Even from its inauguration early in Her Majesty's long reign, the Victorian pictorial mode of staging Shakespeare's plays generated its own reaction. At Covent Garden late in 1823 Charles Kemble (1775-1854) presented King John in early thirteenth-century decor, with (claimed the playbill) 'the whole of the Dresses and Decorations being executed from indisputable Authorities, such as Monumental Effigies, Seals, Illumined MSS,&c.'. At the Haymarket in March 1844 Benjamin Webster (1798-1882) presented a production of The Taming of the Shrew in which the players who arrive in the Induction were made up to resemble Shakespeare, Ben Jonson and Richard Tarlton: however implausible the assembly of these individuals, their respective appearances were copied from old paintings and prints. The two productions were thus the result of the same kind of study of pictorial and plastic images that had survived for centuries; and in fact they had been designed by the same person, J. R. Planché (1795-1880).

The crucial difference between the two productions lay in the point of application of antiquarian research. The 1823 production represented the dramatic time and place in which a Shakespeare play was set, while the 1844 production represented the theatrical time and place in and for which a Shakespeare play was written.