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 Sally Barnden (bio) The Victorian Cult of Shakespeare: Bardology in the Nineteenth Century, by Charles LaPorte; pp. xii + 213. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020, £75.00. There is a marked tendency in contemporary Shakespeare studies to treat the nineteenth century as a period of protracted vandalism which imposed a sentimental, picturesque, and reverential veneer onto William Shakespeare’s texts—a veneer which must be carefully stripped back for the purposes of modern criticism and performance. The efforts of Victorian literary critics, particularly those who read Shakespeare for moral and religious wisdom, have been similarly derided: for example, Hannibal Hamlin, whose The Bible in Shakespeare (2013) is quoted frequently in the present book, complains of the “semi-intellectual soup” of Victorian writing on Shakespeare and the Bible (Hamlin qtd. in LaPorte 73). Charles LaPorte’s valuable new book, The Victorian Cult of Shakespeare: Bardology in the Nineteenth Century, tackles Victorian reverence for Shakespeare head on, takes it seriously, and illustrates its ongoing influence not just on Shakespeare criticism, but on the whole discipline of English studies. Drawing on a substantial set of examples from across the nineteenth century, he reads texts elsewhere dismissed as eccentric and trivial and, without insisting on their critical merit, makes a persuasive case for their significance in the history of literary criticism. The result is a consistently engaging book which has as much to say about nineteenth-century literary criticism as it does about Shakespeare, and which presents itself as a proxy history of the discipline. LaPorte is evidently conscious that his subject matter has often been treated as a punchline and begins his study with George Bernard Shaw’s scornful coining of the term “bardolatry” in 1900 (1). LaPorte’s preferred term, “bardology,” is intended as a nonpejorative way to describe the same phenomenon. Though the history of disapproval poured on religious veneration for Shakespeare remains relevant throughout the book, the term bardology allows a broader view of its impact, including the bardological impulses that endure in contemporary English studies. For instance, LaPorte cites Roland Barthes’s argument that we “cannot study authorship without indulging in theology” and Franco Moretti’s characterization of close reading as “a theological exercise” (144, 145). In a brief preface, LaPorte also defends his book title’s use of the word “cult,” acknowledging the difficulty of writing about religion with appropriate balance and respect. The book’s determination to afford a fair hearing to Victorian devotional criticism is tempered by LaPorte’s generous but sometimes wry prose. He frankly acknowledges the awkwardness of some efforts to draw parallels between Shakespeare and scripture, such as Charles Ellis’s elaborate scriptural paraphrases for Shakespeare’s sonnets (which LaPorte calls “an intriguing display of hermeneutic perverseness” [86–7]). After a lively and wide-ranging introduction, the book begins with a chapter charting the history of Shakespearean sermons, showing how comparatively conservative examples preached to mark the 1864 tercentenary of Shakespeare’s birth provided a precedent for more blatantly idolatrous celebrations of Shakespeare’s divine inspiration later in the century. The next two chapters examine genres of publication whose contents as well as their mise-en-page argue for the equivalence of Shakespearean and scriptural wisdom. Chapter 2 focuses on quotation books that organized out-of-context Shakespearean fragments by theme and placed them alongside comparable extracts [End Page 679] from the Bible. Chapter 3 considers similar efforts regarding the sonnets. As LaPorte notes, we might expect the homoeroticism, idolatry, and explorations of jealousy and lust in Shakespeare’s sonnets to have given pause to a devout Victorian editor. Instead, they prompted some elaborate critical gymnastics to justify interpreting the sequence as a narrative of conflicted devotion to Christ. These chapters are a useful contribution to the field of Victorian Shakespeare and provide crucial context for continuing work on Victorian performance, adaptation, and popular appropriation of Shakespeare in various media (following such scholars as Adrian Poole, Richard Schoch, Gail Marshall, and Stuart Sillars). However, the book’s fourth and fifth chapters constitute a more ambitious intervention by addressing the nineteenth-century genesis of the authorship controversy (in that period...