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

Illustrations of Shakspeare and its mixed reception are revealing of the ambivalent relationship
between antiquarianism, public opinion and perceptions of Shakespeare at the beginning of the
century.
The book was not Douce’s first venture into Shakespearean commentary. George
Steevens (1736-1800), had published some of his ‘remarks’ in the 1790s. Douce’s methods were
closer to those of Malone, however, who ‘examined the records, transcribed the documents, and
weighed the evidence’ than the occasionally maverick Steevens. 18 His antiquarianism was, like
Lingard’s, (and Malone’s) literally conservative in that he sought to establish and preserve the
integrity of his material, but radical in the seriousness with which he took that material, on its
own terms. His dealings with Steevens, if nothing else, would have made him familiar with the
controversies among Shakespeare scholars and between them and their enemies. Douce
accordingly began his book with a Preface designed, if not to ward off hostility then at least to
put up a pre-emptive defence by drawing that elusive line between pedantry and elucidation, or
‘black-letter learning’ and ‘true scholarship and a laudable curiosity’ as he put it, at a point
convenient for his own purposes. 19 Leaning on the short tradition at his disposal he quoted
Steevens’s remark that ‘ “If Shakspeare is worth reading, he is worth explaining” ’ as summing
up every necessary argument for exegesis. In spite of which he took a passing swipe at those
who rejected any kind of commentary and who ‘with all their affectation’ were probably the least
learned of readers and ‘undoubtedly remain so’. 20
With his fellow commentators Douce was only slightly more irenic. He worked his way
in the Preface through his predecessors, according praise to Steevens and Malone but only a
certain respect to Johnson, whom he did not name and could not from his own point of view
much admire, ‘because he was certainly unskilled in the knowledge of obsolete customs and
expressions’. 21 Thus he positioned himself firmly with that romantic, post-Enlightenment view
of Shakespeare as a man of his time, to be seen in his social and linguistic context. In order to
establish this, Douce explained, he could afford no aesthetic squeamishness. This was not a
18 Schoenbaum, Shakespeare’s Lives, p.178.
19 Douce, Illustrations of Shakspeare, 1, p.x.
20 Douce, Illustrations of Shakspeare, 1, p.vi.
21 Douce, Illustrations of Shakspeare, 1, p.vii.
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