SOURCE: Cousin, Geraldine. Introduction to Shakespeare in Performance: King John, pp. 1-27. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994.

[In the following excerpt, Cousin surveys the performance and critical history of King John, listing significant adaptations of the drama and summarizing major movements in its reception and interpretation.]

KING JOHN IN THE SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES

The few incontestable facts concerning the early history of King John are soon told: in 1598 it was listed among Shakespeare's ‘tragedies’ in Francis Meres's Palladis Tamia; it was initially published in the First Folio of 1623; the first production for which a record still exists was at Covent Garden in February 1737. Scholarly opinion is divided with regard to both the date of the play's composition and whether this precedes or antedates the publication, in 1591, of an anonymous play, The Troublesome Reign of John, King of England. Though the majority view has been that Shakespeare's play is a reworking of The Troublesome Reign, and must therefore have been written sometime between 1591 and 1598 (probably 1594-96), a number of critics, including recently L. A. Beaurline, editor of The New Cambridge Shakespeare King John, have argued that Shakespeare's play was written first, some time after the second edition of Holinshed's Chronicles in 1587. The argument in favour of the mid-1590s as the composition date rests chiefly on perceived similarities between King John and other Shakespearean plays of the period, notably Richard II (1595). Edmond Malone, writing in 1790, was the first person to point out the crucial importance of the year 1596 as a possible date of composition.

It is observable that [Shakespeare's] son, Hamnet, died in August, 1596. That a man of such sensibility, and of so amiable a disposition, should have lost his only son, who had attained the age of twelve years, without being greatly affected by it, will not be easily credited. The pathetick lamentations which he has written for Lady Constance on the death of Arthur may perhaps add some probability to the supposition that this tragedy was written at or soon after that period.

(quoted in Scott and Williamson, Shakespearean Criticism, vol. 9, p. 218)

Whatever the precise year in which King John was written, and first performed, a contemporaneous audience would have found much in the play to relate to their own time. The prevailing fear of foreign invasion and civil unrest would have been only too well understood by an audience of Shakespeare's day. The internal strife which had torn England apart for so long had ended only with the accession to the throne of Henry VII, and though ‘the great Armada of 1588’ had been defeated, the country ‘still faced the danger of an attack by a foreign Catholic power with support from Catholic dissidents within the kingdom’ (Smallwood, New Penguin King John, p. 7). John himself, as Smallwood explains, had, with the Reformation, become the subject of a critical reappraisal, a new image of him ‘as a Protestant martyr struggling against papal dominance’ (ibid., p. 10) superseding the wicked John of the old chronicles. It is in this guise, which casts him as a precursor of Henry VIII, that he is depicted in John Bale's fiercely anti-Catholic, mid-sixteenth-century play, King Johan. Here, John is a ‘faithful Moses’, Henry VIII the saviour who will eventually lead his people to ‘the land of milk and honey’. The Troublesome Reign shares the anti-Catholic bias of King Johan, and, similarly, links John and Henry VIII, the dying John promising:

From out these loins shall spring a kingly branch
Whose arms shall reach unto the gates of Rome,
And with his feet tread down the strumpet's pride.

(II.1084-6)

Shakespeare's John is more complex—indeed, ambiguous—than his counterparts in the other two plays, but he too is crucially related to the concerns of the sixteenth-century world. In various ways, he can be seen as analogous to Elizabeth I, who, like her father, was also in conflict with the Catholic Church. Both Elizabeth and John were viewed in some quarters as usurpers; both were faced with rival claimants to the throne (Mary, Queen of Scots and Prince Arthur); both, after the event, tried to distance themselves from responsibility for their rivals' deaths.

Though there is no record of the first performance of King John, it was presumably close to the date of the play's composition, sometime, therefore, in the 1590s. A number of possible allusions to lines in King John have been traced in plays of the period, and Beaurline notes that the role of Robert Faulconbridge, ‘legs two such riding-rods.. / … arms such eel-skins stuffed’, appears to have been ‘written for a ridiculously skinny actor, John Sincler (Sinclo, Sinklo), who played bit parts 1590-1604 for Strange's, Pembroke's, and the Chamberlain's Men’ (New Cambridge ed., p. 1). Evidence of a possible early seventeenth-century performance of the play, though, unfortunately, no date or other precise details, is provided by ‘A list made on or about 12 January 1669 [which] allots certain plays, including King John, to Thomas Killigrew and the King's Company; the plays are described as “formerly acted at the Blackfriars and now allowed of to his Majesty's Servants”’ (Braunmuller, Oxford Shakespeare ed., p. 81). If, as Braunmuller points out, ‘King John was in fact acted by the King's Men at the Blackfriars, then that performance must have taken place some time after the winter of 1609-10, when Shakespeare's company began acting there’ (ibid., pp. 81-2).

EIGHTEENTH- AND NINETEENTH-CENTURY ADAPTATIONS

The first recorded production of King John, in 1737, took place in the context of Colley Cibber's attempt to stage his own drastically reworked version, Papal Tyranny in the Reign of King John, at Drury Lane Theatre. Like the best-known adaptors of Shakespearean texts before him—Davenant, Dryden, Nahum Tate—Cibber attempted to prune and refashion Shakespeare's gifted, but, in his terms, chaotic, plays so that they were more in line with current aesthetic doctrine, chiefly the necessity that a play should be structured around the three unities—unity of time, unity of place and unity of action—and that tragedy and comedy should not be mixed.

By the time Cibber came to adapt King John, he already had one version of a Shakespearean text to his credit—though ‘credit’ is perhaps something of a misnomer in this context. In 1699 he had reworked Richard III, to include the admittedly stirring line: ‘Off with his head! so much for Buckingham!’ (an insertion which proved so popular that it was retained into the twentieth century, and was included in the Olivier film), and the woeful couplet: ‘I'll climb betimes without remorse or dread / And my first steps shall be on Henry's head’, which, far from climbing, sounds as if it is tumbling down a flight of stairs. It is difficult to imagine any actor, however talented, avoiding bathos with lines like that. In his dedication of Papal Tyranny to the Earl of Chesterfield, Cibber claimed that he had ‘endeavour'd to make it more like a play than what [he had] found it in Shakespeare’ (Dramatic Works, p. 242). The theatrical climate had changed somewhat, however, by the 1730s, and Cibber now found himself mocked for his arrogance in believing that he could improve on Shakespeare's original. While Papal Tyranny was in rehearsal, he wrote a piece in the Daily Advertiser (4 February 1737) attempting to justify his adaptation by claiming that many of Shakespeare's plays had ‘for these Hundred Years past … lain dormant, from, perhaps, a just Suspicion, that they were too weak, for a compleat Entertainment’ (quoted in the Oxford ed., p. 88). The controversy, however, failed to die down, and Cibber ‘one morning marched into Drury Lane Theatre, removed his script from the prompter's desk, tucked it under his arm and stalked out’ (McClellan, Whatever Happened to Shakespeare?, p. 56).

When, on 26 February, King John was performed at Covent Garden, the publicity surrounding Cibber's abortive attempt to stage Papal Tyranny ensured a lively degree of public interest—enhanced by the claim that the Covent Garden version ‘As written by Shakespeare’ had the virtue of authenticity. In March, Henry Fielding's highly successful The Historical Register for the Year 1736 was performed at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket. The action takes place in a playhouse and, when a character called Ground-Ivy, and who represents Colley Cibber, enters in the third act, the process of casting Shakespeare's King John is in progress. Ground-Ivy protests that ‘King John as now writ will not do’, but, with a ‘little … licking’ by himself, it can be made serviceable. It is a maxim of his, he explains, ‘that no play, though ever so good, would do without alteration. For instance, in the play before us the Bastard Faulconbridge is a most effeminate character, for which reason I would cut him out and put all his sentiments in the mouth of Constance, who is so much properer to speak them.’ Medley, the author (in Fielding's play) of The Historical Register, aptly comments: ‘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?’

PAPAL TYRANNY IN THE REIGN OF KING JOHN

When Cibber withdrew the play from rehearsal, it seemed that Papal Tyranny would be quietly forgotten. As Pope noted in the Dunciad, ‘King John in silence modestly expires’. History, however, was to come to Cibber's aid, in the shape of a threatened Jacobite rebellion in the north of England and the consequent danger of a Catholic monarch on the throne. The staunchly Protestant Cibber had, as he explained in his dedication, been surprised that ‘Shakespeare should have taken no more fire’ at ‘the flaming contest between his insolent Holiness and King John’. How, he wondered, to account for Shakespeare's ‘being so cold’ in his depiction of this crucially important debate?

Shall we suppose, that in those days, almost in the infancy of the reformation, when Shakespeare wrote, when the influence of the papal power had a stronger party left, than we have reason to believe is now subsisting among us; that this, I say, might make him cautious of offending? Or shall we go so far for an excuse, as to conclude that Shakespeare was himself a Catholic?

(Dramatic Works, pp. 240-1)

Cibber dismisses this suspicion as groundless, but identifies John's ‘coldness’ in his response to Pandulph as the springboard which impelled him to write his own play. It had been his intention to ‘inspirit [Shakespeare's] King John with a resentment that justly might become an English monarch, and to paint the intoxicated tyranny of Rome in its proper colours’ (ibid., pp. 241-2).

On 15 February 1745 Papal Tyranny was performed at Covent Garden. The part of John was played by Quin, that of Constance by Mrs Pritchard. Colley Cibber was Pandulph. Two younger members of the Cibber family were also in the cast: Theophilus as the Dauphin and Jane as Prince Arthur. Sadly, at the age of seventy-three, Cibber had lost most of his teeth and could not enunciate clearly, so that in the large Covent Garden theatre a good deal of what he had to say was lost. Public response to the general acting style was also unfavourable, it being ‘reported that the father had taught the son and all the rest of the persons in [the] play, the good old manner of singing and quavering out their tragic notes, and tho' they spared the fault in the old man, they could not excuse the son’ (Genest, English Stage from the Restoration, vol. IV, p. 162). Five days later, at Drury Lane Theatre, Garrick played John for the first time. Originally scheduled for an earlier date, the performance had been held over until after Cibber's benefit day. Mrs Cibber (interestingly enough, given the preponderance of Cibbers at Covent Garden) played Constance, Delane the Bastard, Macklin Pandulph and Miss Macklin Prince Arthur. During this season Papal Tyranny was performed a total of eleven times, and King John eight times. On six days the rival houses offered a choice of the two plays (Waith, ‘Drama of history’, p. 193).

Though it takes King John as its starting point, Cibber's play is very different. Few of Shakespeare's lines remain intact, even the haunting: ‘Grief fills the room up of my absent child’ being replaced by the infinitely more leaden: ‘I have no son, grief now supplies his room’. The character of Constance is considerably extended, that of the Bastard drastically reduced. The whole of Shakespeare's Act I is omitted, so that John's defiance of Chatillon, the French Ambassador, his arbitration of the dispute between the Faulconbridge brothers, Philip Faulconbridge's (the Bastard's) decision to give up his claim to his inheritance and follow Eleanor to France, and his later discovery that his true father was Richard I, are all cut. In place of Shakespeare's increasingly fragmented presentation of complex action spread over almost a dozen different locations, Cibber offers a neat division between three acts set in France and a final two in England. Even he, however, was obliged to employ a number of different settings in the last act: the walls of a castle, a room of state, a field, and the neighbourhood of Swinstead Abbey. Act V begins with Arthur's death-leap from the walls of the castle (IV.iii in Shakespeare's text), after which he is ‘covered by a parapet between his body and the audience’. Hubert and assorted lords discover the body, and Salisbury, refusing, unlike his Shakespearean counterpart, to believe Hubert's protestations of innocence, stabs and kills him. In the final sequence of action Arthur's funeral procession is seen moving towards the Abbey with Constance in attendance. (Unlike Shakespeare's character, this Constance is still alive at the end of the play.) John, again in contrast to the Shakespearean character, asks Heaven for mercy, and word is brought that Blanche has arrived and persuaded the Dauphin to lay down his arms. In place of Shakespeare's final words—‘Naught shall make us rue / If England to itself do rest but true!’—Cibber concludes: ‘England no foreign force shall e'er subdue / While prince and subject to themselves are true!’

In the same year that Papal Tyranny and the Garrick revival of King John were performed, ‘A letter to Colley Cibber, Esq; on his Transformation of King John’ (unsigned, but, probably, Brian Vickers, the editor of The Critical Heritage, suggests, by the author of ‘The Occasional Prompter’ series in The Daily Journal, 1736-37) took Cibber to task for his avowed intention to make King John ‘more a Play than what you found it in Shakespeare’ (p. 155). Of all Shakespeare's plays, the writer considers this is the one ‘which sins most against the three Grand Unities of the Stage, Time, Place and Action, and is on that Account the less reducible to Rule’ (ibid., pp. 155-6). In addition, though Cibber has ‘purg'd Shakespeare of his low Stuff, he has simply ‘fill'd the Place up with Flat’ (ibid., p. 157). His characterisations of Faulconbridge and Constance are weak and thin compared to Shakespeare's vibrantly realised creations, and, in the crucial scenes between John and Philip and John and Pandulph, where the ‘inspiriting Quality ought to have been, according to [Cibber's] Declaration, infused with a lavish Hand’, the writer ‘can find nothing of it. I observe indeed’, he continues, ‘you have considerably lengthened the Scene; spun out the Dialogue; made John declaim, argue, confute, puzzle the Cardinal himself with Doctrine: but what of all that? where is the Inspiriting?’ (ibid., p. 159). Cibber's rendering of the scene in which John persuades Hubert to agree to Arthur's death is so tamely done that ‘if it was not for a few Lines here and there of Shakespeare retained we shou'd see the whole Scene without any great Pain or Terror’ (ibid., p. 160). Papal Tyranny will, the writer affirms, ‘inspire future Amenders of [Shakespeare], and be as a Land-Mark to them to escape the Perils that wait upon such hardy bold Attempts!’ (ibid., p. 162).

It would be difficult certainly to defend Cibber in the face of the accusation that, having omitted all the bits of King John he considered unsuitable, he proceeded to fill ‘the Place up with Flat’. Instead of Pandulph's casuistical dexterity and John's impassioned, if short-lived, outburst of defiant anger, he offers little but bombastic speeches in the course of which the two men alternately lambast each other to little real purpose. When Shakespeare's Pandulph, for example, enquires why John has refused to accept Stephen Langton, the papal appointee, as archbishop of Canterbury, John replies:

What earthy name to interrogatories
Can task the free breath of a sacred king?
Than canst not, Cardinal, devise a name
So slight, unworthy, and ridiculous,
To charge me to an answer, as the Pope.
Tell him this tale, and from the mouth of England
Add thus much more: that no Italian priest
Shall tithe or toll in our dominions;
But as we, under God, are supreme head,
So, under Him, that great supremacy
Where we do reign we will alone uphold,
Without th'assistance of a mortal hand.
So tell the Pope, all reverence set apart
To him and his usurped authority.

(III.i.147-60)

Here, John's vehemence is directed against the Pope, the man whose hand he defines as merely mortal, not that of God's representative on earth, and whose authority is usurped, not divinely sanctioned. The placing of the word ‘Cardinal’ half way through the third line, preceded and followed by a slight pause, links it rhythmically with ‘Pope, that ‘slight, unworthy and ridiculous’ name. Both men, John declares, are insignificant, their power merely a pretence. Cibber's equivalent speech is as follows:

I tell thee, legate, as to Lancton's right,
One pope's enough for England to endure!
But viceroys there we never will receive,
For such are all when Rome appoints our pastors!
Created from abroad, they know no lord at home;
But, when their duty's question'd, answer Rome!
Rome shall support them; for their king's her vassal!
But, cardinal, from hence imperious Rome
Shall know, in England we will reign!
Nor shall, while we have life, Italian priests
Have tithe or toil in our dominions!

(Dramatic Works, p. 168)

Setting aside the fact that Cibber's language is less forceful than Shakespeare's, the essential difference between the two speeches lies in the emphasis on the word ‘Pope’ in the former and ‘Rome’ in the latter. Shakespeare's John is aware of the danger Langton might pose, but his anger is directed mainly towards the Pope, the mere mortal who dares to interfere in his affairs. King John in Papal Tyranny, on the other hand, is primarily concerned with the fact that the ‘pastors’ created by the Pope would owe their allegiance to a foreign power. It is not one ‘Italian priest’ that is at issue here, but priests in the plural. Protestant England must be saved from the insidious designs of Rome.

It was Cibber's intention, as it had been Bale's, and that of the author of The Troublesome Reign, to present a clear division between John as Protestant hero and Pandulph as the agent of a hostile Catholicism. To achieve this he had to clarify and simplify Shakespeare's more complex and sometimes ambiguous model. In order to strengthen the equation of a virtuous Protestantism with Englishness, for example, Cibber alters the motivation of the English lords who, in Shakespeare's King John, join forces with the Dauphin for reasons which can be seen as self-serving and unpatriotic. In Papal Tyranny their enmity against John is occasioned by a factor which receives no mention in Shakespeare's play, the desire that John will sign the charter, which will ‘to ages hence / Record our ample rights and liberties’. Once this is achieved, their next concern will be ‘to dismiss in peace the arms of France’. The lords are successful in their aims. In the last act, shortly before the dying John is brought on stage, Salisbury remarks: ‘How fortunate the hour! that he had sense / To ratify our rights and seal the charter.’

In the final act of Papal Tyranny, in contrast to King John, Constance is present onstage and Blanche performs an important offstage function. Constance is an odd hybrid in this play, because, though she retains some of the impassioned lines of Shakespeare's character and, in fact, becomes the advocate of an Anglo-French attempt to destroy Angiers in place of the Bastard, who makes this suggestion in Shakespeare's play, her chief role, like that of Blanche, is as a representative of the ‘feminine’ virtues. When the Abbot repudiates her proposal as a ‘resource of female spleen’, she too rejects it: ‘Rather let Angiers know a lawless lord / Than to the rightful be their lives a sacrifice.’ Her exit lines in Act III, after her lamentations over her imprisoned son, present her as a gentle female animal who will die in a helpless attempt to protect her young.

So when the fawn the hunter's toils have snar'd,
The bounding doe forsakes the safer herd;
Wild o'er the fields to his vain help she flies,
And, pressed by fear, on pointed javelins dies.

(p. 280)

In the event, she doesn't die, but survives to forgive John and thank God that her ‘afflictions have subdued [her] soul’ so that she can behave charitably even to her enemy.

While Constance's role as self-sacrificing mother is complicated by the anger which at times she has difficulty in suppressing, Blanche is an ideally submissive figure. Hearing of John's intended departure for England in Act II, she tells the French king that it

Alarms my heart with fears till now unknown:
When he's away, and I left here a stranger,
Young, unexperienc'd, liable to failures,
How may simplicity, tho' well inclin'd,
Mistake the duties of a bride or daughter?
Without his guidance to direct my steps,
How may my errors wander from your favour?

(p. 266)

Blanche's one positive action, her persuading of the Dauphin to end the war, occurs both offstage and in accordance with her womanly role as supplicant for others. As a character, she is merely a cipher, a pallid representative not of an individual person but of the acceptable face of young, docile womanhood.

FURTHER ADAPTATIONS

In 1800 the Rev. Richard Valpy adapted Shakespeare's play for performance by the boys of Reading Grammar School. Like Cibber, Valpy omitted the whole of the first act. Like his predecessor, he attempted to modernise and ‘refine’ Shakespeare's language, and in doing so destroyed the power of the original. Constance's lines: ‘I will instruct my sorrows to be proud / For grief is proud and makes his owner stoop’, for example, became in the Valpy version: ‘I will instruct my sorrows to be proud / For grief is proud and dignifies the mourner’ (quoted by Odell in Shakespeare from Betterton to Irving, p. 71), with the effect that Shakespeare's skill in placing the homely and onomatopoeic ‘stoop’ as the final word in the thought process is entirely negated by the substitution of the grander, but far less resonant, ‘dignifies’ and by the choice of the soft-sounding ‘mourner’ as the concluding word.

On 20 May 1803 Valpy's King John received a further performance, this time at Covent Garden. The title-page of the printed text of the play reads: ‘King John, an Historical Tragedy (altered from Shakespeare), as it was acted at Reading School, for the Subscription to the Naval Pillar, to be Erected in Honor of the Naval Victories of the War; and as it is now performing at the Theatre-Royal, Covent Garden, with Distinguished Applause. Reading 1803’ (ibid., p. 70). Like Papal Tyranny, Valpy's King John received a performance at a major theatre because it capitalised on the current atmosphere of public danger. In the following year, in his revival of Shakespeare's King John, John Philip Kemble responded to the continuing Napoleonic threat with the insertion of the following lines at the end of V.i.

Sweep off these base invaders from the land:
And above all exterminate those slaves,
Those British slaves, whose prostituted souls,
Under French banners, move in vile rebellion,
Against their king, their country, and their God.

Kemble's acting version of King John substantially reduced the number of lines, as did others of the period. In William Charles Macready's King John, Charles H. Shattuck's comparison of acting versions reveals that Garrick's consisted of approximately 1,905 lines, John Philip Kemble's about 1,690 lines and Macready's 1,830 lines, as against 2,570 in the original (p. 10). Frequently, lines were cut either to strengthen the focus on John and his claim to the English throne or because they were perceived as indelicate. Scenes which involved French characters were considerably reduced in length, as were references to the English lords' alliance with the Dauphin. Eleanor's allusions to the shaky basis of John's right to be king, notably his ‘unsured assurance to the crown’ (II.i.471), disappeared. In the 1770s the critic Francis Gentleman had expressed the view that the Bastard's ‘blunt, sportive method of expression, tainted too with licentiousness, is abominable stuff’, and his language at the end of Act I ‘more suitable to the bully of a brothel, than a person of good sense, good breeding and real spirit’ (quoted by Sprague in Shakespeare's Histories, pp. 13-14). Gentleman advocated the omission of Act I in its entirety, and though, as editor of Bell's Shakespeare, he did not himself follow this course of action, Valpy's subsequent understanding of the susceptibilities of his audience is shown by the fact that, when John Philip Kemble restored Act I in 1804, The Monthly Mirror protested that it should be ‘totally expunged’ as it contained ‘indecencies which render it almost infamous for a modest family to be present at the performance’ (ibid., p. 14). In the light of these continuing depredations on Shakespeare's text, therefore, it would seem that a poem of 1750 entitled ‘Shakespeare's Ghost’ was of only limited effectiveness. The poem is addressed to the contemporary Shakespearean actor who is asked to rescue Shakespeare's words from the hands of his adaptors.

To thee, my great restorer, must belong
The task to vindicate my injur'd song,
To place each character in proper light,
To speak my words and do my meaning right,
To save me from a dire impending fate,
Nor yield me up to Cibber and to Tate:
Retrieve the scenes already snatched away,
Yet, take them back, nor let me fall their prey:
My genuine thoughts when by thy voice exprest,
Shall still be deemed the greatest and the best.

(quoted in The Critical Heritage, p. 382)

Though they may not have restored all Shakespeare's words, however, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century actors established a degree of popularity for King John unequalled before or since. The final couplet, therefore, is a valid representation of the actor/author relationship at the time: ‘So by each other's aid we both shall live / I fame to thee, thou life to me shalt give.’

POPULARITY IN THE EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES

For a little over a hundred years following the 1745 revival King John was frequently performed on the London stage and, to a slightly lesser degree, in the provinces and in North America. Its popularity during this period is attributable partly to the early nineteenth-century fascination with historical accuracy in the staging of Shakespeare's plays, and partly to actors' and audiences' enjoyment of the high emotional moments of the play. Major actors and actresses of the day ‘vied with each other in the principal roles’ (Waith, ‘King John and the drama of history’, p. 193). Garrick, John Philip Kemble, Macready, Samuel Phelps and Charles Kean all played John, and Phelps and Macready also played Hubert. Charles Kemble played the Bastard, as also did Garrick. Mrs Cibber, Sarah Siddons and Helen Faucit were notable Constances. In contrast to twentieth-century critical opinion, which has focused largely on King John's apparent lack of thematic and dramatic coherence, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century critics and audiences paid a good deal of attention to key roles and scenes. Mrs Inchbald, writing in 1808, expressed the view that Constance, not John, was ‘the favourite part both of the poet and the audience’ (Shakespeare's Histories, p. 20). Thomas Davies, in the 1780s, was particularly impressed by the scenes of pity and terror in the third act. Act III, scene iii, the ‘interview between John and Hubert, where the king solicits Hubert, more by looks and actions than by words, to murder his nephew Arthur’ was, he believed, ‘in the opinion of every man of taste, superior to all praise’ (quoted in Scott and Williamson, Shakespearean Criticism, p. 217).

The second Hubert/John scene (in IV.ii), the Hubert/Arthur scene, John's death scene and Constance's speeches in III.i. and III.iv. were also highly acclaimed. The tendency of critics and audiences during this period to concentrate on favourite characters and scenes and to respond to the play as a sequence of dramatic moments rather than to search for overall coherence was, Waith suggests, particularly suited to the ‘notoriously episodic’ nature of King John (p. 199). Theatregoers of the time were used to evaluating different actors' portrayals of key scenes and speeches in a similar way to that in which an ‘opera critic would naturally compare, say, Nilson's Liebestod with Flagstad's’ (ibid., p. 198). Two of the greatest interpreters of King John were Kemble and Macready. Though a number of critics found Kemble's John ‘too artificial and too cold’, Boaden, in his Memoirs of the Life of John Philip Kemble Esq., attested to the power of the ‘noiseless horror’ in his portrayal of the ‘great scene with Hubert’ (ibid., p. 195). In Shakespeare and the Actors, Sprague describes Macready's version of this scene:

Macready, after uttering the word ‘death,’ ‘started back appalled by the sense of having overleaped all safety’; then gazed ‘in terror on the witness to the sound … in agony of suspense to know how he received it.’ Like Kemble he had glanced first at the young prince, and made this glance an ‘index to the dark deed.’ But ‘when he pronounces the word “death!” he does not look in Hubert's face.’ Frith reports that when this John threw off the mask ‘and in two words, “the grave,” ‘made his meaning unmistakable, he ‘placed his mouth close to Hubert's ear’ and whispered them; yet the whisper ‘could be heard at the back of Drury Lane gallery.’

(p. 112)

Waith's analogy of an opera critic's characteristic response is particularly apposite to Constance's intricate, rhetorical expressions of grief. According to Thomas Davies, Mrs Cibber delivered the words, ‘O Lord! my boy’ in her final speech ‘with such an emphatical scream of agony as will never be forgotten by those who heard her’ (Waith, p. 194). Sarah Siddons, who succeeded Mrs Cibber in the role, was, in the view of most of her contemporaries, an unsurpassable Constance, both in the power of her performance and in her expression of the character's feelings for her son. For her biographer, Thomas Campbell, ‘she became “the embodied image of maternal love and intrepidity”’ (ibid., p. 198). George Fletcher was of the opinion, however, that Sarah Siddons concentrated too much on Constance's ‘“ambition”, made her too tigerlike’, whereas Helen Faucit portrayed the ‘tenderness and the poetry of … maternal affection’, and revealed the ‘essentially feminine’ nature of the character (Shattuck pp. 50 and 51). …

Both Campbell and Fletcher stressed Constance's maternal qualities. In an essay of 1833, Anna Brownell Jameson also emphasised this aspect of Constance: ‘Whenever we think of Constance, it is in her maternal character’, she wrote. She noted, too, Constance's credibility as a human being. ‘The action calls forth her maternal feelings, and places them in the most prominent point of view; but with Constance, as with a real human being, the maternal affections are a powerful instinct, modified by other faculties, sentiments, and impulses, making up the individual character’ (quoted in Shakespearean Criticism, p. 220). Later in the nineteenth century, however, critical opinion found Constance unconvincing. Hudson, writing in 1872, had little sympathy for her use of rhetoric, which he considered to be frequently redundant, and ‘at the turn of the century’ a number of critics ‘found her guilty of rant’ (Shakespeare's Histories, p. 22). When Julia Neilson played the role in 1899, a reviewer dismissed Constance's ‘hysterical grief’ as ‘overdone’. Mrs Siddons had, he commented, reputedly shed ‘real tears’, but that was, after all, ‘in the sentimental age … I sometimes think’, he continued, ‘Mrs. Siddons must have been what the Americans call “a holy terror”’ (Waith, p. 200).

Critical sympathy for John also waned in the later years of the nineteenth century. Edward Dowden, for example, castigated him as ‘wretched and cowardly’ and Fredrick Boas was of the opinion that he was ‘“the least consistent” of all Shakespeare's kings’ (Shakespearean Criticism, p. 206). The Bastard, by contrast, has increasingly gained in popularity, becoming, in the twentieth century, the one constituent element of the play that has met with almost universal approval.

TWENTIETH-CENTURY RESPONSES

Though it has had its supporters, King John has not been a popular play in the twentieth century. Prior to the First World War, a review of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre production with F. R. Benson as John, in the Stratford-upon-Avon Herald (29 August 1913), observed that ‘despite the beauty of many of its lines’, King John could not ‘be accepted as a very interesting or good acting play’. A little over thirty years later, according to Sprague, King John was ‘almost unknown as an acting play’ (Shakespeare and the Actors, 108). The fact that it is still little known or appreciated is evident from Lyn Gardner's enthusiastic response to the 1988 RSC production which led her to question ‘why King John is generally dismissed as a stinker (and so seldom performed)’ (City Limits, 2 June 1988).

Part of the explanation for King John's demotion to the status of a ‘stinker’ lies in the already noted lessening of sympathy for John and Constance towards the end of the nineteenth century. Arthur, too, has suffered a similar fate. Whereas for William Hazlitt the scene in which the young prince pleads with his gaoler to spare his eyes was the most moving part of the play—‘If any thing ever was penned, heart-piercing, mixing the extremes of terror and pity, of that which shocks and that which soothes the mind, it is this scene’ (Shakespearean Criticism, p. 219)—a review in The Sunday Times, a hundred years later, found it ‘affecting schoolboy stuff’ (16 November 1924). In the 1930s, John Dover Wilson refuted Edmond Malone's citation of the importance of Shakespeare's son's death in determining the date of composition of King John:

if the much-praised, and over-praised, portrait of the boy Arthur be really the dramatist's obituary notice of his own son, as many have supposed, his paternal affection must have been conventional and frigid to a degree which is very difficult to reconcile with the tender and passionate nature that gives warmth and reality to his later dramas. Indeed, if the death of Hamnet Shakespeare in 1596 meant anything to Shakespeare, Constance's lamentations must surely have been written before that event taught him what true grief was.

(Cambridge ed., p. vii)

The more naturalistic performance style of the twentieth century has also created problems for actors in the roles of John, Constance and Arthur. They have been ‘caught between a rock and a hard place, for they would be damned whether they played with the full expression that the lines invite or with muted understatement’ (New Cambridge ed., p. 11). Constance's highly complex, rhetorical speeches of lamentation are particularly problematic because they invite expression in a heightened, declamatory style of performance which a modern susceptibility finds artificial and unconvincing. The contemporary practice of casting a boy as Arthur, instead of a young actress, as in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, has probably added to the difficulties of this role, as Arthur's formalised pleas for clemency in his scene with Hubert require a technical expertise beyond the reach of most twentieth-century boy actors.

A further problem presented by King John is that, with the single exception of Henry VIII, it is Shakespeare's only dramatisation of English history which does not belong within a related cycle of plays. The remaining history plays, the two tetralogies, deal with consecutive events in English history, from the deposition of one Richard to the defeat of another by the first Tudor monarch, and twentieth-century critics and theatre practitioners have increasingly viewed the sequence as a narrative and thematic whole. Intricate parallels and patternings connect the eight plays, so that a knowledge of one gives substance and focus to an understanding of each of the others, as vital questions pertaining to the use and abuse of power are examined over a period of nearly a hundred years. King John, by contrast, is a story ‘told in a vacuum’ (New Penguin ed., p. 8). It ‘stands alone’ and ‘its finale is final’ (Vaughan, ‘Between tetralogies’, p. 408). At the end of the play, as is the case in Richard III, a Henry is present who will become king of England, but, in place of the victorious soldier Henry Tudor, there is a hesitant young man who has not even been mentioned until this point in the play. Even the patriotic elements of King John, once so popular, have in recent times become suspect, as the radical reinterpretation of the Bastard in Deborah Warner's 1988/89 RSC production made clear. In addition, in place of an earlier response which situated the play's power and pathos in individual scenes and moments, twentieth-century scholarship has sought, and frequently failed to find, an overall political meaning. Attention has focused on the play's apparent lack of coherence: its episodic and fragmentary structure, the absence of a clear sense of ending, and the unsatisfactory nature of John himself as unifying agent.

THE ‘LEAST DRAMATICALLY MAGNETIC OF ALL SHAKESPEARE'S KINGS’

Twentieth-century accusations against the eponymous character of King John can be summarised as follows: John is intrinsically uninteresting, he behaves inconsistently, and he fails to unite the various disparate elements of the play. For Gareth Lloyd Evans, for example, he ‘is the least dramatically magnetic of all Shakespeare's kings [who] almost slides his way through [the] play … it is as if King John is the only monarch of English history whom Shakespeare found not only uninteresting but incapable of striking fire from his imagination’ (Shakespeare II, pp. 37 and 38). A review in The Birmingham Post (24 April 1925) of a production at the Stratford Memorial Theatre praised Randle Ayrton's performance as John because he ‘was the wicked man whose wickedness is not so consistent as to become greatness, which is as Shakespeare represented the King’. In the opinion of the reviewer it was ‘Faulconbridge, the bastard of Richard, and not the mean, treacherous, clever King John who [made] the play interesting’.

It is notoriously difficult to designate John as either hero or villain of the piece, his ‘meanness’ and ‘treachery’ disqualifying him from the former role, his equivocation over the murder of Arthur mitigating the force of his villainy. Above all, he lacks staying power and a clear sense of purpose. Though he acts with energy and decisiveness in the early scenes of the play, he later loses momentum, handing over authority to the Bastard and eventually dwindling, in his own words, to become ‘a scribbled form, drawn with a pen / Upon a parchment’ (V.vii.32-3) and now crumbling to ash. Even in the early section of the play, when John is still a forceful figure, he offers few clues as to what is going on in his mind, and, in the final scenes, his responses never seem adequate to the consequences of his own actions or the external pressure of events. He does, it is true, say, ‘I repent’ with regard to Arthur's death, but not only are these two words woefully inadequate as an expression of remorse, they are also made in the context of the lords' anger and his own consequent danger. His attempt, at the end of IV.ii, to place the guilt of the murder on Hubert's shoulders, though unedifying, appears at least to show some consciousness of the gravity of the deed; but the moment he hears that Arthur is in fact still alive the anguish and horror disappear:

Doth Arthur live? O, haste thee to the peers!
Throw this report on their incensèd rage
And make them tame to their obedience.

(IV.ii.260-2)

Neither hero nor villain, a man without consistency of purpose for good or ill, John is a difficult character to respond to with either warmth or dislike. Perhaps, if the play lacks a centre, this is because John himself lacks one. It is hard to know what is going on in John's mind because he so rarely tells us. He is alone on stage only once, and he then speaks his only soliloquy, which consists of three words: ‘My mother dead!’ (IV.ii.181). As a possible indication of John's deep-seated reliance on the forceful Eleanor, the words are revealing, but they can serve only as a form of shorthand for a deeper expression of John's psyche. Perhaps the closest an audience or reader can get to a delineation of John's inner landscape is in III.iii, where, verbally, he transforms the sunny daytime world into a graveyard in which ‘melancholy’ would bake the blood, and Hubert, without the assistance of his bodily senses, would understand and accede to John's purpose. His words here are horrifyingly suggestive of a personal hell, but, prophetically, it is a hell notable chiefly for its insubstantiality of form. If John is the ‘least dramatically magnetic of all Shakespeare's kings’, this is largely because he is also the one most lacking in inner substance. In the English history plays, Shakespeare frequently explores the relationship between the two roles of a king: the body (and mental attributes) of the individual man, and the ruler of the body politic. John's physical body, burnt up by a corrosive poison, is emblematic of England, torn apart by warring factions. John the man, however, resists definition. Even in death he offers us little insight into his inner self. His final words present his death solely in terms of his public function as king: ‘all this thou seest is but a clod / And module of confounded royalty’ (V.vii.57-8)

‘A GOOD ENOUGH RAILER’

A survey of twentieth-century reviews of King John highlights the difficulties facing an actress undertaking the role of Constance during the last hundred years, for, whether she invested the lines with all their inherent histrionic fervour or attempted a more naturalistic tone, her efforts were unlikely to meet with general approval. The Birmingham Post of 24 April 1925, for example, considered that ‘Miss Florence Saunders as Queen Constance … evidently possessed a score which read pianissimo where we should read fortissimo, for she did not realise the character of Constance as manifested by ranting rhetoric and tumultuous action’. In 1957, The Times's reviewer was still offering similar advice: ‘Miss Joan Miller has the difficult part of Constance. She tries to speak her wild and whirling words of love and grief realistically, and skilful as is the attempt, we realize that they are words that cannot be spoken, but must be declaimed with a surge of passion which no realistic treatment can produce’ (17 April). Even when the actress succeeded in playing the lines ‘fortissimo’, she was likely to find herself dismissed as ‘a good enough railer’ (Sunday Times, 16 November 1924) or ‘a believably intolerable Constance’ (The Times, 21 March 1974).

Two recent articles, however, the first by Phyllis Rackin, the second by Juliet Dusinberre, offer new ways of viewing Constance and the other female characters in the play. Rackin argues that women in King John ‘play more important and more varied roles than in any of Shakespeare's other English histories’ and that, ‘Like the ambiguous ethos of the play itself, the female characters … are deeply divided’ (‘Anti-historians’, p. 338). Eleanor and Constance both champion their sons in the battle over the crown, but their traditional gender role as mothers, far from uniting them, has the opposite effect. The play's other mother, Lady Faulconbridge, as the only person who knows the truth about her son's paternity, points to the possibility that an ‘adulterous woman … can make a mockery’ of the notion of patrilineal succession (ibid., p. 337). Blanche, ‘cast in the familiar female role of a medium of exchange between men’, becomes not the means of uniting the ‘warring factions’ but, instead, ‘the embodiment of their divisions’ (ibid., p. 339). In Rackin's view, women characters are fundamentally unsettling in King John because they ‘no longer serve their traditional functions as creators of male bonds and validators of male identity’ (ibid., p. 338). Juliet Dusinberre writes that Constance in her lines describing ‘the state of [her] great grief … becomes … the locus for the conflict of power and powerlessness which shapes the whole play’ (‘King John and embarrassing women’, p. 38). Of Lady Faulconbridge, she observes that her ‘language of honesty’ when she admits her liaison with Richard I ‘liberates warmth and love into the frigid world of this play’ (ibid., p. 46). In Dusinberre's view: ‘What is clear from reading the play—and Deborah Warner's 1988 production reinforced this impression—is that up till the end of Act 3 the dramatic action is dominated by the women characters’ (ibid., p. 40). For Dusinberre ‘the play goes to pieces once the women leave the stage’ (ibid., p. 51). Though Dusinberre and Rackin offer somewhat different views of the precise structural role women characters play in King John, the former seeing them as a unifying element, the later as representative of the essentially divided nature of the play itself, both place the women very much in the centre of the play's events. From Rackin's perspective, the women characters, and especially Blanche, become emblematic of the fractures and opposed loyalties which constitute the play; from Dusinberre's, Constance is the centre which can no longer hold once she is banished from the action.

A SEARCH FOR COHERENCE

The fundamental criticism which has been levelled against King John in the twentieth century is that it is poorly constructed. Like Colley Cibber and his vain search in Shakespeare's play for a piece of theatre structured around the unities of time, place and action, twentieth-century critics have sought (and often failed to find) a coherence of perspective and unified political design. In addition to the problem that John himself presents as the central character, the play has been seen as broken-backed, moving from the lengthy, debate-like Act II to an increasingly rapid and often bewildering succession of events and locations. Dusinberre notes the end of Act III as the point at which the play begins to fall apart, and certainly there is a crucial shift of focus around this point. The end of Act III marks the disappearance of the women, though also of Philip, the French king, who presumably becomes expendable when Cardinal Pandulph, the play's most accomplished politician, enters the action and takes the reins of power from his hands. It is noteworthy, however, that Pandulph is not present in the final five scenes, though his role in bringing the war to an end is reported. As is frequently the case in the last two acts, the motivating factors are offstage and distant. Indeed, it is often difficult to know who, if anyone, is in control of events. The gear-change from the bustle and bluster of the first half of the play, where self-interest and its effect on its victims are at least firmly in the public eye, to the fragmented, less comprehensible, more internalised world of the second half occurs in IV.i, which is in a new, plaintive and minor key. The focus is now on a helpless victim, and the agonising choice facing his gaoler: the setting, a dungeon, a hidden and secret place. Hubert's decision to protect Arthur regardless of the danger to himself is one of the few certainties of the final two acts, where incidents are piled thickly on top of each other, and often the link between cause and effect is obscure. Inconsistencies are not explained (John, for example, calls for Arthur's death in III.iii, but at the beginning of the next act Hubert shows his prisoner a warrant from the king which specifies that the child's eyes should be put out); and there are important gaps in the narrative. When Arthur escapes from prison, he is disguised as a ‘ship-boy’, though why he chooses this particular costume is not explained. The audience never really learns the reason for John's second coronation, or what justification he has for telling the Bastard that he has ‘a way to win [the lords'] loves again’ (IV.ii.168) before he learns from Hubert that Arthur is still alive. Above all, the news that John is on the point of death, ‘poisoned by a monk’, is given without preparation. The lack of explanation and the intense compression of historical events—so that, as E. A. J. Honigmann notes, in IV.ii, practically the entire span of events in John's reign is ‘crammed into one scene and made to seem simultaneous’ (Arden ed., p. xxxi)—are not necessarily problematic in themselves. In any effective production of the play they are unlikely to be noticed. The real difficulty lies in the fact that the audience is given little guidance as to the significance of what happens. The Bastard, who earlier in the play offers a perspective from which to interpret events, is now frequently as much at a loss as the audience or the other characters. There is a disturbing sense that no one is any longer in charge. John slips out of life, the moment of his passing unnoticed. We hear that Pandulph has arranged a peace, but we are not shown this. Despite the Bastard's final, rousing words, it is easy to feel cheated as an unknown figure is hastily produced from the wings to fill the glaringly vacant throne.

Despite the problems it presents, King John has, however, not been without its champions. In the middle of the twentieth century, Lily Bess Campbell focused on parallels between John's reign and Elizabeth's, and saw King John, like the other history plays, as a ‘mirror of Elizabethan Policy’. E. M. W. Tillyard ‘emphasised the theme of rebellion and the theme of the true king … 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' (Waith, p. 192). In her 1984 essay, Virginia Mason Vaughan found the ending unsatisfactory in that the resolution of ‘the problem of succession … is imposed from above, not within’ (‘Between tetralogies’, p. 419), but argued that, in the play as a whole, ‘an alternation between inflated claims of legitimacy and actions which undercut those claims’ creates a shaping pattern, as is the case in the two parts of Henry IV and in Henry V (ibid., p. 415). In the later scenes of King John, ‘Abandoned strategies come back to haunt characters when they least expect it’ (ibid., p. 418). John realises that Arthur is necessary to his security only to find that the boy is dead, and Pandulph, after manipulating the Dauphin into fighting against John, is unable to persuade him to put an end to the hostilities when they no longer serve the Church's purpose.

Though some critics have viewed the Bastard as primarily a commentator on the action, and been of the opinion that, in Honigmann's words, the chorus ‘however likeable … cannot be the hero’ (Arden ed., p. Ixxi), others have been willing to grant him the central and heroic function in the play that John has been seen to lack. Unlike John, the Bastard confides in the audience. He is engaging, amusing, usually honourable, above all likeable, where John is rarely any of these things. He constitutes, too, perhaps the only possibility of a consistent moral centre within the play, his identification of self-interest as the key motive of human action coming as a relief in a world where truth and honour seem merely expedient. Admittedly, he asserts his own right to pursue ‘Commodity, the bias of the world’, but, in the event, he fails to follow this course of action and remains faithful to John despite the defection of the English lords and his own recognition, over the body of the dead prince, of Arthur's rightful claim to the throne (IV.iii.142-5). For James L. Calderwood, ‘King John represents a dramatic crucible in which Shakespeare explores and tests two antagonistic ethical principles, Commodity and Honour. The opposition between Commodity, or scheming self-interest, and Honour, loyalty in general but in its highest form loyalty to the good of England, comprises a basic theme to which almost every action and character of the play is vitally related’ (‘Commodity and honour’, p. 85). Adrien Bonjour argues that ‘Shakespeare attained a remarkably balanced structure by a dynamic representation of two closely connected characters [John and the Bastard] whose evolution curves are, in their very contrast, almost perfectly symmetrical’ (‘The road to Swinstead Abbey’, p. 273). So, as John disintegrates, the Bastard grows in moral stature, and this becomes the central governing principle of the play. Smallwood too locates a major structuring principle of the play in the relationship between John and the Bastard, the collapse of the former and the growth in moral worth of the latter establishing ‘the pattern of the play's final movement’ (New Penguin ed., p. 36). Such is the reader's or audience's sympathy with and admiration for the Bastard that they are lured into viewing him as John's potential successor (and Smallwood sees in V.vi.37-8 a suggestion that the Bastard too is tempted to see himself in this light); but, at the end of the play, the Bastard swears allegiance to Henry—thus offering, through the image of loyalty and integrity he has come to represent, a guarantee of probable future stability.

For some late twentieth-century critics the play's fragmented structure is inherently linked to its characteristic presentation of events. Douglas C. Wixson analyses the dialectical nature of King John, which prevents an audience from sharing ‘the view of any character for long’, with the result that ‘By refusing particular views Shakespeare encourages us to devise our own’ (‘Calm words folded up in smoke’, p. 122). The frequent shifts of perception, therefore, lead to the creation of a kind of puzzle, the pieces of which the audience are invited to assemble. Phyllis Rackin's view of the female characters as embodiments of the divisions between the warring groups of men is linked to an interpretation of the play as revelatory of the fundamental instability of patriarchal power structures. Eugene M. Waith suggests that the general tendency of twentieth century Shakespearean scholarship, which has been ‘to look first for a pattern of ideas’, may have been misguided, in that it has obscured our appreciation of ‘the power that critics once found in scene after scene’ (‘King John and the drama of history’, p. 211). For eighteenth- and nineteenth-century audiences the play's appeal lay in the emotional intensity of key scenes, and in the actors' depiction of the major figures—a focus, in other words, ‘on character rather than theme’ (ibid., p. 201). A search for thematic coherence may well have inhibited their twentieth-century counterparts from responding to Constance's ‘gorgeous affliction’ and being ‘“parched with a scorching fever” at King John's death’ (ibid., p. 211).

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