The Celtic Revival in Shakespeare’s Wake: Appropriation and Cultural Politics in Ireland, 1867–1922

230 Pages·2013·1.57 MB·English

by  Adam Putz (auth.)

The Celtic Revival in Shakespeare’s Wake
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The Celtic Revival in
Shakespeare’s Wake
Appropriation and Cultural Politics in
Ireland, 1867–1922
Adam Putz
© Adam Putz 2013
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013 978-1-137-02765-8
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Contents
List of Figures vi
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction 1
Apparitions 1
Appropriations 4
1 Matthew Arnold 19
Celtic literature 19
Irish politics 34
2 Edward Dowden 47
Mind and art 47
Spiritual brogue 67
Imperial impresario 75
3 W.B. Yeats 89
Victorian ideals 89
‘At Stratford-on-Avon’ 95
At Swim-Two-Swans 113
‘Irving and his plume of pride’ 122
4 James Joyce 134
Shakespeare explained 134
Stephen heroic 143
Conclusion 171
Notes 175
Bibliography 198
Index 213
v
List of Figures
1 ‘Othello’s Occupation’s Gone’, The Union, 24 March 1888 13
2 ‘Hamlet’s Ghost’, The Union, 13 August 1887 14
3 ‘The Irish Shylock’, United Ireland, 4 June 1887 15
4 ‘The Birmingham Macbeth’s Soliloquy’, United Ireland,
27 March 1886 16
vi
Acknowledgements
I could not have undertaken this project without generous support
from the University of Warwick, which funded my doctoral research
from 2008 to 2010 with a Postgraduate Research Scholarship and an
Overseas Research Student Award, and the British Association for Irish
Studies, which awarded me a Postgraduate Bursary in 2008. Moreover,
I would like to thank Jonathan Bate and Thomas Docherty for their
unswerving support as well as their unstinting criticism of my research
at every stage in its development. Likewise, I wish to thank Michael
Bell and Nicholas Grene for their generous feedback as the completed
manuscript’s first readers. In addition, I would like to acknowledge
the Board of Trinity College, which granted permission to quote from
the manuscripts of Edward Dowden and J.M. Synge, and to Ellen
O’Flaherty for her help locating these materials. Finally, portions of the
chapters ‘W.B. Yeats’ and ‘James Joyce’ appear together under the title
‘Continental Thinking, Continental Living: W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, and
the Cultural Politics of Appropriating Shakespeare’ in the volume The
Politics of Irish Writing edited by Kateˇrina Jencˇová, Michaela Marková,
Radvan Markus, and Hana Pavelková (Prague: Centre for Irish Studies,
Charles University, 2010).
vii
Introduction
kent If but as will I other accents borrow,
That can my speech defuse, my good intent
May carry through itself to that full issue
For which I razed my likeness.
King Lear, 1.4.1–41
Apparitions
Shakespeare has spent much of his rich and varied afterlife haunting
men and women affected by the British cultural and political pres-
ence in their country. In Ireland, this presence significantly antedated
Shakespeare’s lifetime. It has persisted there long after his death in
1616. His plays first appeared on the stage in Dublin during the seven-
teenth century, on the page along with his poetry in the eighteenth,
and remained part of cultural life – although almost exclusively within
the Pale – for the nineteenth. Changes to the balance of power amongst
and, eventually, away from the European empires during the t wentieth
century did little to diminish Shakespeare’s position. The revival of
purportedly native literary traditions, in Ireland as elsewhere, has often
meant negotiating this dual inheritance, rather than refuting either
aspect outright, even as these movements successfully inspired inno-
vation in poetry and drama, if not the overthrow of these empires.
Ireland’s writers working in English and Irish continue to struggle with
the complexities of trying to reconcile their love of Ireland with admira-
tion for English literature and, particularly, Shakespeare.
W.B. Yeats was no exception. After seeing Sir Henry Irving play Hamlet
in London, Yeats had a precedent by which he would measure other
Shakespearean performances. He later drew on these figures – actor
1
2 The Celtic Revival in Shakespeare’s Wake
and character alike – to endow his own plays and poetry with pathos.
Indeed, Yeats would associate passion with such tragic figures as Hamlet
and Lear throughout his career. By contrast, Edward Dowden, the pre-
eminent Shakespearean of his generation, first chair of English litera-
ture at Trinity College, Dublin, and certainly no stranger to Irving or
his acting, would emphasise the personal restraint of Shakespeare and
his principal figures. In his essay ‘At Stratford-on-Avon’ (1901), Yeats
redeploys Matthew Arnold’s ‘Celtic note’ to attack what he understood
as Dowden’s privileging of English over Irish literary culture, helping to
establish the association of Dowden and his influential scholarship with
imperialism and positivism, materialism and pragmatism. As Gordon
McMullan has argued, Dowden’s work quickly became for a generation
of Shakespeareans an important jumping off point, albeit an eminently
Victorian one, for at least the likes of Lytton Strachey.2 Yeats adopted a
position, then, that would blossom with the response of many modern-
ists to Shakespeare and much contemporary criticism rooted in the long
history of commentary on his works.
Frank McGuinness has observed of his own naïve certainty about
the political import of the Shakespearean text in an Irish context that
he once believed ‘as an act of faith that in these plays I would come
face to face with a Catholic dissident, marvellously subverting the
insecurities of Protestant England’.3 McGuinness highlights the over-
determined position that Shakespeare occupies in Irish literary history,
bracketing the issue of Shakespeare’s reception in terms of Catholic and
Protestant, republican and unionist readings. No doubt, he might have
added others. It remains clear from Irish theatre history in particular
that control of Shakespeare’s reception has changed hands since the
earliest Restoration performances before the vice-regal court, and his
plays occupy a prominent place in the repertoires of companies in
both Northern Ireland and the Republic to this day. Consequently,
Shakespeare’s position proves difficult to pin down without attending to
the unique contexts informing the performance and publication history
of his plays and poetry in Ireland. Little wonder McGuinness observes,
then, that the Shakespearean text continues to captivate the Irish liter-
ary imagination despite the perplexing cultural position that he and
his works inhabit. Nevertheless, the context in which McGuinness has
written is substantially different from those that prevailed during other
periods in Irish literary history.
Pronounced anxieties over Shakespeare’s aesthetics and politics have
indeed emerged at other cultural moments in Ireland, but these are
hardly the same anxieties in every instance. In this book, I interrogate