In ‘Theatre in the 1850s’, Kate Newey writes about the ‘mapping of London as an international entertainment centre’ and looks at the ways in which theatre began to create a new collective national identity, based in the act of spectatorship, and in what was seen on stage, even when that included the Irish Dion Boucicault’s adaptation of a French melodrama. Newey reminds us of the persistent popularity of melodrama, and of the use of the theatre as a site for discussion of contemporary events, and gives an extended reading of Charles Kean’s work with Boucicault on his drama, The Corsican Brothers (1852), which went on to become one of the most popular plays of the century. The chapter also considers the links between the stage and realist and sensation fiction, the internalisation of British theatre culture, and how nineteenth-century theatre became part of an international, commercial, cultural matrix.

This Interlude between Part 1 and Part 2 of the book briefly considers the use and delayed currency of Shakespeare in the aftermath of the Russian War of 1853–56 (also known as the Crimean War), an unpopular conflict that nevertheless did not dampen the appeal of rousing militarism in Britain or position Shakespeare as a cultural figure through whom critical perspectives about the conduct of war could be presented. The Interlude concentrates on Charles Kean’s post-war Henry V at the Princess’s Theatre, London, in 1859, a production that does not contemporize the play’s events, but rather historicizes and distances them from its own time, reflecting a Victorian nostalgia for medieval history. It shows how the conditions of war and developments in war reporting can affect (and delay) the use of theatre for immediate wartime commentary. Shakespearean productions can be as much about forgetting or displacing contemporaneity, as invoking the specific contexts of a conflict or crisis, a pattern that recurs in the second part of the book.