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I'm teaching _Love's Labor's Lost_ for the first time, using the Signet
edition by John Arthos.  Arthos includes his own essay "_Love's Labor's
Lost_ on the Stage," in which he discusses Peter Brook's "'landmark'
production" of 1946 in which Brook mixes his anachronisms, dressing everyone
in 18th-century costume except Constable Dull, who is dressed as a Victorian
policeman.  Arthos implies that Brook was the first to use anachronistic
costuming in this way (or perhaps I'm just inferring it), as opposed to, for
example, Welles's famous production of _Julius Caesar_ as thoroughly  modern
fascists.  This mixing of anachronisms for Renaissance and medieval drama
seems to be the rule now, if the  Washington, D.C., Shakespeare Theatre and
the Shenandoah Shakespeare Express are any measure, and I wonder if it
really was Brook's innovation.  Does anyone know of any earlier modern
performance practice along these lines?  Is there any evidence that it is a
sui generis rebirth of original practice in early drama productions (e.g.,
mixing togas and pumpkin pants)?

Alan Baragona
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"A man who is not a liberal at twenty has no heart.  A man who is not a
conservative at forty has no brain."    Winston Churchill

"VMI: where the heartless are taught by the brainless."  Alan Baragona