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

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Figure 47 Douce's illustrations <strong>of</strong> fools and <strong>the</strong>ir accoutrements<br />

Douce’s engagement with Shakespeare is both detailed and abstract. He f<strong>in</strong>ds <strong>in</strong> <strong>the</strong> plays<br />

what best satisfies him as an antiquary, a source <strong>of</strong> <strong>in</strong>formation and a subject for enquiry, but he<br />

also has his version <strong>of</strong> <strong>the</strong> essential, transcendent Shakespeare. For Douce that transcendence<br />

over time was to be achieved by be<strong>in</strong>g securely located with<strong>in</strong> it. The drama holds <strong>the</strong> mirror up<br />

not to nature but to history which was, for Douce, perhaps <strong>the</strong> same th<strong>in</strong>g. He knew and admired<br />

John Philip Kemble, who had taken over Covent Garden <strong>the</strong> year before Douce’s book appeared<br />

and had been responsible for <strong>in</strong>troduc<strong>in</strong>g an unprecedented level <strong>of</strong> historical accuracy to<br />

productions <strong>of</strong> Shakespeare. Thus, Douce thought, ‘by exhibit<strong>in</strong>g to us times as <strong>the</strong>y were’ he<br />

was able ‘to render <strong>the</strong> stage what it should be, a true and perfect mirror <strong>of</strong> history and<br />

manners’. 49 This was his version <strong>of</strong> Herder’s ‘all illusion is accomplished by means <strong>of</strong> …<br />

au<strong>the</strong>nticity’. If Coleridge saw <strong>in</strong> <strong>the</strong> character <strong>of</strong> Hamlet a reflection <strong>of</strong> himself as ‘a paralysed<br />

romantic’, <strong>the</strong>n Douce at Kemble’s Covent Garden also saw his own, antiquarian, world-view<br />

bodied forth with equally <strong>in</strong>spir<strong>in</strong>g truthfulness. 50<br />

49 Douce Illustrations <strong>of</strong> Shakspeare, 2, p. 383.<br />

50 Bate, The Romantics on Shakespeare, p. 1.<br />

241

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