Shakespeare and the American Nation (review)

The fascinating story of Shakespeare's reception and reproduction in the United States has been told many times, with recent studies devoted to particular regions such as the Wild West and the South. How did so many Americans come to embrace, as well as mock, a figure whose nationality they otherwise deplored? In Shakespeare and the American Nation, Kim C. Sturgess attempts to answer this question. I'm sorry to report that the story of Shakespeare in America, as Sturgess retells it, is neither compelling nor comprehensive. Sturgess's title is itself highly misleading. A more accurate title would have been Shakespeare in Nineteenth-Century America. Sturgess pointedly confirms Lawrence Levine's account in Highbrow/Lowbrow, stating that there was a "significant populist consumption of Shakespeare consistent with the mass culture described by Lawrence Levine" (21).

Sturgess devotes too little space to the eighteenth century and the early twentieth century. He includes a very brief epilogue on the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. He covers Fourth of July orations, some American literature, Delia Bacon, the Wild West, and the "now familiar stories of the African Grove Theater, the Astor Place riot, the actor Edwin Forrest and the establishment of Shakespeare libraries in America" (8).

Sturgess's book is organized in two parts, each devoted to one of two aims: first, to explain the paradox of Shakespeare's reception in America and, second, to show how Shakespeare came to be embraced. But Sturgess fails to deliver even on these modest aims. In the first part of his book, Sturgess explores "the paradox of the American consumption of Shakespeare, the evidence that Americans did not simply watch and read but actively 'consumed' Shakespeare, and that this level of consumption was greater than that enjoyed by any native writer" (10). Sturgess never explains the paradox, however. At the ending of part 1, entitled "The Paradox," he simply restates it:

at the same time that America declared its cultural independence, and many things English were often considered symbols of 'the enemy' of freedom, liberty and democracy, Shakespeare was embraced and consumed by the citizens of the young republic. Shakespeare . . . somehow avoided the contempt felt by Americans for England and the English. This is the . . . 'paradox' that deserves greater attention .

(47)

Rather than explain the paradox of Shakespeare's reception in America, Sturgess explains it away by arguing that Shakespeare could be embraced because he was part of Anglo-Saxonism rather than England. Shakespeare's reception is thus "seemingly paradoxical" (78). The paradox of Shakespeare's reception is flattened out into an "ambivalence" "between appreciation of Shakespeare and prevalent anti-English sentiment" (131). There is no room for ambivalence about Shakespeare, only appreciation, or about England, only hatred. Sturgess addresses dissent from Shakespeare's populist embrace rather than the use of Shakespeare to dissent from American national and foreign policies. Sturgess pays no attention to the paradox that constitutes America as an empire of liberty and a republic of empire and does not engage the debate among Americanists over whether the United States ought to be considered a postcolonial nation, as well as an empire.

In addition to flattening out the paradoxical into the "seemingly paradoxical," Sturgess also ends up discounting political conflicts among Americans over the use of Shakespeare. All that matters to Sturgess is that all sides used him. Sturgess illogically concludes that Shakespeare therefore always served to unify the United States as a nation. Along similar lines, Sturgess pays almost no attention to censorship or to bowdlerization and doesn't pause to consider what it means for some Shakespeare productions or texts to have been censored or expurgated. To his credit, Sturgess does note several factors that contributed to Shakespeare's Americanization, including the interests of American elites and "American enterprise culture" (181). But state and market, in Sturgess's account, seem to work in seamless harmony to secure Shakespeare's importance as...