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Bardolatry
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Main page Bardolatry is the worship, particularly when considered

Contents excessive, of William Shakespeare.[1] Shakespeare has
Featured content been known as "the Bard" since the nineteenth century.[2]
Current events One who idolizes Shakespeare is known as a Bardolator.
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The term Bardolatry, derived from Shakespeare's
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sobriquet "the Bard of Avon" and the Greek word latria
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"worship" (as in idolatry, worship of idols), was coined by
Interaction George Bernard Shaw in the preface to his collection
Help Three Plays for Puritans published in 1901.[3] Shaw
About Wikipedia professed to dislike Shakespeare as a thinker and
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philosopher because the latter did not engage with social
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problems, as did Shaw in his own plays.[4]
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Contents
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1 Origins
What links here Engraving of the sculpture of
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2 Victorian bardolatry Shakespeare at the entrance to the
Upload file 3 Harold Bloom Boydell Shakespeare Gallery. The
4 See also sculpture is now in the former garden
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 Special pages 4 See also
of Shakespeare's home New Place in
Permanent link 5 References
Stratford.
Page information 6 Further reading
Wikidata item 7 External links
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Origins [edit]
Create a book
Download as PDF The earliest references to the idolising of Shakespeare
Printable version occur in an anonymous play The Return from Parnassus,
written during the poet's lifetime. A poetry-loving character
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says he will obtain a picture of Shakespeare for his study
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and that "I'll worship sweet Mr Shakespeare and to honour
him will lay his Venus and Adonis under my pillow, as we
read of one I do not well remember his name, but I'm
sure he was a king slept with Homer under his bed's
George Romney's The infant
head".[5] However, this character is being satirised as a
Shakespeare attended by Nature and
the Passions, c. 17911792, foolish lover of sensuous rather than serious literature.
representing the Romantic idea of
The serious stance of Bardolatry has its origins in the mid-
Shakespeare's natural genius
18th century, when Samuel Johnson referred to
Shakespeare's work as "a map of life".[6] In 1769 the actor
David Garrick, unveiling a statue of Shakespeare in Stratford-upon-Avon during the Shakespeare
Jubilee, read out a poem culminating with the words "'tis he, 'tis he, / The God of our idolatry".[7]
Garrick also constructed a temple to Shakespeare at his home in Hampton. The phenomenon
developed during the Romantic era, when Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, William Hazlitt,
and others all described Shakespeare as a transcendent genius. Shaw's distaste for this attitude
to Shakespeare is anticipated by William Cowper's attack on Garrick's whole festival as
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blasphemous in his poem The Task (1785).
Victorian bardolatry [edit]
The phenomenon became important in the Victorian era
when many writers treated Shakespeare's works as a
secular equivalent or replacement to the Bible.[8] "That
King Shakespeare," the essayist Thomas Carlyle wrote in
1840, "does not he shine, in crowned sovereignty, over us
all, as the noblest, gentlest, yet strongest of rallying signs;
indestructible".[9]
The essential characteristic of bardolatry is that
Thomas Nast, study for The
Shakespeare is presented as not only the greatest writer Immortal Light of Genius, 1895.
who ever lived, but also as the supreme intellect, the
greatest psychologist, and the most faithful portrayer of the
human condition and experience. In other words, bardolatry defines Shakespeare as the master of
all human experience and of its intellectual analysis.[10] As Carlyle stated,
Of this Shakspeare of ours, perhaps the opinion one sometimes hears a little
idolatrously expressed is, in fact, the right one; I think the best judgment not of this
country only, but of Europe at large, is slowly pointing to the conclusion, that
Shakspeare is the chief of all Poets hitherto; the greatest intellect who, in our
recorded world, has left record of himself in the way of Literature. On the whole, I
know not such a power of vision, such a faculty of thought, if we take all the
characters of it, in any other man. Such a calmness of depth; placid joyous strength;
all things imaged in that great soul of his so true and clear, as in a tranquil
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 unfathomable sea! [11]

Shaw's sceptical views arose in response to such ideas. Shaw wished to demythologise
Shakespeare. He emphasised that Shakespeare was capable of both brilliance and banality, a
point made humorously in his late puppet play Shakes versus Shav, in which he compares
Shakespeare's work to his own. He unequivocally asserted that Shakespeare was a great poet,
even calling him "a very great author" at one point, and praised his use of what Shaw called "word-
music".[12] He also declared, "Nobody will ever write a better tragedy than Lear". However, he also
wrote in a letter to Mrs Patrick Campbell, "Oh, what a damned fool Shakespeare was!", and
complained of his "monstrous rhetorical fustian, his unbearable platitudes, his sententious
combination of ready reflections with complete intellectual sterility".[13]

Harold Bloom [edit]

The critic Harold Bloom revived bardolatry in his 1998 book Shakespeare: The Invention of the
Human, in which Bloom provides an analysis of each of Shakespeare's thirty-eight plays, "twenty-
four of which are masterpieces." Written as a companion to the general reader and theatergoer,
Bloom's book argues that bardolatry "ought to be even more a secular religion than it already is."
He contends in the work that Shakespeare "invented" humanity, in that he prescribed the now-
common practice of "overhearing" ourselves, which drives our own internal psychological
development. In addition, he embraces the notion of the true reality of the characters of
Shakespeare, regarding them as "real people" in the sense that they have altered the
consciousness and modes of perception of not only readers, but most people in any western
literate culture.

See also [edit]

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Shakespeare's reputation
References [edit]
1. ^ "Bardolatry" . OED Online. Oxford University Press. Retrieved 28 October 2012.
2. ^ "bardolatry" . thefreedictionary.com. Retrieved 22 December 2007.
3. ^ G. B. Shaw, Three Plays for Puritans (1901), p. xxxi : "So much for Bardolatry!" See also
'bardolatry, n. ' in Oxford English Dictionary online edition (subscription required), accessed 14
January 2011
4. ^ Tallent Lenker, Lagretta (30 April 2001). Fathers and Daughters in Shakespeare and Shaw
(Contributions in Drama & Theatre Studies). Connecticut: Greenwood Press. p. 5. ISBN 0-313-
31754-2.
5. ^ The Return from Parnassus, Act 4, scene 1.
6. ^ "A Playwright for the Ages" . Royal Shakespeare Company Michigan Residency 2006. University
of Michigan. 2006. Archived from the original on 17 December 2007. Retrieved 21 December 2007.
7. ^ Michael Dobson, The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation and Authorship,
16601769, Oxford University Press, 1992, p.6.
8. ^ Sawyer, Robert (2003). Victorian Appropriations of Shakespeare. New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson
University Press, 113. ISBN 0-8386-3970-4.
9. ^ Carlyle, Thomas (1840). "On Heroes, Hero Worship & the Heroic in History". Quoted in Smith,
Emma (2004). Shakespeare's Tragedies. Oxford: Blackwell, 37. ISBN 0-631-22010-0.
10. ^ Levin, H (Spring 1975). "The Primacy of Shakespeare" . Shakespeare Quarterly. Johns Hopkins
University, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 26 (2): 99112. doi:10.2307/2869240 .
JSTOR 2869240 . Retrieved 21 December 2007.
11. ^ Carlyle, Thomas (1840). LECTURE III. THE HERO AS POET. DANTE: SHAKSPEARE., On
Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History at Project Gutenberg
12. ^ "The Project Gutenberg eBook of Tolstoy on Shakespeare, by Leo Tolstoy" . Gutenberg.org.
2009-01-07. Retrieved 2014-03-19.
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 13. ^ Webster, Margaret, Shakespeare Without Tears, Dover Publications, 2000 [originally published
1942], pp. 256.

Further reading [edit]

Laporte, Charles. "The Bard, the Bible, and the Victorian Shakespeare Question." English
Literary History. Vol. 74, No. 3, Fall 2007: 609628.
Laporte, Charles. "The Devotional Texts of Victorian Bardolatry." Shakespeare, the Bible, and
the History of the Material Book: Contested Scriptures. Eds. Travis DeCook and Alan Galey.
Routledge. 2012: 143159.

External links [edit]

Bardolatry in the dictionary

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