'Man's final lore': Melville's use of Shakespeare to critique American nationalism

This dissertation examines Melville's creative engagement with Shakespeare, finding transnational collaboration where previous studies found nationalist striving. I argue that Melville's apparent participation in the mid-19 th Century literary nationalist movement has been misread. Drawing on untapped contemporary periodicals, my project provides a comprehensive historical context for Melville's invocation of Shakespeare in his major works of the 1850's; I argue that Melville's Shakespearean allusions are intended to connect the cultural development of the young nation to the literature of the larger world and the lessons of the past, not to reject them. Chapter one reassesses "Hawthorne and His Mosses," a composition typically designated as Melville's personal manifesto. By resituating "Mosses" within the print culture in which it was composed, I demonstrate that it represents the perspective of a fictional journalist whose statements on American literature and politics are fundamentally at odds with Melville's beliefs. Chapter two examines Moby-Dick, arguing that Melville draws on contemporary representations of Macbeth and Hamlet to fashion two apparently opposing central characters that reflect the divisions in the Democratic Party at mid-century; however, Melville crafts both Ahab and Ishmael to reflect the fundamental nationalist myth of American self-creation, a conception he exposes as hollow and destructive. Chapter three argues that Pierre creates connections to Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet revolving around American honor culture and slavery. The narrator uses Shakespearean allusions to align Pierre's struggle for independence with Garrisonian abolitionists' campaign for disunion. Melville's political critique is again double-edged: he uses the same Shakespearean dynamics to illustrate the narrator's complicity in his tragic portrait of Pierre. The Epilogue explores The Confidence-Man's invocation of Polonius' maxims to address America's contemporary cultural preoccupation with originality. Entrapping his readers in the confidence-man's ostensibly frank assumptions, Melville suggests that originality is not defined by separation, but by reflectiveness and commonality. During the volatile period leading up to the Civil War, public discourse cast Shakespeare in a leading role in the creation of an American exceptionalist identity. In response, Melville reclaimed Shakespeare as an agent for the unification of past and present, North and South, and England and America.