Before beginning my Spring Term class in Stratford-upon-Avon, I spent a few days in London with my family, and while there we visited the Victoria and Albert Museum. Though my expectations were low, the V&A blew me away with how cool its exhibits were and the breadth of the artifacts it housed. One object that really stuck in my mind was a small golden arm, mounted on a golden base and pointing up. In the center of the arm was a small window revealing an empty chamber. The placard explained that this object was a “fetish” (stop snickering) and that it and other devices like it were used to house relics of saints—this particular piece was, unsurprisingly, meant to hold some saint’s skeletal arm (though the bones are long gone). The room was full of ornate golden objects meant to hold relics, which hammered home to me how incredibly important these holy artifacts were considered to be by the devout of the Middle Ages.
I was reminded of the medieval fascination with relic collection several times this week as I explored Stratford-upon-Avon, a town that has inextricably tied its identity to its most famous son and whose economy depends upon the sale of Shakespeare paraphernalia. When our class visited Anne Hathaway’s house, the tour guide directed our attention to a bench in the living room. In the late nineteenth century, the guide explained, one of Hathaway’s descendants had told guests that Shakespeare had courted Anne on that bench, and that this descendant had then hacked off pieces of the bench to sell to tourists—including one Charles Dickens. However, the guide continued, when contemporary furniture experts looked at the bench, they had determined that it had been built in the mid-1700s, far too late for the Mr. and Mrs. to have actually sat upon it.
Issues of fraud aside, that people would be willing to pay money to possess a hacked-up piece of wood upon which Shakespeare might have sat reveals something powerful and not necessarily positive about how people have worshiped the Bard for centuries. It’s hard to ignore the similarities between this extreme example of Shakespeare obsession and the adoration of saint’s bones or alleged pieces of the true cross. I don’t pretend to have any particularly deep insights into human nature, but I do find it fascinating how Shakespeare the man (or really more the idea of Shakespeare the man) has for many gone beyond being merely a source of very good plays to become a mythologized figure. For people like Dickens, Shakespeare serves much the same function as the stories of saints did for medieval Christians: they thought of the Bard with a sense of awe and they wanted physical objects connected with him upon which to lavish their reverence. As to how good or bad any of this is, I’ll leave to the theologians and psychologists to decide.