Abstract
This article explores the literary responses of two nineteenth-century American playwrights to Shakespeare: Robert Conrad (1810-1848) and George Henry Boker (1823-1890). While Conrad aimed at providing a melodramatic counter-model to 2 Henry VI in Jack Cade, he failed to grasp Shakespeare’s ambivalent stance and to challenge his figure as a symbol of literary genius. Boker’s less radical and more reverential approach in Anne Boleyn and Francesca da Rimini prevented him from being more than an epigone. Although he altered his model and sometimes combined references to different plays, his use of Shakespeare was more a form of imitation than of reinvention. Conrad and Boker’s literary attitudes to the Bard proved to be quite different, but they both failed to defamiliarise him and to truly question Shakespeare as a literary icon.
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