Professor Richard Schoch, Professor of the History of Culture, Director of the Graduate School for Humanities and Social Sciences, Queen Mary, University of London. In nineteenth-century Britain, the theatre was a powerful agent of historical consciousness because it could realize the past with immediacy greater than that of literature, painting, museum collections or photography. The key means for the persuasive performance of history was archaeologically correct scenery: the precise, detailed recreation (usually in painting, but sometimes in three-dimensions) of specific buildings and architectural remains. Nowhere was this devotion to historically accurate mise-en-scène more apparent than in Victorian productions of Shakespeare, which afforded opportunities to recreate onstage sites ranging from the Tower of London to the Piazza San Marco in Venice. In this lecture, we will look at how the astonishing accuracy of theatrical scenery and the presence of live actors recreating legendary events collectively established the Victorian theatre as a place where the traditional parts of history were reclaimed and restored for a mass popular audience.