How Did Shakespeare Formulate An American Culture

Shakespeare in America

Generation after generation, the American authors’ engagement with Shakespeare marks their continuing endeavor to establish an American national literature. Long before the American revolution, as early as the beginning of the seventeenth century, the quest for a distinct American identity lingered on the hearts of many Americans, especially of the American authors, who took it their task to formulate an American literary identity, which was new and different from that of Europe, the old world. Several issues are central to this ongoing quest for literary nationality: the relationship between originality and tradition, past and future, etc.

Benjamin T. Spencer’s book The Quest for Nationality offers a thorough analysis

Coming into the new world, the settlers saw America as a virgin land, the new Zion, free from the corruption and pollution of the old European world. Many early literary works were devoted to praising the new land, God’s divine design. (可引). The seventeenth century writers, believing strongly in the purity of the new Zion, adopted plainness and simplicity as their literary style. The American nature, with its grand scenery, was one of the major source of inspiration. Literature at this time was committed to the idea of Progress and liberty was seen as the “all-sufficient muse” (17). During this period, a distrust for European works was not

The first generation of American authors after the revolution believed that American, as a newborn nation, was the best candidate to embrace and develop the universal taste, which consisted largely of the English literary style. Thus, as argued by Spencer, the American literature at the time was largely “a reordering of European ideas, a purification of Old World genres, or a realization of the literary dreams of ancient cultures in the ideal atmosphere of the New World” (39). Some of the common literary themes at this time, the depiction of the American manners and the American landscape, were therefore to a large extend the realization of the accommodation of American experiences to traditional genres and principles.

Spencer did however, also spots an “undercurrent of confidence” (70) for America’s ultimate literary glory among the post-revolutionary generation, which was partially brought about by the belief in the Berkeleyan principle of the westward cycle of culture and the Scottish philosophers’ correlation of poetry and civilization. Nature and liberty were considered to be the invaluable literary resources that could inspire the American authors to write works that surpass the European masterpieces. Such confidence persisted all the way till the outbreak of the Civil