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

and the exhibition at the British Museum of the Kesselstadt death mask, a dubious artefact that
was, if nothing else, the manifestation of an overwhelming and widely-felt desire to look beyond
Shakespeare’s works to find out the face and personality of the author, to see the genius ‘so
grandly stamped on his high brow and serene features’. 6
At every point on this spectrum from Malone’s ten volumes to Ludwig Becker’s peculiar
relic, from annotation and exegesis to romance and forgery, antiquarianism was at the heart of
the enterprise. Thus it was as critically correct as it was historically implausible for John Faed, in
his reconstruction of the company assembled at the Mermaid Tavern, to place William Camden,
the founding father of British antiquarianism, directly opposite Shakespeare across the table, in
an attitude of intense scrutiny [fig: 45].
Figure 45 Shakespeare and his Friends at the Mermaid Tavern, by John Faed, c1850
For antiquaries in this period Shakespeare’s works were both a subject and a source,
while he himself became a kind of patron saint. The post-Enlightenment rehabilitation of his
works marked an acceptance of much of the material the antiquaries were concerned with: the
local, the vernacular, the history of the Middle Ages. Personally too they could sympathise with
an author who was not classically educated and whose lack of formal learning might be seen as
his strength. It was his very ignorance of the Aristotelian rules of drama that had allowed his
6 Schoenbaum, Shakespeare’s Lives, p. 469.
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