The Victorian Cult Of Shakespeare

Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited

Folger Shakespeare Library

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4.7 • 837 Ratings

🗓️ 24 November 2020

⏱️ 38 minutes

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Summary

For most of the 1700s, Shakespeare was considered a very good playwright. But in the 1800s, and especially during the Victorian period, Shakespeare became a prophet. Ministers began drawing their lessons from his texts. Scholars wrote books about the scriptural resonances of his words—often while taking those words out of context. Shakespeare’s works, the Victorians believed, offered religious revelations. In his new book, "The Victorian Cult of Shakespeare: Bardology in the Nineteenth Century," University of Washington Associate Professor of English Charles LaPorte examines this moment in literary and religious history. We invited him to join us on the podcast to tell us how people in the 19th century thought about Shakespeare, how the moment helped give rise to the “authorship controversy,” and how sometimes, even today, we read Shakespeare like the Victorians. LaPorte is interviewed by Barbara Bogaev. "The Victorian Cult of Shakespeare: Bardology in the Nineteenth Century" was published by Cambridge University Press in 2020. Dr. Charles LaPorte's previous book, "Victorian Poets and the Changing Bible," was named Best First Book in Victorian Studies by the Northeast Victorian Studies Association in 2011. From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published November 24, 2020. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This podcast episode, “I Am No Thing To Thank God On,” was produced by Richard Paul. Garland Scott is the associate producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. Ben Lauer is the web producer, with help from Leonor Fernandez. We had technical help from Andrew Feliciano and Paul Luke at Voice Trax West in Studio City, California.

Transcript

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0:00.0	If you were in English class and you said this, shall I compare thee Jesus to a summer's day,
0:07.7	it's pretty likely people would look at you really funny.
0:12.3	125 years ago, though, there were people who'd hear that, and they wouldn't bat an eye.
0:24.5	For a few years ago, though, there were people who'd hear that, and they wouldn't bat an eye. From the Fulcher Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited.
0:29.0	I'm Michael Whitmore, the Fulcher's director.
0:31.7	That passage I just read, putting Jesus in the middle of Sonnet 18, is a paraphrase from a book called Shakespeare in the Bible
0:39.8	50 sonnets with their scriptural harmonies. Its author was named Charles Ellis and it came out in
0:46.6	1896 squarely in the time we call the Victorian era. What Ellis actually wrote was that Sonnet 18 tells us, Shakespeare trusts
0:57.0	in the constancy in all sufficiency of Christ for all good in this life and in that life which
1:03.3	is to come. Ellis is an example, and not a radical one way Shakespeare was read in the late
1:10.7	19th century.
1:12.3	It was a simple task to find books with titles like
1:15.2	Bible truths with Shakespearean parallels, Shakespeare and Holy Rit,
1:20.8	sacred and Shakespeareian affinities,
1:23.2	being analogies between the writings of the psalmists and of Shakespeare.
1:28.0	They took Shakespeare passages, placed them side by side with the Bible, and drew parallels
1:33.0	that placed Shakespeare next to God.
1:36.8	Preachers in the era did this too.
1:39.1	This seems like an odd pairing in the 21st century.
1:42.9	It would have probably seemed like an odd pairing in the 16th century,
1:47.0	and the 17th. But as you'll hear, by the end of the 19th century, it was considered absolutely
1:54.4	conventional. That was a different time, and in his new book, The Victorian Cult of Shakespeare
	...

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