Bardolatry

Question 1

H.N. Paul

Answer 1

‘His creative mind could have created the characters and events of his plays solely from his imagination but it was inveterate habit to seek for suggestions from other minds on which to build’

Question 2

Samuel Taylor

Answer 2

‘‘wisdom deeper even than our consciousness’

Morally impeccable – ‘keeping at all times the high road of life’, making readers ‘better as well as wiser’

Question 3

Maurice Charney

Answer 3

‘Bardolatry prevents us from understanding Shakespeare as a working dramatist and poet’

Question 4

Alexander Pope

Answer 4

‘that with all these great excellencies, he has almost as great defects; and that as he has certainly written better, so he has perhaps written worse, than any other’

Question 5

Voltaire

Answer 5

influenced by Augustinian aesthetics
‘a fine but untutored nature: he has neither regularity, nor propriety, nor art: in the midst of his sublimity he sometimes descends to grossness, and in the most impressive scenes to buffoonery: his tragedy is chaos, illuminated by a hundred shafts of light’

Question 6

Tolstoy

Answer 6

influenced by preference for C19th naturalism
‘‘all his characters speak, not their own, but always one and the same Shakespearian pretentious and unnatural language, in which not only they could not speak, but in which no living man ever has spoken or does speak’’

Question 7

George Bernard Shaw

Answer 7

‘his complete deficiency in that highest sphere of thought, in which poetry embraces religion, philosophy, morality […] . [H]is characters have no religion, no politics, no conscience, no hope, no convictions of any sort’