An echo of Tocqueville’s own staging of Shakespeare on the frontier –“there is hardly a pioneer’s hut that does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare. I remember that I read the feudal drama of Henry V for the first time in a log cabin” (55)–, this observation made in 1882 by German scholar Karl Knortz in Shakespeare in Amerika , encapsulates some of the questions both integral to the ever-growing field of Shakespeare’s reception in the United States and representative of this issue of Transatlantica . The fact that this comment should have been made by a German scholar in the 19th century indicates that the field was virtually born outside of the United States via the publication in Berlin of Knortz’s study of Shakespearean criticism in the US. As Alfred Van Rensselaer Westfall pointed out in 1939, the only studies on the subject he was able to trace were either written by Europeans or published in Europe, generally under the title “Shakespeare in America” (10). It is only fitting then that a French journal of American studies should publish this issue on American Shakespeare. Besides, despite pioneering work 2 on “American Shakespeare” in France, the field still needs to find its place among French Shakespeareans. Therefore, though this issue is not directed only and primarily towards the French academic readership, its perhaps pretentious yet modest wish is to play a part in the emergence of the field.