Frederick Fox Cooper’s 1869 stage adaptation transforms Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe into a thrilling Victorian spectacle of tournaments, sieges, outlaws, fire, and chivalric conflict. This modern edition restores the complete play, revealing how Astley’s Theatre reshaped Scott’s medieval romance for popular audiences through action, comedy, music, and patriotic drama onstage again.
“If Rome be earthly, why should any knee with bending adoration worship her? She’s vicious … Therefore ‘tis fitter I should reverence the thatched houses where the Britons dwell.”
“Vengeance! Vengeance! I will yet be avenged! In the meantime, let me seek an hour’s repose!”
“Thou mayest be the envy of the world during the day, but night must come, and at night thou must always expect my cheering presence!”
Fans of outlaw stories, if they were ever able to time travel, might travel back to the 1820s and 1830s when Victor Hugo’s outlaw drama premiered.
Distinguished G W M Reynolds specialist, Prof. Louis James, talks about Reynolds’s only known play.
In 1637 Ben Jonson began work on a Robin Hood play, “The Sad Shepherd; or, a Tale of Robin Hood,” and presented an idealised, pastoral outlaw world.
Robin Hood first became an Earl in the 16th century; two relatively unknown plays had a dramatic effect upon later interpretations of the legend.
The folktale of “The Two Children in the Wood” has always been popular with audiences, in spite of its grim content, depicting as it does the death of two children. However, the legend became incorporated into the Robin Hood tradition in the nineteenth century, This post discusses why two very different legends came to be associated.