James Robinson Planché

• Born: February 27, 1796
• Birthplace: London, England
• Died: May 30, 1880
• Place of death: London, England

Other Literary Forms

James Robinson Planché’s literary versatility extended well beyond the theater. He was an inveterate traveler, recounting one of his many Continental journeys in his Descent of the Danube from Ratisbon to Vienna (1828). He was also an antiquarian and a historian, and his History of British Costume (1834) and A Cyclopaedia of Costume: Or, Dictionary of Dress (1876-1879) became standard reference works for theatrical costumers. Furthermore, Planché’s two-volume history, The Conqueror and His Companions (1874), was considered “definitive” in his own day. Always adept at languages, Planché also translated, edited, or adapted works by French, Spanish, Italian, and German authors, including, in 1853, a translation of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Nussknacker und Mausekönig and, in 1855 and 1858, translations of the seventeenth century fairy tales of the Countess d’Aulnoy.

When Planché was asked to write about his extraordinarily long and successful theatrical career, the result was his informative and witty Recollections and Reflections (1872), which offers invaluable insights into nineteenth century theatrical practices. Planché was concerned, however, not only with the theater’s past but also with its future. Shortly before his death, he published a pamphlet, Suggestions for Establishing an English Art Theatre (1879). The proposed theater was to produce plays of merit without regard for commercial considerations. Five volumes of Planché’s extravaganzas were also published in 1879. His songs and poems appeared posthumously in 1881.

Achievements

By his own count, James Robinson Planché wrote seventy-two original plays, ten of those in collaboration with Charles Dance. He adapted or translated an additional 104 plays. Thus, Planché’s pen produced some 176 stage entertainments, embracing such diverse genres as historical drama, melodrama, comedy, farce, burlesque, extravaganza, opera libretto, and revue.

Planché’s achievements were not limited to playwriting. His antiquarian interests, especially his passion for the history of British costume, led him in 1823 to persuade Charles Kemble, then manager of Covent Garden Theatre, to stage William Shakespeare’s King John (pr., c. 1596-1597) with historically correct costuming instead of the contemporary dress that had been customary. Kemble’s production was an unprecedented success. Similarly, in 1831, Planché persuaded Madame Vestris (Lucia Elizabeth Bartolozzi), chief actress and manager of the Olympic Theatre, to stage his burlesque Olympic Revels with authentic costuming. Again, Planché’s innovation was remarkably successful.

Planché was also adept at stagecraft especially set design and scene painting. For his production of The Vampire, he invented the “vampire trap,” which enabled an actor to come and go through seemingly solid scenery. Indeed, when Madame Vestris became manager of the Lyceum Theatre in 1847, Planché wrote for that theater and supervised its scenery.

Shortly before his death, Planché published his Suggestions for Establishing an English Art Theatre, a theater “not wholly controlled by the predominant taste of the public.” Although he did not live to see his project realized, Planché was responsible for two other important reforms. In 1828, an unauthorized performance of Planché’s popular historical drama, Charles XII, led him to seek legal protection. Five years later, in 1833, Parliament, as a result of the efforts of Planché’s friend Edward Bulwer-Lytton, passed the Dramatic Authors Act, providing fines for appropriating a play without the consent of its author. Similarly, in 1829 Planché sued George Rodwell, who was about to publish the lyrics to Planché’s operettaThe Mason of Buda without payment to the author. Planché won his suit and thereby broke the custom of publishers paying royalties to the composer of the music for an operetta but nothing to the writer of the lyrics, which were considered of little value. Thus, Planché’s reforms and innovations touched almost every aspect of nineteenth century theater, much of whose history can be discerned from his works alone.

Biography

James Robinson Planché, son of Jacques Planché, a watchmaker, and Catherine Emily Planché (his father’s cousin), was born in London on February 27, 1796. In his youth, Planché studied geometry and perspective—arts he later applied to his stagecraft. His apprenticeship to a bookseller also enabled him to read widely.

Planché began his theatrical career as an amateur actor at several private theaters. At twenty-two, he wrote his first play, Amoroso, King of Little Britain, which was staged successfully at Drury Lane on April 21, 1818. From that date until 1872, one or more new entertainments by Planché appeared on the London stage nearly every year.

Planché’s diverse talents led to his supervising the music at Vauxhall Gardens during the 1826-1827 season. In 1830, he managed the Adelphi Theatre, and in 1831, he began his long association with Madame Vestris, first at the Olympic Theatre and later at the Lyceum. Planché not only wrote for her theaters but also designed and decorated their sets. In addition, he wrote and staged entertainments for many other theaters, including the Haymarket.

Although Planché’s first love was the theater, his second was antiquarianism. He was elected to the Society of Antiquaries in 1829 and also helped found the British Archaeological Association in 1843. From 1866 to 1871, he held the post of Somerset Herald. Indeed, Planché’s expertise eventually led to his being permitted to arrange chronologically the collection of armor in the Tower of London.

In 1821, Planché married Elizabeth St. George, who was also a dramatist. The couple had two daughters, Katherine Frances and Matilda Anne. Planché died on May 30, 1880.

Analysis

In his Recollections and Reflections, James Robinson Planché categorized contemporary English drama as “mere amusement.” Although critical of this situation, Planché both capitalized on and contributed to it. Indeed, he was the master of nearly every popular dramatic form of his day, including the melodrama.

The melodrama had been popular in England since the end of the eighteenth century. The term literally means “musical drama,” and therefore songs and sometimes dances were often an integral part of the entertainment. Songs were also necessary to circumvent the theatrical licensing regulations of Planché’s day, which placed many restrictions on the kinds of dramatic fare the minor London theaters were able to offer. Although the nineteenth century enjoyed several specific varieties of melodrama (such as the nautical or the gothic), exotic settings, excessive emotions, and extravagant dialogue characterized the genre as a whole.

Despite Planché’s criticism of popular dramatic forms, the majority of his own works were written to satisfy commercial dictates. Indeed, his instincts for what would work on the stage of his era were remarkably acute (a talent also shared by his most direct dramatic descendant, W. S. Gilbert). Although content with the personal profitability of the popular theater, Planché was never content with the status quo. He attempted to change the English stage by experimenting with new dramatic forms and theatrical techniques; by presenting satiric, sentimental, or sensational plays with an underlying serious point; and by proposing the establishment of an “English Art Theatre” to revive “the masterpieces of the last three centuries” in a theater in which commercialism would be subordinated to the highest production standards. The result of Planché’s creative efforts was 176 dramatic entertainments and perhaps the most successful career of any nineteenth century playwright.

The Vampire

One of Planché’s early melodramas was The Vampire, which Planché adapted from a French melodrama, Le Vampire, at the invitation of Samuel James Arnold, then proprietor of the Lyceum Theatre. Indeed, it was Arnold who refused to allow Planché to change the play’s setting from Scotland, “where the [vampire] superstition never existed,” to somewhere in Eastern Europe.

This “Romantic Melo-Drama,” as Planché called his play, consists of two acts and an “Introductory Vision”—the latter set in the moonlit interior of “the Basaltic Caverns of Staffa.” Lady Margaret, soon to be wed to the Earl of Marsden (the vampire), is sleeping fitfully. Unda, the Spirit of the Flood, and Ariel, the Spirit of the Air, recount the vampire legend and try to warn Margaret of danger by raising a vision of the vampire, who emerges from a nearby tomb, springs at Margaret, and then “sinks again, shuddering.” Planché’s invention of the so-called vampire trap enabled T. P. Cooke, as the vampire, to repeat his spectacular exit at the end of the play.

The action of The Vampire is confined to Lady Margaret’s wedding day. Neither she nor her family is aware that her fiancé Ruthven is a vampire who must wed a virgin bride and drink her blood before the moon sets or forever vanish into nothingness. Although Ruthven loves Margaret and tries to forestall their wedding by eloping with a servant girl, his plans are thwarted, and he presses for an immediate ceremony. Margaret’s father at first consents, but later he reflects on two miraculous reappearances of Ruthven, each after Ruthven has supposedly been killed, and concludes that Ruthven himself must be the legendary vampire. Margaret’s father tries to prevent the wedding, but Ruthven discredits his warnings as the ravings of a madman. To Ruthven’s distress, however, Margaret promises to humor her father and to heed his plea not to marry until after the moon has set. As the moon sets, the desperate Ruthven draws a dagger and attempts to seize his bride but is disarmed by Margaret’s father and his servants. With a peal of thunder overhead, the lost Ruthven falls to the ground and vanishes forever.

Although Planché often condemned the public’s preference for a theater of “mere amusement,” he succeeded more often than any other of his contemporaries in catering to that preference. Planché himself attested that The Vampire became one of the most popular plays of its day. Its curious Scottish vampire-villain, its suspenseful though contrivance-ridden plot, its Gothic setting, and its spectacular vampire trap precisely suited public tastes. In 1829, Planché converted his melodrama into a libretto for the German opera Der Vampyr, changing its location to Hungary and substituting a “Wallachian Boyard” for the play’s “Scotch chieftain.” Planché also designed costumes that were, in his own words, “novel as well as correct.” Taken together, these two “vampire” works testify to Planché’s talents as playwright, translator, set and costume designer, librettist, and theatrical entrepreneur.

Charles XII

One of Planché’s most successful ventures into what he termed “historical drama” was Charles XII. The play’s title character, the Swedish King Charles XII (1682-1718), was renowned for his obsession with war. Not having been content to rule his own country, he had attacked Denmark, Saxony, and Poland before being defeated by the Russians at Poltava in 1709. As Samuel Johnson later observed, “the name at which the World grew pale” would henceforth be used only “to point a Moral, or adorn a Tale”—in this case, Planché’s drama.

Planché’s Charles XII avoids the moral ambiguities of the king’s military escapades, using war only as a background menace that sometimes threatens to intrude into the play’s comedy. Instead, the focus is on Charles’s incognito visit to an inn kept by a Mr. Firmann, who is really one Major Vanberg, unjustly convicted of treason and under Charles’s own death sentence. Charles is both charming and charmed, especially by the innkeeper’s daughter Ulrica, who in turn is in love with Gustavus, one of Charles’s officers. Charles has come to the town in search of Adam Brock, the play’s liveliest and most popular character. Brock, something of a good-humored philosopher, had earlier lent money to the king, who now comes to repay him and cancel the debt. Brock’s daughter Eudiga is in love with a Colonel Reichal, and when the king uses that name for his alias, Brock assumes he has come to propose to his daughter. The ensuing comic confusions are finally straightened out when Charles reveals his identity. Potentially tragic complications soon follow. Triptolymus Muddlewerk, a clerk and a busybody, reveals Vanberg’s identity. Brock, who had earlier refused the king’s debt repayment, claims Vanberg’s life instead and later clears Vanberg’s name as well, leaving Charles still indebted to him. Eudiga and Ulrica are united with their fiancés, and Charles returns to his war.

Unlike the sensationalism of The Vampire, characterization is the strength of Charles XII. Charles, momentarily removed from his primary obsession, exhibits all the charm, wit, and repartee of the cultivated eighteenth century gentleman. Likewise, Adam Brock maintains his composure and especially his good humor whether he is dealing with the machinations of Muddlewerk, kneeling before his newly discovered king, or saving Vanberg’s life. Eudiga and Ulrica resemble the spirited heroines of eighteenth century comedy, while the meddling Muddlewerk is straight out of the humors tradition. Nevertheless, Charles XII also anticipates George Bernard Shaw’s The Man of Destiny (pr. 1897). Planché’s Charles is no more “historical” than is Shaw’s Napoleon. Both playwrights depict the softer side of a military hero: Shaw to deflate the pretensions of authority, Planché to show what happens when the softer values predominate, even if only for a moment. Charles’s tragedy is that he cannot sustain those values beyond the moment. Unlike Adam Brock, he cannot synthesize honor and courage with a peaceable disposition—a misfortune in a private man, a disaster in a public one.

Olympic Revels

In addition to his forays into historical drama and melodrama, Planché also experimented with burlesque, a form that treats a lofty subject in a lowly manner. The first of Planché’s classical burlesques, Olympic Revels, which opened at the Olympic Theatre on January 3, 1831, became, in Planché’s words, “the first of a series which enjoyed the favour of the public for upwards of thirty years.” Olympic Revels retells the myth of Olympic characters in doggerel verse, often laced with puns. Jupiter is angry with Prometheus for “making creatures out of clay beneath us” and especially for heating their passions with “pilfered coals” from Jupiter’s “kitchen range.” Jupiter proposes to punish Prometheus by giving him the gift of a woman, Pandora, newly forged by Vulcan himself. With Pandora comes a mysterious casket and Jupiter’s injunction not to open it. A jealous Juno also gives her the gift of curiosity. Pandora soon opens the box, from which immediately issue “fiends of every description.” Jupiter punishes Pandora by turning her into “an ugly old maid” while Prometheus is condemned “to die of a liver complaint.” Both are reprieved, however, when Hope arises out of Pandora’s box to pardon them and provide the conventional happy ending. The play concludes with an appeal to the audience to “fill with patrons all Pandora’s boxes.”

Olympic Revels derives its title both from its classical subject and from the name of the Olympic Theatre where it was performed. Indeed, Madame Vestris, manager of the Olympic, chose Planché’s play to open her new theater. Before the play began, she delivered an address to her audience, promising them joy, mirth, song, whim, fancy, humor, wit, music, and vaudeville from France. Olympic Revels itself comes close to fulfilling most of those promises. In the tradition of eighteenth century ballad opera, the action was interrupted by songs whose original lyrics were set to popular tunes. Planché, however, departed from the convention of presenting burlesques using outlandish costumes. Instead, he insisted on classically correct costumes, dressing Prometheus, he says, in a “Phrygian cap, tunic, and trousers” instead of “in a red jacket and nankeens, with a pinafore all besmeared with lollipop.”

Planché, in his Recollections and Reflections, confesses that the idea for his Olympic Revels came from The Sun Poker, by George Colman the younger. Planché had originally written his burlesque several years earlier but had been unable to produce it. He then suggested to Dance, with whom he had previously collaborated, that they revise the piece and present it to Madame Vestris. Its overwhelming success inspired Planché’s similar treatment of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth a year later in Olympic Devils, which was nearly as well received as its predecessor.

The Island of Jewels

Planché’s fascination with fairy tales led him not only to translate but also to dramatize many of them, including one of his most popular, The Island of Jewels, which opened December 26, 1849, at the Lyceum Theatre. Laidronetta, daughter of the King and Queen of Pharitale, has been made ugly by a spell cast by the wicked fairy Margotine, who was accidentally overlooked and thus not invited to Laidronetta’s christening. While lamenting that her ugliness prevents anyone from loving her, Laidronetta is interrupted by a large, green serpent—himself a victim of Margotine’s spells—who declares his love for Laidronetta and then disappears when she faints. Later, she and her servant are shipwrecked on the Island of Jewels—a fabulously wealthy land governed by the mysterious King Emerald. The king, carried about in a covered sedan chair, offers his hand and his kingdom to Laidronetta if she will marry him sight unseen. She at first agrees, but, prompted by her beautiful and envious sister, she peeks at her intended bridegroom, who is none other than the green serpent. Margotine reappears to threaten both of them, but her power is finally broken by the intervention of the good fairy Benevolentia and by Laidronetta’s unselfish choice to give happiness to the serpent at the cost of having to remain forever ugly. The serpent is transformed into King Emerald, who immediately weds Laidronetta, while Margotine is condemned to live tormented by her “own bad spirits.” The fairy extravaganza concludes with the maxim “If mortals would by happy here below,/ The surest way is making others so!”

Planché’s play is a tour de force of pun and parody. For example, the King of Pharitale, distraught over his daughter’s supposed loss of a kingdom, begins to recite King Lear’s “Blow winds and crack your cheeks” when the rains come and the thought strikes him that he is “a king more rained upon than reigning.” A moment later, the king shouts: “I tax not you, ye elements, you pay/ No duty under schedules D or A.” Nevertheless, under the foolery there lies a nugget of truth, for The Island of Jewels underscores the folly of judging by appearances, both individually and as a country. The irony, though, is that the play itself was finally to be judged chiefly by appearances, for its costumes and scenery were so elaborate that they overshadowed everything else. “It was not,” Planché himself complains, “the precise tissue of absurdity I had calculated for effect.” Indeed, “calculated absurdity”—the satirist’s ability to create a controlled chaos that looks beyond the appearances of order—accounts for much of Planché’s theatrical success.

Mr. Buckstone’s Ascent of Mount Parnassus

Planché was to use this talent to its fullest in his dramatic revues—a form whose freedom allowed him to satirize the popular entertainments of his day, usually those running at competing theaters. Mr. Buckstone’s Ascent of Mount Parnassus, for example, pokes fun at specific genres such as the Italian opera, at specific plays such as Dion Boucicault’s The Corsican Brothers (pr. 1848), and at specific theaters such as Drury Lane and the Lyceum. It even satirizes the contemporary craze for dramatic adaptations of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), which were appearing at many of the London playhouses.

Planché’s protagonist is Mr. John Buckstone, “Sole Lessee and Manager” of the Haymarket Theatre, who acted the part himself. As the play opens, Mr. Buckstone is contemplating a pile of manuscripts, attempting to choose the most profitable entertainment for his theater. As he is reading “Arsenic: a Tragedy in fifteen acts,/ and forty tableaux, founded upon facts,” the Spirits of Fashion and Fortune appear and suggest that Mr. Buckstone emulate Mr. Albert Smith’s The Spirit of Mount Blanc—a combination travelogue and display of scene painting currently appearing at the Egyptian Hall. Mr. Buckstone eventually returns to this suggestion but not before he has heard an aria from an Italian opera, has talked with the spirits of Drury Lane and the Lyceum, and has considered scenes from The Corsican Brothers and George L. Aiken’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (pr. 1852).

Observing that Fortune has its ups and downs, Mr. Buckstone determines that he will go “up or down something wonderful” and selects Mount Parnassus, home of the classical Muses, because “nobody lately has gone high up there.” With the aid of his scene painter, Mr. Buckstone presents a series of views beginning with Mount Parnassus, followed by the Greek villages of Crisso and Delphi and concluding with the summit of Parnassus on which Phoebus Apollo is enthroned. Throughout these proceedings, the Muses appear and comment on contemporary corruptions of their arts. Euterpe, for example, laments that her “ancient concerts” have been displaced by the “discords and sharps” of “rival operas.” Urania bemoans the star system, which emphasized individual actors at the expense of the ensemble, and Mr. Buckstone himself calls it “the ruin of the stage.” Nevertheless, he vows to continue his climb until he can learn from Apollo in person “those fine arts [which] may the drama raise.” His final plea is for his audience’s “assent” to assure his “ascent.”

Planché was an admirer of the eighteenth century dramatic satirists, and Mr. Buckstone’s Ascent of Mount Parnassus is the descendant of such pieces as Henry Fielding’s The Author’s Farce (pr. 1730), in which emblematic representations of the “pleasures of the town” contest for the honor of being declared the Goddess of Nonsense’s most devoted servant. Indeed, both Fielding and Planché capitalized on the dramatic revue’s episodic plot structure, which conveniently permits the presentation of diverse topical material and the easy removal of or substitution for some or all of that material whenever it needs to be updated. More important, however, the dramatic revue constitutes a form of criticism in and of itself because it uses the conventions of its own medium to challenge those same conventions and sometimes to change them.

Bibliography

Booth, Michael, et al. The Revels History of Drama in English, 1750-1880. Vol. 6. London: Methuen, 1976. Richly illustrated with portraits of important theatrical personalities and drawings of the innovative stagecraft of the early nineteenth century, this readable survey considers Planché among the most important playwrights between 1810 and 1850. Contains a thorough bibliography of primary sources on the Georgian and Victorian theaters.

Emeljanow, Victor. “Dramatic Forms and Their Theatrical Context.” In Victorian Popular Dramatists. Boston: Twayne, 1987. Planché is one of many dramatists on whose work Emeljanow comments as he investigates the paradox of Victorian theater: Its audiences grew and its technical expertise increased even as the literary quality of the drama declined—not only in Great Britain but also throughout the English-speaking countries worldwide.

Jenkins, Anthony. “Breaking Through the Darkness.” In The Making of Victorian Drama. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1991. This important study touches briefly on Planché but offers an enlightening, introductory account of the rise of realistic, spectacular stage production of the sort at which Planché excelled. Jenkins details the crucial role of the Olympic Theatre in breaking the patent theater monopoly under the direction of Planché’s sometime coentrepreneur, Madame Vestris (Lucia Elizabeth Bartolozzi).

Nicoll, Allardyce. A History of English Drama, 1660-1900. 6 vols. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1959-1962. Planché is frequently mentioned in Nicoll’s account of “illegitimate drama,” by which is meant melodrama, farce, burlesque, burletta, and extravaganzas. Nicoll has little sympathy for Planché or any other writer who experimented outside conventional comedy and tragedy, but he provides an exhaustive list of Planché’s prolific output between 1818 and 1850.

White, Eric Walter. A History of English Opera. London: Faber and Faber, 1983. An expanded version of White’s earlier The Rise of English Opera (1951). Aimed at a general audience, A History of English Opera is a readable and sympathetic account of an art form that Nicoll derides as “illegitimate drama.” Although this volume traces opera from the early 1660’s through the 1980’s, it devotes generous attention to Planché and other Victorian practitioners, mainly through anecdotes about personalities and performances rather than the analysis of texts.