ABSTRACT
In his tour-de-force study It, Joseph Roach makes the connection between the celebrity of Charles II and film-culture "It-ness", but he stops short of suggesting that the Stuart King himself still compels our attention in the way he did for his own contemporaries. The emotional, dramatic language would appeal to any actor trying to establish a character, especially one who is perusing a script that highlights the obligation Charles felt to his father's memory. Roach chronicles some of the seedier aspects of restoration celebrity culture centred on the fascination with the King. Tony Palmer's England, My England also begins with a fatherless child, adopted, as it were, by Charles II. Uglow, like Roach, emphasizes the theatricality of Charles's reign, which is a commonplace, given his love of the stage and the players on the stage, but their joint sense seems to be that Charles's type of theatricality was a specifically cinematic theatricality.
