Costume designs for the 1885 production of As you like it at London's St. James's Theatre [graphic]

1885.

56 items : watercolors, pen and ink

paper

This is a PRELIMINARY RECORD. It may contain incorrect information. The "FAST ACC" number is a temporary call number. Please email catalog@folger.edu for assistance.

FAST ACC 271037 (quarto)

From dealer's description: "Folio (302 × 205 mm). Manuscript title page with list of characters to verso, 56 original costume sketches in pencil, watercolour and pen, each mounted. Contemporary half morocco album. Joints worn, but secure. Bookplate of Louis Becker. ORIGINAL COSTUME DESIGNS CREATED FOR THE 1885 PRODUCTION OF AS YOU LIKE IT AT LONDON’S ST JAMES’S THEATRE, where the management team of John Hare and actors W.H. & Madge Kendal put on a series of versions of Shakespeare plays characterised by high production values and elaborate and historically accurate costumes. Wingfield based his costumes on images of the fifteenth-century court of Charles VIII of France, and the sets included a replica of the Chateau d’Amboise. The Hare/Kendal team was much praised at the time for improving the moral and artistic tone of the London theatre but this production attracted severe criticism from Oscar Wilde, who in his essay ‘The Truth of Masks—A Note on Illusions’ (Intentions, 1891) on costumes in Shakespeare, singled out, in particular, Orlando’s costume as being grotesquely gorgeous for a character living as an outlaw in the woods. He notes that Wingfield’s justification for the costume, that Orlando would have been constrained by sumptuary laws from dressing down is patently absurd. Wilde was not always so negative about Wingfield, using his lectures on costume history, written to accompany an exhibition in 1884, as source material for his important essay ‘The Philosophy of Dress’. Lewis Wingfield also designed costumes and sets for The Winter’s Tale (1887) and Romeo and Juliet (1884), collaborating with Mary Anderson at the Lyceum Theatre to ‘create superb and detailed visual effects in her productions’ (Newey & Richards), but this was only one aspect of his rich and varied professional life. By birth an Irish aristocrat, he was by turn a novelist (The Curse of Koshin - A Chronicle of Old Japan, 1889), a travel writer (Wanderings of a Globe trotter in the Far East, 1889), a painter who exhibited at the Royal Academy between 1869-75, an actor on the London stage, a reporter and war correspondent. His dispatches from the Siege of Paris in 1870 during the Franco- Prussian war were published in the Times and Telegraph, and it was a sickness picked up when embedded with the British Army in Sudan in 1884 that probably led to his early death at the age of 49." Ordered from Justin Croft Antiquarian Books, D9297, 2019-03-21, email quote.

271037