but a particular moment in the prison scene when Hubert presents the warrant to Arthur. The actor playing Hubert ‘achieved the moment of electrifying contact with the audience in front of him which may only once or twice in a lifetime be the actor’s reward. Out of seventeen hundred spectators, not one stirred. The quality of the attention, even the texture of the silence, changed. The theatre had bound its spell upon them’ (175). The electrifying aspect of this performance, in a deep irony, turns out to be the result of a practical joke played by the child actor performing as Arthur.

  Along with its interest in the world of the theatre, the novel presents a finely calibrated account of King John and Shakespeare in Britain at the start of the 1960s. Freddie’s catch-phrase, ‘Shakespeare would have been pleased, dear’, reveals an identification with Shakespeare that is instrumental and opportunistic. She presents herself as the defender of tradition, and considers King John ‘in justice, to be her own property’ (73). Her school ‘could hardly get any shabbier, and Freddie herself had fulfilled the one sure condition of being loved by the English nation, that is, she had been going on a very long time.… Like Buckingham Palace, Lyons teashops, the British Museum Reading Room, or the Market at Covent Garden, she could never be allowed to disappear. While England rested true to itself, she need never compromise’ (53). The retrospective narration acknowledges that the Lyons teashops are now gone; the produce Market at Covent Garden departed in 1974 and the structure reopened as a tourist mall filled with upscale shops in 1980. Though the move postdates the novel’s publication, the British Library has now decamped from Great Russell Street to its new quarters in St Pancras. Fitzgerald successfully combines a satirical critique of nostalgia with a mildly elegiac account of a world that has passed, and the novel only glances at the forces of post-colonialism that were radically reshaping the globe in the mid-century. A theatrical reviewer, in the novel, praises the prison scene for bringing to ‘dramatic life’ the conflict between ‘unthinking political obedience and human decency’ and concludes, ‘What Hubert decides at that moment, the Third World may have to decide tomorrow’ (176). Whatever degree of irony attends this pronouncement, it is a plausible mimicry of the gestures toward relevance that so frequently accompany the performance of King John in the twenthieth century.

  In 1970, Buzz Goodbody’s avant-garde production of King John at Stratford-upon-Avon presented a radical departure from past performances. Goodbody cut about thirty per cent of the play but added 172 lines from Troublesome Reign as well as six original lines, and presented the play as slapstick satire (Hirvela, 219). In the words of one reviewer, ‘She stages it as a Brechtian comic strip, a Punch-and-Judy game of royal chess.’1 The Coventry Evening Telegraph declared it ‘utterly cynical about national politics’.2 Goodbody’s iconoclastic reworking, featuring Patrick Stewart as an energetic and irreverent King John (see Fig. 14), was a powerful deconstruction of the received stage tradition, and it provided inspiration for John Barton’s production in 1974, also at Stratford-upon-Avon. Barton’s political vision was similarly corrosive, but his rewriting of the play was extraodinarily ambitious: not only did he incorporate material from Troublesome Reign and John Bale’s King Johan (1538), he added some six hundred lines of his own.3 Barton’s aim was to make the politics of the play explicit and immediately topical, and to this end he added language referring to contemporary issues, such as inflation (Smallwood, ‘Unbalanced’, 92). At the same time, the production insisted on the futility of politics. The concluding speech, rather than being an expression of the Bastard’s hard-won experience, was instead read from a large book that he discovered under a Christmas tree (Smallwood, 98). Barton here makes a telling point about the way in which this speech has circulated secondhand as a convenient and empty piece of political rhetoric, and he would not have been surprised by Dick Cheney’s later reflection, ‘Whenever I think of Margaret Thatcher, I can’t help but recall the final lines from Shakespeare’s King John, “Naught shall make us rue if England to itself do rest but true.” ’1 Unimpressed by what he has just read, the Bastard slouched off the stage ‘hands in pockets, whistling’ (Smallwood, ‘Unbalanced’, 98). Barton’s approach was intended to provoke, and it did; while the production had fierce critics and committed advocates, its insistently political vision of King John was deeply influential.