ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an extract from “The Anatomizing of William Shakespeare" published in Atlantic Monthly, 53 (1884). This is the second of a series of three articles appearing under the same title in 1884 and 1885. More inflated nonsense, more pompous platitude, more misleading speculation, has been uttered upon Shakespeare and his plays than upon any other subject but music and religion. Shakespeareanism became a cult, a religion,—in which becoming there is always death at heart and withering at root,—a cult and a religion, with priests and professional incense-burners, who lived, at least in literature, by his worship. The tendency of deliberate eulogy of Shakespeare toward absurdity has striking exemplification in more than one passage of Emerson’s essay on him as the representative poet.
