Staging Ireland Representations in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama

by O'neill, Stephen

• ISBN13: 9781851829897
• ISBN10: 185182989X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-02-16
• Publisher: Four Courts Press

Summary

This book is a comprehensive study of the representation of Ireland in the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Through a detailed analysis of a range of canonical and less familiar plays, such as The Misfortunes of Arthur, Captain Thomas Stukeley, Sir John Oldcastle and Dekker's The Honest Whore, this book reveals fascinating interconnections between Ireland as it was figured in Elizabethan and early Jacobean drama, and contemporaneous political and cultural anxieties about Ireland and Irish alterity. Exploring how the stage provided a fluid, though licensed, space where such anxieties were negotiated and confronted, this study questions views of the stage Irishman as a static colonialist stereotype. Instead, it demonstrates that dramatic representations of Ireland were dynamic, heterogeneous, and ideologically unstable. Opening up Renaissance drama to its multivalent Irish contexts, Staging Ireland will appeal to scholars and students of Shakespeare and early modern literature; drama and theatre as well as Irish studies.

Table of Contents

Introduction : locating Ireland in Renaissance drama	p. 11
Topical plots : drama and the reform of Ireland in the 1580s	p. 24
'Severity upholds both realm and rule' : reforming the Irish in The misfortunes of Arthur	p. 26
Catholic and Irish plots in Peele's Battle of Alcazar	p. 44
'Wand'ring with the Antipodes' : spatial anxieties, the Irish wars and Elizabethan drama	p. 63
'Overrun all your English Pale' : rebellion from the margins in Henry VI	p. 69
'Chas'd from England's bounds' : Marlowe's Edward II and exile in Ireland	p. 90
'Now for our Irish wars' : home and away in Richard II	p. 103
Ireland onstage in Captain Thomas Stukeley	p. 118
'Thy head for treason' : the fall of the Irish rebel	p. 121
'Rebbell tonge' : signifying Irish words	p. 137
1599 : drama, nation and the burden of war	p. 143
'What ish my nation?' : questions of Irish difference on the Elizabethan stage	p. 146
'From Ireland coming' : Henry V and the shaping co-incidence of the Irish wars	p. 163
'That monster of ingratitude' : Irish servant and English master in Sir John Oldcastle	p. 177
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