The Dangers of Bardolatry

...In 1805 the prestigious Edinburgh Review, discussing the sonnet in English, declared that it was "Milton and Gray who have cultivated it with most success...

...a reaction to their excesses is long overdue...

...It is by no means even clear that all of the claims made for Shakespeare as a writer can survive scrutiny...

...And a new generation is being force-fed large doses of his work...

...as Gary Taylor has observed "We assume that Shakespeare's 30-odd plays contain more of humanity than the 500 plays of Lope de Vega that we have not read...

...Shakespeare the sage bears as tenuous a relation to the original as the magician Virgil of medieval European imagination bore to the Roman poet...

...Arbitrarily changing the settings of the plays—for instance, by transferring the events of A Midsummer Night's Dream to 19th-century Italy, as is done in the recent film—would seem to be as gross a violation of the integrity of the text as can be imagined...

...At the risk of being excommunicated by Shakespeareans (Stratfordian and anti-Stratfordian alike), one could plausibly maintain that the great line of comedy in English runs from Jonson and perhaps Fletcher through Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Oscar Wilde and Noël Coward...

...But if Shakespeare's oeuvre is considered to be a venerated and canonical literature in itself, then plundering it can be compared to the use the Greek tragedians made of Homer, or the cannibalization of Virgil and Ovid by medieval authors who retold the stories of "Sir Hector" and "Sir Orfeo" using the conventions of their own day...

...and other university courses in the literatures of modern languages...

...they may be in the process of becoming our "ancient literature...

...Shakespeare's tragedies followed Senecan models...

...Herman Melville's reputation as a novelist has resulted in the reprinting and analysis of his mediocre poetry, but the works of better 19th-century American poets such as John Greenleaf Whittier are out of print and ignored...

...But did he take the prize in the two other genres he pursued, lyric and narrative poetry...

...In the English-speaking world anyway, it seems more students are introduced to Roman history by reading Julius Caesar than by reading Julius Caesar...

...Bardolaters may answer that this merely proves their idol's contemporaries and near-contemporaries lacked taste...

...Between Shakespeare's death and the closing of the theaters in 1640, and again after the Restoration, London audiences preferred the plays of the Francis Beaumont-John Fletcher team...

...The decline of interest in the study of the classical languages encourages a fissioning of Western literature along linguistic and national lines...

...In 1699 James Drake expressed what was then a critical commonplace: "Shakespeare...

...Shakespeare was one of the world's greatest dramatists and poets, but pace the two Blooms, he did not invent the modern notion of human psychology, nor can he plausibly be enlisted to serve as a classical Legislator or culture hero, a Western equivalent of Confucius...

...Summer would not be complete in the English-speaking countries without Shakespeare festivals like the one in Ashland, Oregon...

...What if Marlowe's Hero and Leander really is better than Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece...

...But suppose— just suppose—those in the 17th and 18th centuries who tended to share Shakespeare's conceptions of drama and poetry were better judges of his merits and faults than people from later eras for whom he has become a demigod...

...Lately, as shelves devoted to editions and criticism of Shakespeare have expanded in the big bookstores, the space allotted to the Loeb's Classics has contracted or in some cases vanished altogether...

...More Shakespeare means less Ovid and less Cicero...

...Henderson's judgment strikes contemporary literary intellectuals as absurd— yet is anyone who has not read William Drummond as well as Shakespeare qualified to object...

...his comedies draw on Plautus and Terence...

...It is often said that posterity is the best judge of an artist's work...

...The rising reputation of Shakespeare's sonnets illustrates the tendency to promote the minor works of major writers overtime, and to ignore significant works in the same category by less famous writers...

...Or can we...

...But surely, it might be replied, no harm can come from excessive popular and critical adulation of Shakespeare...

...What if Jonson and Beaumont and Fletcher really were better comic playwrights...

...I would eagerly attend a revival of Jonson's Volpone, but a squad of agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms could not drag me to one of Shakespeare's tedious cross-dressing comedies...

...Perhaps Shakespeare—and equivalent literary Founding Fathers in other modern vernaculars, like Goethe and Pushkin—are destined to be the classics to the moderns of the 21 st and 22nd centuries...

...Like Abraham Lincoln or Thomas Jefferson, whose authority can be invoked on behalf of practically any proposition or cause, King James' court playwright has been elevated to the status of a benevolent demigod...

...Hollywood now regularly crafts movies based on the Bard's plays and has even given us one, Shakespeare in Love, based on speculation about his life...

...The Greco-Roman tradition is the common heritage of the European countries and their former colonies in the Americas and the Southwest Pacific...

...If comedies attract people to the theater, if his sonnets introduce great numbers of readers to poetry, then the excesses of Shakespeare mania can be forgiven...

...I suspect the current cohort of eighth-graders is as baffled by the complexities of Scottish dynastic politics and the heartbreak of adultery as my generation was...

...Others encounter the pastoral only in the form of As You Like It...

...There simply have been quite a number of better narrative poets in English...

...Indeed, Shakespeare would probably be forgotten today if his reputation had depended on hisminiature epics...

...then, for the Romans, it was midway between their era and the classical Greek past...

...Consider the sonnets...

...Besides the downgrading of many eminent poets and playwrights to exalt him, when it comes to the study and discussion of Western literature as a whole, there is a danger that an excessive emphasis on the Bard's contribution will be accompanied by a corresponding reduction in the attention paid to the rest of the tradition...

...Their fear that the study of novels and play's and poetry of recent centuries in the vernacular European languages would displace the study of Greco-Roman classics appears to have been vindicated...

...in recent years Homer and Virgil and Ovid have been ably rendered in English...

...A century ago, many classics teachers lobbied against the introduction of English Lit...

...In four centuries William Shakespeare has gone from being one of three great Elizabethan playwrights, to being the greatest Elizabethan playwright, to being the greatest poet in English, to being the greatest writer in any language...

...The Jacobean and Caroline and Restoration audiences, who thought less than we do of his other efforts, nevertheless admired Hamlet, Macbeth and Othello...

...In contrast to his sonnets Shakespeare's narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, both celebrated and influential in his day, have never been rehabilitated...

...the future may hold surprises...

...the Romans, in turn, were considered cultural ancestors by their medieval and Renaissance successors...

...For every 10,000 — or perhaps 10 million—students who have read or seen them, there may be one who has firsthand familiarity with their inspirations, even in translation...

...Students who come to Shakespeare only after they have studied the Greco-Roman classics, even in translation, would not need a footnote in their edition of A Midsummer Night's Dream to inform them who King Theseus was...

...Studying Shakespeare outside of the context of Western literature as a whole, in sum, is as great a disservice to his memory as enlisting his prestige in the service of this or that critical theory or political philosophy...

...A course in Western literature using only English texts could begin with Homer and Hesiod and proceed chronologically through the classical Greek, Hellenistic, Roman and Medieval eras to the Renaissance and recent centuries...

...Only someone of superhuman erudition and infallible taste could determine whether he is really the world's greatest playwright...

...In the realm of scholarship, Helen Vendler has recently published a painstaking analysis of Shakespeare's sonnets, while Harold Bloom, with characteristic hyperbole, has attributed to him "the invention of the human...

...In Poetic Form and British Romanticism, Stuart Curran quotes one George Henderson as a representative of "mainstream opinion" in 1803: "Until the time of Drummond of Hawthornden, whose Sonnets first appeared about the year 1616, we [British] can advance slender claim to any degree of elegance in this species of versification...

...Shakespeare's works may not only be eclipsing the great literature of the ancients...

...The reductio ad absurdum of what George Bernard Shaw called "Bardolatry" may have been the late Allen Bloom's Shakespeare's Politics, a book that argued the importance of Shakespeare as an ethical and political teacher...

...first published in 1609, they were reprinted only once, in a textually eccentric edition of Shakespeare's Poems (1640...

...Compared to the learned Jonson and the witty Fletcher, Shakespeare was considered crude or "natural...

...Alexander Pope and Nicholas Rowe, in their 18th-century editions of Shakespeare's works, included the sonnets only in supplements...

...Among their other benefits, these or similar approaches would enable students to understand Renaissance writers like Shakespeare far more easily...

...Well, I must confess I share the defect...

...To introduce Paradise Lost to high school or college students who are not as familiar with the Bible, Homer and Virgil as Milton expected his readers to be is a perverse and pointless exercise...

...fell short of the Art of Jonson, and the Conversation of Beaumont and Fletcher...

...IF we are in fact witnessing the promotion of Shakespeare's works from part of literature to Literature itself, it would not be the first time the passage of years has produced an alteration in the vantage point for viewing the Western tradition...

...What his friend Ben Jonson called Shakespeare's "small Latin and less Greek" amounted to considerably more Latin and Greek than all except classicists possess nowadays...

...For different reasons, it found no place in the esthetic schemes of neoclassicists, romantics or modernists...

...The hypothesis that Shakespeare's plays are becoming our "ancient literature" explains one of the otherwise puzzling aspects of modern Bardolatry— namely, the astonishing license modern producers take in adapting the master's work...

...Few would dispute the claim that he was the greatest playwright in the English language (at least to date...

...Generations of schoolchildren have been introduced to premodern English poetry by means of Shakespeare's sonnets...

...Along with the 18th-century poet Thomas Gray, John Milton had the greatest influence on William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who were responsible for reviving the status of the sonnet...

...The Alexandrian era was once "modernity...

...In the 17th century, he was usually joined with Ben Jonson and John Fletcher in what Sir John Denham called "the triumvirate of wit...

...In an era when Jori Graham and Allen Ginsberg are considered great poets, Shakespeare can at the minimum serve as a reminder of the nature of genuine literature...

...Earlier generations did not necessarily think so...

...In the shortened perspective of the average person in the English-speaking world, it appears that the fiction and poetry of the 19th century, Jane Austen and John Keats, constitute the Middle Ages, as it were, to Shakespeare's Antiquity...

...While this would hardly be a cultural disaster, the losses that would accompany the eclipse of Greco-Roman literature by post-Renaissance Western literatures would be quite real...

...According to Gary Taylor in his Reinventing Shakespeare, "In the 17th century there had been fewer allusions to Shakespeare's sonnets than to any of his plays or narrative poems...

...Immediately after Drummond, there does not appear to have been any writer of the sonnet of considerable consequence except Milton...

...AT least we can agree that Shakespeare was the greatest playwright in English...

...But avoiding such an outcome does not require a revival of Latin and Greek...

...I lov'd the man, and doe honour his memory (on this side Idolatry) as much as any," Ben Jonson wrote of Shakespeare in the 1630s...

...even Bardolaters do not quite know what to make of Shakespeare's ventures in this form...

...It is no insult to Shakespeare's memory to question the follies of some of his more enthusiastic admirers...

...Like Christopher Marlowe's Hero and Leander, Shakespeare's miniature epics were influenced by the epyllion, a style that flourished in Alexandrian and Augustan Rome and was revived briefly during the Renaissance...

...Instead of being in the center of a tradition that begins with the Greeks and Romans, at a point closer to us than to them, Shakespeare may now be the most remote and venerable literary figure for most of the educated public (though not the scholarly elite) in the English-speaking world...

...Nor is Shakespeare the only great English author whose works are best understood by those immersed in the Western tradition...

...It would be a tragedy if the conception of a common Western tradition gave way to as many separate literatures as there are Western languages— if most English speakers were to know Shakespeare but not Sophocles, and Italians read Dante rather than his model hero Virgil...

...But this tradition goes back only to the 19th century...

...After all, the Greek and Roman classics can be translated into the modern vernaculars...

...Or the chronological development of tragedy, comedy, satire, etc...

...What if Drummond of Hawthornden and Milton and Gray really did write better sonnets...

...Isn't it enough that Shakespeare was the greatest tragedian in English...

...For us to understand both Shakespeare and the grand tradition in which he belongs, we too must remain "on this side Idolatry...

...couldbe traced through many centuries and several languages...

...Even if all of these heresies were accepted, Shakespeare would remain the greatest tragedian in English, and one of the greatest in world literature...

...Although the costs of Shakespeareworship can be exaggerated I think they are real...