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

By the second half of the nineteenth century, as we have seen, authenticity mattered more
in the study of the past, imaginative reconstruction and expressions of romantic empathy,
counted for less than in the first. By the time such distinctions hardened, however, Shakespeare’s
Birthplace, like Charles Stothard’s interpretation of the Bayeux Tapestry and the Sobieski
Stuarts’ tartans had become lodged, apparently immovably, in the popular mind, on the side of
authenticity.
The tradition of private spaces dedicated to Shakespeare that may be said to have begun
with Garrick’s Palladian Temple of 1757 and to have entered the antiquarian repertoire with
Scott, Britton and Sir John Soane, who arranged a Shakespeare alcove in his home for his copy
of the Bullock cast, culminates in the Birthplace. There is, however, a notable coda in Isambard
Kingdom Brunel’s scheme for a Shakespeare Room. 154 A dining room in his house at 17 Duke
Street, St James’s, London, it was designed to contain paintings of Shakespearean scenes that
Brunel commissioned from a number of leading artists including Landseer, Clarkson Stanfield
and Augustus Egg. The scheme has been well described by Faberman and McEvansoneya but
here it is worth noting the arrangement of the room itself, as planned and partially realised in
about 1848-9. The setting for the pictures was an interior decorated in the Elizabethan style, with
a pendant ceiling and panelling, all done in plaster grained to imitate oak, with dark red velvet
drapery, a Flemish cabinet carved with figures and Venetian mirrors. In a sketch for the
installation of the pictures Brunel showed them arranged around an elaborate niche with
candelabrae, enclosing a full-length statue of Shakespeare. Brunel’s brother-in-law, the artist
John Callcott Horsley, recalled the room as the setting for many happy meetings of friends,
‘lighted up on one of the many festive gatherings... a scene which none will forget who had the
privilege of taking part in it’. 155 The scene that rises in the mind today resembles nothing so
much as Faed’s Mermaid Tavern, with its red velvet, its (possibly plaster) panelling and carved
overmantel, a Victorian antiquarian fusion of past and present which meets in the figure of
Shakespeare.
154
A full account is given in Faberman and McEvansoneya, ‘Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s Shakespeare Room’.
155
Quoted in Faberman and McEvansoneya, ‘Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s Shakespeare Room’, p.110.
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