How did Planche decide to design costumes for his fairy-tale plays?
Most often, following a reasoning he also used with Shakespeare, such as in “The Merchant of Venice,” he dressed the stories in the time and culture in which they were written (France c. 1700). His idea was that when an author does not specify another time or culture for a story, that author has his or her own time or culture in mind. However, he sometimes took his designs elsewhere. For instance, viewing “Blue Beard” as a reflection of a real person of Flemish and French history, he costumed the play in the medieval style which the real personage would have known. In “The Invisible Prince,” he takes a general hint in the d’Aulnoy story that the action takes place in some tropical country (unspecified) to allow him to place the action in Mexico during the age of the Spanish Conquista. Again, in “The King of the Peacocks,” action which is supposed to take place at the farthest end of the world is moved to China to allow for a particular kind of costume. “Beauty and the Beast” is set in
