ABSTRACT
Celtic Shakespeare: The Bard and the Borderers is a fistful of essays that goes further than any previous collection to explain why this dramatist earned the title of ‘the Bard of Avon’. For the startling correction this book confirms is the repositioning of the Stratford writer within rather than outside the imagined community of a greater Celtic Britain. In mapping such archipelagic parameters for the plays and poems this volume thus challenges us to take Shakespeare’s bardic status seriously, and to consider the consequences of reading these texts in relation to a Celtic literary culture that institutionalized the figure of the bard as heir to a supposedly immemorial patrimony of praise and validation. In particular, locating ‘the Bard of Avon’ alongside ‘the Borderers’ of the Welsh Marches who were in fact his first and last promoters sheds unexpected new light on the peculiar forms of Shakespeare’s authorial autonomy, historical imagination and professional success.
