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

see the past in its own terms. The logic of this position, however, meant that Douce had to apply
the same criteria to Shakespeare himself. Knowing what he did about sixteenth-century drama he
could not condone Pope’s attempts to attribute the anachronisms to the publishers of the plays.
‘Nothing… could have been less judicious’ for Shakespeare if not ‘more culpable in this respect
than most of his contemporaries’, nevertheless wrote in an age when antiquarianism was in its
infancy and history was to be bent to the tastes and purposes of posterity. 44
In the notes that follow Douce often sounds like Shakespeare’s irritated schoolmaster,
pointing out the absurdity of mince-pies in Troilus and Cressida or a clock in Julius Caesar and,
while he is prepared to overlook the Great Bed of Ware in Twelfth Night ‘because it is referred to
as in England’ his paragraph on King Lear opens with a tetchy: ‘We have here a plentiful crop of
blunders.’ 45 It is a moot point whether it is Shakespeare or his commentator who is in fact the
promised ‘object of amusement’ at this point. 46 In the next essay, however, ‘On the clowns and
fools of Shakespeare’, while Douce is critical of Shakespeare’s failure to allocate his fools
clearly to any of the nine historical categories Douce has worked out for them, his subject matter
is so rich and the interdependence of documentary and literary sources so great that the balance
shifts again. As Douce interweaves references from Middleton’s Mayor of Quinborough with
Shadwell’s The Woman Captain and an inventory of goods from the ‘ancient company of Saint
George at Norwich’ in his attempt to determine what fools wore, on and off stage, literature
begins to serve antiquarianism. 47 The very fact that ‘former theatrical managers exhibited with
fidelity on the stage the manners of their own times’ is no longer a fault but an asset, for
theatrical records can supply a gap in the history of non-theatrical costume. 48 Here in the
interplay between textual and documentary evidence in Douce’s writings and later in Planché’s,
a new subject emerges. Theatre history is added to the antiquarian repertoire.
44 Douce Illustrations of Shakspeare, 2, p.284.
45 Douce Illustrations of Shakspeare, 2, p.295.
46 Douce Illustrations of Shakspeare, 2, p. 284.
47 Douce Illustrations of Shakspeare, 2, p. 319.
48 Douce Illustrations of Shakspeare, 2, p. 317.
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