If, like me, what you knew about the Peterloo massacre before seeing Mike Leigh’s film Peterloo is that it inspired Percy Bysshe Shelley’s famous poem “The Mask of Anarchy,” then like me you’re going to be incredibly bummed when nobody ever intones the magnificent lines of the refrain:

Rise like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number —
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you —
Ye are many — they are few.

It seems downright perverse that there’s no dramatic use of the poem in the end. Even the marketers of the film knew how fabulous it would be, and emblazoned the glorious lines through the trailer in huge gold letters flowing across the screen between shots of mayhem and slaughter.