What Blest Genius?
The Jubilee That Made Shakespeare
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- $32.99
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- $32.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the 2019 Marfield Prize for Outstanding Writing About the Arts
The remarkable, ridiculous, rain-soaked story of Shakespeare’s Jubilee: the event that established William Shakespeare as the greatest writer of all time.
In September 1769, three thousand people descended on Stratford-upon-Avon to celebrate the artistic legacy of the town’s most famous son, William Shakespeare. Attendees included the rich and powerful, the fashionable and the curious, eligible ladies and fortune hunters, and a horde of journalists and profiteers. For three days, they paraded through garlanded streets, listened to songs and oratorios, and enjoyed masked balls. It was a unique cultural moment—a coronation elevating Shakespeare to the throne of genius.
Except it was a disaster. The poorly planned Jubilee imposed an army of Londoners on a backwater hamlet peopled by hostile and superstitious locals, unable and unwilling to meet their demands. Even nature refused to behave. Rain fell in sheets, flooding tents and dampening fireworks, and threatening to wash the whole town away.
Told from the dual perspectives of David Garrick, who masterminded the Jubilee, and James Boswell, who attended it, What Blest Genius? is rich with humor, gossip, and theatrical intrigue. Recounting the absurd and chaotic glory of those three days in September, Andrew McConnell Stott illuminates the circumstances in which William Shakespeare became a transcendent global icon.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Stott (The Poet and the Vampyre) entertainingly chronicles the 1769 Shakespeare Jubilee in Stratford-upon-Avon, which he asserts cemented Shakespeare's status as the "weightiest of cultural authorities." The book describes the Jubilee as the brainchild of Stratford-upon-Avon's civic leaders, who hoped to thereby raise their town's profile. To do so, they enlisted the aid of renowned actor David Garrick, who had built his career around Shakespeare, whom he revered. While the Jubilee itself was largely a disaster, plagued by heavy rains, flooding, price gouging, and tacky displays, Garrick emerged unscathed. The ode he wrote to Shakespeare was the hit of the festival, and Stratford-Upon-Avon became a popular tourist destination. However, it's James Boswell, famous as Samuel Johnson's biographer, who emerges as the book's true star. Boswell, a good friend of Garrick's, shameless self-promoter, and fervent Shakespeare lover, attended the Jubilee, recorded and published his impressions, and managed to enjoy himself despite the event's many failings. Whether or not the Jubilee was the watershed moment in Shakespeare veneration Stott claims, he provides a lively, page-turning narrative, and proves that shamelessly overhyped media events are not just modern phenomena.
