W. Maley

Shakespeare, Holinshed and Ireland: Resources and Con-texts

The texts of the Western canon play a dominant part in postcolonial literature, from the title of Achebe’s novel, Things Fall Apart, drawn from Yeats’ ‘The Second Coming’, to the influence of Shakespeare evident in Aime Cesaire’s Une Tempete (1969), and Octave Mannoni’s Prospero and Caliban (1950). Another pair of quotations from the same canonical texts might serve here as reminders of two issues central to postcolonialism, namely, the reversal or displacement of the core—periphery model of development, indeed the questioning of ‘development’ itself, and the issue of whether the colonial subject comprises both colonisers and colonised. ‘The centre cannot hold’ and ‘This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine’ aptly summarise much recent debate.1 Ironically, Yeats was writing from a core hitherto regarded as peripheral. The idea that the Empire writes back signals the decentring or recentring of what was hitherto deemed liminal, while Prospero’s owning of, and owning up to, Caliban, can be read alongside arguments around the colonial subject between Homi Bhabha and Abdul JanMohamed, for example, and the accusations of appropriation, and claims around what or who is properly postcolonial.2

How Milton and Some Contemporaries Read Spenser’s View

How influential was Spenser’s View as a representation of Ireland following on from its publication in 1633? What part did it play in the atrocity literature of the 1640s and beyond? Little has been written on this topic, and I am very much aware of treading on unsurveyed territory. Indeed, not only is there a drastic shortage of secondary criticism on the subject of the later seventeenth-century interpretation of the View, but many critics, in discussing the document, appear to be unaware that its most decisive impact must surely have been in this period, and not in the thirty-seven years during which it circulated in manuscript form, however plentiful those manuscripts were. Judging by the twenty-odd surviving copies, the View must have been one of the most popular and widely known of such contemporary treatises. An exception to the general rule that sees Spenser’s View as an Elizabethan document is Pat Coughlan, who has argued: Spenser’s View of the Present State of Ireland (written in 1596, though not published until 1633) is indeed the founding text of modem English discourse about Ireland, and was a specific influence in the civil war decades on Englishmen’s approach to Ireland. It affords a particularly appropriate source for a summary account of those received representations which are the basis of seventeenth-century English thought and action in respect of Ireland.1

Shakespeare and the Irish writer

making and performance. This is an important book to anyone with an interest in our recent past, other ‘postconflict’ societies, to those interested in storytelling and the recording of memory and trauma, and to those with an interest in prisons. There are those who will dispute how such recordings relate and obtain to the present, let alone the past, but these are disputes worth having and who better to articulate them in their own voices than survivors and their relatives? This is a book about memory, trust, and an invaluable historical recording. It would be a disservice to the stories of many previously unheard voices, sensitively and collaboratively documented by McLaughlin and his colleagues, if the memories and voices in these films didn’t attract as wide an audience as possible. After the films, this book is the next best thing.

“A Thing Most Brutish”: Depicting Shakespeare's Multi-Nation State

In recent years, anglocentric and royalist readings of Shakespeare have yielded to colonial and republican perspectives. The placing of the plays within a problematic early modern British context has been a distinctive feature of this criticism. This essay surveys recent work on the British and Irish dimensions, addressing the broad issues entailed in situating Stuart Shakespeare: succession, union, plantation, the reinvention of Britain, and the expansion of England. This criticism, concerned with questions of colonialism and nationalism in the context of British state formation, focuses on the Nine Years War in Ireland (1594-1603), the succession crisis that led to the Union of Crowns (1603), the Flight of the Earls (1607), and the Ulster Plantation (1609). Although this work touches on all of Shakespeares corpus, it tends to centre on a group of plays, namely the “British tetralogy”-Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth and Cymbeline-book-ended by Henry V and The Tempest. This work, part of the “new contextualism”, a revised and enlarged version of new historicism and cultural materialism, mixes the empirical methods of the old historicism with the theoretical insights of the new, and adds the urgency, the “very now” of Presentism. Four related features emerge: the rethinking of genre, in the extending of the category of history play to include tragedies such as Macbeth and King Lear, and romances like Cymbeline and The Tempest; the rethinking of history, in a concomitant extension of the terms “Jacobean” and “Stuart” to all of Shakespeares late and post-Elizabethan work; the rethinking of the relation between new historicism and cultural materialism in the twinning of topicality and presentism as critical approaches; and the reorientation of the field in the recollection of, and reconnecting to, an earlier tradition of (old) historicist criticism preoccupied by geography and place. By going beyond the histories and reorienting the tragedies and romances, this new criticism is challenging genre boundaries as well as national borders.

‘This Sceptred Isle’: Shakespeare and the British Problem

In the summer of 1941, the eminent Shakespearean critic G. Wilson Knight staged a special Shakespeare revue entitled This Sceptred Isle at Westminster Theatre in London. Billed as a ‘Dramatisation of Shakespeare’s Call to Great Britain in Time of War’, the performance was in three parts. The first, headed ‘St. George for England’, opened with Faulconbridge’s lines from the conclusion of King John. This was followed by John of Gaunt’s ‘sceptred isle’ oration from Richard II, Richard III’s speech before the Battle of Bosworth against ‘those bastard Britains’, and Henry V’s pronouncements before and during Agincourt. After a ten-minute interval, Part Two, ‘Patriotism is Not Enough’, comprised two soliloquies from Hamlet, Macbeth’s vision of a line of British monarchs stretching out to ‘the crack of doom’, and three scenes from Timon of Athens, showing Timon’s encounters with Alcibiades and his army, with the bandits, and with the Senators of Athens. A further interval of five minutes preceded the third and final Part, ‘The Royal Phoenix’, which consisted of two excerpts from Henry VIII, Buckingham’s farewell and Cranmer’s prophecy. The performance was rounded off with Queen Elizabeth’s address to English troops at Tilbury before the Spanish Armada. A notice in The Times had reservations about Knight’s acting, but praised the event and the vision of its organiser: the whole unusual production firmly establishes his conception of Shakespeare as the poet and prophet of a free and virile people united under a benevolent monarchy and determined to fight in themselves the evils of greed and corruption and to take up arms against tyranny and the lust for power in others.2

CELTIC CONNECTIONS Colonialism and Culture in Irish-Scottish Modernism

This essay maps out relations between Irish and Scottish modernism as part of a new area of comparative criticism, Irish-Scottish studies, which has implications not only for English literature, but for postcolonial theory, which has tended to be anglocentric in terms of its analyses of British and Irish paradigms. This intervention takes five major Irish and Scottish writers - Muir, Yeats, MacDiarmid, Joyce and Grassic Gibbon - and looks at how language and identity are figured, forged and fused between two countries that are at once foreign and familiar.

Beyond the Law?: The Justice of Deconstruction

This paper offers a close reading of Derrida’s essay “Force of Law” that emphasises the twin strengths of a deconstructive approach to questions of law and justice -- textual analysis and political context. Derrida’s interest is in limit or test cases, and so he engages with the fraying edges of the law, its borders, the frontiers that are most heavily policed because they are most fragile, for example capital punishment, genocide, general strikes and terrorism. Derrida undertakes an exploration of violence through a reinterpretation of Walter Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence”. At the heart of Derrida’s difficult argument is a demand for justice that goes beyond the cataloguing of specific injustices, and beyond the terms of Benjamin’s critique. The utopian impulse that underpins “Force of Law” is carried over into Specters of Marx, Derrida’s recent explicit grappling with the legacy of Marxism. The links between these two texts by Derrida implies a sustained politics of radical commitment on the part of deconstruction, a commitment to future forms of legality and egalitarianism, a theory of justice posited upon prescience rather than precedent.

Crossing the Hyphen of History: the Scottish Borders of Anglo-Irishness

The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English defines the ‘Border’, with a capital letter, as the ‘boundary and adjoining districts between England and Scotland, N. Ireland and the Irish Republic, US and Mexico, etc.’. This is an interesting choice of examples. A‘borderer’, on the other hand is a ‘dweller on or near [a] frontier, especially that between England and Scotland’.1The word ‘border’ comes from ‘board’, which stems in turn from two distinctive Germanic words, ‘bordham’ and ‘bordhaz’, meaning ‘board’ and ‘border’ respectively. To border is also to board, to neighbour, but also to colonize. If we take on board this double derivation, we can see that it fits in with what we know of borders today, and of borders in the early modern period — my period. Periodization is something that postcolonialism cannot ignore, particularly given the academic history that has encouraged it to look for the signs of empire no further back than the nineteenth or at best the eighteenth centuries, and to confine its attention to places beyond Britain, rather than those abutting England.2 Historical borders, no less than geographical ones, demand to be crossed.

Varieties of Englishness: Planting a New Culture Beyond the Pale

Nicholas Canny has reminded us that ‘Spenser’s Irish experience was essentially a Munster or even a Cork one.’1 Rudolf Gottfried writes: ‘Of the four provinces... Munster seems to be that with which the View shows the greatest direct familiarity.’2 Ciaran Brady has drawn our attention to the fact that two other major treatises of the period were composed ‘by the Munster planter Sir William Herbert... and the Munster civil administrator Richard Beacon’.3 Roland M. Smith extends Spenser’s knowledge to the eastern province of Ireland, but plays down the possibility that Spenser was sufficiently widely travelled for his knowledge to encompass the whole country: Investigation makes it more and more evident that Spenser’s was something more than an Undertaker’s knowledge of Ireland, but that his first-hand familiarity was limited to those portions of Leinster and Munster he was closely connected with. For the rest of Ireland he relied upon his reading and maps and hearsay.4 Thus Munster was the site of an exemplary personal experience and investment for Spenser.

Spenser’s Irish English: Language and Identity in Early Modern Ireland

In this chapter I shall suggest that Spenser’s choice of ‘Chaucer’s English’, based upon a nationalistic literary revivalism, was also influenced by a variety of English which survived as a spoken language beyond the pale of the cultural metropolis, in the colonial margins. (Perhaps I should say at the outset that I am approaching this, not as a linguist, nor as a medievalist, but as a ‘cultural historian’.) Spenser’s Irish English, or Hiberno-English, was most certainly influenced by Chaucer, but it was also inspired by the survival of an ancient dialect of English in Elizabethan Ireland. Sixteenth-century Munster, the southern province of Ireland, was a multilingual environment, with Latin as the language of learning, Gaelic Irish as the language of the bards and the peasantry, Middle English as the language of the Catholic descendants of the twelfth-century colonists, known as the ‘Old English’, and early modern English as the language of the post-Reformation Protestant planters, known as the ‘New English’.