ABSTRACT

The fact that Shakespeare’s works resonated for both unionists and nationalists alike reminds us that, as Philip Edwards notes, ‘for a large number of educated Irish people in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries … Shakespeare’s plays [were] an indispensible part of their cultural life’.6 It also reminds us of Ireland’s unique position as a metropolitan colony, which shared longstanding and pervasive cultural, economic and political ties with imperial England. Aware that these connections, especially at the cultural level, are not monolithic or unidirectional, a number of recent critics have revealed how Shakespeare was ‘recruited’, ‘enlist[ed]’ or ‘reinterpreted’ by Irish nationalists during the Revival to suit ‘their own strategic purposes’.7 These readings have cast in greater relief Shakespeare’s symbolic importance within the discourses of cultural imperialism and cultural nationalism, but in this chapter I want to keep the focus squarely on the tensions embedded in Ireland’s transnational cultural heritage. Specifically, I will argue that in the literary criticism of Edward Dowden, a liberal unionist, and W. B. Yeats, a cultural nationalist, Shakespeare functions not only as cultural artifact to be recruited but also as a shared cultural space where they confront and struggle to reconcile themselves with the manifestly international dimensions of Ireland’s colonial history.