The Romantic Cult of Shakespeare: Literary Reception in Anthropological Perspective

255 Pages·1998·20.22 MB·English

by  Peter Davidhazi

The Romantic Cult of
Shakespeare
Literary Reception in Anthropological Perspective
Péter Dávidházi
ROMANTICISM IN PERSPECTIVE:
TEXTS, CULTURES, HISTORIES
General Editors:
Marilyn Gaull, Professor of English,
Temple University/New York University
Stephen Prickett, Regius Professor of English Language and Literature,
University of Glasgow
This series aims to offer a fresh assessment of Romanticism by
looking at it from a wide variety of perspectives. Both
comparative and interdisciplinary, it will bring together cognate
themes from architecture, art history, landscape gardening,
linguistics, literature, philosophy, politics, science, social and
political history and theology to deal with original, contentious or
as yet unexplored aspects of Romanticism as a Europe-wide
phenomenon.
Titles include
Richard Cronin (editor)
1798: THE YEAR OF THE LYRICAL BALLADS
Peter Davidhazi
THE ROMANTIC CULT OF SHAKESPEARE: Literary
Reception in Anthropological Perspective
David Jasper
THE SACRED AND SECULAR CANON IN ROMANTICISM
Preserving the Sacred Truths
Malcolm Kelsall
JEFFERSON AND THE ICONOGRAPHY OF ROMANTICISM
Folk, Land, Culture and the Romantic Nation
Andrew McCann
CULTURAL POLITICS IN THE 1790s: Literature, Radicalism
and the Public Sphere
Ashton Nichols
THE REVOLUTIONARY T: Wordsworth and the Politics of
Self-Presentation
Jeffrey C. Robinson
RECEPTION AND POETICS IN KEATS: 'My Ended Poet'
Anya Taylor
BACCHUS IN ROMANTIC ENGLAND: Writers and Drink,
1780-1830
Michael Wiley
ROMANTIC GEOGRAPHY: Wordsworth and
Anglo-European Spaces
Eric Wilson
EMERSON'S SUBLIME SCIENCE
The Romantic Cult
of Shakespeare
Literary Reception in
Anthropological Perspective
Peter Davidhazi
First published in Great Britain 1998 by
& MACMILLAN PRESS LTD
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London
Companies and representatives throughout the world
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 0-333-69827-4
First published in the United States of America 1998 by
& ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, INC.,
Scholarly and Reference Division,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010
ISBN 0-312-21287-9
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Davidhazi, Peter.
The Romantic cult of Shakespeare : literary reception in
anthropological perspective / Peter Davidhazi.
p. cm. — (Romanticism in perspective)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-312-21287-9 (cloth)
1. Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616—Appreciation—Hungary.
2. Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616—Criticism and interpretation-
-Histoiy. 3. Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616—Appreciation-
-England. 4. Criticism—Hungary—History—19th century.
5. Literature and anthropology. 6. Romanticism—Hungary.
7. Romanticism—England. 8. Romanticism—Europe. I. Title.
II. Series.
PR2979.H8D38 1998
822.3'3—dc21 97-42323
CIP
© P&er Davidhazi 1998
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made
without written permission.
No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with
written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by
the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 9HE.
Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to
criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance
with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and
sustained forest sources.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 21
07 06 05 04 03 02 01 00 99 98
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire
In memory
of my parents
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Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgements xiv
1 The Exploration of a Literary Cult: Theoretical
Assumptions and Methodological Problems 1
2 The Genesis of a Ritual: the Shakespeare Cult in
English Romanticism 34
3 A Middle European Case Study: the Development
of the Shakespeare Cult in Hungary 108
4 The European Context: Typological Problems of
Dissemination 164
5 The Postponed Question of Judgement: Functions
and Values Reconsidered 196
Notes 210
Bibliography 223
Index 233
vn
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Preface
'With us islanders Shakespeare is a kind of established religion in
poetry/ The sentence is from an essay published in 1753 by Arthur
Murphy to justify the ways of Shakespeare to Voltaire. Compar
ing the British reverence for the Bard to some kind of religion
could have no pejorative overtones in this context. The meta
phor was meant to be affirmative, though it was no more than a
casual association, left unexamined and undeveloped in the sub
sequent text, in spite of occasional references to 'our immortal
bard' whose amazing imagination explored 'undiscovered regions
of eternity'.1 The metaphor of religion or cult haunted the commen
tators of Shakespeare's afterlife in the centuries to come, but usually
it expressed less sympathy for the phenomena in question, and
was often used in a derisive or condescending manner, accentu
ated by a subversive tone of playful irony
With no intention either to vindicate or to discredit, in this
book I am trying to investigate what happens when we take the
metaphor seriously. (If taking the ironical at its face value is a
sign of heroische Borniertheit or a simplistic mind, the book may
be used as sufficient evidence against its author.) Its underlying
assumption is that the reception of Shakespeare in several Euro
pean countries over the last two centuries can be viewed as the
dissemination of a secular cult whose psychology, ritual and rhet
oric reveal latent religious patterns. I cannot promise to give a
full explanation of why this quasi-religious behaviour was adopted,
and I confess to have but vague, tentative, unverified and (despite
some evidence) probably unverifiable ideas about connections
between (say) the birth of this literary cult and the crises of traditional
religious authority in eighteenth-century England,2 or between
the Victorian transformation of Shakespeare festivals and a need
for quasi-transcendental legitimations of the national ethos and
its implied social hierarchy. Books have always been written at
least as much by the ignorance as by the knowledge of their
authors: it is the limits of our understanding that make the treat
ment of a topic possible at all, and with a subject as intricate as
mine one has to be especially aware of the many questions left
IX