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

omantic imagination, was also an aspect of the antiquaries’ Shakespeare. 17 The subjective,
narrative engagement with the past, lived out in part at the Musée des Monumens Français, and
in full by the Sobieski Stuarts, reached its apogee in the antiquarian treatment of Shakespeare, in
Scott’s shrine to him at Abbotsford and John Britton’s romantic pilgrimages to Stratford.
Antiquaries were to be found everywhere where Shakespeare was studied or produced,
behind and in front of the scenes in the theatres, in the green room, on the playbill, in the library
and the museum. Of those antiquaries with which this thesis is concerned it was Britton, Douce,
Planché and Scott who most interested themselves in Shakespeare. Douce confined his studies to
the textual and historical and was only tangentially and somewhat uncomfortably in touch with
the theatre, while his friend and protégé Planché, who began his career as a playwright, made the
opposite journey from theatre to library and indeed might be said to have been turned into an
antiquary by his experience of Shakespeare. Scott and Britton were the literary critics. One
hugely influential the other, by his own account, most unjustly ignored. Both saw their own
identities as intimately connected with that of Shakespeare, for whom they helped to create the
face and the biographical context which the early nineteenth century demanded to have. This
account starts with the works and moves on to the life, taking events in an approximately
chronological order.
Francis Douce: ‘authenticated wings…to Mustardseed’
Douce’s Illustrations of Shakspeare and of Ancient Manners: with dissertations on the
clowns and fools of Shakspeare; on the collection of popular tales entitled gesta romanorum;
and on the English morris dance, appeared in 1807, the year of Douce’s appointment as Keeper
of Manuscripts at the British Museum. Neither of these ventures into public life was an
unqualified success. Douce resigned from the Museum in 1811 and one remarkably hostile
review of his book deterred him from publishing anything else for the next twenty-five years. He
was a touchy man but his difficulties were indicative of more than his own temperament and the
17 Herder, Shakespeare, p. 32.
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