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

sun. Arching over the Church were two rainbows, vividly relieved by the dark cloud and sunshine, and losing their
lower limbs amidst the saturated woods. 149
In my copy of the Autobiography a contemporary hand has pencilled in the margin ‘twaddle’, so
perhaps Britton did not speak for all, but he spoke for many. He may certainly stand for the
romantic antiquary as a figure in the Shakespearean landscape.
‘Smug and New’, Shakespeare and the Antiquarian Interior
Had any of the schemes for the purchase of the house in Henley Street with which
Britton was associated succeeded, he might not have been so emphatic on the point that ‘there is
no proof that the Bard was born in this particular building’. 150 As it was, although Britton was on
the London branch of the Shakespeare Birthplace Committee, established in 1847 to secure the
premises for a permanent and public monument, he took no leading part. He therefore felt quite
at liberty to detail the tenuous connections with the poet, the fact that the ‘birthplace’ tradition
was of ‘comparatively modern origin’ and the very mixed history of the building which, he
wrote, had been partially rebuilt by a previous owner Thomas Court who had bought
miscellaneous ‘curiosities’ to furnish it. 151 Britton, accordingly, ‘attached no very high value’ to
the ‘alleged Birthplace, or...any of the relics it contained’. 152 More surprisingly Planché, who
was more socially confident than Britton and was prominent on the Birthplace Committee, in his
equally self-congratulatory memoirs, also passes swiftly over the Henley Street house, with
merely a couple of sentences about its acquisition. Perhaps, by 1872, as Somerset Herald, he too
was uneasy about it.
Writing in 1864 as part of the tercentenary celebrations of Shakespeare’s birth, the
Reverend J M Jephson, FSA, noted of the Birthplace:
149 Britton, Autobiography, (1850), Appendix, p. 39.
150 Britton, Autobiography, (1850), Appendix, p. 33.
151 Britton, Autobiography, (1850), Appendix, p. 33.
152 Britton, Autobiography, (1850), Appendix, p. 34.
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