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The Theatre of Shelley

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Jacqueline Mulhallen

Chapter Four: Turning History into Art – Charles the First

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  • 1 Bodleian MS. Shelley adds e. 17, pp. 33-51, 52 rev., 55 + stray leaf adds c. 4, fol. 136 rev., 185 (...)
  • 2 Jewett, Fatal Autonomy, p. 210; R.B. Woodings, ’Shelley’s Sources for Charles I’, MLR, 64 (1969), (...)

1Shelley began writing Charles the First in January 1822, but at his death he had completed only scenes for a first act, an outline sketch for a second and many notes, jottings and stray lines.1 As he had not worked on it in the months preceding his death, there is a view that he would not have completed it even had he lived. This view undermines the importance of this project, which he had been researching since 1818, and his competence as a dramatist is challenged by the idea that it may have been laid aside because of difficulties with dramatising the material. It should be borne in mind that there is not yet a modern edition of the play and commentators have not always had all the manuscripts available, but those who believe that he could not have finished it include R.B. Woodings, Jewett and, to some degree, Behrendt, who follow Medwin and Mary Shelley, both of whom were with Shelley in Pisa when he was drafting the play.2

  • 3 Mary Shelley, ’Note on Poems of 1822’, OSA, p. 676.
  • 4 Jewett, Fatal Autonomy, p. 210.
  • 5 PBSLII, pp. 394, 436.
  • 6 OSA, p. 676-677; such difficulties are also noted in Scrivener, Radical Shelley, p. 297.

2In her ’Note to the Poems of 1822’, Mary Shelley said that Shelley ’threw aside’ Charles the First in favour of The Triumph of Life, but her supposition that he might not have been able to ’bend his mind away from the broodings and wanderings of thought divested of human interest’ is perhaps coloured by her own estrangement from him during the composition; she knew he was capable of writing dramatic characters in Julian and Maddalo and The Cenci.3 Jewett, too, believes he abandoned Charles the First in favour of The Triumph of Life.4 Shelley, however, frequently wrote more than one work concurrently, as he did Julian and Maddalo, The Cenci and Prometheus Unbound in 1819. Although he remarked to Hunt on 2 March 1822 that ’a slight circumstance gave a new train to my ideas & shattered the fragile edifice when half built’, this ’edifice’ could have been rebuilt as he still had the materials, his notes and drafts, from which he had created it. His remark to John Gisborne on 18 June 1822, ’I write little now […] I do not go on with ”Charles the First”’ also needs to be taken with caution.5 At the time Shelley was recovering from grief over the death of Allegra, Byron and Claire’s daughter, and Mary’s miscarriage and consequent ill-health, by enjoying the beautiful bay of Lerici, sun, music and sailing. At Lerici, he would have found The Triumph of Life easier to write in his boat than Charles the First, which required reference books, consistency of characterisation, manipulation of historical material and ordering of scenes.6

  • 7 Medwin, Life, II, pp. 163, 164.
  • 8 PBSLII, pp. 388, 380; OSA, p. 482.

3Medwin believed that Shelley had ’formed no definite plan in his own mind’ of his subject matter and that he might have abandoned the play because he ’could not reconcile his mind to the beheading of Charles’.7 Although Shelley said to Gisborne on 26 January 1822, ’I cannot seize the conception of the subject as a whole yet’, the ’yet’ shows that he expected to overcome the problem and this is borne out by his drafts. The fragments are in themselves carefully structured which indicates that Shelley was developing a structure for the whole play in his head, even if not sketched out on paper. His remark to Hunt that ’Charles the 1st […] if completed according to my present idea [my italics] will hold a higher rank that [than] the Cenci as a work of art’ tends to confirm this. Such a pattern of working can be seen in the Fragments of an Unfinished Drama. Shelley left only a few speeches, but Mary Shelley knew some of the underlying story which she supplies in her notes.8

  • 9 Medwin, Life, II, p. 164; PBSLII, p. 294; MWSLI, p. 200.
  • 10 See MWSJ, pp. 654, 660.
  • 11 The first three were used by Shelley in his notes in BSMXVI. Shelley’s reading of the last three i (...)
  • 12 PBSLII, p. 269.

4Medwin incorrectly claims that Shelley ’had no means of procuring’ the necessary books of reference. Shelley read numerous works for the play, although some did not arrive until June 1821.9 As well as Milton’s prose and the histories of Clarendon, Hume and Catharine Macaulay,10 Shelley read the royalist propaganda, Reliquiae Sacrae and Eikon Basilike, the Memorials of Bulstrode Whitelocke, The Tryal of Sir Harry Vane, Memoirs of Edmund Ludlow, Lucy Hutchinson’s life of her husband, and Charles I’s own letters.11 He was able to gather from these eyewitness accounts a wide range of views which reveal much character and atmosphere invaluable for developing scenes, characters and situations, and before he had read and absorbed them he could not have started writing. If he had an intellectual grasp of the subject matter, he still required an imaginative response to develop the creative impulse. This he explained to his publisher, Charles Ollier, ’when once I see and feel I can write it, it is already written’.12

5Williams and Trelawny were also in Pisa at the time. Williams said:

  • 13 Gisborne & Williams, p. 123.

As to S[helley]’s ”Charles the First” – on which he sat down about 5 days since, if he continues it in the spirit [of] some of the lines which he read to me last night, it will doubtless take a place before any other that has appear[ed] since Shakspeare, and will be found a valuable addition to the Historical Pla[y.]13

6Trelawny reports Shelley as saying:

  • 14 Wolfe, II, p. 198.

I am now writing a play for the stage. It is affectation to say we write a play for any other purpose. The subject is from English history; in style and manner I shall approach as near our great dramatist as my feeble powers will permit. King Lear is my model, for that is nearly perfect. I am amazed at my presumption.14

7Shelley’s remarks to Medwin, in July 1820, were:

  • 15 PBSLII, pp. 219-220.

What think you of my boldness? I mean to write a play, in the spirit of human nature, without prejudice or passion, entitled ’Charles the First’. So vanity intoxicates people; but let those few who praise my verses, and in whose approbation I take so much delight, answer for the sin.15

8When these passages are read together, it becomes clear that Shelley intended Charles the First to be a major work for the stage, Shakespearean indeed in scale and quality. The ambitiousness of the scale would be likely to cause a writer at times to become discouraged and drop the work, but it would also be a reason to return to it, particularly after investing the amount of time in research which Shelley had done.

  • 16 Wolfe, II, p. 352; PBSLII, pp. 269, 354, 357, 372.
  • 17 Cameron, The Golden Years, p. 412; Scrivener, Radical Shelley, p. 297; Nora Crook, ’ ”Calumniated (...)
  • 18 Curran, Annus Mirabilis, p. xvii.

9Peacock implies that Charles the First was a response to the invitation from Henry Harris to write upon ’a less repulsive subject’ than that of The Cenci, and clearly believes it was intended for the stage. Shelley wrote on 22 February 1821 to Ollier, ’I doubt about ”Charles the First”, but, if I do write it, it shall be the birth of severe and high feelings’ and, in September 1821, ’Unless I am sure of making something good the play will not be written.’ Yet less than a month later he wrote, ’Expect Charles the Ist […] in the spring’ and, when he had started work in January 1822, ’I ought to say that the Tragedy promises to be good’. This confidence is apparent in his attempt to sell the copyright, perhaps encouraged by the notion that, if it were successfully staged at Covent Garden, as Harris’s positive message had given him reason to hope, it would sell well, though he added he could not judge ’how far it may be’.16 Cameron believes Charles the First would have been a ’major historical drama’, Scrivener thought it ’would have eventually been finished’ and Crook describes Shelley as ’writing at the height of his powers’.17 Shelley’s method of working appears to have been to research the subject thoroughly for a long period before he actually began to write.18 If Shelley had had a definite plan and had researched the background for Charles the First over a number of years, as I believe, it is unlikely that he would have abandoned it.

Shelley’s research

  • 19 Mary Shelley, ’Note on Poems of 1822’, OSA, p. 676.
  • 20 PBSLII, pp. 21, 39-40.
  • 21 MWSJ, pp. 215-223.
  • 22 MWSJ, pp. 293-302; PBSLII, pp. 120, 154; For Lucan’s influence, see David Norbrook, Writing the En (...)
  • 23 MWSJ, p. 298.

10There is evidence that in 1819 Shelley was already researching this subject, one he thought suitable for a drama ’full of intense interest, contrasted character, and busy passion’.19 On 8 June 1818, Godwin had suggested ’a book […] to be called The Lives of the Common-wealth’s Men’, as a project for his daughter, Mary Shelley. Shelley’s enthusiastic response on her behalf and later insistence that she should write a play (’Charles the 1st’) may indicate his interest rather than hers; she never took it up and it is significant that he mentioned himself in connection with it at all despite saying he was ’little skilled in English history’ and his interest in the subject ’feeble’.20 As early as 19 June 1818, the Shelleys began reading aloud Hume’s History of England which they continued until 15 August,21 thus commencing the historical research which Shelley was to continue, off and on, for the following three years. His reading appears to bear out Medwin’s suggestion that he had ’designed to write a tragedy’ on the subject in 1818 and began it at the end of the following year. From August 1819, Shelley read ’about 12’ of Calderón’s plays including The Schism in England, other seventeenth-century dramatists, such as Beaumont and Fletcher, Jonson, and Massinger. He also read Lucan, who influenced seventeenth-century republican writers.22 On 9 October, Mary notes ’S. begins Clarendon’ (Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars) and he finished the first volume, some of which he read aloud, by 11 October.23

  • 24 The Manuscripts of the Younger Romantics, Percy Bysshe Shelley. Vol VI: Shelley’s 1819-1821 Huntin (...)

11There is an indication that Shelley was then searching for a vehicle for writing a drama about the struggle for liberty. Mary Quinn suggests that he had ’completed The Cenci within a month or two of jotting down these notes and Prometheus Unbound within weeks or even days’.24 The notes referred to were as follows:

  • 25 MYRVI, pp. 349-348, 347-346.

On Bonaparte
A Drama –
That a bad & weak man is he who rules over bad & wea
First scene the field of Battle [?]in – one of the first in which Bonapa[r]
te was conqueror.
Perhaps in Ægypt
two wounded men hear his a voice – they first mistake it for each
others but it is Jacobinism25

12The wounded men are not given names, but are representative of ordinary people like those in the first scene of Charles the First. The ’Voice’ of Jacobinism is an abstract one in line with the contemporary theatre, where supernatural elements were created and concealed behind a sidewing, as in The Castle Spectre or The Vampire. Shelley is writing with awareness of stageability and theatrical effectiveness since there is the basis of a theatrically thrilling scene in the idea of each man thinking the other had spoken and then realising that it was a supernatural voice.

  • 26 MWSJ, pp. 678; SCVI, p. 958.

13During October and November 1819, Shelley read aloud not only Clarendon’s History but also de Staël’s Of the Revolution, from which he drew the parallels with the French and English revolutions in A Philosophical View of Reform, a work Donald Reiman believes he continued writing into 1820:26

  • 27 ’A Philosophical View of Reform’, SCVI, pp. 980-981.

14The revolution in France overthrew the hierarchy, the aristocracy & the monarchy, & the whole of that peculiarly insolent & oppressive system on which they were based […] The usurpation of Bonaparte and the Restoration of the Bourbons were the shapes in which this reaction clothed itself […] France occupies in this respect the same situation as was occupied by England at the restoration of Charles the 2d. It has undergone a revolution […] which may be paralled [sic] with that in our own country which ended in the death of Charles the 1st. The Authors of both revolutions proposed a greater & more glorious object than the degraded passions of their countrymen permitted them to obtain. But in both cases abuses were abolished which never since have dared to show their face.27

  • 28 ’Stephen Burley, ’Shelley, the United Irishmen and the Illuminati’, KSR, 17 (2003), 18-26 (pp. 19- (...)
  • 29 MWSJ, pp. 219, 295.

The news of the Peterloo Massacre raised the possibility of a prerevolutionary situation in England. On 20 February 1820, Shelley, who had known United Irishmen in Dublin in 1812, discussed the 1798 Rising in Ireland with Lady Mountcashell.28 The Shelleys’ reading aloud in autumn 1819 included Fletcher’s ’tyrant plays’, A Wife for a Month and Philaster; they had read these, with The Maid’s Tragedy and A King and No King, alongside Hume in July 1818, so it is interesting that Shelley read them once more alongside Clarendon’s history of the period.29 Reading them was not only invaluable in developing Shelley’s dramatic technique but also his historical sense. It gave him an insight into the atmosphere of Charles’s court and an awareness of how the theme of tyranny was dealt with in plays, copies of which, incidentally, Charles himself owned and which he saw performed at his father’s court.

  • 30 Andrew Gurr, The Shakespeare Company, 1594-1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. (...)

15Andrew Gurr explains that ’Fletcher made tyranny an explicit feature of his tragedies and tragicomedies’ and that ’Charles’s sexual morality was never in question, but he was seen as a tyrant […] From Philaster and The Maid’s Tragedy onwards, love at court became a metaphor for the impact of royal misrule on the subject’.30 The problem is never resolved by a successful rebellion but by the king repenting or the true king returning. Shelley would have realised from this that a certain amount of discussion of the subject was tolerated as long as the conclusion was that rebellion was not tenable. This knowledge would be useful when writing scenes at court.

  • 31 MWSJ, pp. 310-312, 317, 333.
  • 32 MWSJ: for Macaulay see pp. 326-331, for Clarendon see p. 331, for Godwin see pp. 313-314.
  • 33 MWSJ, p. 370.

16In January 1820, Shelley continued reading aloud Jacobean drama, particularly that dealing with war, tyranny and rebellion: King John, which was frequently played as it provided Siddons with a strong part in Constance, followed by Henry IV Pt 1 which he almost certainly saw in April 1810. In March he read aloud Henry V and, twice, Henry VI, plays from which he was able to learn how Shakespeare handled the dramatisation of war and, particularly importantly for Charles the First, the problem of several battle scenes in the same play. In March, too, he read aloud Jonson’s Roman plays of rebellion and tyranny, Catiline’s Conspiracy and Sejanus, His Fall, and, in the summer, Fletcher’s Bonduca and Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, both dealing particularly with aspects of war affecting women.31 The pattern of reading political works and histories of the English Civil War alongside Jacobean drama was repeated by reading Catharine Macaulay’s History of England, Clarendon’s Rebellion of Ireland and Godwin’s Political Justice.32 In 1821, the Shelleys again read aloud Jonson and ’Old Plays’, almost certainly Scott’s new edition of Dodsley’s Old Plays, retitled Ancient English Drama.33 By immersing himself in Jacobean and Caroline drama for over three years, Shelley became thoroughly familiar with its cadence, vocabulary and manner of writing about political questions; he gained a knowledge of its context by his historical reading, thus preparing the ground for writing a play about the fall of a tyrant and a civil war which warns of the danger of a revolutionary leader who becomes another tyrant. This must have seemed no less necessary in June 1821, when the books he required arrived, since by then he had also received news of revolutionary events in Piedmont, Naples and Greece.

The theme of the play

  • 34 Woodings, ’Shelley’s Sources’, pp. 268-269; Nora Crook, ’Calumniated Republicans’, p. 146. The edi (...)
  • 35 BSMXVI, pp. 235-234; Cameron, The Golden Years, p. 412; BSMXII, p. xxix.
  • 36 Woodings, ’Shelley’s Sources’, p. 273.
  • 37 Lucy Hutchinson, Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson (London: George Bell & Sons, 1906), pp. (...)
  • 38 Medwin, Life, II, p. 165; PBSLII, p. 21.

17By January 1822, therefore, when he began writing Charles the First, Shelley was well able to decide his own ’interpretation of events’ and would not have been dependent on Hume’s history, as Woodings implies. It is true that his notes contain at least twenty page references to it and phrases from Hume appear in the play but, as Crook points out, Shelley refers in his notes to Hume as a ’Tory historian’ and clearly did not endorse his views.34 Cameron, and Crook following him, consider that Shelley would have found those of the Republican Whig, Macaulay, more sympathetic and an examination of Macaulay’s History bears this out.35 He read the Reliquiae Sacrae and the Eikon Basilike because, as a dramatist, he required to know how the King and his supporters thought and felt, not, as Woodings suggests, ’to present the downfall of a suffering king not the overthrow of a harsh despot’.36 Shelley’s portrayal of Charles is more complex and subtle. It shows him to be a loving husband and father and an appreciator of art as a private man, but cruel, autocratic and weak as a ruler. This ambiguity in character was noted by Lucy Hutchinson, for example, who describes Charles approvingly as ’temperate chaste and serious’ but also as ’a worse encroacher upon the civil and spiritual liberties of his people by far than his father’.37 If Shelley’s portrayal of Charles followed Hutchinson, Whitelocke’s eyewitness reports and the King’s own correspondence, this contradiction would be shown by the king’s actions. Yet, if Charles was not to be the hero of the play, there is no reason to suppose that Cromwell would have been. Medwin reports Shelley’s unwillingness to make him so and the information that we have of the play’s structure and the number of characters Shelley planned to include, shows that his intention was in line with Godwin’s suggestion of ’the Lives of the Common-wealth’s Men’, far broader than a mere conflict between two personalities.38

  • 39 Catharine Macaulay, The History of England from the Accession of James I to the Elevation of the H (...)

18Quite apart from the struggle between Parliament and King, there were also the struggles within Parliament, for example those between the Presbyterians and the Independents. Macaulay’s History provided Shelley with the necessary background information. She regarded the Independents as carrying the struggle for liberty forward, but, although Cromwell was an Independent, she described him as an ’usurper’. Shelley wanted to give an accurate impression of those opposed to the King who also opposed Cromwell’s rise to power and the erosion of the liberties won by Parliament, but who were not Puritans like Bastwick, Prynne or Leighton. Macaulay and Whitelocke also provided details about the Levellers and the mutiny in the army. These groups were either silenced by Cromwell or silenced themselves for the sake of peace but did not support bringing back the King.39 Like Macaulay, Shelley would have supported neither Cromwell nor Charles. The focus of the play was unlikely to have been upon either, but upon the struggle for liberty and the title, as with Julius Caesar, justified by the train of events caused by Charles rather than his personal story.

  • 40 ’Original Preface’ in Mitford, Works, I, p. 249; Crabb Robinson, p. 143.

19Had Shelley wanted to write a play based on the clash of personalities, he would have structured it as Mitford did her Charles the First (1825) which is set in the days leading up to Charles’s execution and develops incidents revealing the characters of Cromwell and Charles. Mitford was perhaps using self-censorship; she later felt she had been ’unjust to the memory of a great man’ and that her ’drawing of Charles would have been much less amiable, and that of Cromwell much more so’ had she portrayed them ’at any other part of their career’. Crabb Robinson thought that she ’sadly profaned […] the great names of the great era’.40 Shelley’s historical research and political views were sufficiently strong to prevent him from making the mistake of similarly compromising himself. His attitude towards the English Revolution and the trial of Charles I is clear from A Philosophical View of Reform:

  • 41 ’A Philosophical View of Reform’, SCVI, p. 967.

By rapid gradation the nation was conducted to the temporary abolition of aristocracy & episcopacy, & the mighty example which, ’in teaching nations how to live’, England afforded to the world of bringing to public justice one of those chiefs of a conspirasy of priviledged murderers & robbers whose impunity has been the consecration of crime.41

20In September 1820, he said of the revolutionaries at Naples:

  • 42 PBSLII, p. 234.

if the Emperor should make war upon them, their first action would be to put to death all the members of the royal family. A necessary, & most just measure when the forces of the combatants as well as the merits of their respective causes are so unequal! 42

  • 43 ’A Philosophical View of Reform’, SCVI, p. 1061.

21A Philosophical View of Reform sets out the case for a redistribution of wealth from the ruling classes to the poor. Shelley is willing for ’a process of negotiation’ which would occupy twenty years rather than risk civil war, but he warns that the Government and the richest class must show their sincerity by granting the demands of the poorer classes.43 Although he wrote this in 1819/20, it is unlikely that his view had changed by the time he came to write Charles the First since, on 29 June 1822, he wrote to Horace Smith essentially what he had stated in that essay:

  • 44 PBSLII, p. 442.

England appears to be in a desperate condition, Ireland still worse, & no class of those who subsist on the public labour will be persuaded that their claims on it must be diminished. But the government must content itself with less in taxes, the landholder must submit to receive less rent & the fundholder a diminished interest, – or they will all get nothing or something worse (than) nothing.44

  • 45 BSMXVI, pp. 235-234.
  • 46 Behrendt, Shelley and His Audiences, p. 224; PBSLII, pp. 164, 201.
  • 47 Kenneth N. Cameron, ’Shelley and the Reformers’, ELH, 12 (1945), 85.
  • 48 Mitford, Works, I, pp. 243-245.

22A note relating to Charles the First (’Monopolies and taxes. See Richard 2d – See Hume 206 & consider the present time’)45 suggests that he regarded the play as a suitable vehicle for expressing his views less explicitly than in A Philosophical View of Reform, which Ollier and Hunt were wary of publishing because of the likelihood of prosecution.46 It would also have reached a wider audience than the reformers. ’To Shelley […] the reform movement was part of a vast sweep of progressive historical forces out of the past into the future of a democratic republic and, beyond that, into a Godwinian equalitarian state’.47 He may have believed, as Mitford did, that, since the facts were already in the public domain, a historical drama based on them would not be refused a licence.48

Scene i

  • 49 Whitelocke, p. 19.

23One can see that Charles the First was intended for the stage from the first scene. This is based on an actual historical event described in detail in Whitelocke’s Memorials. It presents a crowd on stage waiting for, and eventually seeing, a procession of pageantry, the Inns of Court masquers travelling to Whitehall for a masque. The masque was presented in honour of Queen Henrietta, ostensibly to distance the Inns of Court from Prynne’s Historiomastix, since Prynne, a lawyer, by referring to actresses as ’notorious whores’, had allegedly attacked the Queen for taking part in masques. Whitelocke, one of the organisers of the masque, explains that it was also a subtle protest against the corruption of granting monopolies. It included an anti-masque of ’cripples and beggars on horseback with musick of keys and tongs […] mounted on the poorest jades that could be gotten out of the Dirt carts’ and the lawyers had oval chariots to indicate that ’there was no precedence in them’.49

24If Charles the First were written for reading only, it would suffice to present the ideas in speeches and to report the procession. Shelley writes an actual procession with spectators watching and commenting, which, on stage, would work on the visual and aural senses, the sharp contrast between masquers and anti-masquers emphasising the symbolic effect of its application to the state of the country and counterpointing the text.

25The violent speeches of the Puritans, the eagerness of the Young Man, the brutality of the Pursuivant and the disdain of the royal procession show the distance and hatred between the people and their rulers. Shelley had mastered dramatic technique sufficiently to combine three striking effects in a crowd scene: a procession, a masque and the shocking entry of Leighton, who was mutilated in punishment for speaking out against Laud’s policies.

26The crowd comments on what the people thought of their government, but it goes beyond the role of a Greek chorus. There is a dynamic within it, the establishment of a group of lively characters who put the point of view of the people in a play ostensibly about a King, in a rapid, clear exposition. Shelley had originally intended to make the opening scene one of Hampden, Vane, Cromwell and other Parliamentarians about to leave England but being prevented by order of the King. This would have been a dramatically effective opening, but the masque scene changes the focus from the Parliamentarians to the citizens of London. As a result, Shelley introduces the King, Queen, Strafford and Laud and the chief issues of the play in a scene of brilliant spectacle and lively dialogue; what is more, as it has an historical basis, its authenticity adds weight to the fictional dialogue.

12. ’Elliston as George IV’, toy theatre illustration, c. 1820. From David Powell The Toy Theatres of William West (London: Sir John Soane’s Museum, 2004), p. 54.

27Several points of view are put: the uncompromising Puritan, the old man who dislikes the injustices, the young man who enjoys the spectacle and believes the King can be won from his counsellors. Through this the audience discovers the attitude of those with no political voice.

  • 50 Young, ’Others and Mrs. Siddons’, pp. 89-92.
  • 51 Rosenfeld, Scene Design, pp. 97-99, 101-102; Nora Crook now considers incorrect her 1991 identific (...)

28Shelley’s development of the pageantry shows his knowledge of the resources of Covent Garden’s property, musical and scenery painting departments, as he asks for nothing that they could not have delivered. Covent Garden had a large enough backstage to accommodate the pageant through the scenery while the actors in the crowd on the forestage could be heard and seen clearly by the audience. Crowd scenes with amateur extras were used; Kemble had used 240 in Coriolanus.50 In 1820, Covent Garden added to Henry IV Pt 2 a coronation procession based on George IV’s, including scenes created with the help of carpenters by the scene painters, T. Grieve, Capon, Dixon and Pugh: an in depth scene of Westminster Abbey; the cloisters of the Abbey; a banquet in Westminster Hall; and the scene outside ’with tiers of painted spectators’. They had also painted New Palace Yard, the Palace of Westminster, Westminster Council Chamber and a Gothic library based on St. Stephen’s, and had the expertise to accurately depict the Banqueting House where the masque took place. Shelley undoubtedly realised the dramatic irony of placing the scene where Charles was executed in 1649.51

  • 52 Cox and Gamer, Broadview Anthology, p. 76; Hunt’s Dramatic Criticism, p. 47; Crabb Robinson, p. 33

29A director today might present such a scene with sound effects, lights, music and the reaction of the spectators but on the Georgian stage such an impressionistic style did not exist. The pageant would have been staged as realistically and spectacularly as possible, but it is doubtful whether real horses would have been used. Covent Garden had used them for the revival of Bluebeard and for Timour the Tartar in 1811 but these were the musical extravaganzas not poetic tragedies. Although equestrian drama was extremely popular, it was not without its critics: Hunt considered the use of horses cruel and ’a mark of corrupted taste’ while Crabb Robinson found Bluebeard ’less impressive than’ the original version ’in spight [sic] of the horses’.52 For a play by a new author, the theatre might have preferred to use models on the backstage for this scene rather than incur the expense of strengthening the stage and hiring and stabling the horses from Astley’s.

13. ’Interior of Westminster Abbey’, toy theatre illustration, c. 1820. From The Toy Theatres of William West, p. 54.

  • 53 Whitelocke, p. 19.

30By 1823, Covent Garden was managed by Charles Kemble who loved authenticity. The huge property department, the Painting Room, Decorative Machinery Room and Wardrobe would have been encouraged to create the stately procession with music, flambeaux, period costumes, pasteboard horses and decorated chariots in the shape of half moons and shells, based on those in Whitelocke’s description of the historical pageant, which were themselves copied from Roman triumphant chariots. This spectacular visual display would supplement the atmosphere Shelley creates by the increasing excitement in the speech of Young Man. One of the chariots carried the musicians with footmen in scarlet livery holding ’huge flamboys’. The first chariot was silver and crimson, the second silver and blue, with matching costumes and plumes for the horses, spangles and silver and gold lace.53

31Shelley enhances the dramatic impact upon the audience in sharing the anticipation of a crowd waiting to see a pageant by allowing them to hear music and see the lights which announce it before it is seen. The Law Student says:

Even now ye see the redness of the torches
Inflame the night to the eastward, and the clarions
Gust to us on the wind’s wave (BSMXII, pp. 289-290, 289-288 reverso)

  • 54 Whitelocke, p. 19.
  • 55 ’6 or 8 first violins, 6 or 8 second violins, 2 tenors, two ’cellos, 3 or 4 double basses, oboe an (...)

32This is based on Whitelocke’s ’the torches and flaming huge flamboys born by the sides of each Chariot make it seem lightsome as noonday’. There were ’clarions’ and other music, including the ’most excellent musicians of the Queen’s chapel’ with their ’40 lutes besides other Instruments and Voices’54 which the Covent Garden orchestra was more than adequate to provide.55

33Shelley shows a mastery of exposition in this scene. With great economy, he sketches in most of the grievances against Charles in the dialogue of the waiting crowd such as the Huguenots Charles failed to relieve at La Rochelle, the ’remnant of the martyred Saints in Rochfort’ (pp. 295-294). The speaking parts in the crowd, the Old Man, Young Man, Citizen and Law Student, are large enough to be included in the Dramatis Personae, but only Bastwick and Leighton are named. The Young Man is disposed to think well of the King and approves of the masque, ’a happy sight to see’ (pp. 317-316), drawing on Whitelocke’s description. The Old Man prophesies of the palace ’nine years more/The roots will be refreshed with civil blood’ (pp. 319-318) and that Charles ’must decline/Amid the darkness of conflicting storm’(pp. 309-308). The Young Man believes ’our country’s wounds/May yet be healed – The King is just and gracious’ but his cry, ’O still those dissonant thoughts’ (pp. 285-284) shows that his delight in pageantry surpasses his interest in politics. They are wellcontrasted characters.

34The discussion of whether the masque is sinful is at the same time a covert criticism of Charles’s government and church. The Law Student asks, ’What thinkest thou of this quaint shew?’ (pp. 287-288). The replies could apply both to art and Charles’s government: the Puritan view, sinful and corrupt in its extravagance and worldliness; the royalist view, harmless in its beauty and escapism, as Henrietta Maria uses art and music in Scene ii. The imagery is reptilian and meteorological. The bishops are ’crocodiles’ (pp. 291-290), the Puritan faith the ’serpent creed’ (pp. 315-314), the adders which ’doff their skin/And keep their venom’ are councillors (pp. 285-284). While Charles is the ’equinoctial sun’ (pp. 309-308) the state of the country is associated with ’inclement air’ ’whirlwind’ and ’the day that dawns in fire will die in storms’ (pp. 311-312). The Puritans, Bastwick, Leighton and ’a citizen’, are given a suitable idiolect to express their sense of being a righteous remnant, such as calling the Queen a ’Canaanitish Jezebel!’ (pp. 321-320), and as in the following exchange:

1st Citizen: The root of all this ill is Prelacy
Bastwick: I would cut up the root
1st Citizen: And by what means
Bastwick: Smiting each bishop under the 5th rib (pp. 291-290)

  • 56 Whitelocke, p. 19.
  • 57 BSMXVI, Note 14, pp. 235-234.

35On the other hand, the masque makes its point through the symbolism of the contrast between the masquers, ’lilies glorious as Solomon’ (pp. 275- 274), and the anti-masque of ’cripples beggars and outcasts/Horsed upon stumbling jades’ (pp. 273-272). 56 Bastwick blames Strafford for the state of the country (’he who poisons/The King’s dull ear with whispered aphorisms/ From Machiavel and Bacon’, pp. 301-300), and has a characteristic distrust of lawyers (pp. 297-296). Shelley noted that the lawyers were ’among the boldest assertors of public liberty’, and also opposed the ’austere & odious temper of the puritans’.57

  • 58 Qtd in MWSJ, p. 256n.

36Shelley’s indictment of the tyrannical rule of Charles is made visually clear when ’A Pursuivant’ enters calling ’Room for the King’ (pp. 305- 304). Although the audience would realise the necessity of having such an official at a procession, it reveals metaphorically the constant interruption of the lives of ordinary people in England by commands to give way to the King’s wishes. Mary Shelley describes seeing ’the Emperor of Austria […] preceded by an officer, who rudely pushes the people back with a drawn sword’ when the Emperor visited Rome in 1818.58 The actions would also recall the violent breaking up of peaceable gatherings in England such as the Peterloo massacre. The word ’pursuivant’ is not used in Whitelocke, but Shelley may have taken it from Shakespeare’s Henry VIII and Fletcher’s A King and No King. Cancelled lines show that he had in mind more aggressive, insulting commands and possibly was trying to choose the right phrases: ’Thou ragged insolence’, ’Fall back’, ’Knave’, ’off with you’, ’Keep from the gate’ (pp. 305-304, 303-302).

  • 59 de Marly, Costume on the Stage, p. 68.

37After the Pursuivant made an effective gap in the crowd, the actors forming the richly costumed royal procession would have entered through one of the proscenium doors and proceeded across the stage to the other door, the entrance to the Banqueting Hall. The royal party do not speak and have no contact with the crowd with which they would have formed a striking and colourful contrast. Theatre convention dressed ’common people’ in ’good, earthy brown’ and this crowd would have included Puritans, dressed in accordance with old prints in black and white with tall hats.59

38The procession introduces the King and Queen, Strafford, Laud and Sir Henry Vane the Elder, the Earl of Pembroke, Lord Essex and Lord Coventry. Bastwick points them out as they arrive in a Jacobean convention of having notables pointed out by onlookers, as in Shakespeare’s Henry VIII and Troilus and Cressida and Jonson’s Sejanus. However, his tirade against them is interrupted by a sudden shock at the sight of the mutilated Alexander Leighton:

What thing comes here[?]
What image of our lacerated country
Filling the gap of speech with speechless horror
Canst thou be –, art thou?

39his reply:

I was (–), Leighton; what
I am thou seest …

40and the response (possibly by another speaker):

… Are these the marks
Laud thinks improve the image of his Maker
Stamped on the face of man?’ (pp. 295-294, 293-292)

  • 60 MYRVII, p. 3.
  • 61 Pedro Calderón de la Barca, The Physician of his Honour, trans. by Dian Fox with Donald Hindley (W (...)

41The reaction to his appearance shows that, as was the case with the historical Leighton, he has been branded, had his nose slit and his ears mutilated. Shelley wrote an earlier entrance for Leighton and this entrance may be a revision. Leighton’s entry is one of the two dramatic events mentioned in Shelley’s note for ’Act 1st the Mask Scene 1’, and he may have wanted to create the coup de théâtre effected by the earlier entrance.60 This has Leighton, with his mutilated face, entering by the opposite door to that used by the procession at the very moment when the Old Man has pointed out Strafford and turns to indicate Laud (pp. 301-300), the men responsible for Leighton’s punishment. Leighton stands unnoticed by the crowd but not by the audience who would, of course, see him plainly on the fully lit forestage. The contrast between the elegance and richness of the royal party and the victim of their policies creates an anti-masque in itself, and the confrontation of two different processions of oppressor and oppressed is one Shelley uses, although for comic effect, in Swellfoot the Tyrant. This violent image may have been influenced by Calderón, who juxtaposes the sight of a mutilated or dead and bleeding body with the symbol of a conservative and cruel ruler or custom. In, for example, The Physician of his Honour, the physician shows the body of his wife whom he has bled to death in revenge for her supposed (not actual) infidelity, covered in blood, while, in The Schism in England, Anne Boleyn’s beheaded body is brought before King Henry.61

  • 62 A King and No King, II. ii. 1-74, ed. by George Walton Williams in Dramatic Works in the Beaumont (...)

42In Shakespeare’s and Fletcher’s crowd scenes, the crowd characters have only a few lines and are easily swayed by a Coriolanus or Mark Antony; the main characters are rulers or wouldbe rulers. The subjects of Arbaces in A King and No King do not wait in vain for a good word from their King,62 but the royal party in Charles the First do nothing to acknowledge their subjects. Shelley breaks wholly new ground by setting the silence of the lords against the voice of ordinary people who state their own views, supported by their experience of life and their religious beliefs.

Scene ii

  • 63 Cameron, The Golden Years, p. 416.
  • 64 Macaulay, II, 455; Whitelocke, p. 43.
  • 65 BSMXVI, pp. 225-224.

43This scene unfolds the characters of those in the procession and, as Cameron says, Shelley ’gives a vivid picture of a tyrannical cabal intent at maintaining its own despotic rule no matter what the cost to the country’.63 It was based on the report of an actual conference produced at Strafford’s trial.64 Shelley made a note of the relevant pages in Hume and Whitelocke.65

  • 66 Christopher Hill, The Century of Revolution (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 13, 49, 52-55.

44Like the first scene, it conveys an enormous amount of historical material economically through dialogue and development of character. The characters of the King and Queen are shown in their speeches to the Deputation from the lawyers who have come to receive thanks for the masque. The King compares himself to Christ in ’the sharp thorns that deck the English crown’ (pp. 269-268). The Queen first claims a role in governing England (’my work/The careful weight of this great monarchy’) thereby implying that it is her kingdom, but then suggests it is not by comparing it unfavourably with France (pp. 267-266). Her tearful opposition to a Parliament reveals her manipulation of the King, her desire to lead him to a French despotism and her lack of sympathy for the people. This is in contrast to Queen Katherine, in Henry VIII, who protests against taxing the people (I. ii. 47-51) and pleads for Buckingham when he is accused of treachery (I. ii. 109-110, 171-175). Shelley may have seen Henry VIII, Katherine being another favourite part of Siddons, and he certainly read it in 1818. Just as with the references to Macbeth in The Cenci, Shelley alluded to plays which the Covent Garden audience knew, and Queen Henrietta’s words, ’the fool of late/Has lost all his mirth’ (pp. 165-164) are reminiscent of Hamlet I. ii. 314 after the throne of Denmark has been usurped. The historical Charles had usurped not the throne but the rights of the people, having ruled without Parliament for 12 years, imposed cruel punishments, implemented unfair taxes such as Ship Money, and abused the system of Wards of Court.66

45Shelley establishes Charles’s ruthlessness as a ruler by showing him giving orders for expeditions against Ireland and Scotland, for heavy taxation and further oppression through the Star Chamber (pp. 252-248). Charles’s complaint that he was forced to ’arm/My common nature with a kingly sternness’ (pp. 237-236) shows that these decisions were his own, rather than as a result of being led astray by his advisers as the Young Man claimed. Shelley reveals the weaknesses in Charles’s ambiguous personality. He allows Archy to be punished by Laud, despite his traditional licence as fool and, as the audience would have known, his words to Strafford, ’My word is as a wall/Between thee and this world of enemy’ (pp. 225-224), were to prove worthless. This ensures that Charles personifies the ’bad and weak’ ruler who rules over ’bad and wea’ men of Shelley’s ’Bonaparte’ sketch. Yet Shelley also shows his positive characteristics, such as his generosity and wit. His dialogue with the Queen shows their mutual affection, interest in music and painting and pride in their children.

46Shelley reveals Laud’s lack of humour and fanaticism directly, when he and Strafford are outraged at Archy, and indirectly when the King compares Laud to his supposed opposite, the Puritan, Prynne. In a couple of lines Shelley delineates the practical Cottington. Cottington is concerned to raise money for Charles but does not seem to realise that the purpose of taxation is a ’scourge’, since the cost of raising taxes is more than their value, and, when Strafford offers to return all his wealth to the King, he comments dryly, ’All the expedients of my lord of Strafford/Will scarcely meet the arrears’ (pp. 195-194).

  • 67 BSMXII, pp. xlviii-xlix.

47The vivid jester character of Archy upstages all the others, enlivening the scene and undercutting the pomposity of Laud and Strafford. Archy does more than weave ’about himself a world of mirth/Out of the wreck of ours’ (pp. 245-244). He is the thread running through the scene which weaves together the King and the Court and the people, exiting and re-entering. He might also have been the weaver of music throughout the play. His final appearance in the play as we have it is his song, ’Heigho, the lark and the owl’ (pp. 159-158), a counterbalance to the touching exchange between the King and Queen which follows his exit. Crook has suggested that the song ’A Widowed Bird’ is Archy’s comment on Henrietta’s taste in music: Archy’s song is English while the Queen has ordered ’airs from Italy’ to sing and play on the lute.67 This has a contemporary counterpart in a musical taste which preferred the Covent Garden English operas to the Italian at the King’s Theatre.

48The juxtaposition in Shelley’s note of ’Archy the K’s fool/The scene of the mask of the Inns of Court’ (pp. 76-77) may be coincidental, but if Archy had been intended to appear in that scene it would have revealed his connection to the people. As it is, he shares their way of thinking. Shelley requires a character in the scene to act as a link between the King and the people and show him what they are thinking and was perhaps intended to undercut what is said at court by presenting the people’s view. Archy is not discharged for his insult to Laud as the historical Archibald Armstrong was, but sent to ’stand outside in the rain’ (pp. 245-244), a metaphor for the state of the country. He reports more rain tomorrow, the mice waiting to catch the cat, Strafford, and the bankruptcy of Laud’s hopes to ’enter the new Jerusalem in triumph’, using the imagery of the anti-masque, the ’stinking ditch […] dead ass, rotten rags and broken dishes’ (pp. 167-166). The Queen calls these cryptic remarks ’the echoes of our saddest fears’. Her suspicion of Archy, whom she would be ’loth to think/Some factious slave had tutored’ (pp. 165-164) emphasises the suspicion underlying the court. Archy’s story of the three poets who were to found a ’gynaecocoenic & pantisocratic’ Commonwealth shows a parallel between the period of Charles I and the 1790s when Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey were to have founded a colony on the banks of the Susquehanna River (pp. 181- 180). Shelley may have planned to give Archy the device of prophesying to comment on Cromwell and other events and their contemporary relevance.

  • 68 Medwin, Life, II, p. 166.
  • 69 Calderón, Schism, pp. 75-78, 149.

49Medwin suggests, probably correctly, that Shelley based Archy on Pasquin in The Schism of England and intended to have given him ’a more than subordinate among his dramatis personae’.68 Shelley finished reading The Schism shortly before starting research on Charles the First. Like Archy, Pasquin is banished from the palace by a worldly churchman, offers parables on kingship and makes prophetic statements. Archy uses imagery of eyes and blindness while Pasquin has a story about the blind man giving light to others. However, Archy’s close relationship with the King is more akin to that between Lear and his Fool, whose similar attempts to warn his king with witty prophecies are also ignored.69

50Charles accepts the wisdom of Archy’s advice but ignores it when he warns against preventing Hazelrig, Hampden, Pym, Vane and Cromwell from leaving the country – ’If your Majesty were tormented night and day by fever, gout, rheumatism and stone and asthma and you should reason these diseases had secretly entered into conspiracy to abandon you, should you think it necessary to lay an embargo on the port by which they meant to dispeople your quiet kingdom of man?’ (pp. 179-178) – picking up Charles’s own imagery of ’humours/Of a distempered body that conspire/ Against the spirit of life’ (pp. 235-234). When Charles remarks, ’The sheep have mistaken the wolf for their shepherd, my poor fellow’, he also ignores Archy’s reply, ’And the shepherd the wolves for the watch dogs’ (pp. 173- 172). Yet there is an understanding between Archy and the King shown by an exchange of wit:

Archy: What think you that I found instead of a mitre?–
King: Vane’s wits perhaps
Archy: Something as vain… (pp. 167-166)

  • 70 David Hume, The History of England from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688, 1 (...)
  • 71 Stuart Curran, ’Shelleyan Drama’ in The Romantic Theatre, pp. 68-70.

51It is not possible for Archy to have this relationship with the King’s advisers, to whom he appears as a threat. A witty and prophetic dialogue with Laud, developed from the historical Archibald Armstrong’s quip, ’Who’s fool now, my Lord?’ 70 emphasises the mirror-imagery Curran sees in the play. Archy is an image of reflection, as he ’mocks and mimics all he hears’.71 Taking up ’Mark you what spirit sits in St. John’s eyes’, Archy remarks:

Pray your Grace, look for an unsophisticated eye, as those just come from the outside of this empty world which sees everything upside down. You who are wise will discern the shadow of an idiot in lawn sleeves and a rochet setting springes to catch woodcocks in haymaking time. (pp. 263-262)

52Laud (’You who are wise’) may see the reflection of himself, a wise man who is a fool in his setting of traps and suspicions, in the eyes of a fool. But Archy is a fool who is also a wise man with ’owl eyes’ which see better and further. He refers to the wellknown Civil War image of ’the world upside down’ and goes on to warn of that coming war by suggesting that a devil ’throws a sword into the left hand scale for all the world like my Lord of Essex’s there’ (pp. 263-262, 261-260). Essex was later to lead the Parliamentarian army.

53Archy’s bold and contemptuous attitude is shown when Strafford threatens him with whipping. His retort, ’If all turncoats were whipped poor Archy would be disgraced in good company’, refers to ’the apostate Strafford’ himself (pp. 259-258). These exchanges are dramatically effective in presenting a tense confrontation on stage between the powerful courtiers and the lowborn but intelligent Archy, which would have been emphasised by the costume: Laud in his ecclesiastical robes, Strafford richly dressed and Archy with his traditional jester’s garb.

  • 72 BSMXVI, pp. 227-226.
  • 73 BSMXII, p. 254n.

54The head of the deputation in Shelley’s source was the royalist Finch, whom he describes in his reading notes as ’a mean, rascally lawyer’, responsible for prosecuting Hampden.72 Shelley replaces him with Hampden’s counsel, St. John, later a leading Parliamentarian, which emphasises the masque’s subversive intention. St. John’s political position is made clear by his riposte to the Queen, ’Madam, the love of Englishman can make/The lightest favour of their lawful King/Outweigh a despot’s treasury’ (a bold reference to her brother, King of France, pp. 265-264). Crook discusses whether the lines ’We humbly take our leave/Enriched by smiles which France can never buy’ (pp. 255-254) were to indicate the exit of the Deputation, but considers the dramatic possibility of their remaining so that two actions, that of the Deputation, King and Queen and that of Coventry, Archy, Laud and Strafford, occur simultaneously on stage.73 The farewell lines do not preclude the two actions taking place simultaneously. If the thrones were placed centre-stage and the Deputation exited by the proscenium door after bows, hand-kissing, perhaps backing out, the group, including Coventry could have been placed on the forestage. Coventry could then have observed the spirit ’in St. John’s eyes’ which he could not have remarked upon on such an occasion in the hearing of St. John or the King.

Scene iii

  • 74 Ibid., p. xliv.
  • 75 Ibid., notes through pp. 126-127; Hume, History, VII, p. 216.

55In order not to lose the dramatic momentum, Scenes iii and iv realise Charles’s orders in Scene ii. Scene iii, of which only a dialogue between Hampden and Vane the Younger was written, was originally intended as Scene i,74 and, as such, a great dramatic effect would have been created by the interruption of the farewells of the wouldbe emigrants by the order to remain. This effect is partially lost by transposing it to Scene iii, as the audience would have seen Charles issue the order in Scene ii. Scene iii establishes the ’characters and intentions’ of ’Pym, Hazlerig Cromwell, young Sir H. Vane, Hampden &c.’ Their speeches carry the dramatic and emotional impact. The manuscript shows Shelley’s difficulty with the speeches in a number of fresh starts; they would undoubtedly have been revised and shortened. The opening speech by Hampden develops into a lively dialogue with Sir Harry Vane the Younger with constant interruption. This is a more natural and more exciting form than set speeches, one that Shelley had developed since writing The Cenci. Hampden’s reasons for leaving England are opposed by Vane, who feels it is better to remain and ’endure’ (pp. 71-107). This incident is reported in Hume, but may not have taken place and, if it had, Vane could not have been present. Shelley’s introduction of him suggests his desire to have a character represent the Parliamentarians but who refused to compromise with either Charles or Cromwell.75 Shelley also needed at least one female character as interesting as the Queen on the Parliamentarian side and he introduces ’Cromwell’s daughter’ here, perhaps intending her to figure as much as these male characters to show the prominence of women among the Republicans.

  • 76 MYRVII, p. 337; BSMXVI, Note 38, pp. 221-220; SPP, pp. 525-526.

56After reading Hume’s description of women petitioning Parliament, Shelley noted ’Xist levelled the sexes’, which reflects his own view in A Defence of Poetry.76

  • 77 R. Douglas Brown, The Port of London (Lavenham: Terence Dalton, 1978), p. 54.
  • 78 For the popularity of nautical drama and its scenery see Booth, English Melodrama; BSMXII, p. 126.
  • 79 BSMXII, pp. 86-87.
  • 80 CCJ, p. 143; Wit Without Money, II. v, ed. by Hans Walter Gabler, in Beaumont and Fletcher, VI.
  • 81 The Boat on the Serchio, ed. by Nora Crook, KSR, 7 (1992), 83-114 (pp. 91-92).

57Before 1800, when the West India Docks were begun, all ships left London from the Pool of London.77 It was usual for passengers to take a boat from Whitehall downriver to embark there and Scene iii takes place at Whitehall Steps since Shelley refers to the ’towers of Westminster’. The scene would have capitalised on the popularity for nautical drama while keeping the action at Whitehall throughout this first act, offering a fine opportunity for the scene painters to paint both Westminster and the Thames with ships and boats.78 The exchange commencing ’Does the wind hold?’ appears a non-sequitur so it may have been intended for another speaker, perhaps another passenger.79 Shelley possibly had a more complex scene in mind including seamen loading the cargo. The Shelleys read and re-read the Beaumont and Fletcher canon, often aloud, so, although he was away when Claire Clairmont noted reading Wit Without Money on 22 April 1820, it is unlikely that Shelley did not know it. In this play, the servants pack the coach with much bustle for the ’Widdow’ to leave for the country but, in the midst of this, she changes her mind and decides to stay and everything has to be unloaded. The stage business is therefore a visual counterpoint which emphasises the turmoil caused by the change of plan.80 The natural verse dialogue carried on between Melchior and Lionel in The Boat on the Serchio, interrupting each other, as they and Dominic load stores and set sail, also points to Shelley’s capability of creating such a scene.81

Scene iv

58In Scene iv, Shelley has given the scene painters the opportunity to create yet another spectacular setting well within their capabilities: the Star Chamber. The results of Charles’s policies are now enforced by Laud, Strafford and

  • 82 Macaulay, II, p. 154.
  • 83 Whitelocke, p. 26; BSMXVI, pp. 233-232.
  • 84 Ibid., p. 75.
  • 85 BSMXVI, pp. 235-234.
  • 86 Whitelocke, p. 75.

59Juxon in their function as cruel judges of the Puritans, Bastwick, Prynne and Bishop Williams. This scene would be all the more shocking since Shelley probably intended the audience to recall the mutilated Leighton, following Macaulay’s remark, ’Whilst the terrors of Leighton’s punishment hung yet on the mind of the public, the courage […] of William Prynne, a barrister at law, give rise to a scene of almost equal butchery’.82 Those with a knowledge of the period would have appreciated Shelley’s wit in obliging Prynne, author of Historiomastix, to appear as a character in a play. Bastwick’s defiant stand that his judges are the enemy of his God and State, not he, is based on his actual defence recorded in Whitelocke. This defence is responded to with further cruelty from Laud, only prevented by Juxon’s concern that it might rebound on themselves. Shelley has the ’turncoat Strafford’ point out that Laud owed his advancement to his next victim, Williams. This is an ironical comment, since Williams’s arrest on the basis of stolen private papers Shelley had noted as ’the most odious violation of private correspondance – see Hume 217.’83 It contrasts with the behaviour of the Parliamentarians who excused Whitelocke from duty on the committee which tried Laud since he owed his university education to him.84 Williams is in his way as defiant as Bastwick. The scene successfully makes concrete Charles’s orders in Scene ii, and ’the infernal cruelties of the high commission court’ and, although incomplete, does not need to be much longer.85 Structurally, it would have balanced the trial of the King who also refused to recognise the court which tried him.86

  • 87 MYRVII, p. 330-331.
  • 88 BSMXVI, Note 20, pp. 225-224.

60Shelley wrote no more dialogue for the play, but he prepared a scheme for Act II – commencing with ’Hampden’s trial’ and ending with ’Strafford’s death’87 – and left a number of notes concerning most, but not all, of the events and characters depicted in these two acts. A problem would have arisen in dramatising the number of trials and executions. He could hardly have failed to include the King’s trial –which had good dramatic material and was historically crucial – but in order not to lose dramatic impact by having too many similar scenes he needed to vary the way in which they were dramatised. Strafford’s trial was an important turning point since it showed the King yielding, the increasing confidence of the Parliamentarians and their first significant success. Moreover, Shelley’s note 29, ’Whilocke 42. Vanes paper’, refers to the historical occasion when Vane the Younger produced the documents found in his father’s chest which condemned Strafford.88 As this is a dramatic surprise event ironically parallel to the case of Bishop Williams, it is likely that Shelley also intended to include it in a scene.

  • 89 Whitelocke, p. 42.
  • 90 Macaulay, II, p. 382-389.
  • 91 Whitelocke, p. 46; BSMXVI, Note 25, pp. 227-226.
  • 92 Ibid., p. 46; BSMXVI, Note 30, pp. 225-224.

61Scene painters had created Westminster Hall where Strafford’s trial took place for an earlier play, but Whitelocke’s eyewitness account would have provided them with invaluable additional detail. It describes the red cloth covered forms, rows of Lords, Commons, Ladies of Quality, the ’close gallery’ for the royal family and the ’place made for the Earl of Strafford with a Seat and Room for the Lieutenant of the Tower; and places for the Earl’s secretaries, and for his council to be near him’. Strafford himself is described: ’his habit Black, wearing his George in a Gold Chain… his Person proper, but little stooping with his distemper, or Habit of his Body, his Behaviour exceeding graceful and his speech full of Weight, Reason and Pleasingness’.89 The sense of mounting excitement when the Parliamentarians decide on Strafford’s impeachment is vividly conveyed by Macaulay’s History.90 Although ’Strafford’s death’ rather than his trial was to end the act, this may not have been intended as an execution scene. Shelley’s comparison of Strafford with Cardinal Wolsey suggests that he had heeded Whitelocke’s description of Strafford’s reaction to Charles’s betrayal, when he ’rose up from his Chair, lift up his Eyes to Heaven, laid his hand on his Heart and said, ”Put not your trust in Princes, nor in the Sons of Man, for in them there is no Salvation.”’91 Shelley noted, ’Strafford passes under Laud’s window’, when he said farewell on his way to execution.92 Either incident, or a combination of the action of the first with the words of the second, would both dramatise ’Strafford’s death’ and make a political point about the trustworthiness of kings.

  • 93 MYRVII, p. 326.

62It appears from Shelley’s note ’Hampden’s trial & its effects. Reasons of Hampden & his colleagues fo(r) resistance’ that, rather than dramatise this trial, he intended writing a scene where the issues were debated among the Parliamentarians. His note referring to ’Young Sir H. Vane’s reasons. The first rational & logical, the second impetuous and enthusiastic’,93 suggests that this debate would reveal contrasting characters and opinions and both types of argument. Other viewpoints would need to be heard in a lively and realistic scene and a note ’The King zealous for the Church inheriting this disposition from his father’ indicates possible remarks to be included.

  • 94 Whitelocke, p. 25.
  • 95 BSMXVI, Note 18, pp. 232-233.

63One of the Judges in Hampden’s case, Croke, ’suddenly altered his Purpose and Arguments; and when it came to his turn, contrary to Expectation he argued and declared his Opinion against the King’. His wife had said, ’That she hoped he would do nothing against his conscience, for fear of any Danger or Prejudice to him, or his Family: and that she would be contented to suffer Want, or any Misery with him, rather than be an Occasion for him to do, or say anything against his Judgments and Conscience’.94 Shelley had noted ’Judge Croke alone gives it against ship money. The noble speech of Croke’s wife’. 95 This suggests that he believed her support to be a crucial factor, and possibly intended breaking up the all-male debates and displaying the spirit of the Republican women with a domestic scene based on this.

  • 96 Ibid., Notes 35 and 37, pp. 222-223.

64Shelley no doubt envisaged the five-act tragedy customary on the stage of his day. Act I lays the foundation of the play, showing Charles in power and commenting on his reign until 1638; it seems that the timescale is 1634- 1638. Act II covers the period when the people begin to take matters into their own hands: Hampden’s defiance, the Scottish war and the trial of Strafford (1638-1642). Act III was therefore likely to show the two sides in conflict, but Shelley made only two notes towards it. Note 35, ’Impeachment of the 5 members & Lord Kimbolton […] His coming in person’ refers to Charles’s intrusion into Parliament to attempt to arrest five members, an event, one of the precursors of the Civil War, far too important to be omitted from the play. The other note, ’The Queen prepares to retire into Holland. The people hate her; she had born the most contumelious usage with silent indignation’ suggests a scene showing her in exile.96

  • 97 BMSXVI, pp. 4, 5.
  • 98 Whitelocke, p. 250; Macaulay, IV, pp. 317-318; Hume, VIII, pp. 125-126.

65The following years were civil war, and most dramatic events took place on the battlefield. Too many battle scenes in a play may become monotonous, but they can be relieved by interspersing domestic scenes or scenes of conferences. Shelley made a note of the Treaty of Uxbridge,97 and perhaps planned to dramatise the conference which led to it. He could have followed Shakespeare’s Henry VI, with its succeeding short battles, or encompassed several in one long battle scene with intervening short dialogues to show how events had travelled forward in time. He could have used reportage, which he does in Hellas, or highlighted events which took place on the battlefield, but not the battle, as he does in the ’Bonaparte’ sketch. His political and moral views might have led him to include scenes showing the courage and principled defiance of Sir John Hotham at the gates of Newcastle or, as he had read Lucy Hutchinson’s memoirs, the beleaguered John Hutchinson at Nottingham As the centre of a five-act tragedy, the climax of Act III shows the positions of power reversed. In this play, therefore, Act III should show Charles in the power of the people. Shelley’s sources, with variations, give the story of the King’s arrest by Cornet Joyce, when the Cornet is said to have interrupted the King at a game of bowls. When the King asked for Joyce’s commission, the Cornet indicated his troopers which the King acknowledged to be a very effective one. The story has dramatic elements: the game of bowls and its interruption; the contrast between the King’s nonchalant, witty attitude and Joyce’s ’plain russet’ manner, emphasised visually by their costume; the culmination in the arrest which makes the reversal of fortunes visually clear.98 This ending for Act III would have been consistent with the time-span suggested for the play by the events covered in the first two acts.

66The economy with which Shelley had planned those would have been unbalanced if the rest of the play were to have consisted of an overlong treatment of the King’s trial and death, which would have been reserved for a big scene, perhaps to open Act IV. If Act III were to cover, approximately, the first Civil War (1642-1647), it can be assumed that Acts IV and V would each have covered similar periods of activity: Act IV, the Commonwealth years up to Cromwell’s seizure of power, including the second and third civil wars (1649-1653), and Act V, the Protectorate and the Restoration (1653-1660). A play which focussed on the liberty of the people and those who fought for it would need to show Parliament’s attempts to establish this, for instance by abolishing the House of Lords, and to demonstrate the continuation of this struggle for liberty after its defeat, first by Cromwell’s dissolution of Parliament and then by the Restoration, through the fates of those who would not compromise. Shelley may have planned to carry the action on until the Restoration or even after if it were to include Vane’s death.

  • 99 Crook, ’Calumniated Republicans’, pp. 152-156.
  • 100 BSMXII, pp. 70-71n.

67Shelley had already used ’Young Sir Harry Vane’ to argue with Hampden in Cromwell’s presence (I. iv). He intended to use him to argue the passionate and principled view against the reasonable in Act II and Vane had to appear in the scene of Strafford’s trial. Although no one central character is established in Act I, Crook has shown that there are suggestions that Vane might be the hero.99 It is also possible that Shelley intended his audience to see the hero as a collective one, since he includes so many of the characters who heroically advanced the cause of liberty. His knowledge of the writings of Milton, Hutchinson, Ludlow and Vane himself show he was well able to do this. Shelley indicates the presence of ’Cromwell’s daughter’ – possibly a composite of daughters which included one who ’opposed to his apostasy from republican ideals’ and another who ’deplored his ruthlessness’ – and Vane in Act I. This suggests an intention to use the character of the daughter and that of Vane to present an oppositional viewpoint.100 Shelley, the creator of Cythna and Beatrice Cenci and the admirer of Antigone, did not believe that a woman could not play a major role.

Performance

  • 101 Charles E. Robinson, ’Percy Bysshe Shelley, Charles Ollier, and William Blackwood: The Contexts of (...)
  • 102 PBSLII, pp. 423, 436, 258.
  • 103 Gisborne & Williams, p. 123.
  • 104 OSA, p. 335.

68Shelley became discouraged about the popularity of his writing, partly because he was unaware of the financial problems which made the Olliers unable to pay for the copyright of Charles the First and thought it was because they thought the play would not sell.101 This mood was evident in May 1822, when he wrote to Horace Smith that living near Byron meant ’the sun has extinguished the glowworm’, and in June 1822, when he told Gisborne that it was ’impossible to compose except under the strong excitement of an assurance of finding sympathy in what you write’, but his statements about giving up writing were not irrevocable. In January 1821, he wrote to Ollier, ’I doubt whether I shall write more’, but went on to compose Adonais, Hellas, Fragments of an Unfinished Drama, Charles the First and other poems.102 Williams said, ’It is exceedingly to be regretted that S. does not meet with greater encouragement. A mind such as his powerful as it is requires gentle leading’.103 Shelley therefore had the sympathy during the composition of Charles the First which he claimed to lack, although he perhaps found this well-meant interest inhibiting rather than encouraging, was distracted by the socialising and constrained by his desire to ’contend’ with Byron. He usually did not discuss his work with others, The Cenci being the only work Mary Shelley was involved in before its completion.104 Even though he must have been aware, since Williams was, that Charles the First was potentially a much greater play than Werner, the apparent ease with which Byron wrote would have been vexing to a writer working on something he had planned over two years before. But the importance of the subject and the amount of research and writing he had completed would have been an incentive to return to it, which he might have done the following autumn, had he lived.

  • 105 Wyndham, Covent Garden, II, p. 208.
  • 106 William Havard, King Charles the First: An Historical Tragedy (Totnes: O. Adams [1775]); Boaden, M (...)

69Had he then finished it and sent it to Covent Garden, it would have arrived most opportunely. By 1823, Charles Kemble was the manager and Macready was their leading tragedian.105 The parts of Charles and Cromwell would have appealed to them as suitable vehicles for their own talents: Kemble’s good looks and gentlemanly presence made him the obvious choice to play the King while Macready could show his skill at playing a scheming politician, later revealed in Lytton’s Richelieu. As children, the Kembles had appeared in Havard’s King Charles the First, a play sympathetic to the King and royal family, in their parents’ touring company.106

  • 107 Mitford, Works, I, p. 243.
  • 108 PBSLII, pp. 372, 219-220.

70In 1825, Mary Russell Mitford was commissioned to write Charles the First, ’originally suggested to me by Mr. Macready, whose earnest recommendation to try my hand on Cromwell, was at a subsequent period still more strongly enforced by Mr. Charles Kemble’. Mitford points out that Covent Garden would not have commissioned her play had they ’foreseen any objection […] on the part of the Licenser [then Larpent] or the Lord Chamberlain’.107 Had Shelley’s play been delivered to Covent Garden in 1823, it would have forestalled hers. As he did not expect the problem of censorship to arise, Kemble may have accepted Shelley’s statements that it was ’not coloured by the party spirit of the author’ and was written ’without prejudice or passion’, and Shelley’s sympathetic treatment of the King as a person rather than a monarch might have led him to believe so.108 Harris had already recognised the quality of The Cenci, and Shelley’s thorough research methods would have appealed to Kemble’s desire for accuracy.

  • 109 Cameron, The Golden Years, p. 412.
  • 110 Representative British Dramas, ed. by Montrose J. Moses (Boston: Little, Brown, 1920), p. 6.
  • 111 Mitford, Works, I, p. 244.

71Cameron, although he thought Shelley ’intended to give what he believed was a true portrait of the king and to present royalist views fairly’, has argued that ’it is clear […] that if performed before a contemporary audience [Charles the First] would have been understood as advocating parliamentary reform or republicanism’.109 Even if Larpent had issued a licence, there was the example of James Sheridan Knowles’s Virginius, set in ancient Rome, which was only allowed on stage in 1819 after the Prince Regent himself had cut out ’some references to tyranny’.110 It therefore seems inevitable that, even if Shelley’s play had been accepted, it would not have been performed at Covent Garden.111

  • 112 Shellard et al., The Lord Chamberlain Regrets, pp. 29-31, 52n.; Worrall, Theatric Revolutions, pp. (...)

72A performance of Shelley’s Charles the First in 1822/1823, then, might have caused the controversy Cameron suggests and Colman feared with Mitford’s play. On the other hand, a different route may have been taken. Martin Shee’s Alasco was submitted to Covent Garden in 1824 but Colman demanded changes unacceptable to the author, who withdrew it and published it. It was ’compressed and arranged as a Melo-Drama at the Surrey’ in April 1824 and in December performed in New York. Given the wide interpretation by this time of the term ’burletta’, the alterations may have been less destructive than Worrall believes; certainly it seems so since George Bartley, Covent Garden’s stage manager, complained of a ’minor theatre’ being able to perform ’the play’. Both the Surrey and the New York theatres used the prohibition at Covent Garden to publicise the play.112 Shelley may not have wished his play to be altered, but, like Byron with Marino Faliero, he may not have been able to prevent its performance. Shelley’s notebooks indicate the way in which his play reflects his research, the accuracy of which gives it its richness and veracity. Whatever discouragement he had suffered and whatever disappointment he expressed, Shelley’s confidence in his powers of developing an idea dramatically had grown by the time he wrote Charles the First. He had become adept in writing for the technical requirements of the late Georgian theatre, and incorporating elements of Jacobean drama which its audience would recognise. In The Cenci he kept his cast small and confined the scenes chiefly to interiors, but in Charles the First he had developed his dramatic techniques sufficiently to write two outdoor scenes, one with a spectacular procession, and another in a busy Thames locality. His cast of at least twenty-four, and probably more, calls for wide differentiation of dialogue and characterisation to allow them to be remembered by the audience, and in this too he was apparently succeeding.

Notes

1 Bodleian MS. Shelley adds e. 17, pp. 33-51, 52 rev., 55 + stray leaf adds c. 4, fol. 136 rev., 185 rev.-93b rev.(BSMXII: 70-109, 114-115, 120-123, 144-327); Bodleian MS. Shelley adds e. 7, pp. 255 rev.-237 rev. (BSMXVI: 220-239); Huntington MS HM 2111, fols *1r-*5r (MYRVII: 322-339).

2 Jewett, Fatal Autonomy, p. 210; R.B. Woodings, ’Shelley’s Sources for Charles I’, MLR, 64 (1969), 267-275; Behrendt, Shelley and His Audiences, pp. 234-235.

3 Mary Shelley, ’Note on Poems of 1822’, OSA, p. 676.

4 Jewett, Fatal Autonomy, p. 210.

5 PBSLII, pp. 394, 436.

6 OSA, p. 676-677; such difficulties are also noted in Scrivener, Radical Shelley, p. 297.

7 Medwin, Life, II, pp. 163, 164.

8 PBSLII, pp. 388, 380; OSA, p. 482.

9 Medwin, Life, II, p. 164; PBSLII, p. 294; MWSLI, p. 200.

10 See MWSJ, pp. 654, 660.

11 The first three were used by Shelley in his notes in BSMXVI. Shelley’s reading of the last three is here inferred from Mary’s having read them after their arrival (MWSJ, pp. 374-375, 408); Eikon Basilike and Reliquiae Sacrae in Walter E. Peck, Shelley, His Life and Work (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1927), pp. 361-364.

12 PBSLII, p. 269.

13 Gisborne & Williams, p. 123.

14 Wolfe, II, p. 198.

15 PBSLII, pp. 219-220.

16 Wolfe, II, p. 352; PBSLII, pp. 269, 354, 357, 372.

17 Cameron, The Golden Years, p. 412; Scrivener, Radical Shelley, p. 297; Nora Crook, ’ ”Calumniated Republicans” and the Hero of ”Charles the First” ’, KSJ, 57 (2007), 141-158 (p. 143).

18 Curran, Annus Mirabilis, p. xvii.

19 Mary Shelley, ’Note on Poems of 1822’, OSA, p. 676.

20 PBSLII, pp. 21, 39-40.

21 MWSJ, pp. 215-223.

22 MWSJ, pp. 293-302; PBSLII, pp. 120, 154; For Lucan’s influence, see David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics 1627-1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 23-62; for Shelley’s reading of Lucan, see MWSJ, p. 660.

23 MWSJ, p. 298.

24 The Manuscripts of the Younger Romantics, Percy Bysshe Shelley. Vol VI: Shelley’s 1819-1821 Huntington Notebook: A Facsimile of Huntington MS. HM 2176 ed. by Mary A. Quinn (New York: Garland, 1994), p. 181.

25 MYRVI, pp. 349-348, 347-346.

26 MWSJ, pp. 678; SCVI, p. 958.

27 ’A Philosophical View of Reform’, SCVI, pp. 980-981.

28 ’Stephen Burley, ’Shelley, the United Irishmen and the Illuminati’, KSR, 17 (2003), 18-26 (pp. 19-20, 23); MWSJ, pp. 309, 309n.

29 MWSJ, pp. 219, 295.

30 Andrew Gurr, The Shakespeare Company, 1594-1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 147, 188.

31 MWSJ, pp. 310-312, 317, 333.

32 MWSJ: for Macaulay see pp. 326-331, for Clarendon see p. 331, for Godwin see pp. 313-314.

33 MWSJ, p. 370.

34 Woodings, ’Shelley’s Sources’, pp. 268-269; Nora Crook, ’Calumniated Republicans’, p. 146. The edition of Hume which Shelley used consists of slim portable volumes suitable for someone who liked to work outside as Shelley did.

35 BSMXVI, pp. 235-234; Cameron, The Golden Years, p. 412; BSMXII, p. xxix.

36 Woodings, ’Shelley’s Sources’, p. 273.

37 Lucy Hutchinson, Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson (London: George Bell & Sons, 1906), pp. 84-85.

38 Medwin, Life, II, p. 165; PBSLII, p. 21.

39 Catharine Macaulay, The History of England from the Accession of James I to the Elevation of the House of Hanover, 8 vols (London: printed for Edward and Charles Dilly in the Poultry, 1771), IV, pp. 267, 303-310, V, p. 201n.; Bulstrode Whitelocke, Memorials of the English Affairs from the Beginning of the Reign of King Charles the First to King Charles the Second His Happy Restauration (London: Tonson, 1732), pp. 396-397.

40 ’Original Preface’ in Mitford, Works, I, p. 249; Crabb Robinson, p. 143.

41 ’A Philosophical View of Reform’, SCVI, p. 967.

42 PBSLII, p. 234.

43 ’A Philosophical View of Reform’, SCVI, p. 1061.

44 PBSLII, p. 442.

45 BSMXVI, pp. 235-234.

46 Behrendt, Shelley and His Audiences, p. 224; PBSLII, pp. 164, 201.

47 Kenneth N. Cameron, ’Shelley and the Reformers’, ELH, 12 (1945), 85.

48 Mitford, Works, I, pp. 243-245.

49 Whitelocke, p. 19.

50 Young, ’Others and Mrs. Siddons’, pp. 89-92.

51 Rosenfeld, Scene Design, pp. 97-99, 101-102; Nora Crook now considers incorrect her 1991 identification, based on a reading of a doubtful word as ’bargates’, of the location of the spectators as Temple Bar, BSMXII, pp. 319-318, a sufficient objection being that it would require the Queen to walk along the Strand to the City of London with her ladies; personal communication, November 2004.

52 Cox and Gamer, Broadview Anthology, p. 76; Hunt’s Dramatic Criticism, p. 47; Crabb Robinson, p. 33.

53 Whitelocke, p. 19.

54 Whitelocke, p. 19.

55 ’6 or 8 first violins, 6 or 8 second violins, 2 tenors, two ’cellos, 3 or 4 double basses, oboe and flageolet, first and second flutes, first and second clarionets, first and second horns, first and second bassoons, trombone, trumpet and bugle, pianoforte, bells, carillons or small bells, and kettledrums’, Wyndham, Covent Garden, I, pp. 336-337.

56 Whitelocke, p. 19.

57 BSMXVI, Note 14, pp. 235-234.

58 Qtd in MWSJ, p. 256n.

59 de Marly, Costume on the Stage, p. 68.

60 MYRVII, p. 3.

61 Pedro Calderón de la Barca, The Physician of his Honour, trans. by Dian Fox with Donald Hindley (Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1997), p. 207; Pedro Calderón de la Barca, The Schism in England, trans. by Kenneth Muir and Ann L. Mackenzie (Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1990), p. 185.

62 A King and No King, II. ii. 1-74, ed. by George Walton Williams in Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, gen. ed. Fredson Bowers, 9 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970-1994), II.

63 Cameron, The Golden Years, p. 416.

64 Macaulay, II, 455; Whitelocke, p. 43.

65 BSMXVI, pp. 225-224.

66 Christopher Hill, The Century of Revolution (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 13, 49, 52-55.

67 BSMXII, pp. xlviii-xlix.

68 Medwin, Life, II, p. 166.

69 Calderón, Schism, pp. 75-78, 149.

70 David Hume, The History of England from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688, 10 vols (London: Christie & Son, 1819), VII, p. 220.

71 Stuart Curran, ’Shelleyan Drama’ in The Romantic Theatre, pp. 68-70.

72 BSMXVI, pp. 227-226.

73 BSMXII, p. 254n.

74 Ibid., p. xliv.

75 Ibid., notes through pp. 126-127; Hume, History, VII, p. 216.

76 MYRVII, p. 337; BSMXVI, Note 38, pp. 221-220; SPP, pp. 525-526.

77 R. Douglas Brown, The Port of London (Lavenham: Terence Dalton, 1978), p. 54.

78 For the popularity of nautical drama and its scenery see Booth, English Melodrama; BSMXII, p. 126.

79 BSMXII, pp. 86-87.

80 CCJ, p. 143; Wit Without Money, II. v, ed. by Hans Walter Gabler, in Beaumont and Fletcher, VI.

81 The Boat on the Serchio, ed. by Nora Crook, KSR, 7 (1992), 83-114 (pp. 91-92).

82 Macaulay, II, p. 154.

83 Whitelocke, p. 26; BSMXVI, pp. 233-232.

84 Ibid., p. 75.

85 BSMXVI, pp. 235-234.

86 Whitelocke, p. 75.

87 MYRVII, p. 330-331.

88 BSMXVI, Note 20, pp. 225-224.

89 Whitelocke, p. 42.

90 Macaulay, II, p. 382-389.

91 Whitelocke, p. 46; BSMXVI, Note 25, pp. 227-226.

92 Ibid., p. 46; BSMXVI, Note 30, pp. 225-224.

93 MYRVII, p. 326.

94 Whitelocke, p. 25.

95 BSMXVI, Note 18, pp. 232-233.

96 Ibid., Notes 35 and 37, pp. 222-223.

97 BMSXVI, pp. 4, 5.

98 Whitelocke, p. 250; Macaulay, IV, pp. 317-318; Hume, VIII, pp. 125-126.

99 Crook, ’Calumniated Republicans’, pp. 152-156.

100 BSMXII, pp. 70-71n.

101 Charles E. Robinson, ’Percy Bysshe Shelley, Charles Ollier, and William Blackwood: The Contexts of Early Nineteenth-Century Publishing’ in Shelley Revalued: Essays from the Gregynog Conference, ed. by Kelvin Everest (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1983), p. 200.

102 PBSLII, pp. 423, 436, 258.

103 Gisborne & Williams, p. 123.

104 OSA, p. 335.

105 Wyndham, Covent Garden, II, p. 208.

106 William Havard, King Charles the First: An Historical Tragedy (Totnes: O. Adams [1775]); Boaden, Mrs. Siddons, I, p. 17.

107 Mitford, Works, I, p. 243.

108 PBSLII, pp. 372, 219-220.

109 Cameron, The Golden Years, p. 412.

110 Representative British Dramas, ed. by Montrose J. Moses (Boston: Little, Brown, 1920), p. 6.

111 Mitford, Works, I, p. 244.

112 Shellard et al., The Lord Chamberlain Regrets, pp. 29-31, 52n.; Worrall, Theatric Revolutions, pp. 54-56.

Table des illustrations

Légende 12. ’Elliston as George IV’, toy theatre illustration, c. 1820. From David Powell The Toy Theatres of William West (London: Sir John Soane’s Museum, 2004), p. 54.
URL http://books.openedition.org/obp/docannexe/image/765/img-1.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 68k
Légende 13. ’Interior of Westminster Abbey’, toy theatre illustration, c. 1820. From The Toy Theatres of William West, p. 54.
URL http://books.openedition.org/obp/docannexe/image/765/img-2.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 85k

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