SOURCE: “King John and the Drama of History,” in King John and Henry VIII: Critical Essays, edited by Frances A. Shirley, Garland Publishing, 1988, pp. 31-50.

[In the following essay, originally published in 1978, Waith examines critical and popular reaction to King Johnthrough the centuries. Waith maintains that the current emphasis on the political and historical themes of the play obscure its power.]

King John is a play which, in our time, there have been few to love and very few to see.¹ The notable revival of interest in Shakespeare's history plays has left it, along with Henry VIII, almost untouched on the Shakespearean bookshelf and rarely performed. A review in the London Times (11 March 1958) of a Marlowe Society production began: “There are plenty of good reasons why King John should be hazier in memory than almost any other of Shakespeare's histories.”

One reason may be that the approach via Elizabethan historiography, largely responsible for this recent wave of interest in the histories, yields considerably lower dividends for King John than for the two tetralogies. E. M. W. Tillyard, for whom the play was “a wonderful affair, full of promise” but “uncertain of itself,” emphasized the theme of rebellion and the theme of the true king.² Lily Bess Campbell saw King John, like the other history plays, as a “mirror of Elizabethan policy,” and brought out the parallels between Arthur and Mary Stuart, between the rebellion of John's barons and the Northern Rebellion of 1571.³ The authors of both of these influential books looked for the political meaning the plays might have had for an Elizabethan audience, and in general, presented them as plays of ideas. There is no doubt that Elizabethan historians saw parallels between their own times and various periods of the past, and it is reasonable to assume that such parallels interested Elizabethan audiences. As for us, the recognition of political themes makes the shape of plays like Richard III and Richard II much more readily understandable. Even when allowance is made for the qualifications of the historiographic approach proposed in the important recent studies that we might call “revisionist,” a grand design appears to underlie these plays and the tetralogies of which they are parts.⁴ The design may be more complicated than we thought, but it is there.

It may, indeed, be there in King John as well, but when we compare Shakespeare's play with two other King John plays, that of Bale in the mid-sixteenth century, and The Troublesome Reign of King John, published in 1591,⁵ we see that a political design is far more evident in them; as it is also in Colley Cibber's eighteenth-century adaptation, Papal Tyranny in the Reign of King John, and in Richard Valpy's King John, altered for performance by the boys of Reading School in 1800. In all these plays John is much more obviously the resister of papal influence who foreshadows Henry VIII or Elizabeth or both.

Oddly enough, what distinguishes Shakespeare's play from its predecessors as well as from later alterations is not only literary superiority but the obscuring of the Protestant and patriotic message or its relegation to second place. Cibber was surprised that Shakespeare “should have taken no more Fire” at the “flaming contest between his insolent Holiness and King John.”⁶ “It was this Coldness,” he wrote, “That first incited me to inspirit his King John with a resentment that justly might become an English Monarch” (sig. A4). On Cibber's plans for alteration Medley, in Fielding's Historical Register, commented: “As Shakespeare is already good enough for people of taste, he must be altered to the palates of those who have none; and if you will grant that, who can be properer to alter him for the worse?”⁷ No one doubts that Papal Tyranny was an alteration for the worse. What is important here is that it was an alteration intended to supply the clear political meaning that the original lacked.

Whether or not this deficiency accounts for earlier periods of unpopularity, the stage history of King John shows that our century is not the only one to have neglected the play. There is no record of its performance in the seventeenth nor in the early eighteenth century. The first revival, prompted (ironically) by rumors of Cibber's alteration, took place in February 1737 at Covent Garden. It was performed there seven more times that season and once at the Haymarket; then another eight times at Covent Garden over the next four seasons. Cibber, meanwhile, had been so daunted by the attacks of outraged Shakespeareans that he had withdrawn Papal Tyranny before performance. It was finally mounted at Covent Garden in February 1745, however, to capitalize on anti-Jacobite sentiments, whereupon Garrick put on Shakespeare's play at Drury Lane. During this season Papal Tyranny with Quin as King John and Mrs. Pritchard as Constance was performed eleven times, while the original play with Garrick as John and Mrs. Cibber as Constance was performed eight times. On six days the public could choose which King John to attend.

Though Papal Tyranny was given only once more, King John was frequently revived for over a hundred years, and in certain seasons, such as those of 1760-61, 1766-67, and 1817-18, there were rival productions at the two royal theatres in London. The greatest actors and actresses vied with each other in the principal roles. During the same period a very considerable number of performances took place in America. After the 1870s the play dropped out of sight once more. But in 1899 Beerbohm Tree mounted a spectacular production in London, after a single undistinguished performance at the Crystal Palace ten years before. Robert Mantell followed suit in Chicago and New York in 1907-08. With these revivals what might be called the ancien regime of King John productions seems to have ended.⁸

I propose to look at what attracted actors, managers, and audiences to King John when it was highly regarded and to ask whether the characteristic critical approaches of our century have been truly appropriate.

I

It is noteworthy that the comments on King John made during the period of its greatest popularity were usually on the characters of King John, Constance, the Bastard, Arthur, and Hubert; and again and again on certain scenes: the outrage of Constance at the accord between John and Philip of France, her grief after Arthur's capture, John's temptation of Hubert, little Arthur's pleading with Hubert, John's second interview with Hubert, and his agonizing death at Swinstead Abbey. Among early scholar-critics Theobald said that John “had that Turbulence and Grandeur of the Passions, that Inconstancy of Temper, that equal Mixture of Good and Ill, and that Series of Misfortunes consequent thereto, as might make him very fit for a Hero in a just Composition.”⁹ And Dr. Johnson, noting with pleasure the variety of incidents and characters, wrote: “The Lady's grief is very affecting, and the character of the Bastard contains that mixture of greatness and levity which this author delighted to exhibit.”¹⁰

Mrs. Cibber showed one generation of theatregoers just how affecting the Lady's grief could be. Francis Gentleman in the 1770s and Thomas Davies a decade later agreed that she was by far the best interpreter of the role.¹¹ Her effect on her audiences can be gauged by Davies' statement that in her last speech the words “O Lord! my boy!” were uttered “with such an emphatical scream of agony as will never be forgotten by those who heard her” (I,55-56). According to Davies, only Mrs. Cibber was able to “utter, with the utmost harmony and propriety” all the succeeding emotions that Constance must display (p. 35). In Bell's 1774 edition of the play Act III is illustrated with an engraving of Mrs. Barry as Constance in a splendidly histrionic pose as she tears a veil from her headdress.¹² Beneath are Constance's lines: “I will not keep this form upon my head, / When there is such disorder in my wit.” It is just before “O Lord! my boy!” Mrs. Barry's rendition of this speech may have prompted Francis Gentleman to write in a note for this same edition that the scene “grows rather too trying for refined sensations” (IV,37), for James Boaden later spoke of Mrs. Barry's ability to produce sounds almost “too terrible to enter human hearing.”¹³

Davies wrote at the greatest length about Mrs. Cibber's Constance, but he also had praise for Walker (the original Macheath) as the Bastard (p. 15) and qualified praise for Quin's rendition of John's speeches to Hubert in the temptation scene (p. 53). No third act in any of Shakespeare's tragedies seemed to him so rich in scenes of pity and terror (p. 50).

The performances which elicited the comments quoted so far occurred in the years between 1737 and 1783. Toward the end of the latter year a worthy successor to Mrs. Cibber was found when Mrs. Siddons took the part of Constance; as King John, her brother, John Philip Kemble, outshone the previous interpreters, including Gerrick, who never did the part to his own or anyone's complete satisfaction. For almost thirty years this remarkable team of John Philip Kemble and Mrs. Siddon, often with their brother Charles as the Bastard, played King John. Though we know that many critics found John Philip Kemble too artificial and too cold in the role of the King, Boaden in his Memoirs of Mrs. Siddens (p. 59) wrote that Kemble had “in every spectator fairly substituted his own face and figure for the picture sense of King John” (an interesting term to which I shall return). In his Memoirs of the Life of John Philip Kemble Esq. he commented especially on “the great scene with Hubert,” which he would select as the one scene most appropriate to Kemble, remembering “this noiseless horror, this muttered suggestion of slaughterous thought.”¹⁴ For his Mrs. Inchbald it was the death scene that stood out: “The genius of Kemble gleams terrific through the gloomy John. No auditor can hear him call for his “Kingdom's rivers to take their course / Through his burn'd bosom,” and not feel for that moment parched with a scorching fever.”¹⁵

Constance was one of Mrs. Siddons' most successful roles—for some critics her best. She achieved the majestic sorrow and the withering contempt demanded by the part; and as for the “piercing note of wild maternal agony” in her last scene, Boaden, comparing her with her predecessors, noted that while “the sharp shrillness of the organ itself will do something for an actress not highly intellectual,” Constance “has meaning in her language,” and that this was what Mrs. Siddons gave, rather than “an inarticulate yell, the grief of merely savage nature” (Mrs. Siddons, pp. 59-52). Mrs. Inchbald made an extraordinary comment on Mrs. Siddons' command of histrionic technique in an earlier scene, where Constance flings herself on the ground at the news of the Anglo-French accord: “The following lines, uttered by Mrs. Siddons in Constance, “Here I and sorrow sit: / This is my throne, bid kings come bow to it,” seem like a triumphant reference to her own potent skill in the delineation of woe” (p. 4). The power of her rendering of this speech, and Mrs. Jameson, writing at about the same time of the character rather than the actress, said, “That which strikes us as the principal attribute of Constance is power—power of imagination, of will, of passion, of affection, of pride.”¹⁶ George Fletcher, who disagreed with Mrs. Jameson about the importance of pride in the character of Constance, considered Helen Faucit's impersonation superior because of her ability to convey the tenderness of Constance's feelings for Arthur. Mrs. Siddons, whom Fletcher had not seen, was said by some to have been deficient in this quality.¹⁷ For most of those who saw her, however, she remained the supreme Constance.

II

Several observations on these responses to King John are in order. The first one might be made on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century criticism of the performances of any Shakespeare play, but it has a special bearing on King John: critics then were accustomed to compare the renditions by several actors of a particular speech, as an opera critic would naturally compare, say, Nilson's Liebestod with Flagstad's. Though critics of Shakespeare today make such comparisons from time to time, they are rarely in the position of their predecessors of having seen the same play many times, acted by the gradually shifting casts of relatively stable companies. If the concentration on details encouraged by these circumstances moved critics to emphasize acting technique, it also enabled them to explore the impact and meaning of certain moments in a way that is not open to the viewer of a single performance. The critic tended to approach the play somewhat more in the manner of an actor, looking for what the text contained that might be effectively exploited.

The memoranda Mrs. Siddons left to her biographer, Thomas Campbell, illustrate perfectly such an approach. She regarded Constance as an extraordinary challenge. “I cannot indeed conceive, in the whole range of dramatic character, a greater difficulty than that of representing this grand creature,” she wrote.¹⁰ Keenly aware of the range of feelings that Constance must display, she fixed upon a unifying concept. Her idea of the character, she told Campbell, was “that of a lofty and proud spirit, associated with the most exquisite feelings of maternal tenderness, which is, in truth, the predominant feature of this interesting personage” (pp. 211-12). “Her gorgeous affliction, if such an expression is allowable, is of so sublime and so intense a character, that the personation of its grandeur, with the utterance of its rapid and astonishing eloquence, almost overwhelms the mind that meditated its realization, and utterly exhausts the frame which endeavors to express its agitations” (p. 225). To sustain the emotional intensity which this perfervid prose reflects, Mrs. Siddons found it necessary to leave the door of her dressing-room open when she was offstage so that she could concentrate on the distressing events onstage, “the terrible effects of which,” as she said, she would have to represent. As she sat listening and thinking about the betrayal of her cause by England and France, the sound of the march when the two armies enter Angiers would usually cause bitter tears to gush into her eyes (p. 215), and thus prepare her for her entrance in Act III, scene I: “Gone to be married! gone to swear a peace!”¹¹ For Campbell the result of these procedures was that she became “the embodied image of maternal love and intrepidity” (p. 209).

The accounts of Mrs. Siddons as Constance may well have inspired the scene in Henry James's The Tragic Muse where Sherringham listens to Miriam declaiming to her teacher: “He recognized one of the great tirades of Shakespeare's Constance and saw she had just begun the magnificent scene at the beginning of the third act of King John, in which the passionate, injured mother and widow sweeps in wild organ tones up and down the scale of her irony and wrath.”¹² For James, as for Mrs. Inchbald, appreciation of technique and of the impersonated character coincide.

III

The reason why such an approach is especially appropriate for King John is that the play is notoriously episodic. Even well-disposed critics have doubted whether all the episodes hang together, and hostile critics have been sure they do not. One inference from the testimony so far considered is that the play lived, so to speak, from moment to moment, and that the effect of certain moments, especially with Mrs. Cibber or John Philip Kemble or Mrs. Siddons onstage, was overwhelming. The episodic structure loosened the bonds between one part of the story and another, releasing the moments to be valued for their individual dramatic impact. But it is also clear that Mrs. Siddons was concerned with continuity and coherence as well as with the individual moments. The coherence she strove for was emotional or psychological rather than narrative or thematic: the variety of passions displayed by Constance must be related to a “predominant feature,” and the actress must stay in her part even when she was offstage, maintaining her relationship to the action in scenes where she did not appear. The play, thus conceived, was a carefully contrived sequence of intensely emotional scenes, revealing the mainsprings of the action in the characters of the principal personages.

If we return for a moment to twentieth-century academic criticism we see even more clearly how different was the approach I have been illustrating. For example, Miss Campbell, speaking of the dramatic gains seen in Shakespeare's reworking of this historical material says, “Perhaps the changes do make for dramatic gains, but if Shakespeare's play is considered as a history play, mirroring the great political problem of Elizabeth's reign, it is to the pattern of events in Elizabeth's reign rather than to dramatic genius that we must look for the explanation” (p. 136). Dover Wilson, who does not turn his back on dramatic values, nevertheless speaks in his introduction of the great concluding lines about England being true to itself as “the theme of the whole play,” and of the Bastard, who speaks these words, as “the mouthpiece of the author” (Cambridge ed., p. lx). John Middleton Murry, like Dover Wilson, considers the Bastard the true hero of the play and says “His function is to embody England, to incorporate the English soul.”¹³

Even critics who do not see the play as inculcating a political message seek to interpret it by finding its theme. Admirers—for despite its relative unpopularity, King John has had sympathetic and sensitive readers in our time—maintain that the theme, properly understood, explains the structure and characterization. In one of the best twentieth-century essays, Adrien Bonjour, charting the fall of the King and the rise of Falconbridge, finds that “the course of his twofold evolution illustrates the leading idea of the whole drama”—the importance of personal integrity.¹⁴ James L. Calderwood bases a fine interpretation on “Commodity and Honour in King John.”¹⁵ Edward I. Berry says that “King John exploits history as a means of posing and resolving dramatically a specific political problem” (p. 113). Less sympathetic critics tend to blame the shortcomings of the play on the lack of a dominant theme or on Shakespeare's failure to take a consistent moral stand.¹⁶ In the critical climate of this century it has seemed proper to ask first, “What is the play about?” L. C. Knights, in a very good essay, gives an answer with which it is easy to agree: “… it is a play about international politics, which are seen with complete realism through the eyes of the Bastard.”¹⁷

Obviously, however, the earlier critics did not see it primarily as a play about international politics nor did the eyes and mouth of the Bastard seem to them to be Shakespeare's. He was a delightful character of a sort that Shakespeare drew well; he was rough, manly, intrepid, and humorous.¹⁸ Hazlitt thought the character well chosen to relieve the poignant agony of suffering in the scenes with Constance.¹⁹ For Mrs. Inchbald he was “one of the brightest testimonies of Shakespeare's comic power,” and “Mr. C. Kemble personates this child of love as Shakespeare himself could wish” (p. 5). But if Charles Kemble's popular impersonation of the Bastard made him, as Charles Shattuck believes, rather too much of a gentleman and hero,²⁰ he was still seen as a less important character than Constance or John.

IV

The vast increase in the attention recently given to the Bastard and the corresponding drop in the attention to Constance are characteristic of a shift in sensibility which helps to explain modern attitudes toward King John. It is not only the concern with political themes that makes the Bastard a favorite, but a liking for his wry, satirical humor. His commodity speech and his flaunting of his bastardy strike a responsive chord, and even his patriotism, less appealing to some of our contemporaries, can be seen as tempered by an ironic view. Nothing tempers the passions of Constance; we turn away from her “gorgeous affliction” with a certain embarrassment and impatience. An early instance of this sort of reaction may be found in a comment of A. B. Walkley's in his review of Beerbohm Tree's production: “The hysterical grief of Miss Julia Neilson's Constance seems overdone.” He went on to say, “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.’”²¹

In contemplating the modern suspicion of the sort of emotional appeal contained in the scenes with Constance or in the scene where the boy Arthur pleads with Hubert not to put out his eyes, we seem to confront an aspect of modern sensibility, though it is not clear that the same distrust of emotion applies to the opera, the film, or television. It may be that spectators come to Shakespearean plays, or all plays, with different expectations. It is curious, however, that the assault on the feelings made by such scenes is not altogether different from what Artaud and others have called for. And by those who do not favor the “theatre of cruelty,” piercing screams have sometimes been regarded as a distinctively modern capitulation to raw sensationalism. However this may be, it appears that King John is not apt to convey all its dramatic riches to those who will not take Constance and Arthur to their bosoms.

Concern with emotional appeal is compatible with the emphasis of earlier critics on character rather than theme. And both were the logical products of certain ideas about dramatic composition and acting. Underlying the praise of particular eighteenth- and nineteenth-century performances is the assumption that Shakespeare's delineation of Constance, John, Arthur, and the rest is strikingly true to nature, and consequently that a good performance will touch the spectator with this truth. Davies praised an actress's performance for being “Natural and impassioned” (p. 9), and, speaking of Constance's last scene, said that “The grief, anguish, and despair of a mother are nowhere so naturally conceived and pathetically expressed as in Shakespeare's Constance” (p. 54; my emphasis). In the Modern Standard Drama edition of King John (1846), giving the text used by Macready and Charles Kean, Epes Sargent praised Shakespeare's transformation of The Troublesome Reign by saying that the historical incidents taken from the old chronicle “are rendered impressive by their being blended with evocations of human passion, which must always appeal to our sympathies because they must always be true to our nature.”²² Charles Kean himself, in a souvenir edition of the play after his production of it in 1858, wrote: “Shakespeare, with the inspiration of a genius, has converted the histories of several of our English kings into a series of dramatic poems, thereby impressing the imagination with living pictures of the Royal race, who in earlier days swayed the sceptre and ruled the destinies of this island.” Political motives and public events, he said, were supplied by Holinshed, but “it is to his own consummate knowledge of human nature that we are indebted for the thoughts which find utterance in the person of each individual character.”²³ Some twenty-five years later Richard Cumberland, dedicating The Carmelite to Mrs. Siddons, wrote: “The character of our Drama in its best examples is so close to Nature, that you, Madam, who are apt to give so perfect a reflection of her image, seem born for the elevation of the British stage. The Author, who shall write for you, must copy from no other model but Nature. …”²⁴

Although there is nothing unusual about praise for truth to nature in characterization, one senses again a very different emphasis from that in most recent treatments of the play. Is it, once more, a matter of expectations? Turning back to Francis Gentleman, writing in Bell's 1774 edition of Shakespeare, we get certain hints of what these expectations were in his prefatory “Essay on Oratory.” Gentleman is a useful witness for the very reason that he had nothing like the critical acumen of his great contemporary, Dr. Johnson, but as a moderately successful actor and playwright was thoroughly conversant with the theatre. He was also intelligent, sensible, and well-informed. In his “Essay on Oratory” he turns quickly to “stage delivery,” which is more difficult than oratory proper because it includes more variety and more force of passion. “It requires the finest, and most significant feelings in the performer,” he says, “to create, by sympathy, proper sensations in the audience” (I,22). “Sympathy” is the key word in this part of his essay. He calls it “that noble and almost peculiar sense of human nature,” and quotes “the ingenious Dr. Smith” (that is, Adam Smith) in his Theory of Moral Sentiments as saying that sympathy arises from the view of emotions in another person (pp. 22-23). To create sympathy, then, is the actor's chief task. Imagination is the vehicle for conveying it to the heart; “that which the Theatre raises, is produced by the bold painting of the Poet's pen, aided by the natural and forcible talents of a good Actor” (p. 23). Gentleman then gives many examples of how the proper reading or declamation of certain lines (not all of them from plays) can create the desired effect. Under the heading “Picture of deep Diffident Cruelty, from Shakespeare” he quotes the lines of King John to Hubert when he is hinting that Arthur should be killed (pp. 43-44). In a note on this speech in the volume containing the play Gentleman says, “It is impossible for words to express, or imagination to paint, a finer representation of dubious cruelty, fearful to express itself, than this address of John's to Hubert exhibits: the hesitative circumlocution, with which he winds about his gloomy purpose, is highly natural, and the imagery exquisite. To do this scene justice, requires more judgment, than powers; a jealous eye, deep tone of voice, and cautious delivery, are the outlines of what it should be” (IV,33-34).

If it is up to actor to enable the spectator to respond emotionally to Shakespeare's fine representation of “deep diffident cruelty,” it is presumably the spectator's expectation that a good performance of the play will bring about such a response. Gentleman's comparison of the actor to an orator, familiar enough to cause no astonishment, reinforces the impression that the performance is thought of primarily in terms of the emotional responses it evokes, while his use of Adam Smith's theory of sympathy ties such responses to the spectacle of emotions displayed by others. When the spectator responds to a successful theatrical performance, he responds as he would if the actor's situation were actual rather than feigned, and in so responding the spectator behaves in a manner characteristic of human beings. Thus in two related ways, the portrayal of character and the response to this portrayal (though Gentleman does not say so), what happens in the theatre is a manifestation of nature.

V

Despite Charles Kean's implication that knowledge of human nature is more important than the historical information provided by chronicles, his productions of the play and the Macready production which inspired him are prime examples of staging influenced by the concern for historical accuracy that swept the nineteenth-century theatre. It affected plays of all sorts, by Shakespeare and others, but naturally had a special relevance to history plays. Macready's King John in 1842 showed what could be done. Kean followed with a New York production in 1846 and two London productions in 1852 and 1858.²⁵ These mid-nineteenth-century productions call our attention to two not wholly separable aspects of the play's appeal at that time: the lavish spectacle which theatres were increasingly able to provide and the recreation of a bygone age. How these attractions relate to the other qualities for which King John was admired is a question to which we shall have to return.

For Macready's production fourteen different scenes were designed by William Telbin. Though they were not the first to be done with great attention to historical accuracy, nothing on the scale of the King John sets had been seen. For the costumes Charles Hamilton Smith made use of Planché's notes on the historically correct designs he had executed for Charles Kemble's revival of the play nearly twenty years before. But the scenery and costumes, gorgeous as they were, did not by themselves constitute the spectacle on which every reviewer of Macready's production commented. The pageantry of court scenes and marching armies, the movement of large numbers of people across the stage, made it the equivalent of a Cecil B. DeMille extravaganza in the grand old days of film. Even the playbill reproduced in Charles Shattuck's edition gives some impression of Macready's staging. Instead of the unnamed and unnumbered “Lords, Ladies, Citizens of Angiers, Heralds, Officers, Soldiers, Messengers, and other Attendants” of a modern edition we find eight English lords, each assigned a name (though of course no lines), four or more unnamed English Barons, two unnamed Knights, seven named French lords, and such further supernumeraries as “Archbishop, Bishops, Mitred Abbots, Monks, Esquires, Standard-Bearers, Notarius Apostolicus, Crozier-Bearer, Knights-Hospitallers, Attendants, Citizens, Ladies,” etc. (Shattuck, p. 45). The ground plan and added stage-directions for the first scene show how some of these actors were deployed. By Shattuck's count “there were fifty-nine persons on the stage” (p. 23) when King John spoke the opening lines. The throne room appeared to be a spacious and elegant hall with tapestried walls and a ceiling supported by hammer-beam oaken arches. John was seated on a blood-red throne on a dais beneath a blood-red canopy, with Queen Elinor at his right on a stool. The ground plan shows where each of the lords, ladies, and attendants was to stand, and the stage-directions added to the printed text, after describing the large circle formed in front of the throne, continue: “Norfolk, who is discovered in the act of speaking to the King, with 2 Knights and Herald with wand Exits Left, and returns immediately Left, ushering in French Herald, 6 French Barons, and Chatillon,—The circle divides, and the attention of all the Characters is given to the proceedings of the Embassy, who all bow to the King, on their entrance. A loud flourish of trumpet, kept up till King John ready to speak.” (I have expanded contractions.) Here a static expository opening scene is made visually (and aurally) impressive and given movement even before the first words are spoken.

Act II, where the armies of Austria, France, and England meet before the gates of Angiers, brought eighty-eight people onstage in front of Telbin's impressive castle walls and his prospect of French landscape. With the withdrawal of the armies for the offstage battle (observed from the walls by the citizens of Angiers), their re-entrance, their regrouping as the proposal of marriage is discussed, and then their joint procession into the castle, the stage picture must have been almost constantly in motion. In intervals between the lines trumpets are called for more than ten times in addition to “wind instruments,” “marches,” “martial music,” “noise of battle,” “shouts,” and “noise of gates opening.” We recall that it was the marches of an earlier production on which Mrs. Siddons, in her dressing room, riveted her attention in order to prepare herself emotionally for Act III. That act, with the arrival of the papal legate and the offstage battle between the French and the English, provides more opportunities for pageantry, as do the last two acts. In Act V there were six settings, the last of which showed the orchard of Swinstead Abbey, illuminated by “Blue Mediums” to suggest moonlight.

It seems fair to ask whether the spectacle, comprised of scenery, costumes, and moving masses of actors, provided Shakespeare's play with an additional interest as both a theatrical experience and an exercise in historical recreation, or whether it was thought to enhance the effect of the scenes in which human nature was so strikingly manifested. That it was to some extent an “extra added attraction” can hardly be denied, especially when we note that so many of the most splendid scenes were ones to which critics of the play paid little or no attention. No doubt there is a serious danger that this sort of staging may swamp the play, but we have interesting testimony from Max Beerbohm that the contrary might be the case. He devoted the first part of his review of Beerbohm Tree's production to description of what took place onstage at several moments. Then he wrote: “Most of the points I have alluded to are, as you will have observed, points of ‘business’ and the stage management. For this I make no apology. I had never seen the play acted before, and I must confess that, reading it, I had found it insufferably tedious. I had found many beautiful pieces of poetry in it, but drama had seemed to me absolutely lacking. That was because I have not much imagination. … Therefore, when I go to a theatre and find that what bored me very much in the reading of it is a really fine play, I feel that I owe a great debt of gratitude to the management which has brought out the latent possibilities.”²⁶ It must be added that these possibilities had doubtless been brought out on the Elizabethan stage too, though without the benefit of painted scenery. Even though the nineteenth-century productions were a special development, bringing with them their own hazards, the visual dimensions of the play, to which they did such ample justice, should never be disregarded in assessing its dramatic values.

A comment of Charles Kean's on Constance suggests how the sort of production that he and Macready staged might bring out the meaning he saw in certain portions of the play: “A lone woman stands in the midst of chivalry, encircled by the din of battle, the emblem of despair and ruined majesty” (p. vi). The “gorgeous affliction” of Constance may have been heightened for the spectator by the visual contrast between her solitary figure and the comings and going of the French, Austrian, and English armies. The Illustrated London News, reviewing Macready's revival, printed a woodcut of the final scene with the comment: “We here present our readers with what we deem to be the most appropriate and effective grouping for scenic illustration—the last tableau of the tragedy. … Hubert, Essex, and Prince Henry are participators of the death-scene; and there is a bold grouping around, which places a splendid circle of caparisoned figures in contrast with the sweet and solemn distance—the beautiful orchard of the picturesque abbey of Swinstead beyond.” The reviewer was explicit about the benefits of Macready's staging: “He wisely sees that the glorious pageantry which interweaves itself among the fine depictments and imaginings of the immortal bard give true and beautiful aid to the living stream of poetry.” Illustration, he said, “Makes beautifully perfect the grand illusions of the play.”²⁷

VI

Pictures had a special fascination in this period of the early photographic experiments of Daguerre and Talbot. The word recurs frequently in dramatic criticism, whether or not it is a question of stage images. It will be recalled that Boaden believed Kemble to have “substituted his own face and figure for the picture sense of King John,” and that Kean credited Shakespeare with “impressing the imagination with living pictures of the Royal race. …” The Illustrated London News, which pointed to the contribution of pageantry and scenic illustration to the realization of Shakespeare's imaginative vision, made more general claims for the compatibility of art and poetry in its first issue, which appeared only five months before the review of Macready's King John. For the past ten years, the editor wrote, he had watched with admiration the progress of illustrative art. “It has given to fancy a new dwelling-place, to imagination a more prominent throne.” Art, in the form of wood engraving, had, in fact, “become the bride of literature.” “Even Shakespeare came to us clothed with a new beauty.”²⁸

We are thus reminded that Charles Knight's Pictorial Edition of Shakespeare had begun appearing about four years before Macready's revival. In his Passages of a Working Life Knight wrote: “Altogether it became necessary for me to look carefully at the plays, to see whether the aid of art might not be called in to add both to the information and enjoyment of the reader of Shakespeare, by representing the Realities upon which the imagination of the poet must have rested.” He mentioned specifically architectural drawings “which imparted a character of truthfulness to many scenes, which upon the stage had in general been mere fanciful creations of the painter.”²⁹ There can be no doubt that in the eyes of Macready and Charles Kean, Telbin's sets were to serve the same educational purpose of representing “reality”—the truth about the past. Again, the Illustrated London News offers a valuable sidelight. The first bound volume of the paper was published in January 1843, with a self-congratulatory preface asserting the value of an illustrated newspaper to historians. The example given is Sir Walter Scott. What would he have given for such a record of the life and times of Elizabeth? The historian of Victoria's reign will have the inestimable benefit of the Illustrated London News, which will “pour the lore of the Antiquarian into the scholar's yearning soul.” A rousing sentence follows: “This volume is a work that history must keep” (pp. iii-iv). Illustration, whether on the page or on the stage, was not only a powerful stimulus of the imagination, and thus the “bride of literature,” but was also the handmaid of historical truth.

VII

It is bound to strike us as curious that such historically faithful illustration as Telbin's sets and Smith's costumes for King John were what made “beautifully perfect the grand illusions of the play,” but the paradox reflects more basic problems about the status of the play as a dramatization of history. We know, as did the nineteenth-century illustrators and actor managers, that much of King John is untrue to history—that the Bastard is largely a poetic invention, and that the confrontations of Constance and Arthur with their enemies and tormentors are heightened by contrivances of plot as well as by the speeches that Shakespeare (in this respect like some of the most famous historians) puts in their mouths. What makes their appeal to us most immediate is also what is least authentic.

Yet we also know that our responses to characters presented as historical differ from responses to avowedly fictional characters. “Historical writings,” as Herbert Lindenberger says, “Make a greater pretense at engaging with reality than do writings whose fictiveness we accept from the start.”³⁰ “All is True,” the alternative title of Henry VIII, is the implicit claim of all history plays, and I believe that it does condition our responses even when we know that certain characters are quite unhistorical. There is powerful appeal in the very complexity of the process of history as it is presented in King John. We seem to see a reflection of the complexities of other periods, including our own, in which conflicting ambitions, good and bad luck, and mixtures of noble and despicable behavior have determined the fate of nations. The link with what we are willing to accept as true history is just strong enough to give us the sense that the events we are witnessing onstage helped to shape what followed, and hence that what these personages did or failed to do mattered greatly. Because they seem to be involved in the process of history they are at once authenticated and magnified.

To Hazlitt the intensified impression of reality in history plays was a disadvantage: “It gives soreness to our feelings of indignation or sympathy, when we know that in tracing the progress of sufferings and crimes, we are treading upon real ground …” (IV,306). His conclusion was a negative one: the playwright had better choose imaginary themes. But Hazlitt's testimony to the special effect of historical material is nonetheless impressive. He seems to imply that truth to nature is given a disagreeably sharp edge by historical truth.

To further the illusion of veracity, historical costumes and sets must have been a powerful aid. For the reader of his souvenir edition of King John, Charles Kean even furnished a list of authorities for the costumes, thus tying the play to surviving monuments and manuscripts. To the extent that such devices helped to persuade audiences that all was true, they were far from being irrelevant. It was by encouraging the desired response that they were most likely to make “beautifully perfect the grand illusions of the play.”

Now let us go one step further. If we say that, like historical settings and costumes, history itself can be used to further an illusion and thereby elicit a certain response, the problems about the historicity of King John largely vanish. This is not to say that certain historical issues or certain periods of the past did not have intrinsic interest for Shakespeare and his audience. It is to suggest that these were not necessarily the principal interests of a history play then or later. We can be reasonably sure that they were not the principal interests for most of the witnesses I have summoned. In times of patriotic fervor there will be more people to feel as Heywood did about the glorious triumphs of Englishmen over foreign enemies. But much of the time even such stirring words as those which end the play—“… nought shall make us rue, / If England to itself do rest but true”—may serve mainly to heighten the significance of the stories the play has presented of John, Constance, Arthur, Hubert, and the Bastard.

The case of the Bastard is especially telling. There is no doubt that this final patriotic speech of his is moving, as are his words to Hubert, picking up the dead body of Arthur: “How easy dost thou take all England up” (IV,iii,142). But what gives these speeches a large part of their special force is the fact that they are spoke by the cynical observer of international politics. His unexpectedly total commitment to the cause of his country is a coup de théâtre and it matters not one bit that he himself is a largely imaginary character. The mixture of greatness with levity, noticed by Dr. Johnson, is what makes him fascinating, and the historical context serves to provide him with the opportunity for greatness.

To refer to little Arthur as “all England” is a clear case of what Lindenberger calls “history as magnification” (see pp. 54-94). The pathos of his situation is infinitely heightened by our awareness of his symbolic and thematic significance. Charles Kean said, “He is the centre from which every scene radiates: and in the spirit of retributive justice, the misfortunes of England appear as the consequent result of the wrongs inflicted by its unscrupulous monarch on his helpless nephew” (p. vi). This is an admirable statement of the connection between history and the emotional impact of Arthur's story.

To see history as instrumental in Shakespeare's creation of drama may further a more comprehensive effort to reorder our priorities in dramatic criticism. In the case of King John it may be that the tendency to look first for a pattern of ideas has kept us from understanding the power that critics once found in scene after scene. Perhaps if we are willing to alter somewhat the expectations we have cultivated, we too can feel that power, respond to “gorgeous affliction,” and even be “parched with a scorching fever” at King John's death.

Notes

1. This article is a slightly revised version of the Fifth Annual Lecture at the 1977 meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America in New Orleans.

2. Shakespeare's History Plays, New York: Macmillan, 1946, pp. 221, 226, 233.

3. Shakespeare's “Histories”: Mirrors of Elizabethan Policy, San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1947, pp. 142-143.

4. See, for example, Henry A. Kelly, Divine Providence in the England of Shakespeare's Histories, Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1970; David Riggs, Shakespeare's Heroical Histories, Cambridge,: Harvard Univ. Press, 1971; Robert Ornstein, A Kingdom for a Stage: The Achievement of Shakespeare's History Plays, Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1972; Moody E. Prior, The Drama of Power, Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1973; Edward I. Berry, Patterns of Decay: Shakespeare's Early Histories, Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1975. Prior has an admirable caveat about critical reliance on such grand designs: “Shakespeare's genius is not, however, primarily theoretical; his insights into the ultimate nature of political thought and action reach us through his dramatic presentation of particular events and persons …” (p. 12).

5. I accept the theory that this play preceded Shakespeare's and was by another author, though this is not the place to argue the case.

6. Papal Tyranny in the Reign of King John, London, 1745, sig. A3.

7. Ed. Wm. W. Appleton, Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1967, p. 44.

8. For eighteenth-century performances, see C. Beecher Hogan, Shakespeare in the Theatre 1701-1800, Oxford: Clarendon, 1952, I, 239-44; II, 319-33; and the relevant volumes of Emmett L. Avery et al., The London Stage 1660-1800, Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1960-68. For a list of performances recorded by Genest and other performances in England and America in the nineteenth century, see the Variorum King John, ed. H. H. Furness, Philadelphia & London: Lippincott, 1919, pp. 656-60. See also Harold Child's stage history in the New Cambridge King John, ed. J. Dover Wilson, 2d. ed., 1954; rpt. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press 1969, pp. lxiii-lxxix. Between 1737 and 1823, the year of Macready's first King John, the play was produced in London in 38 seasons, and sometimes in Edinburgh, Liverpool, Bristol, and Bath. During the next fifty years a writer for the Illustrated London News (23 Sept. 1899) counted “some twenty productions” in London, but none between 1873 and the Beerbohm Tree revivals. The first American production occurred in 1768 and was followed by fourteen more before 1875.

9. The Works of Shakespeare, London, 1733 (i.e. 1734), III, 167.

10. The Plays of William Shakespeare, London, 1765, III, 503.

11. [Francis Gentleman], The Dramatic Censor, London, 1770, II, 171: Thomas Davies, Dramatic Micellanies [sic], London, 1783-84, I, 9, 35-36, 54-56.

12. Bell's Edition of Shakespeare's Plays, London, 1774, IV, facing p. 37.

13. Memoirs of Mrs. Siddons, London, 1827, p. 59.

14. London, 1825, pp. 133-34.

15. The British Theatre, London, 1808, I, King John, p.3.

16. Anna Jameson, Characteristics of Women, London, 1832, II, 215.

17. Studies in Shakespeare, London, 1847, pp. 27 ff.: Variorum ed., pp. 679-83.

18. Thomas Campbell, Life of Mrs. Siddons, London, 1834, I, 219.

19. My quotations from King John are taken from the New Cambridge edition.

20. 1890; rpt. London: Rupert Hart Davis, 1948, p. 260.

21. Shakespeare, London: J. Cape, 1936, p. 156.

22. “The Road to Swinstead Abbey: A Study of the Sense and Structure of King John,” ELH, 18 (1951), 271.

23. University of Toronto Quarterly, 29 (1960), 341-56; rpt. in Shakespeare: The Histories, ed., E. M. Waith (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1965), pp. 85-101.

24. See Robert B. Pierce, Shakespeare's History Plays: The Family and the State, Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1971, p. 144; Ornstein, pp. 96-99.

25. Some Shakespearean Themes, London: Chatto & Windus, 1959, p. 38.

26. See, for example, Davies, p. 15.

27. Characters of Shakespear's Plays (1817), in The Complete Works, ed. P. P. Howe, London: Dent, 1930-34, IV, 311.

28. William Charles Macready's King John, ed. Charles H. Shattuck, Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1962, p. 51.

29. The Speaker, 30 Sept. 1899; quoted in New Variorum edition of King John, ed. H. H. Furness, Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1919, p. 689.

30. The Modern Standard Drama, ed. Epes Sargent, #XXXV, New York, 1846, p. iii; in Vol. V, New York 1847.

31. Shakespeare's Play of King John, London 1858, p. v.

32. The Carmelite, London, 1784, p. iv.

33. About these major revivals we are fortunate to have voluminous information readily available in Charles Shattuck's splendid edition of Macready's King John.

34. Saturday Review, 30 Sept. 1899: quoted in New Variorum, pp. 687-88, where it is ascribed to G. B. Shaw.

35. 29 Oct. 1842, p. 392.

36. 14 May 1842, p. 1.

37. London, 1864-65, II, 284.

38. Historical Drama, Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1975, p. x.

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———. Review of Henry Irving's Henry VIII. The Boston Evening Transcript, January 9, 1894.. Review of Henry Irving's Henry VIII. The Boston Evening Transcript, January 9, 1894.

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