AFTERLIVES

  The afterlife of King John has been extraordinarily variegated. There is little indication that the play was especially popular or influential when first staged, though the existence of two history plays on the reign of King John does suggest that there was an audience for the drama. In fact, King John was the English monarch who appeared most frequently on the early modern stage.1 However, this initial interest in the subject did not assure Shakespeare’s play a place in the repertory during the seventeenth century. It was not until the 1730s that the play rose in public esteem; it was then performed regularly through most of the nineteenth century. Subsequently it fell from prominence, appearing infrequently over the better part of the twentieth century, eventually becoming a watchword for Shakespearean obscurity: unread, unperformed and unloved. Though there is evidence beginning in the 1970s of a renewed theatrical interest in King John, the play has not achieved the visibility that it enjoyed in the nineteenth century. Its shifting critical fortunes are tied not only to the prominence of Shakespeare more generally, but also to broader cultural currents concerning most obviously, the religious identity of England and later Great Britain, the place of the monarchy, the relative importance placed on questions of emotion and affect, and shifting interest in history as a mode of knowledge. What follows is not intended as a comprehensive reception history of King John. Instead, we will survey a range of the productions and publications that have contributed significantly to the interpretative traditions associated with King John. In each instance, these cultural artefacts can be located both diachronically and synchronically, that is, as part of an inherited and explicit tradition (whether performative, critical or editorial) and as a response to the exigencies of historical context. The examples chosen are intended to foreground two major points: first, the current status of the play is a sharp reversal of its prominence in the past; second, King John’s sophisticated treatment of history has made it an especially attractive site for an engagement with questions of the past and its representation.

  The seventeenth century provides little evidence that Shakespeare’s King John attracted much attention. G.E. Bentley notes only a handful of allusions to the play, and The English Treasury of Wit and Language (1655), a commonplace book comprised exclusively of dramatic writing, contains 154 quotations from twenty-six Shakespeare plays but nothing from King John.1 Interestingly, the one early instance (1612) of quotation from the play that does not appear in a dramatic context is in a manuscript by Sir John Hayward: ‘Excellent Queene! what doe my wordes but wrong thy worth? what doe I but guild gold? what, but shew the Sunne with a candle in attempting prayse thee.’2 This apparent recollection of 4.2.11, 14–15 anticipates the popularity of the play’s most cited rhetorical flourish, a passage that in condensed form gives us the still-current cliché: to gild the lily. Shakespeareans have speculated that Shakespeare drew on Hayward’s controversial history of Henry IV, but less has been said about the possibility that Hayward was influenced by Shakespeare. The expurgation of the playtext (replacing references to God with heaven) to bring it into conformity with the Act to Restrain Abuses of Players (1606) suggests that the King’s Men prepared the play for performance sometime after the promulgation of the Act and before the publication of the First Folio (see pp. 119–21). This supposition is further supported by a document granting the King’s Company permission to stage King John in 1669; the play is listed as ‘having formerly acted at the Blackfriars’, which would indicate a performance sometime after the King’s Men began performing at the Blackfriars in the winter of 1609–10. Though the King’s Company had a claim on the play, there is no evidence that it was performed during the Restoration.1 Indeed, the earliest performance that can be assigned to a specific date did not occur until 27 February 1737, at Covent Garden.

  The re-emergence of King John in the 1730s was most immediately the result of a confluence of events in the world of print publication and theatrical performance. The Covent Garden performance is regularly described as having been provoked by Colley Cibber’s initial attempt to produce Papal Tyranny, his adaptation of King John, in the same year. Credit is also given to a loosely affiliated group of women, the Shakespeare Ladies’ Club, who pursued a vigorous campaign, beginning in 1736, in support of restoring Shakespeare to the stage.2 Both of these developments, which will be discussed below, were preceded by Robert Walker’s publication of a duodecimo edition of Shakespeare’s complete works in eight volumes in 1734–5.1 Walker’s goal was to contest Jacob Tonson’s claim to control the publication of Shakespeare’s plays. Tonson, who had published Nicholas Rowe’s groundbreaking edition of 1709, claimed the Shakespeare copyrights, but his position had been undermined by the 1710 copyright statute, which limited the term of old copies to twenty-one years, resulting in an expiration date of 1731. The Stationers, predictably, contested this element of the law, arguing that statute law could not vacate a property claim supported by common law, and resorting to Chancery in order to secure injunctions against infringing printers. In the absence of a decisive test case, the legal situation remained unclear. Walker began with The Merry Wives of Windsor and issued his work in parts, so that a buyer could, if desired, purchase a single play or collect the six or so that comprised a multi-work volume. The intent was to be fast and cheap, and to provoke Tonson into suing in order to establish the legal case against perpetual copyright. Tonson, presumably unwilling to risk a precedent that would deny his ownership of a considerable backlist, pursued another strategy: he produced a competing edition in the same format and drastically undercut Walker’s price in an attempt to drive him out of business. While Walker managed to produce the complete set of plays, there is no evidence that the venture was a financial success, nor did it clarify the unsettled legal situation concerning expired copyrights. But the episode did succeed in producing a flood of cheap Shakespeare plays. Shakespeare’s King John had not appeared in a stand-alone volume before Walker and Tonson issued their competing editions in 1734 and 1735. Both books include as a frontispiece an image based on Foxe’s woodcut of King John resigning his crown to Pandulph. Tonson’s volume includes an advertisement at the end that excoriates Walker and accuses him of an inability to distinguish Shakespearean plays from non-Shakespearean plays: ‘Whereas one R. Walker has proposed to Pirate all Shakespear’s plays; but through Ignorance of what plays are Shakespear’s, did in several Advertisements propose to print Oedipus King of Thebes, as one of Shakespear’s Plays; and has since printed Tate’s King Lear instead of Shakespear’s, and in that and Hamlet has omitted almost one half of the Genuine Editions printed by Tonson and Proprietors.’1 Tonson stands on privilege and propriety; with a shaky legal case, he plays up his reputation as a promoter of true literature, a discerning tastemaker, whose products will be reliably superior to those of the upstart Walker. While the appearance of these two editions of King John is unlikely to have contributed directly to the subsequent events in which the play featured prominently, it is impossible to deny that the proliferation of cheap editions increased the general visibility of Shakespeare’s texts in the mid-1730s.

  The story of Colley Cibber’s much-excoriated Papal Tyranny, however, begins as early as 1722. Having had an early success with his adaptation of Richard III in 1700, Cibber ‘turned to King John as a theatrical response to the partisan and Jacobite upheavals of 1722’ (McGirr, 24). Fearing the opposition of Tory writers as well as Whigs hostile to the government, Cibber shelved the play until 1736, when it was completed and in rehearsal before being cancelled. Cibber’s retreat was the result of an onslaught of orchestrated criticism, ‘a good deal having been said against Cibber for again presuming to meddle with Shakespeare’.2 In an effort to win support for the production, Cibber wrote an open letter ‘To the Younger Gentleman, Students of all the Inns of Court’ that appeared in the Daily Advertiser on 4 February 1737, in which he compliments a ‘Sett of Ladies’ for helping to revive the ‘true old Taste for Plays’ and locates his own production of King John as part of this general restoration of Shakespeare’s works. Cibber’s attempt to align himself with the Shakespeare Ladies’ Club in order to mollify the law students was, it hardly needs to be said, unsuccessful, and his letter only seems to have provoked further criticism.1 At this juncture, John Rich, the manager of Covent Garden, sensing an opportunity, produced King John ‘As written by Shakespear’. This, the first datable performance of the play, was a modest success; performed ten times in 1737, it was revived in 1738 and again in 1741.2

  Rich was not in principle opposed to Shakespearean adaptation, nor was he unwilling to work with Cibber. When the threat of Catholic invasion seized the public imagination in 1745, a fear that would be realized later that year when Bonnie Prince Charlie, the grandson of the exiled James II, landed in Scotland to lead a Jacobite rebellion against George II, Rich produced Papal Tyranny at Covent Garden. This production has regularly been dismissed as a disaster providing evidence of a decisive shift away from adaptation, an assessment that has recently been contested by Elaine McGirr, who argues that the play was far from a catastrophe and that the difficulties it encountered ‘had less to do with adaptation than with personal and partisan conflicts’ (McGirr, 23). As McGirr points out, a twelve-night run and three printed editions in 1745 cannot be counted a failure. The Victorian actor Henry Irving concludes: ‘It does not reflect much credit on the taste of the Covent Garden audiences of that period, that the gambols of this literary monkey on the tomb of our great poet were rewarded by a net profit of £400 and that the performance was sufficiently popular to be repeated.’1

  Cibber’s adaption of King John, whatever its aesthetic merits, deserves attention for what it tells us about the reception and circulation of Shakespeare’s play. Usually Papal Tyranny is treated entirely negatively: it is simply not Shakespeare. In particular, Cibber’s anti-Catholic message reverts to the sort of polemic found in Troublesome Reign. Conveniently, perceived aesthetic deficiency aligns with political sycophancy and religious bigotry, and Cibber is the impudent upstart mocked by Alexander Pope and Henry Fielding. Though this position has a basis in fact, it does not provide a full picture. In truth, the reformulated play does not exactly live up to its title, which may have misled some modern scholars. In his dedication to the Earl of Chesterfield, Cibber famously writes: ‘In all the historical Plays of Shakespear there is scarce any Fact that might better have employed his Genius, than the flaming Contest between his insolent Holiness and King John. This is so remarkable a Passage in our Histories, that it is seems surprising our Shakespear should have taken no more Fire at it’ (A4r). Cibber’s supply of fire consists of expanding Pandulph’s curse from the seven and half lines in King John (3.1.172–9) to twenty-three lines. In addition, King John’s response to Pandulph’s curse locates the play’s action more securely in a received Protestant historiography. The King sends two followers to England:

  There, from their Hive of Canterbury,

  With military Force of Fire and Sword,

  Exterminate these trait’rous Monks, that have,

  In this Election of their Prelate, dar’d

  To send the Question of our Right to Rome:

  Seize on their Goods, their Moveables, and Treasure!

  Confiscate to the Publick! Then proclaim it Death

  To give them Shelter through our whole Dominions!

  Without Remorse, Inquiry, or Delay,

  See this our Will, with rigour, be obey’d!

  (Cibber, 23–4)

  This is considerably harsher than the commission that Shakespeare’s John gives to the Bastard after the battle in which Arthur is captured (KJ 3.3.6–11), and it clearly conflates John’s seizure of monastic wealth with King Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries. At the same time, Cibber does not insist that the monks are guilty of having poisoned King John; indeed, the King concludes his life with a colloquy with an Abbot that establishes his contrition. Chiefly an attempt to rehabilitate King John, Papal Tyranny also presents a Catholic figure in a positive light. Ultimately, Cibber is less interested in religious vituperation than he is in clarifying the murky politics of Shakespeare’s play. He downplays the question of John’s legitimacy and makes him advocate a distinctly eighteenth-century attitude toward papal power:

  Let Popes confine to Points of Faith their Sway,

  And none shall more implicitly obey:

  But when they strain that Sway to temp’ral Pow’r,

  And would the inborn Rights of Kings devour;

  Then, by our Arms, from Usurpation hurl’d,

  We’ll treat them as the Tyrants of the World!

  (Cibber, 24)

  Shakespeare’s King John never acknowledges the Pope’s authority over ‘Points of Faith’; instead he insists he himself is, under God, ‘supreme head, / So, under Him, that great supremacy / Where we do reign we will alone uphold / Without th’assistance of a mortal hand’ (KJ 3.1.155–8). Nor does Shakespeare’s account of royal supremacy delve into the distinction between temporal and religious power. Cibber corrects and clarifies this oversight, providing the King with a clear political position. Indeed, the play returns again and again to the distinct forms of power: ‘sacred Pow’r’, ‘Carnal Power’, ‘temp’ral Pow’r’, ‘temp’ral Crown’. However, Cibber’s emphasis on this distinction owes much to a post-Lockean understanding of the distinction between civil and religious societies. Moreover, Cibber creates a parallel between John’s accession and the Glorious Revolution that displaced the Stuarts and inaugurated the rule of the Hanoverians.1 Cibber’s John rules by authority of law and Parliament as opposed to heredity, and thus exemplifies Whig principles against Jacobite claims in favour of the House of Stuart. Papal Tyranny also reflects Whig history by attributing the revolt of the barons to their discontent over John’s refusal to sign Magna Carta. As Salisbury explains, their alliance with the French is temporary, an expedient designed to compel John’s capitulation: ‘Now shall our Charter seal’d, to Ages hence / Record our ample Right and Liberties’ (Cibber, 42). Immediately before John’s death, Salisbury remarks: ‘How fortunate the Hour! that he had Sense / To ratify our Rights and seal the Charter’ (67). Shakespeare is silent on the subject of Magna Carta, but this absence is in keeping with the received accounts of John’s reign circulating in the late sixteenth century. It was only in the seventeenth century, beginning with the work of Edward Coke, that Magna Carta and the Ancient Constitution emerged as key elements in British political discourse. Central to this line of thinking is the idea that there exists a fundamental compact between monarch and subject that limits the royal prerogative and guarantees certain fundamental rights to the people (such as trial by jury and habeas corpus). Accordingly, Cibber rewrites the play’s final couplet in Whig terms: ‘England no foreign Force shall e’er subdue, / While Prince and Subject to themselves are true’ (70). Shakespeare’s evasive and nearly tautological last line, ‘If England to itself do rest but true’, is transformed into an explicit declaration of the mutual obligation between crown and people.

  In addition to clarifying the play’s political and religious positions, Cibber sought to correct what he took to be dramatic deficiencies in the original: ‘I have endeavour’d to make it more like a Play than I found it in Shakespear’ (Dedication, v). Dismissing characters and streamlining the action as well as simplifying the language (which retained little of Shakespeare’s original) were his principal strategies. Eleanor disappears entirely from the play, as does the first scene set in England. The Bastard’s part is simplified and reduced, and Constance is made less strident and more pitiful. Her part is also expanded, so that she witnesses John’s death in the final scene. In addition, Cibber added processions (as a formal dramatic device the procession is a fitting analogue to the Whig interpretation of history). John’s submission to Pandulph (KJ 5.1) becomes an opportunity for elaborate pageantry: ‘Enter in Procession (to solemn Musick) Pandulph, preceded by Clergy, &c. of several Orders. Then the Nobles and Officers of State before King John, (supported by two Abbots) wearing his Crown and Robes. Pandulph being seated, the King with the Abbots kneel to him’ (Cibber, 57). This moment, familiar from the woodcut included in Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, is of enormous symbolic and historical significance, and it is unsurprising that Cibber would deploy the full resources of the theatre in its depiction. Act 5, however, includes an entirely new (and unhistorical) scene: ‘The SCENE opening discovers the funeral Ceremony of Arthur moving towards Swinstead-Abbey to a Dead-March; Lady Constance with the Abbot and Mourners attending’ (64). While both moments count as theatrical spectacle, this second addition serves as a platform for the further elaboration of Constance’s grief, and Cibber was prescient in recognizing that her character was one of the central attractions of the play. His introduction of elaborate pageantry also anticipates developments that became increasingly prominent in subsequent productions.

  Papal Tyranny met with, according to Cibber, a ‘favourable reception’ in the theatre, but it also provoked a good deal of criticism, including the anonymous A Letter to Colley Cibber, Esq; On His Transformation of King John (1745). Evidently it also provoked Drury Lane to mount a competing production of King John ‘in its original form, with David Garrick as the King’ (Pedicord, 443). The existence of the two different versions of the play in performance at the same time occasioned considerable commentary and established King John as an important part of the Shakespeare repertory. The anonymous author of A Letter was clearly a supporter of Garrick’s production: the letter quotes copiously from Shakespeare’s text in order to demonstrate the superiority of his language. Importantly, the author does not make the case for an inviolable Shakespearean text, admitting that there are situations in which the shears should be ‘apply’d without Mercy’ as well as characters who benefit from ‘improving or heightening’. Cibber has, the writer admits, ‘purg’d Shakespear of his low Stuff’, but where characters have been amended they have invariably been attenuated. The author singles out for particular attention the Bastard and Constance (13). ‘There is a wild Greatness, in some of Shakespeare’s Characters’, and the Bastard’s character, ‘tho’ an humorous One, has a certain Dignity in it, that well becomes the Greatness of Mind he discovers in his graver Walk’ (13–14). The author then substantiates this claim by quoting five substantial speeches, concluding with the entirety of ‘Mad world, mad kings’ (KJ 2.1.561–98). Failing to understand the greatness of the character, Cibber has ‘gutted’ Faulconbridge, preserving to him merely the ‘Name and Office of a Messenger and Letter-Carrier’. The case of Constance is even more dire: ‘Design’d to be outrageous and violent in Grief’, Cibber has instead presented her as ‘soft and pathetick’ (18). After the capture of Arthur, Constance ‘utters such forcible Passion, that nothing but Shakespear’s Genius cou’d express it’ (23), a claim supported by quoting in its entirety her encomium to Death (discussed above, pp. 55–6). The letter then quotes three more extensive speeches (KJ 3.4.23–36, 44–60, 91, 93–105) before concluding: ‘It is plain from these Quotations that Constance is a Character of Fire throughout! Great and Impetuous in ev’ry Thing! And masterly drawn!’ (25). Though the criticism of Papal Tyranny does not extend to the play’s explicit politics, the author does object that John’s debate with Pandulph has only been lengthened, not enlivened; Cibber has ‘made John declaim, argue, confute, puzzle the Cardinal himself with Doctrine’ (43).