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

Conclusion
Each chapter of this thesis has indicated how, for reasons cultural, biographical
and institutional, antiquarianism was transformed at the mid-century. There is a coda to
the Shakespeare chapter, however, which summarises something of that intangible shift
that took place in the relationship of past to present.
While Douce, Britton, Planché and Scott were pursuing Shakespeare the man and
the author along their several avenues of enquiry, another antiquary, John Payne Collier,
was making even more substantial contributions to the subject. Collier might have been a
subject for this thesis had his career not been so exhaustively investigated already, and
had not his combination of scholarship, forgery and self-deception placed him at a point
on the spectrum of antiquarian activity so close to the Sobieski Stuarts. 1 Like them he
found the second half of the nineteenth century less comfortable than the first and his
downfall, which was more public and more complete than theirs, coincided exactly with
the change of sensibility that marked the arrival of the High Victorian age.
Doubts that were cast first in the 1840s on the authenticity of Collier’s discoveries
were voiced ever more loudly and began to emerge in print in the next decade. In April
1860 a series of letters to The Times exposed the ‘Perkins Folio’, one of Collier’s greatest
supposed discoveries, as a forgery and in 1861 Clement Ingleby’s Complete View of the
Shakespeare Controversy destroyed Collier’s reputation for ever. 2 Like the Sobieski
Stuarts he outlived his disgrace by many years but his forgeries, unlike theirs, died with
their author’s reputation and were rooted out and abandoned. It was as if at the midcentury
the music stopped and what had been already accepted continued to be taken
seriously (Ingleby was a trustee of the Shakespeare Birthplace) but those subjects on
which the light of new scholarship was cast were subject to more rigorous or at least
different kinds of interrogation.
1
Freeman and Freeman, John Payne Collier.
2
Schoenbaum, Shakespeare’s Lives, pp. 352-356 tells the story of Collier’s downfall.
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