As Shakespeare became widely accepted as a heroic exemplar, a new academic phenomenon arose that appeared to challenge the still emerging bardolatry. Published first in America, questions were raised as to Shakespeare's authorship of the plays. This was not simply a challenge to the accepted identity of the playwright, however. The most prominent name behind the authorship controversy sought to link the playwright irrevocably with the revolutionary ideology behind the foundation of the American nation.

The first public challenge to William Shakespeare's authorship was made in an obscure book by Joseph C. Hart, a New York lawyer and journalist and later a consul for the United States. In 1848 Hart published The Romance of Yachting, a book presented to readers as an account of a sailing trip across the Atlantic to Spain. Despite the title, it contained a discourse on ‘several favorite and prevailing historical assumptions, which the author … made object of [his] dissent’. Among these ‘dissents’, Hart proposed to rename the city of New York removing what he argued was the ‘badge of colonial slavery’, and he attacked the tradition of the iconic New England Puritans, preferring to champion the role of the ‘Knickerbocker race’ of Dutch New Amsterdam. Both these ‘dissents’ suggest the continuing prevalence of an anti-English sentiment that perhaps also lay behind Hart's challenge over Shakespeare.