SHAKESPEARE IN IRELAND

‘The best way of marking an end to Victorian Shakespeare,’ says Adrian Poole, marking an end to his own excellent study of the topic, ‘is to look towards Dublin.’ There, at the turn of the century, Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, George Bernard Shaw and W. B. Yeats were all writing, or about to write, Shakespeare into their own work both critically and creatively; and, in varying degrees, controversially and even subversively. This greatest of English writers was being defined and focused in alternative ways for the new century by increasingly self-confident writers from across the Irish Sea. Yeats wrote only one full-length critical essay on Shakespeare, the slyly revisionist ‘At Stratford-on-Avon’, first published in two parts in the London journal The Speaker in 1901 and subsequently collected in Ideas of Good and Evil in 1903. But numerous other scattered observations of sometimes striking originality and insight attest to a passionate lifelong engagement. Yeats's creative work has, throughout, its Shakespearean traces, and it culminates in a vision of ‘tragic joy’ directly indebted to Shakespeare, even if also drawing on Nietzsche, and realised in poems occasionally allusive to him, among them some of the greatest Yeats wrote.