In the Victorian era, William Shakespeare's work was often celebrated as a sacred text: a sort of secular English Bible. Even today, Shakespeare remains a uniquely important literary figure. Yet Victorian criticism took on religious dimensions that now seem outlandish in retrospect. Ministers wrote sermons based upon Shakespearean texts and delivered them from pulpits in Christian churches. Some scholars crafted devotional volumes to compare his texts directly with the Bible's. Still others created Shakespearean societies in the faith that his inspiration was not like that of other playwrights. Charles LaPorte uses such examples from the Victorian cult of Shakespeare to illustrate the complex relationship between religion, literature and secularization. His work helps to illuminate a curious but crucial chapter in the history of modern literary studies in the West, as well as its connections with Biblical scholarship and textual criticism.

How and why did Victorian culture make Shakespeare into a literary deity and his work into a secular Bible?

Shakespeare and the Victorians explores the place of Shakespeare in Victorian culture, and shows how the plays and the man became central to all levels of Victorian life and thought.

Swinburne, it may also be used to promote more conservative policies and literary interpretations in other writers such as Robert Browning and Charles Dickens.".

What did the Victorians think of Shakespeare? The twelve essays gathered here offer some answers, through close examination of works by leading nineteenth-century novelists, poets and critics including Dickens, Trollope, Eliot, Tennyson, Browning and Ruskin. Shakespeare provided the Victorians with ways of thinking about the authority of the past, about the emergence of a new mass culture, about the relations between artistic and industrial production, about the nature of creativity, about racial and sexual difference, and about individual and national identity.

What is (a) play? How do Shakespeare's plays engage with and represent early modern modes of play – from jests and games to music, spectacle, movement, animal-baiting and dance? How have we played with Shakespeare in the centuries since? And how does the structure of the plays experienced in the early modern playhouse shape our understanding of Shakespeare plays today? Shakespeare / Play brings together established and emerging scholars to respond to these questions, using approaches spanning theatre and dance history, cultural history, critical race studies, performance studies, disability studies, archaeology, affect studies, music history, material history and literary and dramaturgical analysis. Ranging across Shakespeare's dramatic oeuvre as well as early modern lost plays, dance notation, conduct books, jest books and contemporary theatre and film, it includes consideration of Measure for Measure, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Macbeth, Titus Andronicus, Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, King Lear and The Merry Wives of Windsor, among others. The subject of this volume is reflected in its structure: Shakespeare / Play features substantial new essays across 5 'acts', interwoven with 7 shorter, playful pieces (a 'prologue', 4 'act breaks', a 'jig' and a 'curtain call'), to offer new directions for research on Shakespearean playing, playmaking and performance. In so doing, this volume interrogates the conceptions of playing of/in Shakespeare that shape how we perform, read, teach and analyze Shakespeare today.

Shakespeare and the Royal Actor argues that members of the royal family have identified with Shakespearean figures at various times in modern history to assert the continuity, legitimacy, and national identity of the royal line. It provides an account of the relationship between the Shakespearean afterlife and the royal family through the lens of a broadly conceived theatre history suggesting that these two hegemonic institutions had a mutually sustaining relationship from the accession of George III in 1760 to that of Elizabeth II in 1952. Identifications with Shakespearean figures have been deployed to assert the Englishness of a dynasty with strong familial links to Germany and to cultivate a sense of continuity from the more autocratic Plantagenet, Tudor, and Stuart monarchs informing Shakespeare's drama to the increasingly ceremonial monarchs of the modern period. The book is driven by new archival research in the Royal Collection and Royal Archives. It reads these archives critically, asking how different forms of royal and Shakespearean performance are remembered in the material holdings of royal institutions.

"Adrian Poole examines the Victorian's obsession with Shakespeare, his impact upon the era's consciousness, and the expression of this in their drama, novels and poetry. The book features detailed discussion of the interpretations and applications of Shakespeare by major figures such as Dickens and Hardy, Tennyson and Browning, as well as those less well-known."--Bloomsbury Publishing.

Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro explains when and why so many people began to question whether Shakespeare wrote his plays.

Shakespeare is the most frequently quoted English author of all time. Quotations appear everywhere, from the epigraphs of novels to the mottoes on coffee cups. But Shakespeare was also a frequent quoter himself - of classical and contemporary literature, of the Bible, of snatches of popular songs and proverbs. This volume brings together an international team of scholars to trace the rich history of quotation from Shakespeare's own lifetime to the present day. Exploring a wide range of media, including Romantic poetry, theatre criticism, novels by Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy and Ian McEwan, political oratory, propaganda, advertising, drama, film and digital technology, the chapters draw fresh connections between Shakespeare's own practices of creative reworking and the quotation of his work in new and traditional forms. Richly illustrated and featuring an Afterword by Margreta de Grazia, the collection tells a new story of the making and remaking of Shakespeare's plays and poems.