Using Shakespeare to Frame the American Story as Anglo-Saxon

THOMAS CARTELLI: Emerson saw Shakespeare as the "father of the man in America," and if he had to trace back American history, he didn't let the revolution create some kind of insurmountable obstacle, but he went all the way back to Jamestown, he went back to the Mayflower, so that it was, in fact, the Elizabethans, the subject citizens, adventurers of the 1590s, in England in the first decade of the seventeenth century, and thereafter, who were the founding fathers and mothers of America, as it were. So that Shakespeare as, you might say, the most prominent member of that generation, apart from Elizabeth herself, becomes in some respect for writers like Emerson, a virtual founding father. And it wasn't, again, just Emerson that thought this.

This was also a way to build a certain kind of narrative that later became very important in the later decades of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, that the American grain is essentially an Anglo-Saxon story, an Anglo-Saxon narrative, and during the period of the great emigrations from Europe to America, from southern Europe to America, from eastern Europe to America, and even earlier from China and other places, the attempt to forge an American identity that is really an Anglo-American identity becomes kind of exacerbated, and again it traces itself back to the Elizabethan period for a kind of birthright, for a kind of stake in Englishness.

Charles Mills Gayley, scholar of the early twentieth century, makes a point that later Michael Bristol elaborates on, on the notion of Shakespeare as the father of the man in America. The point being that if we trace back our history and move past the obstacle of the American Revolution, where we find ourselves is in Jamestown in 1607, in Plymouth in 1620. We find, if we need them, we find our forebears in the merchant adventurers, the explorers, the settlers, the religious refugees, if you like, who all come to America in this particular period, and who therefore establish themselves in some way as our founding narrative.

There's an interesting sidelight to this in the recent film, Shakespeare in Love, which plays fast and loose with a host of issues, and a host of characters. The last scene has the character from Twelfth Night, Viola, finding herself suddenly put upon the shore of Virginia, as if there's this natural stream, literally, that goes from England to the Americas and we grow from that.