King John is the title by which the earliest known example of a film based on a play by William Shakespeare is commonly known.
Each of those films showed a heavily edited scene from Herbert Beerbohm Tree's forthcoming stage production of Shakespeare's mid-1590s play, King John, at Her Majesty's Theatre London.
The filming of King John was produced and directed by William Kennedy Laurie Dickson and Walter Pfeffer Dando.
The below still frames from the film were published in the 27 September 1899 issue of The Sketch accompanying a review of Tree's stage production.
[3] While these were known to scholars ever since Robert Hamilton Ball's Shakespeare On Silent Film (1968), and preceding journal papers, they were assumed to be ordinary production stills from the stage adaptation.