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

The more I look at it the more I feel that it must have resembled the Bard much more than any of the ordinary prints,
unless it be that in the first folio edition, which has all the appearance of being taken from it. The forehead is more
expanded, and has not a narrow, peaked, and priggish look inconsistent with the dignity of Shakespeare's character,
and which strongly marks all the ordinary portraits. 126
Scott was willing to read the mind’s construction in the face, unlike Wordsworth, who wrote, in
a tactful but tepid letter of thanks on receipt of a copy of the engraving Britton commissioned of
the cast that, ‘the mighty genius of Shakspere [sic] would have placed any record of his
physiognomy under considerable disadvantages for who could shape out to himself features and
a countenance that would appear worthy of such a mind’. 127 It would be unfair to suggest that
Scott was so jejune as to like the bust more because he had found it resembled himself, but he
clearly warmed to it and it took on a profound associative resonance.
George Bullock made a special cabinet for it to stand on when it was enshrined at
Abbotsford. In this, Scott kept the ‘small unadorned snuff-box’ one of many made from the
Stratford mulberry tree said to be Shakespeare’s. 128 This one had the additional interest of having
belonged to Garrick and had been given to Scott by the actor Robert Bensley, thereby completing
a chain of thespian friendship that might be seen stretching from the Globe to Drury Lane.
Scott’s identification with Shakespeare was more comradely than self-aggrandizing and in this
important gabion and its presentation he suggested a personal, all but reciprocal relationship, one
that was consummated when, at Scott’s death, the Shakespeare bust was moved and Bullock’s
cast of Scott put in its place. In the posthumous portrait [fig: 49] of Scott at Shakespeare’s tomb,
the two writers gaze at one another for the last time in that archetypical romantic antiquarian
setting, the dimly lit chancel of the medieval church, over which the stained glass casts a
melancholy twilight gleam.
126
Scott to J B S Morrit, 22 November 1816, Scott, Letters, 4, p. 295.
127
Britton, Autobiography, (1850), Appendix, p. 17.
128
Scott, Reliquiae Trotcosiensis, p. 47.
261