Shakespeare and Victorian Essayism: A Note of Provinciality

In this paper I consider the modes and the terms of Shakespeare's Victorian canonization by surveying the chief voices of 19th-century criticism. Referring to Carlyle’s “The Hero as a Poet. Dante and Shakespeare” (1840), Bagehot’s “Shakespeare—The Man” (1853), and Ruskin’s Lecture 5 of Munera Pulveris (1862), I point at the ways in which Shakespeare was turned into a political and cultural issue in mid-nineteenth-century Britain. The first two documents contributed to building the monument of Shakespeare and to strengthening its identification with the nation, by adapting and also naturalizing some of the key arguments of romantic criticism. Ruskin’s lecture, on the other hand, provides a complex reading of Shakespeare's The Tempest in the light of Plato’s Republic that evokes the disquieting scenery of England’s contemporary labour conditions.