Conceived as a replacement for religion, English was institutionalized at the height of the Victorian deification of Shakespeare, swapping the old Judeo-Christian God for one that Britain had ready at hand. "An institution," Ralph Waldo Emerson observed, "is the lengthened shadow of one man." And the Academic institution of English literature, as the scholar Nancy Glazener writes, can be understood as a shadow cast by Shakespeare, though this shadow is "an effect of Shakespeare's having been positioned and lit retrospectively."

—Elizabeth Winkler, Shakespeare was a Woman and Other Heresies