Free King John & Henry VIII by William Shakespeare Page A

included highly researched costumes designed by Percy Anderson, sumptuous sets, and vast numbers of supernumeraries.
    While the absence of any reference to Magna Carta is relatively easy to understand, the lack of any reference to Robin Hood is more puzzling, since there was already a strong popular tradition of Robin Hood plays in the Tudor period. 34 A story about noble outlaws with a reputed link to good King Richard would seem to be prime material for the play’s themes of integrity, legitimacy, and kingship, and, moreover, the material would have been well known to Shakespeare’s audience: Robin Hood featured in a large number of popular ballads during the medieval and English Renaissance periods. 35 In the last years of the sixteenth century, moreover, there appeared a spate of London plays involving the outlaw, thus demonstrating his popularity with Elizabethan London playgoers but, much to the modern theatergoer’s disappointment, there is no reference to Robin Hood in
King John
.
    This brief history has outlined the remarkably varying stage popularity of
King John
but not discussed in any detail the play’s political elements, which become important during the twentieth century, in particular in a number of the Royal Shakespeare Company productions of the play, to which we now turn.
AT THE RSC
    In 2011, the Royal Shakespeare Company celebrated its fiftieth anniversary and marked the event by opening a major extension and refurbishment of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. While the new RSTis boldly forward-looking in its design, it intellectually links with the past both through its apron stage, which harks back to the theaters of Shakespeare’s day, and through its brave new tower, homage to the 1879 Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, which stood on an adjoining site before much of it burned down in 1926. It also physically links with the past by conspicuously combining with, rather than replacing, Elizabeth’s Scott’s elegant 1932 art deco building and by sharing the front-of-theater space in the new RST with the vestiges of the 1879 theater, which, refurbished in 1926, now form the RSC’s Swan Theatre. Within this new theater complex, forward-looking but rooted in the past as it is, lies a clue to understanding the shifting stage fortunes of Shakespeare’s play,
King John
.
    If a present-day visitor to the RST turns right at the main entrance and skirts the outside of the theater on the west side to come to the Waterside entrance to the Swan, opposite Chapel Lane, and looks up and to the left of the entrance, they will see three stone gothic arches, within each of which is a terra-cotta relief panel. These panels were commissioned and installed in 1885 and survived the disastrous fire of 1926; each depicts a scene from a Shakespeare play, chosen to represent one of the three main genres of the Shakespeare canon, namely comedy, history, and tragedy. The left panel depicts what is clearly a woman in man’s clothing standing in a leafy forest, while the right panel depicts a man standing by a graveside staring at a human skull in his hand: our present-day RST visitor, equipped with only a passing knowledge of the most popular plays, is quite likely to identify the first figure as Rosalind disguised as Ganymede and the second as the Danish Prince:
As You Like It
and
Hamlet
would still today be sensible choices to represent Shakespeare’s comedies and tragedies. But how many present-day theatergoers—or English literature scholars for that matter—would immediately recognize the central panel as depicting the boy Arthur’s moving plea to Hubert not to put out his eyes in Act 4 Scene 1 of
King John
? Certainly, our Shakespeare-loving visitor is likely to shake his head in puzzlement; how the mighty are fallen.
    The fact that in 1885 the Shakespeare Memorial Association chose
King John
as one of three plays to commemorate on the façade of its new theater, and as the single play to represent