Around the mid-nineteenth century, however, the field began to professionalize. A discipline called English literature arose, founded on and formed around Shakespeare. It arose, first and foremost, as a substitute for religion. For centuries, Christianity had exerted a pacifying influence on the population, encouraging values of meekness and self-sacrifice, and unifying all classes, from the richest congregant to the pious peasant, under a single ideology. But by the Victorian period, religion was threatened by scientific discovery and social change. Church attendance among the working classes was falling. Social unrest seemed to be building. The church was losing its hold on the masses, and the Victorian ruling class worried that, without religion to encourage morality and restraint, something like the French Revolution could happen in Britain. A new religion was needed; a discourse that could provide the unifying, pacifying function formerly provided by Christianity. As the scholar Terry Eagleton writes, "If one were to provide a single explanation for the growth of English studies in the later nineteenth century, one could do worse than to reply: 'the failure of religion.'"

—Elizabeth Winkler, Shakespeare was a Woman and Other Heresies