Shakespeare in Performance: Film
King John (1899, Herbert Beerbohm Tree)
| Title | King John |
|---|---|
| Year | 1899 |
| Release Locations | UK |
| Director | Herbert Beerbohm Tree |
| Medium | Black & white video, no sound |
| Length | 1 mins, 1 segments |
| Play Connections | King John (scene(s)) |
| Media Collections |
Description
Of prime importance to historians of Shakespeare on film as the first Shakespeare movie ever made. As Professor Ball argues, this recording of a scene from Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree's spectacular production of King John at Her Majesty's Theatre showed the signing of the Magna Charta, which scene is of course not in Shakespeare's play at all. Hence the inaugural attempt to put Shakespeare on screen embodied the unending dialectical struggle between film directors and the Shakespeare text. It therefore might be said that Tree was the first director to attempt to impose his own signature as auteur on a Shakespeare film. He was also the creator of the first "exploitation" movie in the sense that the film was largely designed to publicize his stage production of the play
Description from Shakespeare on Screen : an International Filmography and Videography by Kenneth S. Rothwell and Annabelle Henkin Melzer. ©1990 Kenneth S. Rothwell. Cited by permission. — Added 2008-11-14
Cast Overview
| King John | Herbert Beerbohm Tree |
|---|---|
| Prince Henry | Miss Dora Senior |
| Pembroke | James Fisher |
| Salisbury | S. A. Cookson |
Production Team and Crew Overview
| Director | Herbert Beerbohm Tree |
|---|
Production information courtesy of: Kenneth Rothwell