Here at “Folklife Today,” we’ve been following the history of Jack tales, from their emergence in the late middle ages to their adoption into modern literature. In our last installment, we traced Jack in both fantasy literature and more realistic fiction, finishing up with the great 20th century epic series of novels by Patrick O’Brien featuring Jack Aubrey, and the current series of novels created by Lee Child and featuring Jack Reacher. In this post, we’ll look at Jack tales in other arts, from drama and film to sculpture and comics.
The Aubrey and Reacher novels, of course, have taken their respective Jacks from the page to the screen, and this suggests we might start with dramatic adaptations of Jack Tales, on both stage and screen. Let’s begin with Jack in the theatre!
Jack in Drama and Comedy
We know there have been Jack Tale comedies and dramas since at least 1819, when we have the first record of “Jack and the Beanstalk” pantomime. Pantomime, often colloquially known as “panto,” is a genre of musical comedy developed in Britain in the 18th century, based on Italian Commedia Dell’arte and other classic comic genres. Panto shows typically run during the holiday season, although they don’t often have overtly holiday themes. In the 19th century pantomime was heavily influenced by current trends in music halls, so pantos often feature piano-based renditions of typically English popular songs, with the audience encouraged to sing along. Similarly, during the broad, slapstick comedy segments, the audience is expected to shout phrases to the actors, such as the warning “he’s behind you!” Gender-crossing is common, with men playing women’s roles and vice versa. Pantomimes frequently use common folktales or fables for their plot, and Jack is a perennial favorite, as the posters above show. In fact my hometown troupe, the British Players of Washington, DC, did “Jack and the Beanstalk” as their annual show just this past Christmas.
Interestingly, “Jack and the Beanstalk” as a tale emerged just as panto was developing out of Commedia. It may be telling in this regard that the very first known version of “Jack and the Beanstalk” from 1734, “Jack Spriggins and the Enchanted Bean,” was published in the book “Round About Our Coal Fire: or, Christmas Entertainments.” It is not in the form of a play script, but its description as an “entertainment” suggests it might have been acted out or at the very least read aloud, and its association with the Christmas season is intriguing.
In the U.S. there’s another popular dramatic adaptation of “Jack and the Beanstalk”: a play by the well-known children’s playwright Charlotte Chorpenning. It was first produced by the Federal Theatre Project in 1934, and the Library of Congress has posters, photos, and design drawings from that production. One of Chorpenning’s innovations was the character who bore the magic beans, Frehol, who was a figure like a human beanstalk. He was played in the 1934 production by Vito Scotti, a character actor trained in Commedia Dell’arte who went on to a long career in movies and TV, including a supporting role in “The Godfather.” See Vito Scotti in costume as Frehol, and the design drawing for the costume, at the top of the post!
Dramatic Jack tale adaptations go past the typical beanstalk and giant-killer tales, too. In North America, playwrights and drama teachers have considered dramatized Jack tales a good way to teach performance skills with a side helping of local and regional heritage. Ferrum college had a performing group called the Jack Tale Players who performed dramatized versions of the tales from 1975 until 2012. They still get together for reunion performances, including one for their 50th anniversary this October. Similarly, in Newfoundland, the artistic collective Sheila’s Brush began performing plays based on Jack tales in 1980, and one of its members, Andy Jones, has continued to adapt and perform dramatized tales to this day, including “Jack Meets the Cat,” “Jack and The Three Giants,” and “Little Jack The Little Fisherman.” Jones also adapts Jack tales as children’s books, and is part of a collective of artists exploring The Jack Cycle, which describes its goal as “forging a Newfoundland folk epic.”
Playwrights in other countries and languages have drawn on their own versions of Jack too. Ibsen’s “Peer Gynt” is widely understood to have drawn heavily on tales of Espen Askeladden, the Norwegian Jack; Derek Wolcott’s “Ti-Jean and his Brothers” uses Caribbean Jack tales with French Creole background; and numerous German playwrights have crafted versions of Hans tales, including “Hansel and Gretel.”
Jack has been adapted for the screen many times. Edwin Porter and Arthur White directed what was perhaps the first Jack tale movie in 1902: “Jack and the Beanstalk.” The silent classic was billed as “A grand spectacular performance in nine scenes and one tableau, illustrating the most popular fairy story ever written….” You can watch that film, as restored by the Library of Congress, in the player below.
Since the 1902 film, Jack and the Beanstalk has been adapted for film and TV well over a hundred times, starring everyone from Gene Kelly to Vanessa Redgrave, and from Abbot and Costello to the Teletubbies. The part of Jack has been played by Mickey Mouse, Tweety Bird, Woody Woodpecker, and (of course) Bugs Bunny. Notably, in 1983, it was episode 6 of the popular TV show “Faerie Tale Theatre,” starring Dennis Christopher as Jack, Elliott Gould as the Giant, and Jean Stapleton as the Giantess. “Jack and the Beanstalk: The Real Story,” a 2001 TV miniseries, begins with Jack’s modern descendant, and works its way backward to explain Jack’s original tale, with effects by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop. The 2020s have brought us new versions for TV, including a pantomime-style version by Peter Duncan and a children’s comedy starring David Walliams.
“Jack the Giant-Killer” has also been a popular theme for films, including an early version by Walt Disney (1922). This tale has been treated a little more seriously, being made into straight action films as often as comedies. The best known is probably the 1962 stop-motion epic directed by Nathan Juran, which adds structure to Jack’s giant-killing exploits by creating a framing story about a princess captured and bewitched by the evil lord Pendragon. On the other hand, who could forget 2013, when we had to choose between “Jack the Giant Killer,” directed by Mark Atkins and starring Jamie Atkins and Ben Cross, and “Jack the Giant Slayer,” directed by Bryan Singer and starring Nicholas Hoult and Ewan McGregor? Canadian animator Bryant Fryer’s now-lost 1932 version is also notable, as it is reportedly one of the first Canadian films with a dedicated music score.
Of course, films have been made drawing on other Jack tales, including Stuart Kinder’s “Jack and the Fairies” (1912) Tom and Mimi Davenport’s “Jack and the Dentist’s Daughter” (1984) and “Soldier Jack or the Man who Caught Death in a Sack” (1988), and Brandon McCormick’s moving modern Jack tale “Jack and the Dustbowl” (2012). Finally, movies that draw on the Jack tale tradition more generally include “How Ivanushka the Fool Traveled in Search of Wonder” (1977), “Legend” (1985), and “Puss in Boots” (2011).
We also might mention a special series of short films made by the National Film Board of Canada about Ti-Jean, the French Canadian version of Jack. The three educational films placed Ti-Jean in a modern context, in order to teach Canadian children about life in the lumber camps of Québec in the early 20th century, the wheat fields of the Canadian West in the 1950s, and the Iron mines of Labrador at about the same time. As he visits each region and works in each industry, the young Ti-Jean engages in superhuman feats such as outrunning a speeding train, chopping down and processing thousands of trees, and saving a mine from deadly sabotage. Although the plots aren’t literally folktales, the first film ends with the words: “This film was inspired by the superhuman exploits of Ti-Jean, hero of many French Canadian folk-tales.” The films were acted more or less as silent movies with almost no audible dialogue, but with a narrator telling the story in voiceover. This had the practical effect of making it relatively easy to create a French-language and an English-language version of each film without much awkward dubbing. But it also had the artistic effect of making each film literally a story told by one voice with a visual interpretation on the screen, which worked well with Ti-Jean’s folktale origins. The films are available to watch on the National Film Board of Canada site:
- Ti-Jean s’en va-t-aux chantiers (1953)
- Ti-Jean Goes Lumbering (1953)
- Ti-Jean s’en va dans l’Ouest (1957)
- Ti-Jean Goes West (1957)
- Ti-Jean au pays du fer (1958)
- Ti-Jean in the Land of Iron (1958)
Jack in Musical Arts
In music, Jack has been the subject of a few operas and operettas, largely for children. One example that’s popular today sets a new libretto by John Davies telling the tale of “Jack and the Beanstalk” to music written by Sir Arthur Sullivan of Gilbert and Sullivan fame. A more curious example from the 19th century was an operetta on “Jack the Giant Killer” by Deakin’s Liliputian Comic Opera Company. The company, founded in Milwaukee in the 1870s, featured little people in most of the roles, and specialized in stories featuring characters of disparate sizes, including “Jack the Giant Killer” and “Gulliver’s Travels.” A more musically ambitious opera on a Jack Tale theme is Otakar Ostrčil’s “Honzovo Království,” generally known in English as “Jack’s Kingdom.” (Czech “Honzovo,” like German “Hans,” is a diminutive of “John,” equivalent to English “Jack.”) “Jack’s Kingdom” adapts Tolstoy’s “The Tale of Ivan the Fool,” which as we have seen was itself based on a Jack tale in which Jack, seemingly the simplest of three brothers, is the only one able to defeat the Devil.
“Jack and the Beanstalk” is also a major component of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s “Into the Woods.” Perusing the Library’s recent acquisition of Sondheim’s papers might turn up interesting details about the character as envisioned in his music and lyrics!
Jack in Visual Arts and Comics
In visual arts, likewise, Jack has thrived. This very series of blogs at “Folklife Today” has been full of illustrations of Jack. From the 17th to the 19th centuries, anonymous woodcuts illustrated chapbook renderings of “Jack and his Step-Dame,” “Jack the Giant Killer,” and “Jack and the Beanstalk.” Classic illustrators of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including Walter Crane, Jessie Willcox Smith, and Arthur Rackham, illustrated the Jack stories, especially those featuring giants. More recent illustrators, from Victor Ambrus to John Howe, have all had a crack at Jack.
Jack was an important character in one of the most acclaimed fantasy comics of the early 21st century, Bill Willingham’s multiple-Eisner-award-winning comic book series, “Fables” (2002-2015). The series began with an unnamed young man urging a New York cab driver to go faster. Readers were soon introduced to the near-frantic passenger: Jack, a former fairy-tale hero who had been expelled from his homeland by the mysterious “Adversary,” and who was living in exile in New York City. Jack was joined in his predicament by such fairy-tale regulars as Beauty and the Beast, Snow White, the Frog Prince, the Three Little Pigs, and the Big Bad Wolf. Through multiple storylines, Jack remained one of the series’ most compelling characters, and eventually spun off into his own comic series, “Jack of Fables” (2006-2011), in which he was revealed to be Jack Horner, who is not only the the sword-wielding hero of “Jack and the Beanstalk,” “Jack the Giant-Killer,” and the other Jack tales, but also the nursery-rhyme star of “Little Jack Horner” and “Jack Be Nimble.”
Unusually for an adaptation of Jack tales, Jack in “Jack of Fables” is a completely self-centered, unlikable character with almost no redeeming qualities. Playing with the fact that Jack varies from story to story, the comic introduces different versions of Jack, from his doppelganger Wicked John to his son, Jack Frost. The series also adds unusual characters, including anthropomorphic personifactions of such literary ideas as censorship, revision, the deus ex machina, and the pathetic fallacy. This allows Willingham to comment on the meaning and function of stories, while also following the amusing exploits of Jack and his friends and adversaries. For folktale enthusiasts, the series also takes detours into some traditional tales, including a fascinating version of “Soldier Jack.”
The revived “Fables” comic (2022-2024) preserved the continuity of “Jack of Fables” by not featuring Jack Horner, who was otherwise occupied during the time period it depicts. However, it introduced two new Jack characters in the form of “Jack(s) in the Green.” Jack in the Green is the title given to the protector of the Black Forest, and the books occur just as an older male Jack retires and is succeeded by a young woman Jack. The idea of Jack as not an individual but a role which involves protecting a community, and which can be filled by either men or women, is similar to the idea of Jack in Charles De Lint’s “Jack of Kinrowan” books, which we disussed in our last post. This suggests that new traditions about Jack are emerging and developing in the context of modern fantasy literature and comics.
One of the most unusual works of what w emight call “Jack art” is the Jack Tales Wall, a 30 by 50 foot bas-relief sculpture wall depicting scenes from Jack tales, located at Southwest Virginia Community College. The Jack Tales Wall was sculpted in brick by Johnny Hagerman. It was designed by Charles Vess, an artist and illustrator and winner of the Hugo, Eisner, Locus, and World Fantasy Awards among others. (The Library of Congress has Vess’s original artwork from his graphic series “The Book of Ballads.”) Vess recalls that, when challenged to think of a good theme for wall art at the college, he was initially stumped, but soon had a powerful idea:
“Jack of the mountains, Jack and his brothers, Soldier Jack, — The Jack Tale. Who better to represent the people of these four counties than young Jack, the hero of hundreds of lively tales, indigenous to the Appalachian mountains? These very tales that were brought by the Scots-Irish and German immigrants from Europe into the southwestern Virginia region during the mid 1700’s. Much as the early pioneers adapted themselves to this mountain environment, so did their stories adapt along with them. Thus, tales that were first transmitted orally throughout the British Isles and written down by the Brothers Grimm in Germany, mutated here into stories with an intrinsically ‘American’ hero. A hero who possessed limitless optimism and a trust in his absolute ability to control his own destiny.”
Back to Jack
The many ways in which Jack has been borrowed and reflected in modern culture give us as audiences multiple ways to experience this favorite character. Still, while you can and should enjoy Jack tales as novels and short stories, as movies and TV shows, as pantomimes and plays, as operas and musicals, or as drawings and sculptures, I believe one of the best ways to experience Jack tales is still to listen to traditional storytellers. More than that, this is the only way to understand what these tales are like in their best and most effective forms. Obviously, the best way to do this is to find good local storytellers who know Jack Tales. If you can’t find one, of course, you can listen to recordings of storytellers, ot watch videos. In the player below, you can hear Maud Long tell one of her best Jack tales, “Jack and the Bull.”
I’ll end with a link to a video from AFC’s Alan Lomax collection, in which you can watch Ray Hicks tell a humorous tall tale about Jack’s hunting exploits. If you really listen, you might find that Ray can transport you into the story more completely than a book or TV show can.
In the video, you’ll see several members of Ray’s family enjoying the story, including his nephew Frank Proffitt, Jr. Frank once said of Ray Hicks: “he becomes Jack when he’s telling. And when I watch him, we both become Jack.”