The costume designer for the 1827 Paris performances may have been James Robinson Planché, the man who first introduced historically accurate costumes to the theater, although this is merely a speculation. Before 1823, Shakespeare's plays had always been performed in contemporary dress, no matter what the setting of the play. Some productions purported to have authentic dress, but this was not the case. For example, in an eighteenth century production of King Lear, it is said that some actors wore Old English dress. However, what passed for Old English costuming then was "a picturesque mixture of Tudor, Elizabethan and Caroline costume" (Williamson 163).

Planché worked as a dramatist at the Covent Garden Theatre in London under the management of Charles Kemble in the 1820s. No one knows whether it was Kemble or Planché who came up with the idea, but Planché was put in charge of designing historically accurate costumes for Covent Garden's November 1823 performance of King John. Although he had no previous experience with costume design, Planché took his job very seriously, scrupulously researching to make sure every detail of the costuming (and weaponry) was historically correct (165). In fact, other members of the theater company complained because Planché had nearly taken over the production and had spent what was normally only spent on Christmas and Easter productions. If it hadn't been for Kemble's enthusiastic approval and his willingness to wear the historically accurate, if not strange looking, costumes, Planché would have had a revolt on his hands (166-67).

The success of King John was so great that Planché went on to design costumes for all of Shakespeare's histories, as well as for Hamlet, MacBeth, King Lear, Othello, As You Like It, The Merchant of Venice, and The Merry Wives of Windsor (Buczkowski). Planché also published a book about his costume design in King John entitled, Dramatic Costume: Costume of Shakespeare's Historical Tragedy of King John.

According to Paul Buczkowski, perhaps the foremost scholar on Planché:

His approach to costume and set design was almost obsessively historical, for he felt that accurate portrayals of the past were both more interesting and more artistic than either traditional or fanciful costume designs. Even so, he did not go so far as later nineteenth-century designers would. For instance, in dressing Hamlet, he chose a date in the eighth century based upon inferences regarding the relation of the Danish court to England, the presence of Christianity in Denmark, and the war between Norway and Poland. Having done so, he realized a real Danish prince of that time would have dressed in scarlet, rather than Shakespeare's "sable." Planché lamented the necessity of so dressing the character, but he maintained Shakespeare's concept, unlike some later theatrical personalities, such as Sir Henry Irving, who dressed the prince in historically-accurate (if un-Shakespearean) scarlet with gold trim, omitting the reference to the color of Hamlet's clothing. Curiously, given his general insistence that costume should reflect character and plot, Planché did not suggest that Hamlet's rejection of the royal color and its attendant prestige could represent part of the prince's general melancholy.

Given the extremely bare amount of information about theatrical costume design, it is hard to determine whether the costumes for Hamlet in the 1827 Paris performances were designed by Planché. Other than that Hamlet was dressed in black, there is no information about the other costumes that Planché designed for the play.

The dress that Harriet Smithson is wearing in the lithographs of the performances (see left) suggest that Planché did not design all of the costumes for sure. Her dress is strikingly similar to those fashionable in Germany, France and England in the 1820s.

The costumes worn by the king and queen in Hamlet seem Turkish in nature, especially the Turban-like hats. For these characters at least, it appears that they were given the best-fitting fancy costumes the Odéon had to offer.

Charles Kemble, however, may be wearing a costume designed by Planché. It appears to be black and fur trimmed, and Kemble probably had played the role previously at Covent Garden.

It seems that the Paris audience of 1827, however, was not so much moved by the costuming as they were by the acting itself. No review of the performance even mentions the costumes or sets, but the force of Smithson's mime and the sheer culture shock of Shakespeare's deviance from classical theater is repeatedly written of. According to one scholar of the 1827 performances, "In terms of décor, the English theatre contributed nothing. The stage sets were taken from stock, and their inadequacies were often all to obvious. There was little comment on the costumes, which would have been provided by the principal actors themselves for the main characters. Visually the most important, if indirect, reflection of the performances was in the work of Delacroix..." (Raby 99).