‘Van Dyck in Action’: Dressing Charles I for the Victorian Stage

Abstract

In 1872, the then relatively unproven young actor, Henry Irving, took to the stage of London’s Lyceum theatre to play the part of Charles I in a new play by William Gorman Wills. The play’s phenomenal popularity was Irving’s first major triumph as a tragedian, but what few historians have explored was that his success was largely predicated, not just upon his acting ability, but on the visual aspects of his performance, particularly his appearance as Charles I, and his costumes, which were characterized by his biographer Bram Stoker as akin to watching ‘Van Dyck in action’. This notion, that Irving was the incarnation of Charles I as painted by Van Dyck, came to dominate the visual and verbal rhetoric of the production. However, looking in detail at images of the king, and of Irving’s costumes, this article breaks down this myth, and questions the validity of such a metaphor, arguing that Irving was not so much portraying Van Dyck’s king as a Victorian idea of how Charles should appear, which chimed perfectly with the expectations of his audiences, and ensured his success.