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1899, King John. First ever brush between Shakespeare and what would later become known as the cinema. In filmic terms, it's certainly not groundbreaking,

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but it is, of course, of great interest for its pioneering status. The British Mutoscope and Biograph Company shot three or four short scenes lifted directly from the 1899 London

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stage production of King John, put on by the spectacular actor manager, Herbert Beerbohm Tree, seen here in centre frame. Only one of the filmed scenes has survived, and this is it, a single shot, captured with a theatrical style

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attention from a static frontal camera. King John, played by Tree, undergoes a painful death by poisoning, attended, among others, by the young Prince Henry in the gardens of Swinsted Abbey,

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evoked by a painted backdrop brought from the theatre to an open-air studio on the London embankment. Later, in 1916, Tree said these very early Shakespeare films were only meaningful to those who

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were perfectly familiar with the play and could recall the lines appropriate to the action. For those who were perfectly familiar with the Shakespeare play, the lines that might be brought to mind by this scene

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would be the section from act 5 that begins, "There is a hot summer in my bosom that all my bowels crumble up to dust." Tree's performance in the stage production

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was described by one reviewer as a little over emphatic in detail, and at one point, needlessly hysterical. I think it would be fair to say that the film performance to which this surviving fragment gives us

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privileged access is also not one characterised by restraint.