Antiquaries in the Age of Romanticism: 1789-1851 - Queen Mary ...

manners and habits’ to fill the larger stages with scenery and vary the costumes for longer
processions and bigger crowd scenes. 60
Planché’s greatest contribution to the process was, by his own account, persuading
Charles Kemble to mount historically authentic productions of Shakespeare’s history plays at
Covent Garden, starting with King John in 1823. This remains his most widely-acknowledged
legacy but, as has been pointed out, such productions remained relatively rare both in Planché’s
work and for some time in the repertoire in general. 61 Moreover by the mid-century, when
Charles Kean was putting on much more thoroughly historicised stagings of Shakespeare,
Planché was showing signs of ambivalence about over- researched costumes and settings which
weighed the drama down with ‘gems culled from authority by taste’. 62 As innovative as his King
John was his production in 1844 of The Taming of the Shrew at the Haymarket Theatre, done
with scarcely any scenery at all. A closer consideration of Planché’s work makes it clear,
however, that far from being paradoxical that he should have embraced such apparent extremes,
they were in fact two aspects of the same endeavour. Planché, like Douce, indeed like Coleridge,
whose criticism ‘shifts uneasily between historicism and atemporality’, was seeking out that
elusive ground on which authenticity and illusion, the Shakespeare of history and the
Shakespeare of eternity might meet. 63
In his Recollections and Reflections of 1872, an autobiography which, if it is generous to
others, at times rivals Britton’s in its generosity to the author, Planché gives himself full credit as
the ‘original cause’ of a ‘complete reformation of dramatic costume…upon the English stage’. 64
In fact the movement towards historical dress had been initiated, as Douce wrote, by John Philip
Kemble and, as Jeffrey pointed out in his review of Douce, Charles Macklin could be said to
have begun the process with his historical costume as Shylock as early as 1768. It had, however,
been a piecemeal business. In many plays some characters wore historic dress and others modern
and John Philip Kemble’s re-dressing of Shakespeare had concentrated on the Roman plays. The
60
Planché, ‘History of Stage Costume’, p. 173. See also, Kelly The Kemble Era, for a full account of the effect of
larger theatres on the nature and staging of the repertoire.
61
See, Reinhardt, ‘The Costume Designs of James Robinson Planché’.
62
Quoted in Wells, ‘Shakespeare in Planché’s Extravaganzas’, p.114.
63
Bate, The Romantics on Shakespeare, p. 17.
64
Planché, Recollections, 1, p.57.
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