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

In many ways Douce’s view of Shakespeare, as both text and performance, was prescient
and it was certainly influential, but the immediate reception of his book was severely
discouraging. Its several favourable reviews were less prominent than the savaging it received in
the Edinburgh Review, a particularly extreme, if not untypical, example of Francis Jeffrey’s
editorial practice. Having commissioned a piece from the lawyer and author Barron Field (1786-
1846), who praised Douce’s book, Jeffrey, for some reason, possibly a quarrel with Douce’s
publishers, Longman’s, rewrote the article transforming what Douce had been assured was a
‘skilful, honourable & gentlemanly’ 51 account into a withering attack on ‘this petty sort of
antiquarianism’. 52
Whatever inspired it, it was a thoughtful and well-aimed onslaught not just on Douce but
on everything his book represented and it was imbued with social and intellectual condescension
that pressed on all the tenderest points of antiquarian feeling. Antiquaries, Jeffrey implied, were
presuming, daring to venture beyond the humble subjects that were proper to them in
approaching the national poet. Hence ‘that miserable erudition, which would otherwise have
gone to enrich the Gentleman’s Magazine, or to add weight to some county history is in danger
of acquiring a more extended reputation’. 53 With the romantic-antiquarian contextualising of
Shakespeare clearly in his sights Jeffrey picked on a slip in one of Douce’s quotations,
suggesting that this is what is to be expected of the sort of author who engages with the vulgar
vernacular tradition, for ‘if a man will stuff his head full of Gammer Gurton and Gabriel Harvey,
he will soon find that he has no room for Milton and Virgil’. 54 There were, he concluded
patronisingly, ‘many little items of information’ that a reader might find useful but overall his
message was to warn the lowly, self-taught antiquary off the cultural high ground. ‘We remain
confirmed in our opinion that the commentators are “a feeble folk” and that they have no
business to make their houses in the rocks which support the everlasting monument of
Shakspeare.’ 55
51 The story is told in Christie, The Edinburgh Review, p.41.
52 .Jeffrey, ‘Douce’s Illustrations of Shakespeare’, p.449.
53 Jeffrey, ‘Douce’s Illustrations of Shakespeare’, p.449.
54 Jeffrey, ‘Douce’s Illustrations of Shakespeare’, p. 459.
55 Jeffrey, ‘Douce’s Illustrations of Shakespeare’, p. 468.
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