King John has been described by Kenneth McLeish and Stephen Unwin as ‘the runt in the litter of Shakespeare’s plays on English history’, standing outside of his two tetralogies of later Plantagenet plays and the later collaborative work, Henry VIII. His King John film was the first ever time a Shakespeare play had been filmed. He didn’t choose the most famous play from the Shakespeare canon – indeed, you’d be hard-pushed to find a less well-known title – but in having King John committed to film, he was making cinema history. This short piece of silent cinema included footage of King John’s dying moments, along with three other clips from the production.
In 1899, the great Victorian theatre director Herbert Beerbohm Tree made a short silent film to promote his forthcoming stage production of William Shakespeare’s history play, The Life and Death of King John. Constance reminds us that she is a widow, and so Arthur is not only her ‘fair son’, but a reminder of her marriage to her dead husband, whom she loved.
My life, my joy, my food, my all the world!Ĭonstance concludes her speech by addressing Jesus, and then her own son, Arthur, who means everything to her. She then dishevels her hair, arguing that she should not have neat hair when the head beneath is so disordered by grief.
But it seems to be a rhetorical question: is it not strange, she asks, not needing an answer, that when we grieve, we are at least given comfort by remembering the thing we have lost? (Yes, but it’s a false comfort and also a taunting one, since it stands in for the thing we wish with all our hearts wasn’t lost.)Ĭonstance addresses King Philip directly and says that if he had experienced the loss of his child, she would do a better job of comforting him than he is currently doing of comforting her. If grief has taken on the appearance of the absent child, looking and acting just like him, and making Constance feel as though her missing son is actually in the room with her, then shouldn’t she look fondly on grief, for keeping her son in the room with her, even as a mirage, a memory?Ĭuriously, many editors take Constance’s question here to be an exclamation, and so end the line with an exclamation mark rather than a question mark. Constance’s grief is so powerful that everywhere she looks, she sees her son as if he were there. Constance’s question shows the clever but also poignant basis of Shakespeare’s witty but moving conceit.
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