Shakespeare and the Irish Writer edited by Janet Clare and Stephen O’Neill (review)

“It seems incredible how little real reading of Shakespeare went on” among Irish and, sometimes, English writers in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, notes Philip Edwards, in “Shakespeare and the Politics of the Irish Revival,” the first essay in this collection (37). Sometimes William Shakespeare was accepted by them “because he was so English” and sometimes rejected “because he was so English” (37). Both judgments were “founded on stereotypes: on stereotypes of Shakespeare, stereotypes of national character, even stereotypes of masculinity and femininity” (37). The essays that follow in Shakespeare and the Irish Writer are divided into two categories: those that bear out this claim and those that do not.

The texts contradicting Edwards, which show how sensitively Shakespeare was read by several Irish writers in this period, are worthwhile exercises in literary influence. Declan Kiberd demonstrates that Hamlet is woven into the “deeper themes” of Ulysses (105). Joyce, he claims, “recognized in Hamlet,” with his present-absent father, his dilatory ways, and his personal insufficiency, “the problem of the neurotic modern intellectual, in whom the balance between inner and outer worlds has been lost” (100). Richard Meek explores Oscar Wilde’s “provocative and complex engagement with Shakespeare,” especially in his writings on the theater and aesthetics and in The Picture of Dorian Gray (138).¹ Heather Ingman offers a detailed exegesis of echoes of Twelfth Night in Elizabeth Bowen’s novel, The Last September, and of The Tempest in her short story, “Sunday Afternoon.”² And David Wheatley finds the overlaps in the “universe[s]” of Samuel Beckett and the bard: “Endgame and King Lear are both zero-sum games, in which victory or defeat threaten to end up looking much the same” (174).³ These authors write with Shakespeare. Their own artistry is predicated on his achievements and reflects a real sense of those achievements. Sometimes they write in a spirit of homage, sometimes in opposition—and often both. Shakespeare is the literary ideal who must be emulated. He is also the literary progenitor who must be contested. (As the editors point out, Harold Bloom’s “singular theory of poetic influence” is invoked repeatedly in this volume—8.⁴)

What many of the essays in Shakespeare and the Irish Writer demonstrate, however, is that, as Edwards says, it is possible to engage very deeply with Shakespeare as an “image” (37)—a figure in a cultural constellation of values, loyalties, oppositions, and so on—and yet not engage with Shakespeare-as-text very deeply at all. One of the accomplishments of this collection is that it shows how intricate, nuanced—and fascinating—this discourse on (but not really about) Shakespeare was in Ireland and England during the period. To my mind, one of the most intriguing essays here is Edwards’s own. An admittedly speculative piece, it tries to make sense of the convoluted bardology of Edward Dowden, a Professor of English Literature at Trinity College Dublin. His book, Shakspere: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art,⁵ portrays the playwright as an “Anglo-Saxon … a worldly, pragmatic success-worshipper” (30), and it was highly influential. W. B. Yeats was reacting to it when, in his essay “At Stratford-Upon-Avon,” he portrayed the bard, contrariwise, as a quasi-Celt, “emphasising his sympathy for … political failure” (28).⁶ But, Edwards argues (29), Yeats got Dowden wrong. The “Celtic” Shakespeare that Yeats described, the one who evinced a “sweetness of temper,” a “dreamy dignity” (106), was the same Shakespeare that Dowden saw. For personal and political reasons, however, according to Yeats, Dowden had to invent Shakespeare as an “anti-self,” a self less given to “gender-confusion” and “masochistic fantasies” than Dowden himself (37). Shakespeare, the Celt, is abjected, as we now say, in favor of Shakespeare, the Anglo-Saxon.

From a certain remove (perhaps our own), this debate seems implausible. Shakespeare actually was a successful theatrical entrepreneur, as...