Charles Downing perhaps represents the pinnacle of this line of thought [the reverence of Shakespeare bordering on hagiography or deification as moral-spiritual icon]. Writing under the pseudonym "Clelia," he published
God in Shakespeare in 1890, in which he promised, "I will show that the profane play-actor was a Holy Prophet - 'Nay, I say unto you and more than a Prophet,' a Messiah. Heine, a Hebrew, first spoke of Stratford as the northern Bethlehem. I will show that Heine, a poet, spoke more truly than he knew." "Clelia" followed up in 1901 with
The Messiahship of Shakspeare: A Symbolic Poem which takes the Shakespeare cult to its pinnacle:
The Tempest, like the Sonnets is a work of a religious nature by unmistakable marks. It is imbued throughout with high moral passion, it presents in Prospero a worker and teacher of the moral law, a God-man, a Logos, a Trinity in Unity, which, moreover, is the Christian Trinity in Unity. And observe, Prospero is not the mere artistic presentation of a God-man. He is the proclamation of the internal significance of a role that has been lived. For twelve years previous to the proclamation, Shakspeare, at one with the Spirit and with God, at one with Christ the Judge, in a series of great tragedies had judged the world.
Deranged as a Downing sounds, his God in Shakespeare was published, and reprinted, by the respectable publisher T. Fisher Unwin, and it obviously sold well enough to justify the publication of Messiahship eleven years later by Greening & Co., publishers of serious criticism on Walter Raleigh, Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Pinero, and Oscar Wilde.
