Shakespeare Tercentenary RSVP

General

• ways to expand/articulate stakes:
  • link to Houston 2014 - the digital shows us the complexities of print networks and can send us back to the archive to better understand the cultural dynamics around it, as I do here. Check.
  • Respond to Laurel's critique: it is content driven, but the content of the Reader is understudied and using periodicals to understand the social dynamics of Victorian reprint culture is a contribution. Check.

Commemoration/Monumentality Addition Source Notes

Edinburgh Companion Shakespeare/Arts

The Edinburgh Companion to Shakespeare and the Arts. ed. Mark Thornton Burnett et al. Edinburgh: UP, 2011.

Balz Engler, "Shakespeare, Scultpure and the Material Arts," pp 435-444

• 435: These monuments, which often served as models for smaller representations, can tell us a great deal about the cultural status of the person depicted by them.
• Sculptures arrest the flow of time and freeze a person in a significant image; they call it back to life, as it were at the same time as fixing it in rigor mortis, those who put up the sculpture publicly associating themselves with the person or the event commemorated. They are therefore elements in a culture of memory.
• 436 In the second half of the nineteenth century [there was a] veritable monument-craze. Public spaces were adorned with the statues of historical personalities, statesmen, generals, poets, but also allegorical figures, meant to represent the cultural and political values of the community.
• 438 In 1734 it was suggested that the acting profession and theatre audiences should collect money for a Sh monument and the plan came to fruition in 1739. Its erection also had political implications. It was promoted by opponents of Walpole's corrupt regime; Shakespeare was claimed "as both a foe to tyranny and a genuinely national hero, above the reach of bribery or invidious patronage."
  • quotes Dobson 1992, The Making of the National Poet
• Soon the statue [from above quote] appeared on the stage in an enterainment at Goodman's Field, Harlequin Student, or the Fall of Pantomime by David Garrick, and it became a popular icon for later representations, including china figurines. As Sidney Lee complained in 1906, this "set a bad pattern for statues of Shakespeare. Posterity came to invest the design with some measure of sanctity." As such it could serve those who wanted to enhance their status by associating themselves with Sh.
  • Sidney Lee, "the commemoration of Shakespeare in London," 1906
• 439: [The quote from Malvolio "There is no darkness but ignorance," on Leicester statue in 1874] Again the words have been isolated from their context and reproduced as a statement of general truth, now expressing a Victorian belief in improvement
  • the practice isn't new or isolated to statuary, but the ideology might be

Mark Thornton Burnett, "Shakespeare Exhibition and Festival Culture"

• 445 the extent to which this seminal movement [Stratford Jubiliee 1769] in the reification of Shakespeare spawned a dialogue about the Bard that brought national and international forces into play.
• the role of the text in the celebratory Shakespearean impulse: arresting is the fact that it is not so much the sanctity of the word that is privileged as a looser set of meanings precipitated by the Bardic name.
• Shakespeare emerges from celebration as inspiring and transcendent, even as an instrument of moral and educative improvement.
• 446 ...Garrick's paean to the Bard helped inaugurate the dominant conception of Shakespeare in the popular consciousness
• Garrick's discovery of Shakespeare is a pastoral one and serves to forge a lasting idea of the dramatist as a creature of the bucolic world. [his poem includes the "lov'd spot" of Stratford]
  • London Terc. committee comes into conflict with this deeply embedded cultural discourse
• 447 ...What distinguishes Sh is his claim to perpetuity. By recollecting Sh, and by contemplating the past, we might better confront the present, the argument runs, the associated idea being that memory and the Bard are customary bedfellows.
• 454 The "book," writes Barbara Hodgdon, "remains the clearest channel for Shakespearean evangelism." From the evidence of Shakespeare exhibitions and festivals, however, a less centralized conception of text comes into view.
  • no plays performed in 1769 - at least the Victorians were more text focused at Stratford and in the West End
• If there is a constant [across the course of "Shakespearean festive history"], it is that the text - or simply text - comes in and out of focus. At times, this is prioritized, as befits the particular occasion, but, at other times, this is subsumed within, and mediated by, other forms of cultural representation.
• In these manifestations of Shakespeare exhibition and theatrical culture, at least, the book yields up to a late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century investment in the plethora of mass media.
  • but I would argue that this happens too in 1864 but the mass media is still the codex, pointing up the technologically mediated cultural investment in mass reproduced cultural objects
• 460 Shakespeare as a "place of convergence - contacts across time and space. ...A constant, too, is Shakespeare as a cult and Shakespeare as culture[.]
• Sh exhibited and celebrated, then, is not a bookish phenomenon; rather, the emphasis is on the ways in which his corpus of meaning signifies. According to this logic, Shakespeare is an instrument for keeping in touch with important truths. Exhibitions and festivals dedicated to him enable an experience of authenticity and they allow for an idealization of universality. Invariably, these processes take place in denial of informing material contexts, which include the relation between symbolic capital and [461] economic capital and the purposely obfuscating operations of memory. Yet, even inside the obvious mystification of Shakespeare in festival and exhibition culture, responsiveness to the complexities of the moment can be detected. History is bodied forth in Shakespeare exhibitions and festivals to the extent that new histories to emerge into view. The loss of empire, the role of nation, the situation of English, forms of domination and the question of relativity - these and other developments and considerations are enshrined in the festive Shakespeare in ways that have reflective value and purpose. Celebrating Shakespeare offers us an insight into the past at the same time as it invites us to contemplate alternative bonds of association and as yet untested commemorative possibilities.
  • new communities and publics offered through Shakespearean mass print

Rigney/Leerssen Commemorating

Rigney, Ann and Joep Leerssen. "Fanning out from Shakespeare." Commemorating Writers in Nineteenth-Century Europe: Nation Builiding and Centenary Fever. ed. Joep Leerssen and Ann Rigney. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Print.

• Use Benedict Anderson to connect monuments to periodicals in "imaginative communities"? Does Mary Shannon have something useful for BA -> periodicals?
• impt not to flatten that the 1864 tercentenary wasn't very successful (certainly not as much as Garrick's in 1769) - this is one of the reasons why there was no civic monument to Shakespeare in London until later

• 1 originary point in Johnson's 1765 ed of Shakespeare for "canonization of the bard"
• look up Quinault, Roland, "The Cult of the Centenary," Historical Review 71.176 (1998) 303-23.
• 1916 anniversary of his death during WWI: "This gave a material shape to the historical links btwn Sh, Tudor England, colonization, and the British Empire by including a reduced-scale Tudor village (designed by Edwin Lutyens, architect of New Delhi and later of the Cenotaph)... alongside a replica of the first Globe Theatre, at which excerpts from Eliz and Jacobean plays were performed three times a day"
  • Kahn 2001
• 2 [busts, statues, and paintings] augmented his textual legacy by visual and plastic representations that were displayed in and on buildings, as well as in parks and streets.
• At the 1864 celebrations at the Crystal Palace a bust of Shakespeare presided over events, whith a permanent public 'national monument' following in 1871 at Stratford.
• These various ways of cultivating Shakespeare's memory often worked together in a multimedia layering of text and image.
• profusion "all feedback loops in the self-amplifying multimedia perpetuation of an author's celebrity and canonicity."
• Carlyle in On Heroes: "He is the grandest thing we have yet done. For our honour among foreign nations, as an ornament to our English household, what item is there that we would not surrender rather than him?" (Carlyle 1870, 132)
  • goes on to say he'd give up the empire rather than Sh
• 3 ...the link made by Carlyle between a writer and an empire as both a form of collective capital and a mark of international honour is striking, and indicates that much more was at stake in the public celebration of literature than a mere matter of aesthetics.
• internationality of this canonicity - "London had no outdoor statues dedicaated to him to match the one placed in New York's Central Park in 1872. The tercentenary of his birth saw the foundation in 1864 of the first Shakespeare society - in Germany."
  • what about the early literature societies? Those are earlier by a bit...
• It has been shown how the cultivation of Sh's memory helped to consolidate his position at the very pinnacle of the English literary canon and as part of an international hyper-canon - a champion's league of European classics if not indeed paradigmatic for world litearture.... As this volume will show, the public celebration of literature on the occasion of the centenary of a writer's birth and death was by no means unique, either to Sh or to England. [A Europe-wide phenomenon btwn 1769 and 1916]
  • the canon isn't stable in the way that Empire isn't either: it looks it but isn't, it's always in the process of being formed - by watching this during the 1864 tercentenary we have a micro-history of canon formation

LaPorte Bard Bible

LaPorte, Charles. "The Bard, the Bible, and the Victorian Shakespeare Question." ELH 74:3 (Fall 2007), 609-28. Web.

• A case study to watch canon formation and nation formation in action: implicit in other studies' arguments is the fundamental methodological point that this happened in periodicals and, as such, it is incumbent on us to explore this site more fully as a site in itself.
• Make sure to situate Terc after 1850s controversies: Collier, authorship controversy w/ Delia Bacon
• 609 C19 criticism of W Sh provides the foremost example of the romantic and Victorian habit of conflating literary enthusiasm with genuine religious feeling.
• ...the profound extent to which religious discourses have shaped our ideas about literature, for bardolatry and Xianity functioned as models for one another in ways that go beyond analogy.
  • Rigney: the historical movement away from religious festivals in Europe, but the rhetorical and discursive continuity
• Argument: In this work, I wish to show how the Sh 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.
• 610 In the early years of the C19, ST Coleridge and T Carlyle used the authority of these continental figures [Goethe and Herder] to bolster their defense of Sh's universal genius. In doing so, they fanned the flames [that started with Garrick] of Sh enthusiasm so successfully that by mid-century it was a ubiquitous part of the British literary imagination. M Arnold merely rehearses romantic truisms in his 1849 sonnet "Shakespeare" when he compares Sh to a mountain of which we cannot conceive the summit.
• 612 But that Sh actually came to be set beside the bible in facing-page volumes is a triumph of Victorian piety that outstrips the audaciousness of romantic critics. Carlyle's own great mid-century influence must have gone a long way toward reconciling the two for the age that followed him. It is difficult to imagine Coleridge on his deathbed in 1834 demanding his Sh as Tennyson would do in 1892.
• [Swinburne, Shakespeare, 1909] "The word Sh connotes more than any other man's name that was ever written or spoken upon earth."
• 613: Paradoxically, the quasi-religous canonization of Sh upon which Swinburne depends could only occur when the Bible was at the center of a hermeneutic and religious crisis, and when the scriptures were being broadly reconceived as inspired in a literary way - not as a divine catalogue of divine historical events, but as a human catalogue of poetic imitations about the nature of the divine.
  • This is what's different about Victorian Shakespeareanism: not just continuous with patterns from Garrick and Romantics
• 614 German Classical philology and Biblical criticism had provided the theoretical foundation for this reexamination of Sh, and this is why the terms in which Sh was discussed often reflect contemporary anxieties about the Bible.
• 616 [Aurora Leigh line about "Wolf," who wrote Prolegomena ad Homerum - AL engaged with the textuality because of Straussism and the Shakespeare Question - the same nexus of questions and ideas for Biblical doubt and Sh Question]
• 617 Indeed, it is only Strauss's looming presence that explains why Wolf's thesis was still so shocking to Aurora a half-century after it was initially published, and why she condemns him as an atheist. By the 1850s, Wolf was old hat, but Strauss was still shockingly new, and few of his claims were more unnerving to believers than the following one about authorship: "It is an incontrovertible position of modern criticism that the titles of the Biblical books represent nothing more than the desingn of their author, or the opinion of Jewish and Christian antiquity respecting their origin."
• In light of such controversy over Biblical hermeneutics, and particularly the way that Strauss's questions of authorship resonated in the mid-Victorian religious atmosphere, I wish to suggest that it was virtually inevitable that the Sh Q would come to be raised as it was.
• 618 In Scotland, England, and America, common elements of the V religious atmosphere also accounted for the continued reiteration of the importance of myth and explain why the so-called mythology of Sh attained so prominent a role in debate about the Sh Q. As Carlyle and Hawthorne both saw it, the most important part of Bacon's claim was "that the "Man Shakespear'" is a Myth." This is what Strauss had so famously called the mythic point of view.
• 619 Following Carlyle and Hawthorne, Whitman here reproduces the logic of the higher critics (especially Strauss) by identifying Sh as a figure best seen through the lens of myth [as opposed to history]: one dares not put into plain statement guesses about his "real" authorship. These would invariably come short of the mythology, and the real authorship is probably unknowable anyway. It is essential to see that Whitman's "Straussism" [in November Boughs] comes to present a radically different point of view from that which advocates an actual author for the plays, whether that author be Francis Bacon, the Earl of Oxford, or the Stratfordian actor who is usually given credit. It is also essential that were one to take Whitman's statement and replace "the Sh question" with "the Gospel," the entire passage would be equally characteristic of the anxieties of the nineteenth century.
• For many C19 critics, the more striking implication was that secular literature might attain a similarly sacred character to that of the Scriptures. Put simply, to believe that texts can attain a sacred character is to raise the stakes of literature; it is this romantic conviction that produces the Victorian Sh.
• 621 The religious - perhaps the irreligious - thrust of the higher critical method provides the best context for the profound theological anxiety that surrounded the Sh Q for the ensuing half-century or more. Thus Charles Dickens writes apprehensively of Sh's personal obscurity, "It is a Great comfort, to my thinking, that so little is known concerning the poet."
• Dickens's trembling and James's haunting, like Tennyson's distaste for biographical history and Twain's mock readiness to die for his faith, all reflect an enormous Victorian anxiety about the ways in which the basis for Xianity, and, in turn, of culture, depended upon the uncertain ground of myth.

Yeats

Add most recent notes Yeats, George. "Shakespeare's Victorian Legacy: Text as Monument and Emendation as Desecration in the Mid-Nineteenth Century." VLC 40 (2012): 469-486. Web.

• 469 association between monument and text goes back to F1 and F2 prefatory verses by Jonson and Milton
• the monumental analogy, with its suggestions of imperviousness, stability and timelessness, is arguably an unsuitable evocation of the documents upon which [470] Heminge and Condell based the Folio. DS Kastan believes that as many as thirty-three of that volume's thirty-six texts were probably based on "scribal manuscripts or the bookkeepers' marked playbooks," and therefore had been subject to processes of alteration, regularization, and excision before they reached the printers (73).
  • qts Kastan, Sh and the Book
• 470 By the mid C18, editors had heavily amended its texts, playwrights had freely adapted the canon, and commemorative events - such as the unveiling of Peter Sheemaker's Westminster abbey statue in 1741 and the 1769 Jubilee festivities - were imbuing the figure of Shakespeare with new cultural and political significances [cf. Engler]. Around those years various memorialists identified Sh's legacy not only with the text but also with the contemporary stage, the actors who reincarnated him, and his status as a personification of British culture.
• 471 From the 1840s to the 1860s, as scholars debated how the textual legacy might be restored to its supposed original integrity, there were a number of major developments in Sh scholarship: there was the growth of a conservative editorial school advocating the restoration of readings from the early quartos and the first folio; there were the publications of the Shakespeare Society (1840-53); there were the fascinating annotations that one of the Society's most prominent members, John Payne Collier, claimed to discover in a copy of the second folio and the investigations that eventually exposed the marginalia as bogus (1859); there were two editions that imitated or reproduced the first folio; and there was the so-called "Cambridge Shakespeare" (1863-66) whose apparatus documented and attributed every significant variant known at that date.
  • make sure to mention sig of Cambridge Sh ads
• 472 By the early C19 the first folio, so liberally emended during the early-to-mid eighteenth century, had recovered its textual authority thanks largely to the decision of two editors, Edward Capell (1768) and, more influentially, Edmund Malone (1790), to adopt it and the early quartos as their copy-texts. As Andrew Murphy explains, "call[s] for a radical return to the text of the First Folio" inspired Francis Douce to reprint it, for the first time, in 1807 (Sh in Print 191).
• 473 In the mid 1840s two prominent Vic editors were reviving the authority of the 1623 text itself. Charles Knight and Collier both advertised their editions of 1844 as restoring folio readings and, in Collier's case, those of the early quartos.
• look up GH Lewes' "Shakespeare and his Editors" (1845)
• 476 The special tercentenary issue of Chambers's Journal -- look up