ABSTRACT

Published in 1999. Shakespeare is ‘the great author of America’ declared James Fenimore Cooper in 1828. The ambiguous resonance of this claim is fully borne out in this collection of writings on Shakespeare by over forty prominent Americans, spanning the period between the War of independence and the outbreak of the First World War. Featured writers include: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allen Poe, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman and Mark Twain.

The essays, many of which are reprinted here for the first time, are arranged in chronological order and provide a fascinating conspectus of American attitudes to Shakespeare, from Revolutionary and Transcendentalist approaches through to the influential interventions of professional American critics in the early twentieth century. The extraordinary and bizarre contribution to the Shakespeare debut by Delia Bacon is exemplified by the inclusion of her 1856 article which is reprinted in its entirety.

Americans on Shakespeare charts the emergence of an American literary tradition, and the gradual appropriation of Shakespeare as part of the American search for cultural identity; an identity whose domination is set to continue into the twenty-first century.

chapter 1|3 pages

The Pausing American Loyalist

chapter 3|16 pages

Stratford-on-Avon

chapter 4|3 pages

Notions of the Americans

chapter 8|3 pages

Literary Vassals

chapter 9|2 pages

Emerson

chapter 10|23 pages

Shakespeare

chapter 12|15 pages

Shakespeare; or, The Poet

chapter 13|12 pages

Shakspeare and Insanity

chapter 15|11 pages

The Romance of Yachting

chapter 16|8 pages

Alleged Immorality

chapter 17|4 pages

Shakspeare in America

chapter 18|6 pages

Hawthorne and his Mosses

chapter 19|31 pages

William Shakespeare and his Plays

chapter 24|4 pages

Shakespeare

chapter 25|3 pages

Shakspeare

April 23, 1864

chapter 26|2 pages

Why We Have No Shakespearean Scholars

chapter 27|9 pages

Philosopher and Poet

chapter 28|4 pages

A Thought on Shakespeare

chapter 29|9 pages

Shakespeare Once More

chapter 30|9 pages

Coriolanus

chapter 31|4 pages

Two Speeches

chapter 32|2 pages

Democratic Vistas

chapter 34|21 pages

The Shakespeare-Bacon Controversy

chapter 36|2 pages

In Warwickshire

chapter 40|2 pages

A Thought on Shakspere

chapter 44|5 pages

George Fox (and Shakspere)

chapter 47|5 pages

Edwin Booth

chapter 48|10 pages

Shakespeare’s Americanisms

chapter 49|4 pages

Barnum and Shakespeare

chapter 50|5 pages

New World Discoveries

chapter 51|6 pages

Shaw and Shakespeare

chapter 52|31 pages

Shakespeare in America

chapter 53|14 pages

Introduction to The Tempest

chapter 54|6 pages

The Response of Concord

chapter 55|5 pages

Is Shakespeare Dead?

chapter 56|14 pages

Shakespeare Spells Ruin

chapter 57|13 pages

Shakspere and his Audience

chapter 60|15 pages

Shakespeare in America