Shakespeare, Memory, and Modern Irish Literature

In Shakespeare, memory, and modern Irish literature, Nicholas Taylor-Collins charts the ways that the modern Irish nation is underwritten by Irish writers whose own cultural agency is improved by their engagement with William Shakespeare. Through a wide-ranging theoretical approach, Taylor-Collins privileges forms of intertextual memory that avoid the obvious quotation or explicit reference: this innovating proposal for a 'dismemorial' intertextuality allows readers to read both Shakespeare and the Irish writers with renewed understanding of their craft.

In the Introduction, Taylor-Collins establishes the grounds for comparison: both early modern England and modern/contemporary Ireland deploy a commemorative practice reliant on the theatre as a locus. Thereafter Taylor-Collins proceeds to examine the Shakespeare-Ireland connection through ghosts, bodies, and the land. In the first section, an exploration of Hamlet's hauntology enhances readings of J. M. Synge's Playboy of the Western World, James Joyce's Ulysses, and John Banville's Ghosts. The second section explores first how antitheatrical corporal economies in Coriolanus and Ben Jonson's satires re-emerge in Beckett's Three Novels, before moving on to Caithleen in Edna O'Brien's The Country Girls Trilogy as she borrows from 'hysterical' forebears in Othello, The Taming of the Shrew, and The Winter's Tale. The final section explores W. B. Yeats's infatuation with the surface of the land via King Lear and As You Like It, before finishing with Seamus Heaney's rootedness in the land via Hamlet's jumping into Ophelia's grave.

For scholars and students of Shakespeare and modern/contemporary Irish literature alike, this book will also appeal to continental theorists.