The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare

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Bard

Bard,
sometimes extended to ‘the Bard of Avon’, a widespread nickname for Shakespeare, once reverent but now usually used at least half-facetiously. Identifying Shakespeare as the chronicler of his tribe's golden age—implicitly, an English Homer—the term was first commonly applied to Shakespeare around the time of David Garrick, one of whose songs at the Jubilee in 1769 proclaimed that ‘The bard of all bards was a Warwickshire bard.’

Michael Dobson

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