Celtic Shakespeare: The Bard and the Borderers ed. by Willy Maley, Rory Loughnane (review)

Shakespeareans have productively studied early modern England’s relations with its border states—Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. According to the editors of Celtic Shakespeare, this “Celtic turn in Shakespeare studies has primarily entailed individual national perspectives” (11). This volume “bring[s] together the non-English perspectives . . . in the light of recent history” (12–13). “Recent history” refers to the growing body of scholarship that aims to write a pluralist history of the British archipelago’s various cultures. Most of Celtic Shakespeare’s fourteen essays are informed by the “new British history,” and the best resonate with the energy and innovative insight that characterize a novel academic direction.

The nascence of the new history also makes it timely “to assess where scholarship on this subject stands” (19). John Kerrigan’s substantial prologue and the editors’ introduction lay important groundwork for the task. Literary criticism of the Shakespearean Celtic has its own long and active history. Kerrigan enumerates five periods when such criticism has flourished, beginning with the “Jacobite aftershocks” following the Act of Union in 1707 (xvii). The prefatory pieces also show that early modern English writers vigorously debated linguistic and ethnic definitions of “Celtic.” Roman authority, for example, bequeathed them polar Celtic identities. One connected the ancient Gauls to French alterity, yet the prized notion of ancient British Celts hinged upon “Caesar’s observation that the tribes of Britannia resembled the Gauls” (xxiii). Shakespeare’s own Celtic representations belong not to a binary but to a “multi-faceted category” (xxiv), always if “variously marked as non-English throughout [his canon]” (xxv). A xenophobic marking appears in the first tetralogy, in which “The French and the Irish kernes . . . are mutual, Celtic enemies of England” (xxiv). Yet Celtic Shakespeare also reveals “cultural crossovers” (12) that may be benign. Today’s historians are once more debating these issues of sameness, difference, and crossovers between Celtic and English.

The opening section of essays, “Tudor Reflections,” demonstrates that “Shakespeare’s treatment of national identity in his . . . Elizabethan history plays may be less distinct from his Jacobean plays than critics have heretofore imagined” (14). The first three essays attend to the three traditional Celtic border states. Philip Schwyzer observes that although early modern “Briton/Breton” could refer to a Breton or to a British islander, in Richard III“Britain” and its cognates appear six times late in the play and refer exclusively to Richmond or his geographic power base. In his battle speech at Bosworth, Richard “seeks to whip his soldiers . . . into a lather of xenophobic fury” (29), deriding the enemy as “‘A scum of Britains and base lackey peasants’” (30). By using an “ethnically loaded Celtic/Saxon dichotomy” (xxv), Richard seeks a visceral response. That he calls his soldiers “English gentlemen” and his kingdom “England” (30) supports Schwyzer’s own claim that Shakespeare represents “Richard III as the last king of the English” (34). But then, Richard massacres nearly every other English royal claimant.

Vimala C. Pasupathi cites early modern sources that attest to Scottish mercenaries’ high repute and identifies this military tradition as “a defining factor in the developing sense of Scottishness” (36). Douglas’s career in 1 Henry IV introduces three perspectives on the professional Scottish soldier. When King Henry acknowledges his “‘great name in arms’” (50), such praise befits an international campaigner, not a border-raider. Admiring Hotspur’s “honor,” Douglas befriends him and “tak[es] up a fight that is not his country’s own” (51), exercising the agency conferred by the mercenary’s independence (49, 52). Finally, “Shakespeare figures Douglas’s soldiery as increasingly antagonistic to monarchy, and ultimately as regicidal” (52)—a motive evoking English anxieties over Scots who “serve[d] Irish lords in Ulster” (42) and fought “for the Tyrone Rebellion” (43). The mercenary factor in Scottish identity no doubt raised anxieties in the house of Stuart as well.

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