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

and theatrical activities continued to preoccupy him about equally for some decades, but in the
end antiquarianism won out and he ended his life as Somerset Herald.
Planché’s career spanned the transition from the age of private collections and individual
scholarship to that of public institutions and professional curatorship. In 1843 he was a founder
member of the British Archaeological Association, to which he remained loyal after the great
split, and in the 1860s he re-ordered the armoury at the Tower of London and arranged Samuel
Rush Meyrick’s collections of armour for display at the South Kensington Museum. Planché’s
was a humorous and agreeable temperament. He found in the prickly Douce a ‘dear old man’ 57
who was generous in his loans of books to the aspiring antiquary and in the bombastic John
Britton a friend ‘who had always an encouraging word and a helping hand for rising youth or
struggling age’. 58 While much of Planché’s work on Shakespeare was a development of
Douce’s, the trajectory of his career was the exact opposite. Douce’s researches led him from his
study to the green room, where, as his encounter with Kemble suggests, he was a somewhat
incongruous and not entirely welcome figure. Planché who had an easier passage in his journey
from theatre to library might be said to meet Douce as they passed at the stage door. The
suggestion that it was Planché’s existing ‘standing as an antiquarian’ that somehow ‘authorised’
his productions of Shakespeare misrepresents the order of events. 59
Both as a playwright and as an antiquary Planché’s career was an expression of popular
taste and was to some extent a product of it. If he was more successful than Douce in introducing
historically accurate costumes to the stage, and if he made fuller use of Shakespeare and other
literary sources, as a basis for an historical study of dress, that was largely because he belonged
to the rising generation among whom the appetite for history was keener. Moreover in the
theatre, in addition to the general enthusiasm for the past that swept through art and literature, the
successively larger buildings at Covent Garden and Drury Lane bred ‘the rage for melodrama
and spectacle’ which were in turn ‘productive… of a still greater spirit of inquiry into ancient
57
Planché, Recollections, 1, p.54.
58
Planché, Recollections, 1, p.130.
59
Watson, ‘Kemble, Scott, and the Mantle of the Bard’, p. 75. Watson also conflates the careers of John Philip and
Charles Kemble.
244