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

productions, with Kean taking historical realism to unprecedented levels of antiquarian
literalism. Kean’s first production of this sort went on, soon after the passage of the act, at Drury
Lane, where his Richard IIII opened in January 1844. In March and April of that year Planché
mounted two dramatic critiques of Kean’s approach, one explicit and the other implicit. He
himself had left Covent Garden, for which he had been writing exclusively for three years, taking
advantage of the Act, as he saw it, to escape from the commercial pressure to fill the huge
auditorium at the expense of artistic concerns. He went to the Haymarket as stock author and one
of his first productions there was The Taming of the Shrew which opened in March.
Planché was responsible for the scenery, costumes and the editing of the text for which he
wanted to restore Shakespeare’s original, in place of Garrick’s adaptation, Katherine and
Petruchio, which was still the usual performance version. To carry off this innovation, or
restoration, Planché took the next logical step towards seeing Shakespeare in his time, by
extending his antiquarian study of theatre history into his own practice as a dramatist. Rather
than seek out a realistic, that is illusionistic, setting, he preserved Sly’s Induction and dressed the
rest of the action as a play within a play, performed by actors in Elizabethan costume. There
were only two sets, the exterior of the tavern from which Sly is expelled and the Lord’s
Bedchamber in which the players perform. The restoration of the Induction, ‘this gem’, gave
Planché as much ‘pride and satisfaction’ as anything in his career 90 and was ‘eminently
successful’, by his account, ‘proving that a good play, well acted, will carry the audience along
with it...and in this case also, remember, it was a comedy in five acts, without the curtain once
falling during the performance’. 91 This was perhaps, another exaggeration for he seems to have
had few immediate followers in this approach, but it is indicative of the direction that Planché
and some at least of the public were prepared to take in the pursuit of the true and historic
Shakespeare.
A month later, on 8 April 1844, also at the Haymarket, in his The Drama at Home
Planché set out the argument behind his Taming of the Shrew in a skit on the Patent Theatres, the
Regulation Act and what he hoped would be its beneficial influence in rescuing Shakespeare
90 Planché, Recollections, 2, p.86.
91 Planché, Recollections,, 2, p. 85.
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