The Celtic Revival in Shakespeare's Wake

Appropriation and Cultural Politics in Ireland, 1867-1922

A. Putz

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137027658
• eBook ISBN: 9781137027665
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book reconsiders the Celtic Revival by examining appropriations of Shakespeare, using close readings of works by Arnold, Dowden, Yeats and Joyce toreveal the pernicious manner in which the discourse of Anglo-Irish cultural politics informed the critical paradigms that mediated the reading of Shakespeare in Ireland for a generation.

1

Matthew Arnold

VOLUMNIA Making the mother, wife and child to see
The son, the husband and the father tearing
His country’s bowels out.

Coriolanus, 5.3.110–13

Celtic literature

In the spring of 1863, James Byrne, a reverend in the Anglican Church of Ireland, offered a theory of national poetics predicated in terms of ‘racial’ characteristics for his contribution to the first series of ‘Afternoon Lectures on English Literature’. From the ‘unsectarian’¹ setting of Dublin’s Museum of Industry on College Green, he observed a hard and fast distinction between the peoples of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland by locating the quick-witted, emotional sort that he called ‘Celts’ largely on the Irish side of the Irish Sea, and the dim-witted, rational sort that he called ‘Anglo-Saxons’ largely on the British.² Byrne tracked the intersections and traced the subdivisions of these types to build his case for an English literary lineage that starts with Spenser and Shakespeare, excludes Milton, but includes the Scots poet Robert Burns, with the exquisite natural details of his verse representing an irrefutably English literary quality inherited strictly on the Anglo-Saxon side of this divide. From Dryden through Cowper to Wordsworth, Byrne extended the Anglo-Saxon line to include Tennyson at the end of what he considered an unbroken chain that linked the Victorian present to the Elizabethan past. Shakespeare rather than Milton served as the supreme example of ‘English characteristics’ in this context:

In Milton, on the contrary, there is a striking absence of English characteristics. There is no elaboration of details, no deficiency of general effect. His characters indeed are admirably drawn, and his descriptions shine with the light of genius, but we are struck rather with the poetry and truthfulness of the whole than with the life and fidelity of the particular touches. He had in common with all the born kings of human thought, the divine gifts by which they hold their universal and eternal dominion over the soul of man, but in him those gifts were specialized not as national but as individual.³

Milton exceeds the ‘English characteristics’ that had otherwise constrained Shakespeare’s verse to fit the national type, making Shakespeare England’s national poet and Milton something else entirely for Byrne. Dichotomies saturated in racial terms only gained in currency during the middle years of the decade.

As professor of poetry at Oxford in 1865, Matthew Arnold delivered the first of his four lectures on Celtic literature. The series marked his return to the topic. He had lectured on ‘The Claim of the Celtic Race, and the Claim of the Christian Religion, to Have Originated Chivalrous Sentiment’ in 1861 as part of his lecture series on ‘The Modern Element in Literature’. Significantly, he would preserve, whether he knew of it or not, Byrne’s basic distinction between Celtic and Anglo-Saxon poetics. But Arnold would also break with Byrne in two influential ways.

First, Arnold gendered the distinction between Celtic and Anglo-Saxon literature as feminine and masculine, just as Renan had in his work on the poetry of his native Brittany and Britain’s own ‘Celtic fringe’:

If it be permitted us to assign sex to nations as to individuals, we should have to say without hesitance that the Celtic race, especially with regard to its Cymric or Breton branch, is an essentially feminine race. No other has conceived with more delicacy the ideal of woman, or been more fully dominated by it. It is a sort of intoxication, a madness, a vertigo.⁴

Second, writing at a time of heightened political tension between Britain and Ireland, Arnold situated Shakespeare as a figure who straddles such divisions. The Cornhill Magazine, a London literary periodical perhaps more famous for its serialised novels, featured his new lectures on Celtic literature from March to July 1866. Arnold provided an introduction and saw these pieces into print as a single volume in 1867, a year that witnessed an increase in Fenian activity in Ireland alongside violent attacks in Britain and North America. A transatlantic organisation composed largely of émigré Irish men and women with connections to the Irish Republican Brotherhood in Ireland, the Fenians had appropriated the legendary Fianna army from the medieval saga of Fionn mac Cumhaill.⁵ With a rising in Ireland foiled in 1865, Fenians in the United States ran raids on British forts and custom-houses in Canada between April and June 1866, pressuring Westminster on independence for Ireland.⁶ ‘At the present day there is probably no people on earth who are more pronounced in their opinions, more faithful to their traditions, or more mindful of the marked peculiarities which go to make up national character, than the Irish people’, one observer remarked. The Fenians proudly represented a recalcitrant element within Irish nationalism, ‘notwithstanding the fact that the English policy has, especially during the past decade, been of a character to completely denationalize the Irish, it has been utterly powerless to damp those ardent national characteristics which belong to the Celtic race’.⁷ An unsigned article in the January 1866 number of the Cornhill Magazine on ‘The Ancient Fenians and Fenian Literature’ cites Foras feasa ar Éirinn, a narrative history of Ireland written by the Catholic theologian and Irish scholar Geoffrey Keating during the 1630s, in order to challenge contemporary Fenians to satisfy the seven articles of the ancient Fianna army.⁸ This riposte serves as a fitting complement to Arnold’s own problematic blend of literary and political interests in Ireland, as he concludes his last lecture by distinguishing between Celts and Fenians in terms of cultural politics.

Arnold’s appropriation of the Shakespearean text as a composite of the best characteristics of the Celtic and Anglo-Saxon literary traditions registers the tensions of Anglo-Irish cultural politics during a period of heightened Fenian activity. Although he fondly recounted ‘the inimitable Celtic note’ and, more importantly, heard it sound in Shakespeare at a time when his works were more often considered the paragon of a literary tradition that had helped to define a strident British Empire, Arnold would also redeploy Shakespeare in arguments for sustaining that empire nearer to home by preserving the political union with Ireland through conciliation, coercion, and if necessary the suspension of civil liberties. Newspapers ran lurid stories about the Fenian threat during the late 1860s and early 1870s, suggesting that ‘Fenian fever’ still ran hot amongst readers on both sides of the Irish Sea three years after the dramatic attack in 1867 on a police van in Manchester and the explosion at Clerkenwell gaol in London brought the Fenians to public prominence. Shakespeare provided images and metaphors easily recognised by that public and frequently exploited by the press in its running commentary on Anglo-Irish politics. But Shakespeare also served as a source of cultural capital that an English critic like Arnold needed to appropriate for his own project of isolating the function of criticism in response to this trauma.

Arnold thought that he might have found an answer to the problem of separatist violence that the Fenians posed. ‘The moment is altogether one of surpassing interest’, he wrote excitedly to his mother in July 1866,

What I have said in one of my Celtic lectures, – the idea of science governing every department of human activity – is the root and heart of Prussia’s success at this moment. […] I should not wonder if Ireland were the fatal difficulty of the present Government: what L[or]d Derby says about it is not promising. Not that the late Gov[ernmen]t did any good there, but the Tories are more dangerous.⁹

Arnold had indeed suggested that the Fenians were simply a byproduct of ‘the Philistines, who among their other sins are the guilty authors of Fenianism’. Therefore, he recommended as a solution to this hopelessly middle-class problem of political mismanagement in Ireland the founding ‘at Oxford [of] a chair of Celtic, and to send, through the gentle ministration of science, a message of peace to Ireland’.¹⁰ In 1877, Oxford established just such a chair and Welsh scholar Sir John Rhys served as its first occupant. But Arnold’s conceit that institutionalising the study of Celtic cultures, languages, and literatures would pacify those men and women willing to fight and die for a politically independent and united Ireland misdiagnosed the problem.

Arnold’s examination of Celtic literature appears neither ‘dispassionate’ nor its influence on the Revival straightforward, much less something to pass over in the name of adopting a ‘scholarly attitude towards Celtic Studies’.¹¹ His ideas significantly influenced not only the subsequent debate about Irish literary history and Shakespeare’s place in it, but also the debate about Anglo-Irish politics and literature’s place in it. As Joep Leerssen has observed, Arnold’s lectures on Celtic literature also served as the ‘first sign of the gradual de-Saxonization of English public opinion and self-image, as well as an important blow to the unalleviated realism and moralism of Victorian literature in favour of something altogether more elfin’.¹² In this way, these lectures form an integral part of Arnold’s larger project to bring ‘sweetness and light’ to his materialist compatriots.¹³ With these lectures in particular, he wanted to indicate what of Celtic literature might ‘offer matter of general interest, and to insist on the benefit we may all derive from knowing the Celt and things Celtic more thoroughly’.¹⁴ Arnold confirmed his intention in a letter to Sir Edward Hamer Carbutt, an engineer and later Liberal MP for Monmouth, on 3 April 1866:

I am only trying to call attention to the subject, in the hope of getting a Celtic chair established in the University of Oxford. Therefore to indicate the chief sources of information and the chief lines of treatment is all I can attempt. […] My position, however, is, simply, that every educated person should know more about Celtic matters than they now do, and I do not pretend to speak as a Celtic student myself, but merely as one of the crowd of educated persons who want instruction.¹⁵

Although Arnold stresses the ‘provisional character’ of his propositions here, his lectures would recommend a greater commingling of Celtic and Anglo-Saxon characteristics to strengthen Irish unity with England, marrying the study of Celtic literature to the practice of Anglo-Irish politics.

Certainly, Arnold could not have picked the work of a more loosely and yet more suggestively representative English writer. ‘Shakespeare’s birthplace, Stratford upon Avon, is an appropriate point of origin for a writer acutely aware of Roman and Celtic influences on his nation and state’, Willy Maley has observed. ‘It takes its name from a Romano-Celtic amalgam of “Stratford”, a Roman straet or thoroughfare fording the “Avon”, the Celtic word for river being afon. Even the word “bard” is Celtic in origin, so the Bard of Avon is fittingly and tellingly a writer who builds bridges between Britain’s past, present and future.’¹⁶ Arnold hoped that, by pointing up the Anglo-Celtic poetic of Shakespeare, his lectures might in some small way help to preserve the tenuous political unity of Britain and Ireland. As Leerssen notes, Arnold’s concern for ‘true unity’ translated into a desire for integration across the ‘racial’ divisions of the British Isles: ‘“Englishness” was seen, not so much as a composite of subdued Anglo-Saxons and Norman-French conquerors, but as the conquering Germanic element within the British Isles: the offspring of the Angles, Saxons and Jutes, as opposed to various non-English (“Celtic”) aboriginals: Welsh, Highlanders and Irish.’¹⁷ Culturally grafting the last of these groups onto the whole looked the most difficult and yet most necessary of all to Arnold.

By challenging conventional wisdom on the relationship between England and its Celtic fringes, Arnold also effectively challenged conventional wisdom on Shakespeare and the ‘Celtic note in him’.¹⁸ For Arnold, Shakespeare the Celt – genealogical considerations aside – could cool the conflict heating up between national and regional identities within the British Isles under the Union. Of course, Arnold also makes a political play in this way and does nothing to tone it down: ‘in England the Englishman proper is in union of spirit with no one except other Englishmen proper like himself. His Welsh and Irish fellow-citizens are hardly more amalgamated with him now than when Wales and Ireland were first conquered, and the true unity of even these small islands has yet to be achieved.’¹⁹ Arnold wanted this ‘true unity’ and thought it the pressing cultural as well as political project of the period. In particular, he envisioned a lasting union forged through an Anglo-Celtic national poetic. This amalgam could produce a spiritual union stronger than the precious little that he thought politics alone had already achieved.

Arnold opens his argument by trumping up the stereotype that Celtic cultures are fundamentally ‘sentimental’.²⁰ ‘The Greek has the same perceptive, emotional temperament as the Celt’, he observes, ‘but he adds to this temperament the sense of measure.’²¹ Measure might have given the Greek success in the ‘plastic arts’, but Arnold identifies ‘the very point of transition from the Greek note to the Celtic’ in English literary history with Shakespeare’s ‘Look how the floor of heaven | Is thick inlaid with patens of bright gold’ (The Merchant of Venice, 5.1.64–5).²² ‘Shakspeare’, he argues, ‘in handling nature, touches this Celtic note so exquisitely, that perhaps one is inclined to be always looking for the Celtic note in him, and not to recognise his Greek note when it comes.’ Arnold parses the subtle difference between the two by putting ‘the Greek clearness and brightness’ to one side, leaving ‘the Celtic äerialness and magic coming in’ on the other.²³ It comes as no surprise, then, that Arnold invokes the need to acknowledge a Celtic influence on English literary culture in order ‘to give us delicacy, and to free us from hardness and Philistinism’ of measure alone.²⁴ Arnold aligns his influential Hellenism to Celticism against the rigid Hebraism and Anglo-Saxonism behind the puritan, middle-class sensibilities of his contemporaries.

As Philip Edwards has wryly observed, however, ‘The discovery that the pillar of the Anglo-Saxon literary tradition was in fact a Celt was of course an Anglo-Saxon discovery’, a point that Arnold observes almost in passing.²⁵ Arnold did indeed reason along the lines of John Morley, Liberal MP and, subsequently, Viscount Blackburn, that without a Celtic element, ‘Germanic England would not have produced a Shakespeare’.²⁶ Moreover, Leerssen observes that Arnold echoes ‘a very “German” sense of methodical scholarship’ to make his case for the ‘true unity’ of Anglo-Saxons and Celts.²⁷ But he lets this sensibility creep into his lectures much earlier, in fact, than his stated debt to Morley. ‘One thing, and one thing alone, led to the truth’, Arnold...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Matthew Arnold
• 2 Edward Dowden
• 3 W.B. Yeats
• 4 James Joyce
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index