Shakespeare in Ireland

Adaptations and Appropriations

Andrew Murphy, Mark Thornton Burnett

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781350458390
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Shakespeare Drama
• Index: Literature

Through a selection of essays from a variety of scholarly voices, this volume maps the various ways in which Shakespeare has been adapted, adopted and appropriated in Ireland from the late 17th century through to the present day. Shakespeare's plays have been performed in Ireland since the 1660s, when Smock Alley theatre was established in Dublin, with Shakespeare serving as its essential stock-in-trade. Since then the playwright's work has played a central role in the formation of Irish culture. His works helped to fashion colonial identity in Ireland in the 18th century and beyond, but, from the 1800s onwards, Shakespeare also became an important figure for Irish nationalists. In the modern period, Shakespeare's influence can also be discerned in the work of a broad range of Irish writers, and this volume considers the impact of his plays on such authors as Synge, Joyce, Beckett and others. The volume also explores the place of Shakespeare in the Irish theatrical tradition. Shakespeare in Ireland explores the history of Irish Shakespeare through the numerous ways in which the playwright and his work were reconfigured and recycled in various Irish contexts. The volume demonstrates how Shakespeare has been rendered Irish in a variety of complex ways, and it aims to track, over time, the story of how Shakespeare became a fully hibernicised figure.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Shakespeare on Aran
• 1 Thomas Sheridan’s Coriolanus (1752) and the making of Smock Alley
• 2 Tralee, 1756: Shakespeare on the Atlantic edge
• 3 Gothic protagonist, romantic icon, Irish character? The uses of Shakespeare in the portrayal of Melmoth the Wanderer
• 4 From Stratford to Galway: W. B. Yeats on Shakespeare
• 5 Unquiet ancestors: Beckett reading Shakespeare through Synge and Joyce
• 6 Shakespeare iconography in Victorian Belfast: Materiality, industrialization, imperialism
• 7 Séacspaoir sa Taibhdhearc: Irish translations
• 8 Shakespeare’s Irish History Museum: Adapting Richard II
• 9 Hamlet the Irishman: Irish theatre histories, re-invented and re-circulated
• 10 ‘Great liberties are taken with the action’: Siobhán McKenna’s ‘experimental version’ of Hamlet
• 11 ‘Looks the part’: Conceptual casting as incomplete adaptation in Corcadorca’s Merchant of Venice (2005) and Terra Nova’s Belfast Tempest (2016)
• 12 ‘To tell [Ireland’s Shakespeare] story’: Filmic Histories / Social Justice
• Index
• Imprint