Antiquaries in the Age of Romanticism: 1789-1851 - Queen Mary ...

e performed in historic costume. ‘All illusion’ Herder writes, ‘is accomplished by means
of… authenticity.’ 45
It is a seeming paradox that is, in the theatre, a simple truth. Beyond the theatre
however, and the romantic rediscovery of history extended well beyond the theatre, it
proposes a subjective interaction with the past in which truth may be found anywhere on
a scale from complete authenticity to the purest illusion. Scott, as a young man, learned
German in order to read the Sturm und Drang poets. Later, Schlegel’s writings on
Shakespeare were widely read in Britain and are cited by John Britton, writing for a
popular audience in 1818. 46 This thesis is less concerned, however, to establish the extent
of direct influence from Herder and the German school as to suggest the ethos which
enabled antiquarianism in the romantic period to run the full gamut from fact to fiction.
Romantic antiquarianism might be many things; comical, tragical, sinister,
scholarly, political, pedantic, mystical, bohemian, even occasionally female. This was an
age when the antiquary could be anyone from an utterly respectable clergyman, such as
John Lingard, to, in the case of the brothers who became known as the Sobieski Stuarts,
fraudulent claimants to the British throne and when, as in these instances, it was the
clergyman who was denounced by the Poet Laureate, Robert Southey, as an enemy of the
state, while the pretenders’ book was bought and much enjoyed by Queen Victoria. The
Sobieski Stuarts’ next production, a supposedly autobiographical novel Tales of the
Century opens with an epigraph that is a reverse variant of Herder and which relies
heavily (too heavily in the event) on the power of artistic truth to create historical
authenticity: ‘It is credible, because it is improbable’. 47
45
Herder, p. 49.
46
Britton, Remarks on the Life and Writings of William Shakespeare, p.9.
47
Sobieski, John and Charles Edward Stuart, Tales of the Century, p. xii.
21