Cult and criticism: Ritual in the European reception of Shakespeare

Abstract

The phrase 'Shakespeare cult' is one of those terminological counters we play with far too thoughtlessly both in the technical discourse of our discipline and in the more casual language games of the educated layman. A counter assumed to be convertible into practically every currency, it is hardly ever considered worth defining, and even less do we take it seriously as a possible object of systematic research. Counters, after all, are not what the games are about, so why bother? The juxtaposition of 'Shakespeare' and 'cult' looks so disarmingly simple that we immediately accept it as a solution and thereby lose sight of the problem. No wonder we tend to forget that when yoked together, the name of a writer and that of a religious phenomenon would suggest a daring analogy between literary life and religious practice; nor does it occur to us that a patient exploration of that analogy and its amply documented historical variants could enhance our knowledge about the anatomy of literary cults in general and maybe, to a lesser extent, that of other quasi-religious secular cults as well. Literary historians have been engaged in analysing the dramas themselves, whatever that may mean, or the history of Shakespeare criticism as ideas or judgements mostly in a vacuum; cultural anthropologists, on the other hand, have studied cults in the manifestations of Ndembu ritual in Africa, or the new sect and cult movements in the United States, or the carnival in Rio. 1 If and when the