Born, in London, 27 Feb. 1796. Articled to a bookseller, 1810. Upwards of seventy dramatic pieces produced, 1818–71. Married Elizabeth St. George, 26 April, 1821. F.S.A., 24 Dec. 1829 to 1852. Rouge Croix Pursuivant at Arms, Heralds’ Coll., 13 Feb. 1854; Somerset Herald, 7 June 1866. Civil List Pension, June 1871. Died, in Chelsea, 30 May, 1880. Works: [exclusive of a number of dramas, burlesques, and extravaganzas, mostly printed in “Lacy’s Acting Edition of Plays,” or in Cumberland’s or Duncombe’s “British Theatre”]: “Costumes of Shakespeare’s King John” (5 pts.), 1823–25; “Shere Afkun,” 1823; “Descent of the Danube,” 1828; “History of British Costumes,” 1834; “A Catalogue of the collection of Ancient Arms … the property of Bernard Brocas,” 1834; “Continental Gleanings” [1836?]; “Regal Records,” 1838; “Souvenir of the Bal Costumé” … at Buckingham Palace,” 1843; “The Pursuivant of Arms,” 1852; “A Corner of Kent,” 1864; “Pieces of Pleasantry for Private Performance” [1868]; “Recollections and Reflections” (2 vols.), 1872; “William with the Ring,” 1873; “The Conqueror and his Companions” (2 vols.), 1874; “A Cyclopædia of Costume” (2 vols.), 1876–79; “Suggestions for establishing an English Art Theatre,” 1879; “Extravanganzas,” ed. by T. F. D. Croker and S. Tucker (5 vols.), 1879; “Songs and Poems,” 1881. He translated: Hoffman’s “King Nutcracker,” 1853; Countess d’Aulnoy’s “Fairy Tales,” 1855; “Four-and-twenty Fairy Tales selected from those of Perrault, etc.,” 1858; and edited: H. Clark’s “Introduction to Heraldry,” 1866.
Personal
This active spirit, so varied in accomplishments, so deeply imbued with taste, so full of sweet and genial fancy, has at last passed away. The latter part of his life was unfortunately embittered by family misfortune. But he bravely took to his home a widowed daughter and eight children, for whose sake he still toiled, and struggled with manly fortitude and Christian kindliness. Suffering, also, from excruciating disease, was hard to bear in his old days. But his genial spirit still shone forth throughout all.
It is only very recently that a well-known face is missing from the tables of those who love the society of artists, and, old as he was when he passed away from the scenes of his successes, his death caused surprise, for he had looked for so many years the same, his cheery spirits never seemed to flag, and he appeared to have defied the inevitable. This was Planché. I knew him well and met him often. I suppose that in his long journey through life, although he met with great successes, he never made an enemy; and though many of his contemporaries might be named whose literary fame is greater, how few have caused more amusement! He was, moreover, fortunate in being associated with Madame Vestris, who seemed to be created to embody upon the stage, and even to give additional charm to his refined and elegant burlesques.
Planché was, when I first knew him, a little bent, bowed, and shrivelled old gentleman, who in a second could twist his features so as to resemble a chattering monkey. He was one of the old school of good manners, obviously a courtier, and at times a veritable “pocket Polonius.”
General
Whatever the origin of Planché’s pieces, there can be no doubt that he exercised a considerable influence on the English stage. The two most characteristic qualities of his writings were taste and elegance. Breadth of tone in comedy—power which might in most cases have been justly looked on as fustian, and sentiment which chiefly displayed itself in maudlin clap-trap—had been the main attributes and aims of most of the dramatists of the first quarter of the century. Planché introduced into his works elements which gave a fresh direction to the comedy writers of the period. True, they were redolent of hair-powder and bedecked with patches; but they had a pleasant smack of elegance and grace; and, although not displaying the breadth of low comedy, the tendency to fine heavily-phrased writing, or the platitudes of artificial sentiment which were the prevailing characteristics of most of his immediate predecessors, they were accepted with delight by the public. In adopting and adapting French models he had imbued himself with the spirit of the French school, and almost founded a new school of his own. “The natural,” somewhat heightened in colour by the stage rouge, which is more or less necessary to all dramatic doings, and the due proportions of which were well taught by his foreign prototypes, took the place of stereotyped artificiality.
In the first years of the reign of Victoria the stage had in Mr. James Robinson Planché, a delightful writer of brilliant extravaganzas, fairy pieces with grace of invention and treatment, and with ingenuity and beauty in the manner of presentment…. Mr. Planché distinguished himself as a student of ancient life and manners, whose antiquarian knowledge, joined to his good taste, made him a valuable counsellor upon all points of dramatic costume.
He was an assiduous student of archæology…. A great deal that Planché has written is not literature. In even his best comedies his style can hardly be called brilliant, while his characters are drawn on more or less conventional lines. But the dialogue is dramatically effective and the plots are neatly constructed. The imbroglio in “The Follies of a Night” (perhaps the most entertaining of his comedies), is managed with delightful address. It is in his extravaganzas, however, that his peculiar talent shines out most brightly. These little pieces cannot properly be described as burlesques. Their writer had a vein of poetry as well as a frolic wit; he never stooped to vulgarity or brainless buffoonery. He adhered as closely as he could to the lines of the old stories which he cast into dramatic form. His fairy plays are brimful of humour and graceful fancy, ringing with mirth and music, lightly touched here and there with the colours of romance. There blows through them a breath from the country over the hills and far away, not, it is true, from the moonlight-coloured dreamland of the olden fairy poetry, but from the powdered and perfumed and delightfully modish world of gruff, bluff kings, and bombastic chancellors, and foppish wiseacres, and shrewish queens, and machinating cooks, and charming oppressed princesses, and town-witted elves—the world into which Thackeray leads us when he introduces us to Rosalba and Bulbo.
From 1818 onward Planché was the author, adapter, translator, and what not, of innumerable—they certainly run to hundreds—dramatic pieces of every possible sort from regular plays to sheer extravaganzas. He was happiest perhaps in the lighter and freer kinds, having a pleasant and never vulgar style of jocularity, a fair lyrical gift, and the indefinable knowledge of what is a play. But he stands only on the verge of literature proper, and the propriety, indeed the necessity, of including him here is the strongest possible evidence of the poverty of dramatic literature in our period. It would indeed only be possible to extend this chapter much by including men who have no real claim to appear, and who would too forcibly suggest the hired guests of story, introduced in order to avoid a too obtrusive confession of the absence of guests entitled to be present.
More graceful extravaganzas than those written for the Lyceum by Planché were never seen on any stage. The versification was always neat and admirable, the rhyming faultless, and the puns of the very best kind.
