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

Sir Walter has found out... that there is no romance like the romance of real life, and that if we can but arrive at what
men feel, do, and say in striking and singular situations, the result will be “more lively, audible, and full of vent”
than the fine-spun cobwebs of the brain...Our author has conjured up the actual people he has to deal with...in “their
habits as they lived”...ransacked old chronicles... invoked the spirits of the air...and...has enriched his own genius
with everlasting variety, truth and freedom. 110
If the quotation from Coriolanus is not entirely flattering in its implications, it is nevertheless an
embedding of Shakespeare within Scott, while the reference to Ben Jonson’s The Fortunate Isles
further attaches him, and specifically his antiquarian interest in ‘manners and customs’ to the
greatest ‘olden times’ of English literature.
Two years after Hazlitt’s essay was published Scott formally announced his authorship of
the Waverley novels in a speech to the Edinburgh Theatrical Fund, in which he identified himself
with two Shakespearean characters, Macbeth, ‘another Scottish criminal of more consequence’
and Prospero, ‘it is your breath that has filled my sails’. 111 In public he left it to others to identify
him with Shakespeare himself, which they did a few weeks later as Scott recorded in his journal.
In a revival of James Townley’s comedy, High Life Below Stairs, during the exchange on the
subject of ‘Shikspur’, Lady Bab’s favourite author, in which ‘Kitty’ asks ‘who wrote it’ and gets
the answers ‘Ben Jonson’ and ‘Finis’, the actor William Murray settled the dispute with an ad
lib: ‘“It is Sir Walter Scott; he confessed it at a public meeting the other day.” ’ 112 The joke was
based on the real and widespread comparison which persisted to the mid-century and saw Scott,
after his death, enshrined with Shakespeare in the literary pantheon. Thomas Faed’s painting,
[fig: 48] is thought to have been conceived as a pendant to his brother John’s [fig: 45] which it
mirrors. The authors are drawn into sympathy as individuals, the Scott of living memory
bringing the Shakespeare of history nearer to the present.
110 Hazlitt, The Spirit of the Age, p. 107.
111 Quoted in Garbin, ‘“Not fit to ties his brogues”’, p.141.
112 Scott, Journal, p. 323.
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