Status Updates From Contested Will: Who Wrote S...

And the seventeenth-century biographer John Aubrey hadn’t helped de Vere’s legacy by retailing an embarrassing and probably apocryphal anecdote about him: “This Earl of Oxford, making of his low obeisance to Queen Elizabeth, happened to let a fart, at which he was so abashed and ashamed that he went to travel seven years. On his return the Queen welcomed him home, and said, ‘My lord, I had forgot the fart.’”

Unfortunately, the conviction that Shakespeare was godlike had by now intensified to the point where his plays could casually be referred to as a “Bible of Humanity” and a “Bible of Genius,” and his words juxtaposed with those of Holy Writ to underscore their scriptural force in books such as J. B. Selkirk’s Bible Truths with Shakespearean Parallels.

By the end of the eighteenth century the idea of a divine Shakespeare had become commonplance. Still, it wasn't as if anyone was paying homage to his image in a house of worship. Another century would pass before that happened.

Yet referring to Shakespeare as divine had become so habitual that by 1728 a sharp-eared foreigner like Voltaire couldn't help but notice that Shakespeare "is rarely called anything but 'divine' in England" - to which Arthur Murphy proudly retorted, "With us islanders, Shakespeare is a kind of established religion in poetry."

Meant to finish this while in SF but ended up spending all my time exploring the town or being exhausted & sunburnt from exploring. So I'm just getting back into it!

I like how he totally calls out one of his fellow Shakespearean scholars for believing the plays are autobiographical.