Talk:The cult of Shakespeare

Issues with this article

This article has a couple of issues...

First, as I hadn't run across the concept of "cult of Shakespeare" used as distinct from Bardolatry before, I had to do some digging. What I found suggests that this stems entirely from the "world-shake.ru" source, which is actually mostly just describing Bardolatry without using that term. The reason is that the source is actually a Russian ternary source that's been translated into English by a non-native speaker, and it discusses the topic in a Russian cultural context. Specifically, it leans on the related concepts of "Shakespearisation" and "Shakespearianism" which are, again, English ad hoc translations of terms used in Russian literary criticism (by Pavel Annenkov) and is used when describing the relationship of, e.g., Dostoyevsky, Pushkin, and Tolstoy to Shakespeare and Shakespeare's influence on Russian cultural and literary history). While there are, of course, a whole host of hits for "cult of Shakespeare" on the web, they all refer to Bardolatry (in particular, F. E. Halliday's book The Cult of Shakespeare, which traces Bardolatry and the cult of Shakespeare from Shakespeare's day to the middle of the 20th century). The related (translated) terms referred to have a few hits in Russian and Asian sources, but zero hits in JSTOR, Project MUSE, Cambridge Core, and Oxford Journals. That is, these are not terms used by topic matter experts, relevant scholarly journals (such as Shakespeare Quarterly, Modern Language Review, or Cahiers Élisabéthains), or the main critical editions (The Arden Shakespeare, The Oxford Shakespeare, the New Cambridge Shakespeare, etc.).

In other words, there isn't really a "cult of Shakespeare" concept that is distinct from Bardolatry, and there is no material for a separate article here. Voltaire's relationship with Shakespeare might well merit coverage in the article on Bardolatry somewhere, but the rest has no place (Garrick is already covered and the Russian terms belong on ruwiki).

In addition, the first sentence of the lede is a close paraphrase of the "world-shake.ru" source, and other bits are close paraphrases of the other cited sources. It's probably too short to rise to the level of copyvio, but it should still be fixed.

And there are the various issues I've tagged inline in the article. --Xover (talk) 13:56, 15 June 2017 (UTC)

Absent objections for six months I've boldly gone ahead and merged the relevant parts (Voltaire) into Bardolatry. --Xover (talk) 08:33, 2 January 2018 (UTC)