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The Bard, the Bible, and the Victorian Shakespeare Question Charles Laporte Nineteenth-century criticism of William Shakespeare provides the foremost example of the romantic and Victorian habit of conflating literary enthusiasm with genuine religious feeling. Panegyrics upon Shakespeare proliferate during this period, and they invoke his "divine" inspiration so regularly as to make this idea come to seem unexceptional. At the same time, the nineteenth-century idea of Shakespeare's inspiration was rarely divorced from religious and reverential connotations. The excesses of romantic and Victorian Shakespeare enthusiasm—or "bardolatry," as we now call it—suggest the profound extent to which religious discourses have shaped our ideas about literature, for bardolatry and Christianity functioned as models for one another in ways that go beyond analogy.1 Many examples of this exist, but none are more salient than popular debates about the historical identity of Shakespeare that emerged 150 years ago in connection to related doubts about the historical identity of Jesus. Shortly after 1850 and before the emergence of English as an academic discipline, a great number of writers and scholars on both sides of the Atlantic came to question whether the works of Shakespeare could actually have been written by the humble actor from Stratford-upon-Avon to whom we normally ascribe them. The ensuing debate over Shakespeare's identity came to be called "The Shakespeare Question," "The Shakespeare Myth," "The Shakespeare-Bacon Controversy," and, perhaps most pointedly, "The Baconian Heresy"—these final two after Sir Francis Bacon, who headed most nineteenth-century lists of alternative Shakespeare identities.2 The mid-century Victorians had no less information about Shakespeare's life than their predecessors, of course, but the dearth of reliable particulars became a critical problem for them in a way that it had not been for preceding generations. In this work, I wish to show how the Shakespeare Question arose at an important moment in the history of hermeneutics, when the confluence of romantic literary enthusiasm and historical Biblical scholarship had established the right cultural atmosphere for widespread speculation about how such inspired texts as Shakespeare's come into being. [End Page 609] More specifically, this question arose when the English translation of David Friedrich Strauss's Das Leben Jesu (1835; trans., The Life of Jesus [1846]) had provoked extensive debate about the similarly sparse historical record of Jesus. My first section below addresses the textual emphases of Victorian bardolatry to show how it differs from the romantic enthusiasm that produces it. Section two addresses the Shakespeare Question itself and depicts the Victorian religious and scholarly context in which it arose. Section three expands briefly upon the romantic roots of such interpretation, and section four upon the way that the Shakespeare Question forms an important literary element of what we describe more broadly as the Victorian religious crisis. I. The Bibliolatry of Bardolatry To make sense of the Shakespeare Question, it is helpful to recall that romantic enthusiasm for Shakespeare generated an astonishing momentum during the latter half of the eighteenth century, when a national interest initially associated with the actor David Garrick blossomed into a literary cult. This highly national bardolatry subsequently inherited the sanction of German critics such as Johann Wolfgang Goethe and Johann Gottfried Herder, for whom Shakespeare served as a helpful alternative to neoclassical French drama. In the early years of the nineteenth century, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas Carlyle used the authority of these continental figures to bolster their defense of Shakespeare's universal genius. In doing so, they fanned the flames of Shakespeare enthusiasm so successfully that by mid-century it was a ubiquitous part of the British literary imagination. Matthew Arnold merely rehearses romantic truisms in his 1849 sonnet "Shakespeare" when he compares Shakespeare to a mountain of which we cannot conceive the summit. His fellow Victorians took their bardolatry to further extremes. Many seriously advocated treating Shakespeare's works as a secular, national Bible: a "Bible of Humanity" or a "Bible of Genius."3 Others hypothesized (against all evidence) that Shakespeare must have had a key role in the inspired translation of the King James Bible.4 And on his deathbed, the laureate Alfred Tennyson demanded his Shakespeare after Job and...
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