From Janus to Prometheus

Abstract

The 1769 Stratford Jubilee, where Garrick celebrated Shakespeare as ‘the god of our idolatry’, is generally recognized as the first public manifestation of Bardolatry, the dramatist’s elevation to the status of a creative divinity being associated with Coleridge’s criticism. This article rather suggests that the construction of Shakespeare as an icon was a gradual process generated by the contradictions inherent to the reception of his plays by neoclassicism. It argues that the main catalyst in this paradoxical transfiguration of a playwright into a demigod was the instability of neoclassical concepts of nature and imitation when confronted with Shakespeare’s characters.