Even in Shakespeare's own time, people idolized him. Otherwise his colleague Ben Jonson would never have bothered to say, after Shakespeare's death, that he loved the man as well as anybody, "this side idolatry." Obviously, Jonson, who himself called Shakespeare the "soul of the age," knew people whose adoration was even more extreme. The idolatry has never wholly stopped. Its incense burners were snuffed, for several decades, after the Puritans shut down England's theaters, but David Garrick relit them at full strength, and they've sent smoke up steadily ever since. Even the constant, idiotic attempts to prove that somebody other than Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare's plays count as so many misshapen votive candles... More >>>