ABSTRACT
The fact that Shakespeare's works resonated for both unionists and nationalists alike remind us that, as Philip Edwards notes, 'for a large number of educated Irish people in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These readings have cast in greater relief Shakespeare's symbolic importance within discourses of cultural imperialism and cultural nationalism. When Yeats claimed that Dowden had 'turned Shakespeare into a British Benthamite', he was referring to Dowden's most important work. These types of anarchic performances were surely on Dowden's mind when he spoke at the Great Unionist Demonstration in Ulster. Ireland's trans-cultural heritage is bound up with the broader issues of political and military history, race and language. The opening reference to Morris also speaks to the way that Yeats's emphasis on transnational spiritual connections. He must square this reinterpretation with the fact that Richard speaks in English, language of Anglo-Saxon. Yeats does not provide his readers with an instance of any such revelation in Richard's speeches.
