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

Figure 48 Walter Scott and his Literary Friends at Abbotsford by Thomas Faed, 1849
Scott’s own identification with Shakespeare expressed itself less directly. In a letter of
1822 to Heinrich Voss, on the question of annotations, and possibly with Douce in mind, he
wrote that the ‘great fault’ of many commentators was that:
They must & will have everything completely & accurately explaind [sic] without considering that Shakespeare like
all other poets who write in a hurry very frequently uses a form of words the meaning of which is clear enough when
the full sentence is considered although it may be very difficult to dissect the sentence grammatically and apply the
special and separate meaning to each branch or word in it. 113
Scott, who always wrote in such a hurry that Hazlitt wondered if he ever re-read his work, is
clearly here aligned with the author against the antiquaries. It was an antiquarian enterprise,
however, the cast of Shakespeare’s memorial bust, undertaken by John Britton, which allowed
Scott the fullest scope for empathy with the person of Shakespeare, establishing the Bard as one
of the most resonant of the gabions in the memory theatre of Abbotsford.
By 1814 the search for an adequate image of Shakespeare had already been a long one.
The greatest sculptors of the eighteenth-century, Roubiliac, Rysbrack, Cheere and Scheemakers
113
Scott to Heinrich Voss, March/April 1822, Scott, Letters, 12, p.450.
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