The book advances the idea that American, Southern, white, planter class authors have appropriated models and modes of masculinity from William Shakespeare. Keener traces the history of this appropriation and its attendant masculinities from authors as early as William Gilmore Simms, through Thomas Nelson Page and Thomas Dixon, to William Faulkner.
"A unique, lively text.... Keener traces the textual and historical evolutions of the idea of Shakespeare as the literary-cultural father through three successive Southern figures, with their distinct appropriations and re-inscriptions, not only of Shakespeare, but also of a distinct body of Southern Shakespearean appropriations and re-inscriptions." - Philip Beidler, Professor of English, University of Alabama and series editor for Signs of Race