SOURCE: Macaulay, Alastair. Review of King John. Financial Times (20 December 2001): 22.

In the following review of Gregory Doran's 2001 Royal Shakespeare Company production of King John, Macaulay commends the strong performances of the cast as well as Doran's fine stewardship of the drama, but suggests that even these could not surmount the plot and pacing weaknesses inherent in Shakespeare's play.

No Shakespeare play comes round less often than King John. And yet there's never any doubt that all of it—unlike Pericles or Henry VIII, for example—is Shakespeare's work. In every scene, the cut-and-thrust of dialogue, the wonderful alternations of plain talk and lyrical metaphor, the forcefields created simply by bringing dissimilar characters together: all this feels sheer Shakespeare.

Why don't we see King John more often? It has the most famously misquoted line in all of Shakespeare “to paint the lily and to gild refined gold” (usually rendered...