King John, page 9
Cibber’s attempt to clarify and make explicit the politics of the play is dismissed as a tedious exercise in captious rhetoric that eviscerates Shakespeare’s original conception of complex characters in conflict. Needless to say, despite being couched in entirely aesthetic terms, this assessment carries its own political valence. It is a position of assured privilege that dismisses political talk as vulgar. It is especially revealing that the letter writer accuses Cibber’s John of enigmatic obscurantism, since Cibber had attempted to make the play’s politics more explicit. Indeed, Cibber seems to speak through John when he has the King complain: ‘Blast your evasive School-distinctions, / That prove at once, I am and am not King!’ (Cibber, 21). This impatient expression of a desire for a plain-English politics is directed at Pandulph’s scholasticism, but it is hard to escape the implication that the criticism also extends to Pandulph’s creator, Shakespeare.
Cibber’s Papal Tyranny, unlike his Richard III, did not become part of the repertory, while Garrick’s competing production did. Nonetheless, Cibber deserves credit for having recovered King John from neglect if not oblivion. As Cibber remarks in his Prologue, ‘Yet Fame, nor Favour ever deign’d to say, / King John was station’d as a first rate Play.’ His ambitions ‘To cure what seem’d amiss’ sparked a return to the original that proved to be extraordinarily durable. As Eugene Waith observes, ‘King John was frequently revived for over a hundred years, and in certain seasons, such as those of 1760–1, 1766–7, 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 considerable number of performances took place in America’ (Waith, 193).
However, the theatrical recovery of King John was preceded by a textual recovery. Not only did Walker’s contest with Tonson create a flood of cheap single-volume editions; earlier in the century Tonson had published Rowe’s edition (1709), the first modern edition of the dramatic works, now consistently divided into acts and scenes and provided with dramatis personae as well as engraved illustrations. While Rowe, of course, included King John, it is the supplemental volume published by Edmund Curll in 1710 that affords our earliest sustained critical assessment of the play. Commissioned by Curll, Charles Gildon provided what the title-page advertised as ‘Critical Remarks on his Plays, &c. to which is Prefixed an Essay on the Art, Rise, and Progress of the Stage in Greece, Rome, and England’. Gildon is not especially enthusiastic about the history play as a genre, and his verdict on King John is decidedly lukewarm. The Bastard and Constance are the only characters of ‘any Figure’ (Gildon, 338). Observing that ‘There are too many good Lines in this Play for me to take Notice or to point to them all’ (339), Gildon embarks on a brief survey of key passages. He begins with: ‘On new Titles. For new made Honour doth forget Mens Names, &c’ (339). This is presented as an entry in a commonplace book with a quotation (KJ 1.1.187) placed under a topical heading, but Gildon does not consistently pursue this approach. Instead he singles out various passages as very good and worthy of close attention, while also acknowledging faults, such as the ‘Scolding’ between Eleanor and Constance, which he considers a breach of decorum: ‘For what ever the Ladies of Stocks Market might do, Queens and Princesses can never be suppos’d to talk to one another at that rate’ (340). A topical approach returns when Gildon declares, ‘The Topic of Interest or Advantage is well handled in Falconbridges Speech … beginning thus. – Rounded in the Ear, with that same Purpose-changer, that sly Devil, &c.’ (340). But Gildon is also sensitive to the play’s affective force: ‘The Passion of Constance in the third Scene of Act 3. is extreamely touching, among the rest, this one Line is admirable, He talks to me, that never had a Son’ (340–1). His treatment of King John concludes: ‘The Hearty Englishman appears so well in the last Speech of the Play, that I must point it out for some of the Gentlemen of this Age to Study’ (341). The notion that the Bastard exemplifies an earlier, more robust model of English manhood that might serve as a corrective to the effete present was to prove durable.
The idea that Shakespeare’s text is a repository of moral exempla or poetic flowers available for practical application, redeployment or reflection is built into the genre of the quotation collection. The first printed collection of quotations devoted entirely to Shakespeare, William Dodd’s The Beauties of Shakespeare (1752), was extraordinarily popular and influential (de Grazia). The very first quotation offered within the book is from King John. Dodd opens his Preface by disavowing any intention to praise Shakespeare, a useless labour at a time when ‘every tongue is big with his boundless fame’ (Dodd, A3r), adding, ‘He himself tells us,’
To gild refined gold, to paint the lilly,
To throw a perfume on the violet,
To smooth the ice, or add another hue
Unto the rainbow, or with taper-light
To seek the beauteous eye of heav’n to garnish,
Is wasteful and ridiculous excess.
The prominent placement of this passage is, of course, merely accidental, but the passage serves wonderfully well to make the point. A rhetorically elaborate criticism of all works of supererogation is transformed into a critique of rhetorical embellishment that promises the reader direct access not to a critical discourse but to the beauties of Shakespeare themselves. Dodd helpfully provides a footnote referring the reader to vol. 2, p. 84, where the quotation reappears under the heading ‘To add to Perfection, superfluous, and suspicious’.
Dodd’s selection of passages from King John is not entirely shorn of critical commentary. Along with the brief descriptive headings, he includes discursive footnotes, beginning with a headnote on the play that observes: ‘The style all thro’ this excellent play is grand and equal, and it abounds with a great variety of fine topics, and affecting passages’ (73). He identifies aphoristic passages and powerful expressions of emotion as the key attributes of the play. However, his selection of passages is largely derived from Gildon. Each of the passages that Gildon cites for praise (many not in fact quoted) is included in Dodd. However, Dodd’s work is not entirely derivative. He significantly expands the set of passages included, adding, for example, ‘A Description of England’, ‘Courage’, ‘Struggling Conscience’ and ‘A Man’s Tears’ (KJ 2.1.23–30, 80–2; 4.2.76–9; 5.1.45–59). The passages follow the order of their appearance in the play, presenting a précis that encourages the reader to recall or speculate about the narrative arc of the drama. Accordingly, Dodd ends with the Bastard’s final words, presented under the heading ‘England, invincible, if unanimous’ (91). This gloss places the final line in a distinctive light: the need for political loyalty, that Cibber rewrote in Whiggish terms, is here understood as the absence of dissent. Dodd’s conviction that the play was especially patriotic is hardly exceptional, but it is explicit. In a footnote to the passage describing England (‘That pale, that white-faced shore …’), Dodd explains: ‘Shakespear, like a true lover of his country, has never omitted any opportunity to celebrate it or his countrymen’ (74).
As Dodd observes in the opening of his preface, by the middle of the eighteenth century Shakespeare was receiving ‘universal and just applause’. The Shakespeare Ladies’ Club worked to get a monument to their hero placed in Westminister Abbey, David Garrick’s promotion of Shakespeare on the stage reached one culmination in the Shakespeare Jubilee of 1769, and Samuel Johnson’s critical, lexicographical and editorial labours established Shakespeare as a classic. In the general approbation that surrounded Shakespeare’s promotion to the status of national poet, it is unsurprising that King John would be read and produced as a straightforward expression of national sentiment. As Braunmuller observes, the eighteenth-century popularity of the play on the stage owed much to ‘such powerful sentiments as Francophobia, anti-Catholicism, and arguments over constitutional monarchy’ (88). The evidence of surviving promptbooks indicates that the play was usually cut, and the excisions tend to diminish the visibility of English division, simplify the presentation of both the French and Pandulph and remove Peter of Pomfret and his association with the supernatural. At the same time, the text is frequently supplemented with lines from Troublesome Reign.1
If eighteenth-century performances tended to remove dissonant notes in order to streamline the play’s action, the nineteenth century would witness a revolution in the staging of King John, transforming it into a spectacular historical extravaganza. Charles Kemble’s Covent Garden production of 1823, the result of an extensive collaboration with J.R. Planché, inaugurated a new phase of theatrical antiquarianism. This fully realized staging of King John with historically accurate costumes was not unprecedented. Charles Macklin had acted Macbeth in a carefully researched version of highland garb in 1773, and John Philip Kemble commissioned historically accurate medieval architectural scenery by the artist William Capon at both Drury Lane and Covent Garden between 1794 and 1809.1 What set the Kemble–Planché production apart was not simply its commitment to historical accuracy, but its success in making theatrical antiquarianism de rigueur. In his youth, James Robinson Planché studied geometry and drawing, but he began his professional life as an apprentice to a bookseller before taking up play-writing, and his antiquarian interests eventually led to his appointment as Rouge Croix Pursuivant at the College of Arms in 1854 (ODNB). In his memoir, Planché is emphatic about his role in initiating the trend toward theatrical antiquarianism: ‘I complained to Mr Kemble that a thousand pounds were frequently lavished on a Christmas pantomime or an Easter spectacle, while the plays of Shakespeare were put upon the stage with make-shift scenery, and, at the best, a new dress or two for the principal characters’ (Planché, 1.52). Importantly, Planché felt that eclectic, anachronistic costuming was a barbarism, and that propriety demanded historically accurate dress keyed to the period being depicted. Of course, his aesthetic commitments were reinforced by the possibility that ‘pecuniary advantage … might result from the experiment’. While some of Planché’s account must be discounted as self-promotion, there is no denying that the Covent Garden production of 1823 was recognized as a startling innovation.
The playbill (see Fig. 9) advertised the new production as ‘Shakespeare’s Tragedy of King John … With an Attention to Costume never before equalled on the English Stage’. It promises that ‘Every Character will appear in the precise HABIT OF THE PERIOD.’ But perhaps the most striking aspect of the playbill is its inclusion of a list of ‘Authorities for the Costume’. Effigies of King John, Queen Elinor [sic] and the Earls of Salisbury and Pembroke are listed along with their locations, as is ‘King John’s Silver Cup in the possession of the Corporation of King’s Lynn, Norfolk’. Additional authorities include illuminated manuscripts at the British Museum and the Bodleian, as well as published antiquarian scholarship. The substance and seriousness of the enterprise is supported by a tie-in: a volume depicting the costumes is available from J. Miller of Fleet Street and ‘all other Booksellers’. This work, Costume of Shakespeare’s historical tragedy of King John: selected and arranged from the best authorities, expressly for the proprietors of the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden: with biographical, critical and explanatory notices, had twenty-two leaves of plates, including hand-tinted lithographs by J.K. Meadows, who would later establish his reputation with his work for Barry Cornwall’s illustrated edition of Shakespeare in 1843. In his first costume the Bastard wears pink hose accompanied by a taupe robe with a cowl and trim in sky blue, details taken from the enamelled cup owned by the Corporation of King’s Lynn (see Fig. 10). The Earl of Pembroke appears in a coat of mail and carrying a shield that accurately depicts the arms of William Marshall, 1st Earl of Pembroke: a rampant red lion over a field of gold and green (see Fig. 11). While it would be easy to position this publication as intended to promote the performance, it might equally be said that the performance served to promote the publication; more generally, print publication and theatrical performance work together to present Shakespeare as providing access to an accurate version of the past.
9 Playbill for Planché’s 1823 production of King John at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden
Antiquarianism invariably involves a degree of pious ancestor-worship, and this dynamic is especially evident in the Kemble–Planché production. But the loving attention lavished on the things of the past – on what is now referred to as material history – is not committed to a notion of absolute difference between the past and the present. The importance of heraldry for Planché is a good indication that his interest in history was at once antiquarian and genealogical. Getting the history right, presenting Shakespeare’s characters in historically accurate dress, mattered enormously, but this was not merely an exercise in inert nostalgia for a simpler medieval past. Implicit in the presentation is an understanding that the events of the past mattered for the present, that the British people were peculiarly the product of their history. While what D.R. Woolf has referred to as the historical culture of the English has deep roots, running at least as far back as the early modern period,1 there is no question that the French Revolution and its aftermath gave renewed impetus to an English historical tradition that emphasized continuity. The embrace of antiquarianism has been interpreted by some as a refusal of political engagement; Jane Moody, for example, speculates that Kemble’s embrace of Planché’s antiquarianism was an attempt to ‘shake off the play’s propagandist, xenophobic past’, and Jonathan Bate surmises that it ‘put Shakespeare safely back in the past, safely depoliticizing him’.1 However, there is little reason to accept this claim. It depends on a narrow definition of politics, which is reduced to topicality. For contemporary audiences topicality is often signalled by modern dress, as when Richard III is staged in costumes and uniforms from the 1930s in order to make an explicit parallel between Yorkist tyranny and modern fascism – so it is perhaps understandable that historically accurate costume might be construed as a rejection of topicality. There are two points to be made here: theatrical antiquarianism does not, in fact, preclude topical application; topicality, narrowly construed as a parallelism between events and characters depicted and current affairs, is not the only way in which theatrical performances enter into the world of politics. In the immediate context of the 1820s, the antiquarianism of the Kemble–Planché production contributed to a burgeoning interest in the past. In a striking coincidence, Sir Walter Scott’s first historical novel depicting England, Ivanhoe, published in 1820, popularized a version of King John that drew on Shakespeare’s portrayal of the monarch.2
10 ‘Costume for the Bastard’, by J.K. Meadows, from J.R. Planché, Costume of Shakespeare’s historical tragedy of King John, 1823
11 ‘Costume for the Earl of Pembroke’, by J.K. Meadows, from J.R. Planché, Costume of Shakespeare’s historical tragedy of King John, 1823
According to Planché, ‘When the curtain rose, and discovered King John dressed as his effigy appears in Worcester Cathedral, surrounded by his barons sheathed in mail, with cylindrical helmets and correct armorial shields, and his courtiers in the long tunics and mantles of the thirteenth century, there was a roar of approbation, accompanied by four distinct rounds of applause, so general and so hearty, that the actors were astonished, and I felt amply rewarded’ (1.52). Bell’s Weekly Messenger gave the productions an adulatory review: ‘The decided success of Shakespeare’s Tragedy of King John, on its first presentation on Monday evening, aided by the new and appropriate costume, which has seldom been equalled for splendour and effect, will, we trust, stimulate the managers to undertake the revival of other plays of the great Dramatist, with similarly correct dresses, armour, &c.’1 Almost fifteen years later, the Penny Magazine credited Charles Kemble with having ‘set about the reformation of the costume of Shakespeare’s plays in good earnest’.2 The chronology is clear: the Kemble–Planché production led to the subsequent antiquarian revivals of King John by Charles Macready in 1842 and Charles Kean in 1852. As Richard Schoch has argued, the deep connection made ‘between King John and the foundations of English civil liberties’ explains why nineteenth-century antiquarian revivals of the play ‘occupy a position of pre-eminence in the late-Georgian and Victorian theatre’; ‘The play acquired its deepest political colouring,’ according to Schoch, ‘only when historicized’ (Schoch, Victorian Stage, 119).
