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

general prejudice in favour of classical subjects had left the history plays little altered and the
changes Kemble had made ‘while they rendered them more picturesque added but little to their
propriety’ as Planché noted, ‘the whole series, King Lear included, being dressed in habits of the
Elizabethan era’. 65 To Planché, although he had at that point turned his attention ‘but little’ to the
subject it was self-evident that:
Some change of fashion must have taken place in the civil and military habits of the people of England during
several hundred years…It was not requisite to be an antiquary to see the absurdity of the soldiers before Angiers, at
the beginning of the thirteenth century, being clothed precisely the same as those fighting at Bosworth at the end of
the fifteenth. 66
The fact was indeed obvious, but what had changed since Douce’s day was that it was
now a fact that mattered, anachronism had become absurdity. Among the general public,
audiences and men of the theatre like Planché, the awareness of history had reached a point
where historical inaccuracy interfered with the suspension of disbelief, as it had not done for
their parents. Charles Kemble was persuaded that this was so and moreover, with that
professional realism that so repelled Jeffrey, he ‘perceived the pecuniary advantage that might
result from the experiment’. 67 Whereupon Planché remembered that ‘gratuitously…solely and
purely for that love of the stage, which has ever induced me to sacrifice all personal
considerations to what I sincerely believed would tend to elevate as well as adorn it’, 68 he
embarked on what was to become his ‘most absorbing study’ of costume history. 69 With the
assistance of Douce and Samuel Rush Meyrick and in the teeth of opposition from Mr Fawcett
the stage manager as well as many of the cast who looked askance at the tin-plate replicas of
medieval helmets, ‘which they irreverently stigmatized as stewpans!’ Planché designed costumes
based on authentic models either observed at first hand or culled from antiquarian publications. 70
When at last the curtain rose:
65 Planché, Recollections, 1, p.52.
66 Planché, Recollections, 1, p.52.
67 Planché, Recollections, 1, p.53.
68 Planché, Recollections, 1, pp.53-54.
69 Planché, Recollections, 1, p.52.
70 Planché, Recollections, 1, p.56.
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