staging antiquities.

I have been reading "Shakespeare's Victorian Stage" this week, and today I was focusing on a chapter titled "The prince of theatrical antiquaries," which is an allusion to the Shakespearean actor-manager Charles Kean. This man was quite famous in his time, and even now you can find many images of Kean in his Shakespearean costumes. Kean was also largely invested in making Shakespeare on stage as historically authentic as he could. Now, before I read too much of the chapter, I thought I would find that Kean tried to recreate the Elizabethan stage as close to how it was when Shakespeare plays were produced on it, but I of course was wrong in that assumption. Instead I found that Kean wanted to make Shakespeare's plays as accurate to the historical time that they were set in as he could. This involved a lot of money, and a lot of artistic freedom with Shakespeare's works. I find that Kean's goal particularly fascinating because while he was trying to be as authentic to history as he could, he was not showing Shakespeare, also a historical figure, in a very historically accurate light.

Before I get into Kean's productions of Shakespeare, I wanted to just add a little background information on Kean as a person. He was the son of a famous actor, Edmund Kean, and Kean junior just couldn't match up to his father's acting presence or ability. His father even denounced his son since he was such a poor actor. But, that didn't stop Charles Kean. In fact, as the book mentions, mid-Victorians "admired nothing so much as a man who had the courage and resolve to overcome the obstacles which beset him," and being an actor was very much an obstacle for young Charles Kean, so that's what made him famous and what made him stand out, that he kept trying even though he wasn't very good.

After growing up a bit and marrying an actress by the name of Ellen Tree, the both of them went into the business of being theater owners and stage managers. The purchase of the Princess's Theatre is what aided Kean in fulfilling his desires to create plays in an entirely historically accurate way, and after the Theaters Regulation Act of 1843, the Keans could perform Shakespeare without having to gain access and permission before hand. And Charles Kean's pursuit of historical accuracy began right away with the purchase of medieval furniture of high quantities, so much so that the Princess's Theatre was named "Mr Charles Kean's furniture warehouse on Oxford street (27)."

Kean went all out as far as new stage technologies and elaborate settings and scenery, and he was very much questioned for his actions by many critics, but by the time the Princess's Theatre had been open and running for a while, the costs and intricacies of his stage were no longer scrutinized, but were mentioned and praised for being so very accurate. In fact, because of Kean's attention to detail on the stage, many other actor-managers were expected to have their plays at the same level of accuracy as did the Kean's stage.

This new standard of other actor-managers to execute their plays as seamlessly and beautifully as Kean led to "anxiety [to] acquire sufficient knowledge of costume, to avoid committing such errors as disgraced the works of many of their predecessors (49)." And this is where creative liberties came in for Kean and other actor-managers to change Shakespeare's plays as they saw fit so that the Bard's plays were truly as historically accurate as they thought he meant them to be. When Kean produced Henry V he did thorough research and found that the Bard had left out many important and telling events in the life of Henry V, such as Henry's entrance into London. So Kean added this scene, and really made it extravagant, as it would have been when the real Henry entered the real London. This addition, along with many others, "compensated, as it were, for Shakespeare's failure to document medieval history as exhaustively as a mid-Victorian audience would have liked (49)." How fascinating that the people living in the Victorian era thought that Shakespeare, even then regarded as the most brilliant writer ever, did not inform and perform accuracies of history as well as they could've. There seemed to be a lot of egos on Shakespeare's Victorian stage, but even with all of that, audiences really believed that Kean was executing his duty to all in displaying

the scenery of all the different parts of the world, under every possible variety of light, colour, and circumstance; the manners, habits, and customs of all nations, and all ages and all grades of society; the dresses, arms, houses and strongholds of men in all stages of their progress. (50-1)

It's as if the Victorian audiences of Kean's revised Shakespeare thought that Kean was the master at creating scenes that the Bard simply neglected. This makes me wonder if the Victorian's even understood at all what Shakespeare was about. Of course none of his works, even his historical plays, were one hundred percent accurate. He wrote histories in a way that let the everyday man see how closely it related with his own life. Shakespeare, I'm thinking, didn't feel it necessary to include every major detail of Henry V's life, that wasn't what he was after. It was all about the experience and what was gained from the events in his character's lives. Nevertheless, the Victorians thought they were doing the old Bard a favor by implanting events that they felt he ignored on purpose; they must've thought they were doing right by doing that act of "service".



Works Cited.  
Schoch, Richard W. Shakespeare's Victorian Stage: Performing History in the Theatre of Charles Kean. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1998. Print.