Charles William Stubbs and Shakespeare: The Incarnation and the English Cult of Literature at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

Abstract

On April 23, 1899, Charles William Stubbs, Dean of Ely, delivered the Shakespeare Sermon in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon. The Shakespeare sermon was later expanded as one of Stubbs's Hulsean lectures (1904-1905) in Cambridge, published in the volume The Christ of English Poetry in 1906. This article shows how Stubbs's profound analysis of Shakespeare as the main English Renaissance literary representation of the personality of Christ is a unique religious and literary reflection on Frederick Denison Maurice's social theology of the incarnation at the turn of the twentieth century. This distinctiveness is reinforced, as this article explains, by the dialogue that Stubbs establishes with the ideas of Auguste Comte, Walter Bagehot, Giuseppe Mazzini, and Edward Dowden, which constitutes a significant and unexplored chapter of the history of Shakespeare's reception and a compelling illustration of William R. McKelvy's concept of the "English cult of literature," that is, of how religion functioned as a powerful instrument of literary interpretation as literature served the purposes of religious creed at the turn of the century.