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

attempt at an antiquarian excavation of the grave and, finally, the purchase of the house in
Henley Street that became the Birthplace, were all carried out during the years of his
pilgrimages. 145 Britton, according to his Autobiography, was involved, at least on the fringes, of
some of them, but he had little direct influence. It is the light that his love of Shakespeare casts
on him and on romantic antiquarianism that is most revealing. He saw Shakespeare as not just a
household god but an entire world, laid out, like a landscape, before him. Scott, similarly, in his
essay on ‘The Drama’, had related the effect of the plays to the aesthetic of the Picturesque,
displaying the text book qualities of variety and irregularity translated into human form.
Where all is elegant, nothing can be sublime...The touches of nature which Shakespeare has exhibited in his lower
and gayer characters, like the chastened back-ground of a landscape, increase the effect of the principal group. The
light and fanciful humour of Mercutio, serves, for example, to enhance and illustrate the romantic and passionate
character of Romeo. 146
Britton’s critical assessment of Shakespeare was not so sophisticated. It was summed up
in the assertion that ‘on men and manners, and on subjects of religion and philosophy, his
sentiments are uniformly appropriate’. 147 In the experience of architecture and landscape,
however, he came to the same picturesque epiphany. We might leave him, near the end of his
Autobiography, gazing on Stratford at sunset, like Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the
Fog, when, having just left ‘the smoky worldly, hammering town of Birmingham’ 148 he was
overwhelmed by the appearance of a scene which answered every popular requirement of art,
nature and association and which ‘the imagination invested with the presence of persons who
were contemporary with Shakspere, either occupied in rural labours, or in festive amusements’
until he seemed to pass into it and lose himself:
A slight shower, from a dense black cloud, had just passed over; everything was calm; Nature seemed to be
reposing, after some electric conflict in the mid-regions of space; and rain-drops were hanging from every bough,
branch, and leaf, catching and reflecting myriads of fairy-like prismatic rays. In front, the tall and delicate spire of
Stratford Church was relieved against a dark mass of trees, which united with a heavy black cloud to the east; whilst
the chimney shafts, gables, and grey, curling smoke from the houses in the town were also brightened by the setting
145
See Schoenbaum, Shakespeare’s Lives and Michell, Who Wrote Shakespeare? pp.62-66.
146
Scott, Essay on the Drama, pp.186-87.
147
Britton, Remarks on the Life and Writings of William Shakespeare, p.12.
148
Britton, Autobiography, (1850), Appendix, p. 40.
267