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

order to satisfy the taste of a later age and which should be stripped away. 9 Scott indeed draws
an archaeological analogy, comparing the restored text to an ancient statue that had been
excavated and ‘disencumbered from the rubbish in which it had been enveloped’. 10 Southey too
had made just that comparison. 11
The critics were of course, like everyone including the antiquaries, opposed to ‘mere’
antiquarianism, indeed Herder was ‘indifferent to antiquarian detail’. 12 In the study of
Shakespeare, as elsewhere, however, one person’s pedantic footnote was another’s salient fact.
Over the period the staging of Shakespeare favoured ever more historically accurate costumes
and more realistic scenery. It was the completeness of the detail that sustained the theatrical
illusion, ‘the time and place and the fullness of external circumstances that necessarily lends the
whole story substance, durability, and existence’, as Herder put it. 13 The point at which the detail
was felt to overwhelm the substance would vary over time and according to taste among
individual actors, critics, antiquaries and audiences. The counterbalance against which it was
weighed was the corollary of the romantic account of Shakespeare, the timelessness which made
him always of the present. ‘Nobody from reading Shakespear would know,’ Hazlitt wrote, ‘that
Lear was an English king…There are no data in history to go upon; no advantage is taken of
costume, no acquaintance with geography or architecture or dialect is necessary; but there is an
old tradition, human nature -an old temple, the human mind’. 14 The remarks come in the course
of a critique of Walter Scott and Hazlitt drives his argument home on the point that while Lear is
‘a thousand or two years old…yet the tragedy has no smack of antiquarianism in it’. 15
However, it is not the case as Hazlitt implies or as Nicola J Watson has recently argued,
that antiquarianism belonged to only one side of the romantic account of Shakespeare,
‘historicised rather than timeless’. 16 The other Shakespeare who ‘speaks the language of all ages,
peoples and races of men’, a part of each successive age and therefore an expression of the
9
Scott, ‘Essay on the Drama’, p.218.
10
Scott, ‘Essay on the Drama’, p.218.
11
See Chapter 2.
12
Herder, Shakespeare, Introduction, p. xxxvi.
13
Herder, Shakespeare, p.40.
14
Quoted in Watson, ‘Kemble Scott and the Mantel of the Bard’, p.87.
15
Quoted in Watson, ‘Kemble, Scott and the Mantel of the Bard’, p.87
16
Watson, ‘Kemble, Scott and the Mantel of the Bard’, p.73.
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