Bowdler and Britannia: Shakespeare and the National Libido

Summary

The inception of the ‘Shakespeare industry’ during the eighteenth century, with which I shall be largely concerned in this paper, has not always been considered an especially sexy topic, I admit, and it is probably still true that for most historians of Shakespeare criticism the period which gave us the first ‘scholarly’ edition (Rowe’s, 1709), the first public squabble over textual editing (between Alexander Pope and Lewis Theobald, 1725–6), and the first solemn pilgrimage to Stratford (Garrick’s Jubilee, 1769) isn’t one with any very obvious erotic overtones. Nonetheless, it is precisely the sexual dimension of the Enlightenment’s processing of Shakespeare that I mean to sketch here, and especially its inextricable connection with the development of English nationalism. I shall be suggesting that the definition of Shakespeare as an object of nostalgic veneration during the eighteenth century is inseparably bound up with both the construction of modern sexuality and the construction of English national identity; so bound up, in fact, that it would be possible to regard the Enlightenment Shakespeare we still largely inherit as not just the ally but the offspring of Bowdler and Britannia, propriety and nationalism. In the course of this argument I shall be illustrating how in the eighteenth century Shakespeare came to embody the national libido-albeit, paradoxically, at the expense of his own.