Charles Macready’s King John: Victorian Theatre and Double-voiced Medievalism

Abstract

During the nineteenth century, there was a revival of interest in the Middle Ages, which was considered the birth of English culture and identity in opposition to Classical Antiquity. This movement was called the Medieval Revival. It was expressed in several areas of knowledge and artistic manifestations, including in the theatre. Charles Macready’s reconstruction of Shakespeare’s King John in 1842 at Theatre Royal Drury Lane in London is inserted in this context. Macready’s production brings together two perspectives of the Middle Ages on stage: the more negative Renaissance view along with the Victorian idealised outlook, cha0racterising a phenomenon I call double-voiced medievalism, based on Richard Schoch’s concept of double-voiced historicism