ABSTRACT
Shakespeare’s location in the feudal past and the aristocratic values his plays were seen as advocating represented a threat to the republic. The historical Shakespeare, however vague the history, a genius, both as a shaper and heroic function of an antithetical aristocratic age somehow valorized by his work, was a supreme problem for burgeoning American writers in search of cultural distinctiveness and a legitimating poetic voice. Shakespeare is the paradigmatic exemplar of that genius which is nothing but the “natural action of the mind rendering obedient to itself by a higher principle those objects to whose power it might otherwise have been subjected.” In the nineteenth century and before, many writers held, only the Americans remained true to the radical spirit of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England; hence they were the rightful possessors of a Shakespeare who had previously been the common heritage of both the English and the Americans.
