From the Declaration of Independence in 1776, anti-English sentiment was expressed by many Americans, paradoxically at the same time as Shakespeare was celebrated and enjoyed. Hans Kohn, referring to the early nineteenth century, wrote of the ‘bitter opposition in America to England’, amounting to a ‘venomous hatred’. Gustave de Beaumont, writing in 1830, observed that Americans generally ‘detested the English’. According to another scholar, Edward P. Crapol, ‘Anti-British nationalism, running like a red skein through American history, apparently served a negative but nonetheless essential role in the development of an American patriotism.’

That there was hostility to England and the English during the early period of the republic is not surprising and following the War of Independence can perhaps be considered natural. What I will demonstrate in this chapter, however, is the full extent to which this strong anti-English sentiment became institutionalised and an expression of American nationalism while simultaneously Shakespeare gradually became subsumed into national consciousness.

An essay by Jürgen Heideking described the process by which England became the important ‘other’ both at the time of the Revolution and ‘during the first 125 years of American independence’. This essay and others within the collection Enemy Images in American History demonstrated how the creation of a separate American identity for the nation relied upon a process of recording first the English, and then other groups as ‘the enemy’.