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produced many of the plays. Acknowledged in his day for having done much to revive interest in Shakespeare onstage, he would be buried at the foot of Shakespeare’s statue in Westminster Abbey, the words on his tomb declaring that ‘Shakespeare and Garrick like twin stars shall shine’.
    Garrick had even built a temple to Shakespeare on his estate in Hampton on the banks of the Thames. The treasures contained within the octagonal shrine drew admirers from Horace Walpole to the King of Denmark: Roubiliac’s statue of Shakespeare (now housed in the British Museum, and for which Garrick himself was almost certainly the model), various carvings from the famed mulberry tree, and even some of Shakespeare’s personal effects, including ‘an old leather glove, with pointed fingers and blackened metal embroidery’, an old dagger and a ‘signet ring with W.S. on it’. For detractors like Samuel Foote the heresy was a bit much: Mr. Garrick had ‘dedicated a temple to a certain divinity … before whose shrine frequent libations are made, and on whose altar the fat of venison, a viand grateful to the deity, is seen often to smoke’. Others found nothing strange in this at all.
    Even Garrick admitted that the rain-soaked Stratford Jubilee had been a ‘folly’. It set him back £ 2,000 and he never again set foot in Shakespeare’s native town. Locals were apparently confused by the Jubilee (including a labourer from Banbury hired to deliver a double-bass viol to the event, who reportedly thought that it was to be used at ‘the resurrection of Shakespeare’). Stratford’s tourist industry as well as the proliferation of Shakespeare festivals around the world can trace their roots back to that extravaganza. The Jubilee, according to Christian Deelman, the best historian of the event, also ‘marks the point atwhich Shakespeare stopped being regarded as an increasingly popular and admirable dramatist, and became a god’.
    By all accounts, its climax was Garrick’s recitation of an ‘Ode to Shakespeare’, a shameless appeal to Shakespeare’s divinity:
    â€™Tis he!’ tis he – that demi-god!
    Who Avon’s flowery margin trod.
    In case anyone missed the point, Garrick was happy to repeat it: ‘’Tis he! ’Tis he! / The god of our idolatry!’ One gushing eyewitness wrote afterwards that the audience ‘was in raptures’. Garrick avidly promoted mulberry relics, of which he owned a considerable supply, including the very goblet that reappeared as a prop in the Drury Lane celebration of 1794.
    Garrick recouped his Stratford losses four times over by restaging a version of the events at Drury Lane, in a play simply called The Jubilee . It was a sensation and ran for a record ninety-two nights. His ‘Ode’ was not only published and circulated widely, but also recited on provincial stages from Canterbury to Birmingham. The Jubilee tapped into larger cultural currents, for no ‘other topic in the century inspired quite such a surge of stage plays and poems’. Word spread quickly beyond England’s shores, and two Jubilees were held in Germany, modelled on Garrick’s. After Garrick’s death, William Cowper celebrated him as ‘Great Shakespeare’s priest’, underscoring the ways in which the celebration of Shakespeare was now most fittingly described in religious terms:
    For Garrick was a worshipper himself;
    He drew the liturgy, and framed the rites
    And solemn ceremonial of the day,
    And called the world to worship on the banks
    Of Avon famed in song.
    Contemporary painters were quickly drawn to the idea of a divine Shakespeare, and did much to popularise this conceit. In 1777 Henry Fuseli sketched out plans, much talked of but neverrealised, for a Shakespeare ceiling modelled on that of the Sistine Chapel: even as Michelangelo portrayed the story of Creation, Fuseli would render