ABSTRACT
‘Shakespeare was Irish! I kid you not’, or so claims an article in the online newspaper Indymedia Ireland in 2006. 1 Tracing references to Ireland in Shakespeare’s plays, the article suggests putative Irish and Celtic sources and determines that the playwright must himself have been from Ireland. An identification of Shakespeare as one William Nugent, Baron of Devlin, previously suggested in Elizabeth Hickey’s biography of Nugent, The Green Cockatrice (1978), is even offered. To establish Ireland as a presence in Shakespeare’s creative map – as in the case of such works as David Comyn’s Irish Illustrations to Shakespeare (1894) and Plunket Barton’s Links between Ireland and Shakespeare (1919) – is not sufficient here; 2 this must be accounted for as a function of the author’s putative nationality or his cultural affiliation with Ireland. Scholarly and pseudo-scholarly speculation has long been a facet of Shakespeare’s cultural afterlife. In an Irish context it has been parodied, most notably in the National Library episode of Ulysses. Buck Mulligan asks ‘Shakespeare? I seem to know the name […] The chap who writes like Synge’. John Eglinton says, ‘I hear that an actress played Hamlet for the fourhundredandeight time in Dublin. Vining held that the prince was a woman. Has no one made him out to be an Irishman? Judge Barton, I believe, is searching for some clues’. Later, in the same episode, Stephen Dedalus asks, ‘Why is the underplot of King Lear in which Edmund figures lifted out of Sidney’s Arcadia and spatchcocked on to a Celtic legend older than history?’ 3 Parody and iconoclasm, Joyce suggests, can signal a frustration with colonial authority and its master texts but might also quite readily disclose an embarrassing national inferiority complex. There might also be a Joycean jibe at Matthew Arnold’s claim of a Celtic note in Shakespeare’s aesthetic. 4
