In Romantic Acting and
Bardolatry, Celestine Woo discusses reports of audiences' fervid reactions to performances by Siddons; she notes that female theatregoers in particular were afflicted with this starpowered hysteria, apparently "so overcome by Siddons's passionate acting that they swooned during the performance" (123).
As Gail Marshall has pointed out, it is ironic that a society so devoted to the practice of "
bardolatry" was also guilty of so drastically altering Shakespeare's work for the stage.
by Sybil Thorndike." Brian Walsh, '"Shakespeare in Stained Glass: The Shakespeare Memorials of Southwark Cathedral and 'Local'
Bardolatry," Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 7, no.
But if this outrageous example of early
Bardolatry sets Shakespeare apart from any individual contemporary, it is Digges himself, who wrote primarily as a translator and had an intimate understanding of the dynamics between originals and translations as well as those between authors and translators.
At its heart lies a sequence of vocal solos (and one delightful duet) interspersed by a lengthy Shakespeare-quoting piece of
bardolatry by Garrick himself, elegantly (legs nicely turned) if occasionally muffledly declaimed by Samuel West.
"In one of her most interesting chapters, Mays describes the rise of '
bardolatry' over the next century and a half, and the slow recognition of the unique value of the First Folio....
Despite Bate's disavowal of the term 'Apocrypha', his General Introduction is not short on
bardolatry. A particularly egregious example is his assertion that the value of the plays included in the volume resides for the most part, if not entirely, with the fact that they were at some time or another ascribed to, or associated with, Shakespeare.
(7.) In Bloom's books, from The Western Canon to Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, he upholds Shakespeare's supreme position in the western canon and advocates a "secular religion" of
bardolatry (Invention, xix).
Call it
bardolatry. There has been a kind of godlike essence in the way I see him.
Schoch, Not Shakespeare:
Bardolatry and Burlesque in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 2002).