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Yeats, Shakespeare, and Irish Cultural Nationalism

Oliver Hennessey

Yeats, Shakespeare, and Irish Cultural Nationalism examines Yeats’s writing on Shakespeare in the context of his work on behalf of the Irish Literary Revival. While Shakespeare’s verse drama provides a source of inspiration for Yeats’s poetry and plays, Yeats also writes about Shakespeare in essays and articles promoting the ideals of the Revival, and on behalf of Irish literary nationalism. These prose pieces reveal Yeats thinking about Shakespeare’s art and times throughout his career, and taken together they offer a new perspective on the contours of Yeats’s cultural politics.

This book identifies three stages of Yeats’s cultural nationalism, each of which appropriates England’s national poet in an idiosyncratic manner, while reflecting contemporary trends in Shakespeare reception. Thus Yeats’s fin-de-siécle Shakespeare is a symbolist poet and folk-artist whose pre-modern sensibility detaches him from contemporary English culture and aligns him with the inhabitants of Ireland’s rural margins. Next, in the opening decade of the twentieth century, following his visit to Stratford to see the Benson history cycle, Yeats’s work for the Irish National Theatre adopts an avant-garde, occultist stagecraft to develop an Irish dramatic repertoire capable of unifying its audience in a shared sense of nationhood. Yeats writes frequently about Shakespeare during this period, locating on the Elizabethan stage the kind of transformational emotional affect he sought to recover in the Abbey Theatre. Finally, as Ireland moves towards political independence, Yeats turns again to Shakespeare to register his disappointment with the social and cultural direction of the nascent Irish state.

In each case, Yeats’s thinking about Shakespeare responds to the remarkable conflation of aesthetic and religious philosophies constituting his cultural nationalism, thus making a unique case of Shakespearean reception. Taken together, Yeats’s writings deracinate Shakespeare, and so contribute significantly to the process by which Shakespeare has come to be seen as a global artist, rather than a specifically English possession.

University Press Copublishing Division / Fairleigh Dickinson University Press

Pages: 196 • Trim: 6½ x 9¼

978-1-61147-626-2 • Hardback • August 2014 • $105.00 • (£81.00)

978-1-61147-741-2 • Paperback • May 2016 • $54.99 • (£42.00)

978-1-61147-627-9 • eBook • August 2014 • $52.00 • (£40.00)

Subjects: Literary Criticism / Shakespeare, Literary Criticism / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Literary Criticism / Poetry

Yeats, Shakespeare, and Irish Cultural Nationalism

Hardback

Paperback

eBook

Summary

Yeats, Shakespeare, and Irish Cultural Nationalism examines Yeats’s writing on Shakespeare in the context of his work on behalf of the Irish Literary Revival. While Shakespeare’s verse drama provides a source of inspiration for Yeats’s poetry and plays, Yeats also writes about Shakespeare in essays and articles promoting the ideals of the Revival, and on behalf of Irish literary nationalism. These prose pieces reveal Yeats thinking about Shakespeare’s art and times throughout his career, and taken together they offer a new perspective on the contours of Yeats’s cultural politics.

This book identifies three stages of Yeats’s cultural nationalism, each of which appropriates England’s national poet in an idiosyncratic manner, while reflecting contemporary trends in Shakespeare reception. Thus Yeats’s fin-de-siécle Shakespeare is a symbolist poet and folk-artist whose pre-modern sensibility detaches him from contemporary English culture and aligns him with the inhabitants of Ireland’s rural margins. Next, in the opening decade of the twentieth century, following his visit to Stratford to see the Benson history cycle, Yeats’s work for the Irish National Theatre adopts an avant-garde, occultist stagecraft to develop an Irish dramatic repertoire capable of unifying its audience in a shared sense of nationhood. Yeats writes frequently about Shakespeare during this period, locating on the Elizabethan stage the kind of transformational emotional affect he sought to recover in the Abbey Theatre. Finally, as Ireland moves towards political independence, Yeats turns again to Shakespeare to register his disappointment with the social and cultural direction of the nascent Irish state.

In each case, Yeats’s thinking about Shakespeare responds to the remarkable conflation of aesthetic and religious philosophies constituting his cultural nationalism, thus making a unique case of Shakespearean reception. Taken together, Yeats’s writings deracinate Shakespeare, and so contribute significantly to the process by which Shakespeare has come to be seen as a global artist, rather than a specifically English possession.

Details

University Press Copublishing Division / Fairleigh Dickinson University Press

Pages: 196 • Trim: 6½ x 9¼

978-1-61147-626-2 • Hardback • August 2014 • $105.00 • (£81.00)

978-1-61147-741-2 • Paperback • May 2016 • $54.99 • (£42.00)

978-1-61147-627-9 • eBook • August 2014 • $52.00 • (£40.00)

Subjects: Literary Criticism / Shakespeare, Literary Criticism / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Literary Criticism / Poetry

Author

Oliver Hennessey teaches courses in Shakespeare and early modern literature at Xavier University.

Table of Contents

Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction: William Shakespeare in Yeats’s Irish Revival
Chapter 1: De-Anglicization: Yeats, Victorian Shakespeare, and Cultural Authority
Chapter 2: The Birth of a Nation: Shakespeare in the Irish Dramatic Movement
Chapter 3: Disappointment, Degeneration, and Despair: Yeats’s Late Shakespeare
Chapter 4: Yeats’s Modern(ish) Shakespeare: Irish Revivalism and Literary Modernism
Bibliography
Index
About the Author

Reviews

Hennessey examines the role of Shakespeare within the discourse of Irish cultural nationalism and the work of W. B. Yeats. An evolving figure, Yeats’s Shakespeare remained central to the Irish writer’s aesthetics and nationalist cultural agenda throughout his career. Hennessey demonstrates how Yeats interpreted and appropriated Shakespeare’s works, characters, and cultural authority to advance the Irish Revival and help write himself into the history of Irish nationalism. Shakespeare’s literary reputation was mythologized to promote England’s diverse political and cultural agendas. Yeats de-Anglicized Shakespeare and claimed that one should distinguish the Elizabethan’s sensibility from that of 'English' modernity. For Yeats, Ireland’s premodern folk culture emulated the culture that had inspired the dramatic genius. Hennessey shows three evolving stages of Yeats’s Shakespeare: a premodern 'folk' Shakespeare, a 'symbolist' Shakespeare, and a cultural authority whom Yeats used to measure the inferior nationalistic culture of the burgeoning Irish state. Hennessey’s study contributes to a fuller understanding of Yeats’s nationalist thought, his identity politics, his aesthetics, and the role Shakespeare’s figure played within these contexts. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.
— Choice Reviews

Yeats, Shakespeare, and Irish Cultural Nationalism

Oliver Hennessey

Yeats, Shakespeare, and Irish Cultural Nationalism

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