Read Online King John & Henry VIII by William Shakespeare - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: William Shakespeare
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heart with some of the most poignant and potent poetry in the play,” 20 while Kate Bassett in the
Independent
was even more trenchant: “Marie Louise O’Donnell is ludicrous as the pretender’s mother, swishing around like a furious, punctured balloon.” 21 Playing Constance in a cooler, more psychoanalytic fashion acceptable to modern audiences requires a realistic, perhaps cinematic acting style that may appear excessively understated unless it is presented in an intimate theater setting, or indeed on film. More generally, complaints about the declamatory nature of the play are rife in the criticism of live performances in the twentieth century, suggesting a reason for its lack of popularity. Thus, a contemporary reviewer of the 1957 Old Vic production commented: “No-one in
King John
ever speaks. They all declaim.” 22
The play’s popularity during the early to mid-nineteenth century was also due in some measure to the development in English culture of a taste for extreme historical—indeed “archaeological”—accuracy in the treatment of the subject matter of drama, combined with the spectacular use of costume, stage effects, and supernumeraries. The Shakespeare productions of, in particular, Charles Kemble, William Charles Macready, and Charles Kean, presented costumes and settings that were heavily researched on the basis of scholarship, historical documents, funerary sculpture, and so on. They typically used literally hundreds of supernumeraries in battle scenes and culminated in spectacular final scenes. In part, this trend was commercially based: faced with increasing competition from the nonpatent theaters with their pantomimes and burlesques, the patent theaters had begun in the early nineteenth century to look for new ways to draw the crowds, and so “for all their pieties about only playing the classical repertoire—no burlettas or performing dogs—they relied more and more on ‘low’ spectacle.” 23
More generally, however, there developed in the mid to late nineteenth century a love of the spectacular, alongside the widespread availability of inventions such as the magic lantern and thestereoscope, paralleled on a grander scale by huge, walk-in, three-dimensional panoramas and dioramas that were popular in London until at least the end of the third quarter of the nineteenth century. Thus, toward the end of William IV’s reign, and certainly by the beginning of the second decade of Victoria’s (as witnessed by the Great Exhibition in 1851), the English were accustomed first to grandeur and ostentation in their architecture and domestic furniture, and second to looking at the world through pictures rather than through the use of imagination. Thus, the love of the spectacular in the theater, which combined both of these elements, was simply one manifestation of a more general phenomenon in English society. 24
King John
lent itself well to the pictorial treatment that could be meted out in lavish, spectacular productions, since the very “serial discontinuity” 25 of its episodic structure, together with its medieval subject matter made it ideal for a theatrical magic lantern show that would bring in the crowds. James Robinson Planché, historical advisor to Charles Kemble’s 1823 Covent Garden production, recalls with satisfaction the opening night performance:
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. 26
In Macready’s 1842 Drury Lane production, in addition to recovering the painstaking historical researches of Planché to inform the costume design, fourteen intricate, massive, highly researched painted sets were designed by William Telbin, and huge numbers of
Independent
was even more trenchant: “Marie Louise O’Donnell is ludicrous as the pretender’s mother, swishing around like a furious, punctured balloon.” 21 Playing Constance in a cooler, more psychoanalytic fashion acceptable to modern audiences requires a realistic, perhaps cinematic acting style that may appear excessively understated unless it is presented in an intimate theater setting, or indeed on film. More generally, complaints about the declamatory nature of the play are rife in the criticism of live performances in the twentieth century, suggesting a reason for its lack of popularity. Thus, a contemporary reviewer of the 1957 Old Vic production commented: “No-one in
King John
ever speaks. They all declaim.” 22
The play’s popularity during the early to mid-nineteenth century was also due in some measure to the development in English culture of a taste for extreme historical—indeed “archaeological”—accuracy in the treatment of the subject matter of drama, combined with the spectacular use of costume, stage effects, and supernumeraries. The Shakespeare productions of, in particular, Charles Kemble, William Charles Macready, and Charles Kean, presented costumes and settings that were heavily researched on the basis of scholarship, historical documents, funerary sculpture, and so on. They typically used literally hundreds of supernumeraries in battle scenes and culminated in spectacular final scenes. In part, this trend was commercially based: faced with increasing competition from the nonpatent theaters with their pantomimes and burlesques, the patent theaters had begun in the early nineteenth century to look for new ways to draw the crowds, and so “for all their pieties about only playing the classical repertoire—no burlettas or performing dogs—they relied more and more on ‘low’ spectacle.” 23
More generally, however, there developed in the mid to late nineteenth century a love of the spectacular, alongside the widespread availability of inventions such as the magic lantern and thestereoscope, paralleled on a grander scale by huge, walk-in, three-dimensional panoramas and dioramas that were popular in London until at least the end of the third quarter of the nineteenth century. Thus, toward the end of William IV’s reign, and certainly by the beginning of the second decade of Victoria’s (as witnessed by the Great Exhibition in 1851), the English were accustomed first to grandeur and ostentation in their architecture and domestic furniture, and second to looking at the world through pictures rather than through the use of imagination. Thus, the love of the spectacular in the theater, which combined both of these elements, was simply one manifestation of a more general phenomenon in English society. 24
King John
lent itself well to the pictorial treatment that could be meted out in lavish, spectacular productions, since the very “serial discontinuity” 25 of its episodic structure, together with its medieval subject matter made it ideal for a theatrical magic lantern show that would bring in the crowds. James Robinson Planché, historical advisor to Charles Kemble’s 1823 Covent Garden production, recalls with satisfaction the opening night performance:
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. 26
In Macready’s 1842 Drury Lane production, in addition to recovering the painstaking historical researches of Planché to inform the costume design, fourteen intricate, massive, highly researched painted sets were designed by William Telbin, and huge numbers of
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