Page:Costume, fanciful, historical, and theatrical (1906).djvu/285

CHAP. XX stockings and shoes, with buckles at his knees and feet, and a tie wig, or in the scarlet and gold-laced uniform of a British general of George III.'s reign! And fancy Lady Macbeth in enormous hooped petticoats and huge flounces, as Mrs. Yates dressed her; yet, when she said, "Give me the daggers," and took them in her hands, as an old print shows her doing, no one in the audience recorded a thought that the action was incongruous with the costume, or the costume with the tragedy. What a contrast to the superb green and gold glories of the costume of Miss Ellen Terry's Lady Macbeth, immortalised by Sargent! But there was no attempt in those days to give the audiences anything better. When Benjamin West asked Garrick why he did not initiate reform in stage-costume, his answer was that the public would not allow it. "They would throw a bottle at my head," added the great actor, and he found it easier to elude the bottle—at least, that particular bottle.

I believe it is to John Kemble we are indebted for the first careful study of dressing a part on its merits, even though he did not allow himself too near an approach to accuracy, lest, as he said, the public should call him in disgust "an antiquary." So he did not hesitate, in playing Macbeth, to wear a great bonnet of the 42nd Highlanders—the Black Watch. But when Sir Walter Scott saw this, he was so shocked at the anachronism that he plucked out the big plume and replaced it with a single broad eagle's feather, the time-honoured symbol of the Highland chieftain.

It was, however, to the antiquarian researches of R. J. Planché, for Charles Kemble's production of King John at Covent Garden in 1823, that our