For those interested in Victorian literary culture and religion, this splendid new book can be read with profit and pleasure on its own, but a full appreciation might require an understanding of it as a sequel to Charles LaPorte’s highly regarded Victorian Poets and the Changing Bible (2011). That book began by remarking how twentieth-century critics were prone to frame much Victorian poetry as a melancholy tribute to what Matthew Arnold called the age’s retreating “Sea of Faith,” a body of water shrinking under the relentless glare of both science and modern biblical criticism that undermined traditional religious authority in the eyes of many. In this context, Victorian poets (and especially the good ones) were destined to bear witness to religion’s general decline as the Bible was increasingly understood as an all too human compound rather than an inerrant, divinely inspired history. In place of this model, LaPorte’s poets find ample opportunity in the day’s debates about the Bible precisely because modern critics agreed on the need to read scripture on literary terms. As ancient scriptures were increasingly conceptualized with poetic and literary categories, contemporary poetic activity had increasing access to scriptural status. The literary reading of scripture being so widely discussed by Britons at mid-century did not inevitably signal religious decline; it could and did provide models for literary ambitions with access to a reconceived sacred textuality.While thinking about poetics and biblical criticism, LaPorte, as evidenced by “The Bard, the Bible, and the Victorian Shakespeare Question” (ELH 74 [2007]: 609–28), also became convinced that the rise of anti-Stratfordian authorship theories at mid-century were influenced by the same biblical debates and theological controversies noted earlier, an argument that was warmly embraced by the early modernist James Shapiro in Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? (2010). Now in The Victorian Cult of Shakespeare we have an extended exploration of the religious dimensions of nineteenth-century Shakespearian criticism, a broadly conceived subject that includes “Shakespeare enthusiasm” becoming for some “a more or less respectable form of religion” (8) at a time when biblical criticism was challenging many Christians to reassess the forms of their faith. Following an introduction that highlights Shakespeare’s Victorian consolidation as the greatest English poet (rather than a dramatist or playwright), the first chapter reads a range of sermons across several decades and charts a trend in which recognizably protoacademic subjects such as Shakespeare’s scriptural allusions give way to an increasing willingness to read the Bard’s corpus as a national scripture in its own right. Clerics move from affirming the poet’s Protestant piety to praising his miraculous authorship of an inspired canon containing precious and redeeming words for readers in the global Anglosphere.This homiletic arc sets the stage for the chapters that follow. Chapter 2 reads texts that in various ways juxtapose Biblical and Shakespearean quotations. Here, both the makers and readers of these books are clearly engaged in devotional literary economies. Chapter 3 explores how authors engaged with the sonnets as religious texts despite the fact that these poems are, as LaPorte reminds us, “[f]requently profane, vindictive, bawdy, and crammed with phallic puns” (80). Chapter 4 reprises the 2007 article on what would become an increasingly robust Shakespeare Question, whereas chapter 5 focuses on Victorian debates about editorially producing an authentic text by an author rising in cultural status even while being shadowed by elaborate mysteries of identity. These issues of textual criticism, including arguments about the dating of the composition of the plays as well as sorting out possibilities of collaboration and misattribution, have in many cases roots in the work of Shakespeare’s most prominent eighteenth-century editors. But as LaPorte convincingly shows, the Victorian debates about Shakespeare’s text were repeatedly conducted with religious and theological language that was not simply stylish or ironic. Although some Shakespearean combatants concerned with issues of authorship or emendation found models in the ideas and practices of liberal hermeneuts, others more closely resemble the vociferous opponents of innovative biblical criticism. A rewarding conclusion to The Victorian Cult of Shakespeare then situates the foregoing chapters in the academy’s ongoing reevaluation of secularization and secularity.Readers will recognize this book as both participating in the broader religious turn in literary studies and what has been characterized as a postcritique literary hermeneutic that allows LaPorte to engage seriously with some printed Victorian Shakespeare enthusiasm that might, at first blush, only seem silly or perverse. Among others, we have Charles Downing’s The Messiahship of Shakespeare (1901). Chiefly drawing on the sonnets and four plays, Downing proclaims that a symbolic reading of his key texts reveal Shakespeare to be a prophet of a new revelation that has been lost for readers in a modern age enthralled by either science and the visible world or a spurious religious orthodoxy. As LaPorte points to the surprisingly positive notice of Downing in the Westminster Review, one recalls that periodical readers at the end of the century were well accustomed to a steady barrage of new revelations; this familiarity allows the Westminster reviewer the equanimity to weigh what was compelling in Downing’s close attention to the sonnets without becoming the ideal convert Downing must have had in mind.LaPorte also sees in this history of the sacralizing tendencies of Victorian Shakespeare writing an opportunity to examine how an emerging sphere of professional vernacular literary studies both drew on and disavowed religious concepts and categories at different times. On the one hand, the technical canonization of Shakespeare as the preeminent English poet in the nineteenth century relied on the philological skills that were at the heart of the historical criticism of the Bible. Philology can be completely divorced from religious issues, as it was for some scholars of classical texts, but LaPorte generally deploys “philology,” as many Victorians did, to mean any deeply informed, linguistically sensitive inquiry into the origins and proper interpretation of texts, especially older ones. In this context, coming to terms with and debating the chronology of Shakespeare’s plays and determining which if any of the plays were composed by multiple hands is clearly enriched by contemporary biblical debates: coming to terms, for example, with a chronology of the writing of the books of the New Testament and determining, by way of another example, which of the many epistles traditionally attributed to Paul were likely to have been written by him. In this instance, the Victorian canonization of Shakespeare is a chapter of cultural history with important connections to religious debates and interpretive procedures.Moving in the opposite direction, LaPorte is also interested in how English studies at other times have sought to distinguish the legitimate realm of literary criticism from religious values such as reverence, devotion, and sectarian zeal. Here, LaPorte takes as a point of departure George Bernard Shaw’s coinage of “bardolatry” in 1900, a term used to dismiss a highly personalized form of veneration foisted on the dramatist by his Victorian idolators. An active and influential critic, Shaw was, of course, not an English professor, but he speaks for strains of twentieth-century Shakespeare criticism that, among other things, promoted Shakespeare as a fundamentally secular artist for all times precisely because he was not caught up in the religious controversies of his day. There have also been times when some professional Shakespeareans have seemed embarrassed by speculations about the playwright’s confessional allegiances, just the kind of pseudocritical project to be pursued by a Victorian vicar ready to subordinate proper literary analysis to external religious concerns. These same generalizations can no longer be made about Shakespeare studies of the twenty-first century, but the transition is worth noting. Although the word “religion,” for example, does not appear in the table of contents in the The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare of 2001, The New Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare from 2010 features an essay entitled “Shakespeare, Religion and Politics.” Apparently, part of what made the 2010 Companion new was the foregrounding of religion as an essential category for knowing Shakespeare, a shift to be further attested by the appearance of The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Religion (2019). Considering this critical trend and comparing the uses of “Mariolatry” and “Mariology,” LaPorte promotes “bardology” as a more neutral alternative to Shaw’s pejorative term (21). Yet even as he makes this compelling point, the bardology of this book’s title remains a semantic palimpsest: we cannot and should not forget that it has been written on a scoured and salvaged parchment where we still see traces of the censorious ur-text. The same is true for the history of modern English studies. Some historians of our discipline acknowledge its vital religious roots. Others construe a modern literary sensibility in opposition to religion, with that term too often reduced to meaning an unattractive form of dogmatism. LaPorte’s reflections on bardolatry/bardology are therefore relevant not only to Shakespeare studies but also to the larger topic of how post-Romantic literary studies have taken notice of and characterized religion in general.In closing, I turn to a claim made at this book’s beginning that is simultaneously bold and veracious. “It would be difficult,” writes LaPorte, “to overstate the centrality of my two central texts (Shakespeare’s oeuvre and the Bible) to Victorian literary culture” (4). Here, we have a succinct description of the unusually ambitious scope of The Victorian Cult of Shakespeare. LaPorte expertly navigates the Bible and Shakespeare during a time when they both had a voluminous and contentious public reception in an ever-increasing number of books and periodicals. LaPorte writes with a compelling personal but always judicious voice as he explores a fascinating public discourse felt by all involved to have high or even grave stakes. Anyone working on Victorian literature and religion will want to read the results at length.