The Victorian Cult of Shakespeare: Bardology in the Nineteenth Century by Charles LaPorte

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Victorian Cult of Shakespeare: Bardology in the Nineteenth Century by Charles LaPorte Marija Reiff (bio) The Victorian Cult of Shakespeare: Bardology in the Nineteenth Century by Charles LaPorte; pp. 213. Cambridge UP, 2021. Charles laporte begins his engaging examination of Victorian "bardology" (a term he invents as a counter to George Bernard Shaw's pejorative "bardolatry") with a simple request to the reader: to view the [End Page 131] Victorians' literary and religious investments in Shakespeare with "readerly sympathy" (24). This modest admonishment belies the capacious sweep of LaPorte's thesis, which details not just the Victorians' penchant to read Shakespeare through a religious lens but also the indebtedness of contemporary literature departments to reading literature, and Shakespeare in particular, with competing pieties that mirror those of nineteenth-century scholars. Although the bulk of The Victorian Cult of Shakespeare focuses on archival work, with each of its five chapters exploring little-known documents that reveal the creative ways Victorians imbued Shakespearean texts with religious meaning, LaPorte aims to do more than just recuperate the ostensibly naive Victorians who worshipped Shakespeare with a cult-like reverence and produced dubious, frequently humorous scholarship. Rather, he seeks to re-enchant literary studies as a whole by reclaiming the Biblical-studies roots of its hermeneutic past. LaPorte traces the origins of cultic Shakespeare and contemporary literary criticism to the appearance of Higher Criticism, which treated the Bible not as the direct word of God but as an ancient, possibly mythical text worthy of critical examination. In LaPorte's account, as Higher Criticism transformed the Bible from the factual word of God into the "inspired poetic expression" of God, "the most sublime secular poetry" showed promise "to become its own Bible, as well" (33). In light of the Higher Criticism, Shakespeare came to be seen as a Biblical supplement, a type of modern-day prophet. This move to make Shakespeare into something of a fifth Evangelist is evidenced through a trove of artifacts found from the mid-1800s on, most notably the proliferation of "Shakespeare sermons" and the appearance of Shakespearean devotional books, which mined Shakespeare's plays and sonnets for their possible theological and religious meanings. LaPorte's book is at its best and most illuminating in the first three chapters, wherein he explores these archival materials. Chapter 1 examines the "occasionally ridiculous, invariably quaint" Shakespeare sermons of the nineteenth century (24). These sermons treated Shakespeare's wisdom much like the Bible's: that is, as "timeless, universal, and divinely inspired" (29). These sermons had their heyday in the celebrations of Shakespeare's tercentenary, in 1864, and they proliferated both in the pulpit and in published pamphlets. They looked to Shakespeare's plots and his characters' words to reveal truths about sin, temptation, and corruption, topics that could be placed within the framework of a larger Christian discourse. If the Shakespeare sermons connected Shakespearean wisdom to Biblical wisdom, then the appearance of devotional Shakespeare volumes, the subject of chapters 2 and 3, flat-out conflated them. These volumes placed Shakespeare's work in dialogue with the Bible, often comparing individual phrases with analogous phrases from the holy book. While the Shakespeare sermons often pulled religious meaning out of Shakespeare's themes, these [End Page 132] printed devotional works moved beyond thematic meaning and instead focused on exact words or phrases and their supposed Biblical counterparts. This direct comparison was indicated not simply by their content, but also by their mise-en-page, wherein Shakespeare's words were placed on facing pages to the Bible's, often in matching fonts. LaPorte argues that these devotional texts became a sort of "secondary Bible, showing divine wisdom refracted through English genius" (64). These cuttings and juxtapositions were often absurd in the context of the plays themselves and could only be examined for wisdom when removed from the intricacies of Shakespeare's plots. LaPorte argues that these compilers frequently exhibited a "sublime indifference to literary contexts" (84), with Victorian scholars drawing ostensibly meaningful moral lessons from Shakespearean villains and clowns. Such creative interpretations oftentimes went far beyond the confines of the text, and LaPorte draws our attention to other such instances of "hermeneutic extravagance...