Shakespeare and the American Nation. By Kim C. Sturgess. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. vii + 234 pages.
The blurb on its dust jacket claims that Kim Sturgess's Shakespeare and the American Nation will tell us why "so many Americans celebrate Shakespeare, a long-dead English poet and playwright," how nineteenth-century citizens "made William Shakespeare a naturalized American hero," and that by the turn of the twentieth century "for many Americans Shakespeare had become as American as George Washington." I had heard such broad claims made before when, as a high school student, I had read Nancy and Jean Francis Webb's Will Shakespeare and His America (1964). And I had since found good reason to question their validity when they were largely reproduced in Lawrence Levine's assertion that "Nineteenth-century America swallowed Shakespeare, digested his plays, and made them part of the cultural body" (Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America [Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988, 24]). Such generalizations draw on evidence that is as partial as it is anecdotal, and largely discount the ambivalence that informs so much of the commerce between Shakespeare and America in the nineteenth century. They also feed off the bardolatry that should presumably be one of the primary objects under review. As Michael Dobson has observed: "The presence of Shakespeare's plays in the culture of the United States of America--a nation descended, according to its principal founding myth, from seventeenth-century Puritans who fled England to avoid (among other things) Renaissance drama--has always been attended, understandably, by a certain ambivalence, even on the part of the most bardolatrous" ("Fairly Brave New World: Shakespeare, the American Colonies, and the American Revolution," Renaissance Drama 23[1992]:189).
In his more balanced introduction, …
