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

genius to develop freely, Scott suggested, without ‘access to any models of which the
commanding merit might have controlled and limited his own exertions. He followed the path
which a nameless crowd of obscure writers had trodden before him’. 7
Exactly the same might be said of the mostly self-taught antiquaries who took their often
oblique course along the byways of learning. Scott identified himself, and was identified by
others explicitly with Shakespeare, and Britton did so by association. This chapter argues that the
engagement with Shakespeare between 1790 and 1850 may be said to mark the apotheosis of
romantic antiquarianism. Not only did the life, work and physical image of Shakespeare engage
it in every aspect, but in its responses to Shakespeare antiquarianism entered into the mainstream
of romantic thought. It might be argued that German idealism was an oblique influence on other
areas of antiquarian enquiry, but in the study of Shakespeare it is a direct and acknowledged
point of reference. The romantic critics, Schlegel and Coleridge in particular, were explicitly
invoked by antiquaries while the critics in their turn, notably Hazlitt writing about Scott,
addressed the effects of antiquarianism on the appreciation and performance of the plays.
The great departure in the Romantics’ criticism of Shakespeare, as it derived from
German idealism, beginning with Herder’s essay of 1773, was the suggestion that his works
should be seen in the context of history, measured by the standards of their own day, rather than
those of classical Greece. A nation should, Herder wrote: ‘Create its drama out of its history, out
of the spirit of the age, manners, opinions, language, national prejudices, traditions, and
pastimes, even out of carnival plays and puppet plays.’ 8 Shakespeare had done this and his
sources, by Herder’s account, were just those ‘manners and customs’ that were at the heart of the
antiquarian enterprise. Shakespeare might therefore be established as an honorary antiquary.
More important, however, was the underlying assumption that the past had its own criteria which
should be understood and accepted as valid. It was the same principle which was applied in the
antiquarian vindication of medieval architecture. Milner bemoaned Wyatt’s modifications to
Salisbury cathedral in very similar terms to those in which Scott deplored the alterations made to
Shakespeare’s texts as ‘interpolations and alterations’that ‘marred and disguised’ the original in
7 Scott, ‘Essay on the Drama’, p.197.
8 Herder, Shakespeare, p.25.
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