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, for the (largely antipathetic) age that followed and for Elinor Glyn who used her imaginative engagement with the Stuart court to fashion Hollywood royalty in the 1920s. Yet, Charles II does more than just provide a vocabulary of “It-ness” (ceremony, religiosity, contradictory messages of vulnerability and strength). As several significant film treatments in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries demonstrate, this king on the screen offers writers, viewers, actors, and directors a way to interrogate the nature and effect of the kind of celebrity he himself helped establish.
