Based on extensive archival research, Shakespeare in the Victorian Periodicals offers an entirely new perspective on popular Shakespeare reception by focusing on articles published in Victorian periodicals. Shakespeare had already reached the apex of British culture in the previous century, becoming the national poet of the middle and upper classes, but during the Victorian era he was embraced by more marginal groups. If Shakespeare was sometimes employed as an instrument of enculturation, imposed on these groups, he was also used by them to resist this cultural hegemony.

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.

Based on extensive archival research, Shakespeare in the Victorian Periodicals offers an entirely new perspective on popular Shakespeare reception by focusing on articles published in Victorian periodicals. Shakespeare had already reached the apex of British culture in the previous century, becoming the national poet of the middle and upper classes, but during the Victorian era he was embraced by more marginal groups. If Shakespeare was sometimes employed as an instrument of enculturation, imposed on these groups, he was also used by them to resist this cultural hegemony.

Yeats, Shakespeare, and Irish Cultural Nationalism examines Yeats’s writing on Shakespeare in the context of his work on behalf of the Irish Literary Revival. While Shakespeare’s verse drama provides a source of inspiration for Yeats’s poetry and plays, Yeats also writes about Shakespeare in essays and articles promoting the ideals of the Revival, and on behalf of Irish literary nationalism. These prose pieces reveal Yeats thinking about Shakespeare’s art and times throughout his career, and taken together they offer a new perspective on the contours of Yeats’s cultural politics. This book identifies three stages of Yeats’s cultural nationalism, each of which appropriates England’s national poet in an idiosyncratic manner, while reflecting contemporary trends in Shakespeare reception. Thus Yeats’s fin-de-siécle Shakespeare is a symbolist poet and folk-artist whose pre-modern sensibility detaches him from contemporary English culture and aligns him with the inhabitants of Ireland’s rural margins. Next, in the opening decade of the twentieth century, following his visit to Stratford to see the Benson history cycle, Yeats’s work for the Irish National Theatre adopts an avant-garde, occultist stagecraft to develop an Irish dramatic repertoire capable of unifying its audience in a shared sense of nationhood. Yeats writes frequently about Shakespeare during this period, locating on the Elizabethan stage the kind of transformational emotional affect he sought to recover in the Abbey Theatre. Finally, as Ireland moves towards political independence, Yeats turns again to Shakespeare to register his disappointment with the social and cultural direction of the nascent Irish state. In each case, Yeats’s thinking about Shakespeare responds to the remarkable conflation of aesthetic and religious philosophies constituting his cultural nationalism, thus making a unique case of Shakespearean reception. Taken together, Yeats’s writings deracinate Shakespeare, and so contribute significantly to the process by which Shakespeare has come to be seen as a global artist, rather than a specifically English possession.

The English humour magazine Punch, or the London Charivari, which first appeared in 1841, quickly became something of a national institution with a large and multi-layered readership. Though comic in tone, Punch was deeply serious about upholding high literary and artistic standards, about dealing with serious subject-matter, and about attempting to nurture its readers' appreciation of the national drama and of Shakespeare's plays in particular. The author's detailed examination of Punch's constant advocacy of Shakespeare reveals telling new evidence concerning the ubiquitous presence of Shakespeare within Victorian culture. New research in the Punch archives and elsewhere also reveals the identities of many of the Punch authors and artists. The author shows how those who worked for Punch often subsumed their collective identities within the single persona of Mr. Punch, a fictional creation who repeatedly presents himself in both texts and graphics as a close friend and admirer of Shakespeare, a man able to remind Victorian readers constantly of the supreme literary and moral values represented by Shakespeare's works.

An illustrated collection of new essays with valuable reference material on the performance and reception of Shakespeare's plays.