Shakespeare and Twentieth-Century Irish Drama

Conceptualizing Identity and Staging Boundaries

Rebecca Steinberger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351149266
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Exploring the influence of Shakespeare on drama in Ireland, the author examines works by two representative playwrights: Sean O'Casey (1880-1964) and Brian Friel (1929-). Shakespeare's plays, grounded in history, nationalism, and imperialism, are resurrected, rewritten, and reinscribed in twentieth-century Irish drama, while Irish plays, in turn, historicize the Subject/Object relationship of England and Ireland. In particular, the author argues, Irish dramatists' appropriations of Shakespeare were both a reaction to the language of domination and a means to support their revision of the Irish as Subject. This study reveals that Shakespeare's plays embody an empathy for the Irish Other. As she investigates Shakespeare's commiseration with marginalized peoples and the anticolonial underpinnings in his texts, the author situates Shakespeare between the English discourse that claims him and the Irish discourse that assimilates him.

Chapter 1
‘What Ish My Nation?’: The Blurring of National Identity in Shakespeare’s Henry V, Richard II, and Spenser’s A View Of The Present State Of Ireland

Elizabethan political ideology incites colonial enterprises through the use of propaganda writings in which pamphleteers construct denigrating images of Ireland and its people. This trend was also carried out in literature which served to establish a dominant discourse that would privilege England over Other cultures. In particular, Edmund Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland deals a damaging blow to England’s Western neighbor through the use of linguistic tactics which perpetuate these stereotypes. However, this colonial servant is censured by his antithetical contemporary, William Shakespeare, whose history play Richard II exposes Spenser’s plan of deterritorialization by critiquing an Elizabethan foreign policy that supports imperial domination. In addition to this critique, Shakespeare then shows through Henry V that English national identity is not achieved through ‘Englishness,’ but rather through the oppression of the Other. This approach suggests how it is possible to read Shakespeare against state-supported hegemonic writings such as Spenser’s View.

When addressing the ‘Irish question,’ the tenuous relationship between Ireland and England of this past century comes to mind—with the media’s sensationalizing of IRA activity in Northern Ireland and devastating bombings as a result of this ancient conflict, it is difficult to pinpoint where the hostility between these island neighbors began. But what is largely misunderstood as a religious conflict has actually been in existence since the twelfth century.¹ After Henry VIII declared himself King of Ireland in 1541, ill sentiments spread rapidly throughout Great Britain. But it was not until the late 1500s when Elizabeth I—who was well aware of Catholic Spain’s interest in the isle—began to transplant English nobility onto Irish soil that the Irish question became truly pronounced.² As a result, numerous pamphlets and tracts laden with propaganda permeated England and sustained the stereotyping of the Irish nation and its people.³ The resulting socio-political chaos, I believe, was the direct result of the blurred boundaries of a national identity that existed and persisted through England’s campaign of assimilation. By indicating a ‘blurring’ of identities here, I am positing that the Irish national identity—which is not fixed—at times becomes indistinguishable from the English identity that continually seeks to define itself through marginalization of the Other.

Disseminating Identity: England’s Sense of Self and the Irish Other

By examining the numerous linguistic devices that operate to position one discourse over another, we can better assess Elizabethan England’s imperialist agenda and quest for territorial gain. Political tracts, propaganda-laden pamphlets, and popular literature of the era contained the colonial biases that helped perpetuate damaging stereotypes of cultures relegated to the periphery in this dominant discourse.⁴ Additionally, visual culture—chiefly through the art of mapmaking—led its own brand of hegemony,⁵ as it re-oriented the image of nations, cultures, and peoples in the Renaissance. Following Christopher Saxton’s production of an Atlas of England and Wales in 1579⁶ and the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, England’s image as a Western powerhouse was bolstered by its depiction in maps and through the documents that position the land as central to the discourse of the dominant social order. For that reason, the visual and linguistic manifestation of chorography (the depiction of a specific region or territory) functioned in the construction of geographic space. Imperial agents subverted the territories they desired to control by manipulating the chorography of maps as depicted through John Norden’s Speculum Britannia (1598) and surveying tracts like Ralph Agas’s A Preparative to Plotting of Landes and Tenements for surveigh. In the latter, Agas warns the reader of the potential for abuse with land surveying: ‘The practice hereof … is but new, and scarsely established …[I]t were then an exceeding losse to the common weale, a dangerous harming of [peace] … if this excellent practice should be overthrowne and destroid by abusing the same.’⁷ This illustration therefore reveals the potential for chorography of England’s geographic space to be exaggerated by politicos and literati alike as a means of locating the nation’s cultural epi-center as a prime territory for mercantilism and commerce. In fact, Robert Payne discloses that ‘the generall Map of Ireland, which is joined with the old Map of England, is most false: The author (as it seemeth) drew them both by reporte, and the common computation of myles … and the Mappe of Ireland littell more then one forth at that if would be, if it were truly drawen.’⁸ What Payne alludes to in this tract, then, was not an anomaly. By historicizing specific texts published in late-1500s England, we can assess how the mapping of space operated to construct a national identity at the onset of the defining moment of English nationalism.

The effect of new technologies, including surveying, on ideologies of land use and settlement must be considered in understanding England’s concept of the nation as a distinctive landscape. The textual manifestations of landscape (or space) thus contained ideological, territorial, and subjective shaping of new colonies. While in England, the concept of rural space infers breaking the confines of city/civility/ court life (as evidenced in Shakespeare’s plays As You Like It, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia), cartographers and/or surveyors subvert this same space in marginalized nations to minimize their potency. Ireland, in particular, was subject to this deterritorialization which resulted in the subsequent erosion of Irish culture.

How does literature in Elizabethan England successfully construct its own map of authority? As Nicholas Canny suggests, ‘Almost every English-born author writing of Ireland during the 1580s and 1590s was insistent upon the development of a clearly-defined radical programme of reform which would involve the erection of a completely new commonwealth upon firm foundations.’⁹ At the same time land surveying was becoming an important tool in shaping England’s rural/urban space (the town and country, if you will), Edmund Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland was published (1596). Contemporary students of Elizabethan England would recognize Spenser as a model of English nationalism, but perhaps few might recognize him as a colonial official. It is my contention that Spenser did much damage to Ireland through his View by offering Elizabeth and imperial strategists the impetus for colonizing Ireland. But how was this possible? Spenser was known for his prose and poetry, but he was not schooled in cartography. Yet, the literary map of Ireland established in View is drawn with an authority that reduces Irish space to an ‘uncivil,’ ‘desolate’ ‘wasteland.’ Even more intriguing is the immediate function of the exiled Spenser’s sketch; for he indicts Elizabeth as being weak in her program of hegemony over Ireland. This indictment embedded in the dialogue between Eudoxus and Irenius carries a warning, also, as Elizabeth is cognizant of Catholic Spain’s interest in England’s island neighbor.

Spenser is not the first Elizabethan to link the Queen with geographic space; nor is he the most prominent.¹⁰ Cartographers inscribed their maps with recognizable symbols—such as the royal coat of arms—and even Elizabeth herself, who appears on the frontispiece to Saxton’s atlas (1579), for example. But nowhere is Elizabeth’s relation to the geographical space she rules more evident than in the Ditchley portrait (1592). The illustration of Elizabeth standing on Saxton’s map implies that the two are inextricably linked—Elizabeth is a representation of the land itself¹¹ … politically, metaphorically, and visually. Spenser seemingly draws on this—in A View as well as in Faerie Queene—to both praise his sovereign and warn her.

In his important study, Richard Helgerson asserts that ‘maps do not … speak only of the source of their authority—that is, of the power that through the system of patronage brought them into existence—but also of the relation of that power to the land they depict.’¹² Thus, taking a cue from the art of cartography, Spenser, too, transfers England’s power over Ireland with an air of authority. As a royal servant, Spenser was dispatched to County Cork to establish colonial order and oversee English plantations, or ‘plots.’ His growing dissatisfaction (as mentioned earlier) with England’s imperial enterprise in Ireland resulted in A View of the Present State of Ireland and therefore, mapping the Other as a means of asserting/inserting English hegemony.

How Does a Text ‘Colonize’?

According to sixteenth-century historians, while Spain desired Ireland for her own means, Elizabeth warned the Spanish crown that she considered ‘Ireland part of the English crown, a legacy of her ancestors’ and that she was quite prepared to defend ‘her properties.’¹³ Thus, a heightened period of anxiety launched an influx of English officials taking up residence in Ireland. More importantly, the presence of the English on Irish ground—represented by a dichotomy between individuals with Old English ideals and those who fall in the category of the New English¹⁴—led to a deeper inquiry of what constitutes a ‘national’ identity. As evidenced in Elizabethan pamphlets, the New English often charged Elizabeth’s Irish policy as weak. Dissatisfaction with Elizabeth’s sensitivity to Old English opinion and her reluctance to prosecute large-scale war was widespread among the faction of colonial servants who took up posts in Ireland from the mid-1500s. While Spenser was not the only open social critic of the body politic, his ideology differs from that of other colonial discourses because it creates a prototype for total assimilation of the Irish space.¹⁵ Spenser understood the possible ramifications for the Elizabethan court if the pursuit of Ireland was not a primary military and political focus.¹⁶ In fact, his main motivation for writing View was a ‘response to Queen Elizabeth’s vacillating and placatory policies in dealing with the Irish question.’¹⁷ The text thus serves to delineate the variances of Spenser’s foreign policy as compared to the Queen’s, and I believe it is important that Spenser would not be afforded the ability to voice his own plan for colonization had he been living in England under Elizabeth’s direct scrutiny.

In Spenser’s View, he offers a dialogue between two characters, Eudoxus and Irenius, who exchange reductive judgments with regard to sundry affairs in Ireland. Not only does he find fault with the land, but he imposes a cultural alienation of the race when he intimates that there was never a Celtic-speaking people and the Spaniard is ethnically impure.¹⁸ In doing so, the writer downplays Spanish claims on the island and paints Ireland as a barren territory that lacks a definitive culture and history. Spenser’s View illustrates the author’s specific intent to validate England’s imperial enterprise there. As the text asserts, Spenser’s designs include imposing a political hegemony over Ireland, and these intentions are couched in metaphors targeting England as the physician that the ‘diseased patient’—Ireland— needs. Throughout this dialogue, Spenser repeatedly reduces Ireland to an ‘uncivil’ and ‘desolate’ ‘wasteland,’ and the inhabitants are stigmatized as ‘savage,’ ‘barbarians,’ and ‘the very wild Irish.’ Clearly, the repetition of these metaphors operates to inscribe a distorted and cynical portrait of the land and its people and marginalize the Irish. Not only does Spenser paint an unstable picture of Ireland when he asserts that England is ‘the cure’ to ‘redress’ Ireland, for ‘fear that it might lapse into its former condition,’¹⁹ but Irenius’s reference to ‘Irish deserts’²⁰ and a ‘goodly country wasted and left desolate’²¹ imagines the land as fruitless. This is precisely how deterritorialization, the pro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Plates
• Introduction
• 1 ‘What Ish My Nation?’: The Blurring of National Identity in Shakespeare’s Henry V, Richard II, and Spenser’s A View Of The Present State Of Ireland
• 2 ‘Past and to Come Seems Best; Things Present Worse’: Appropriations Of Shakespeare’s Henriad in Modern Irish Drama
• 3 ‘Something is Being Eroded’: Peripheral Visions in Contemporary Irish Drama
• Conclusion
• Further Reading
• Bibliography
• Index