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sacrilegious. The great anti-theatrical preachers of Elizabethan England may have been turning in their graves, but Shakespeare’s divinity was now taken for granted.
    The process that had led to his deification was a curious one. In his own day Shakespeare was typically equated with rivals, both classical and contemporary. Francis Meres likened him to Ovid, and ranked him with the best of English tragedians and comedians. In his Epistle to The White Devil in 1612, John Webster grouped him with Thomas Dekker and Thomas Heywood as one of England’s most prolific playwrights, notable for their ‘right happy and copious industry’. And when Edmund Howe added a brief account of ‘our modern, and present excellent poets’, in the fifth edition of John Stow’s Annales in 1615, Shakespeare’s name predictably appears along with those of a score of other distinguished Elizabethan poets and dramatists. Examples could easily be multiplied.
    It was only posthumously that Shakespeare was finally unyoked from the company of rivals or mortals. This occurred in the prefatory verses to the collection of his plays put together by fellow actors John Heminges and Henry Condell, who had worked alongside Shakespeare for over twenty years. They published the collected plays in 1623 in a folio edition (and the decision to publish them in a large and costly folio format – in which the printed sheet of paper was only folded once – the equivalent of the modern‘coffee-table’ book rather than the paperback-sized and inexpensive quartos or octavos in which plays typically appeared, and in which the printed sheet was refolded to produce a considerably smaller page – was itself an indication of his distinction). Before this, only Ben Jonson had published plays in a folio-sized volume, and he had been mocked for presuming to do so. For Jonson, who contributed a pair of poems to the First Folio in praise of his rival, Shakespeare ‘did far outshine’ Marlowe, Thomas Kyd and John Lyly (though not, presumably, Jonson himself). But in the same poem, Jonson also recycled a trope he had used so effectively in his ‘Ode to Cary and Morison’, where the heroic dead live on in the heavenly firmament:
    But stay, I see thee in the hemisphere,
    Advanced and made a constellation there!
    Shine forth thou star of poets.
    In a similar vein, James Mabbe wrote that ‘We thought thee dead’, but like a good actor, Shakespeare has managed to ‘die, and live’. For Leonard Digges, it was the works that would prove immortal: ‘every line, each verse, / Here shall revive, redeem thee from thy hearse’. Ben Jonson wrote much the same thing:
    Thou art a monument, without a tomb,
    And art alive still, while thy book doth live.
    These are all lovely and probably heartfelt sentiments, but nobody at the time would have mistaken hyperbolic claims about Shakespeare’s immortality for anything but a literary device. So too, when in the late seventeenth century John Dryden spoke of Shakespeare’s ‘sacred name’, or ‘professed to imitate the divine Shakespeare’, his words were never meant to be taken literally.
    Yet referring to Shakespeare as divine had become so habitual that by 1728 a sharp-eared foreigner like Voltaire couldn’t help but notice that Shakespeare ‘is rarely called anything but “divine” in England’ – to which Arthur Murphy proudly retorted that ‘With us islanders, Shakespeare is a kind of established religion in poetry.’What had begun as a literary trope became a widely shared conviction after David Garrick mounted a Shakespeare festival – a three-day ‘Jubilee’ with all its religious overtones – in Stratford-upon-Avon in September 1769. Garrick, who had risen to fame thanks to Shakespeare, had few rivals as a bardolator. By this time he had appeared in a score of Shakespearean roles and had