bardolatry
bardolatry,a term for the uncritical, quasi-religious worship of Shakespeare's genius, particularly in its Romantic and 19th-century variants. The term was first coined by the agnostic George Bernard Shaw in 1901, and owes something to Ben Jonson's remark that he loved Shakespeare and honoured his memory ‘on this side idolatry, as much as any’ (in Discoveries, c.1630). David Garrick made no such qualification in 1769, when he adapted a phrase from Romeo and Juliet in his Jubilee ode—‘'Tis he, 'tis he, | “The god of our idolatry!” ’—and Shaw's distaste for this attitude to Shakespeare is anticipated by William Cowper's attack on Garrick's whole festival as blasphemous in his poem The Task (1785).
Michael Dobson
Bibliography
Babcock, R. W., The Genesis of Shakespeare Idolatry, 1766–1799 (1931)
Dávidházi, Peter, The Romantic Cult of Shakespeare: Literary Reception in Anthropological...
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