SHAKESPEARE AND IRELAND: HISTORY, POLITICS, CULTURE.(Review)

SHAKESPEARE AND IRELAND: HISTORY, POLITICS, CULTURE. Edited by Mark Thornton Burnett and Ramona Wray. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997-Pp. xii + 264. $59.95.

What should a book of essays on Shakespeare and Ireland be like? The editors of this one, Mark Thornton Burnett and Ramona Wray, both hold academic appointments at the Queen's University of Belfast. But the book has a green dust-jacket and the "wearing of the green" pretty well signals what the book is about. All the essays use the conceptual vocabulary of postcolonial argument. The volume is organized around topics that have become canonical for this genre of criticism. The first group of essays covers the "construction" of Ireland in Shakespeare's works. This is followed by a series of discussions of the appropriation of Shakespeare in Irish literary modernism. A final group of essays investigates the institutions of Shakespearean production: theatre, translation, editing, and pedagogy. The emphasis throughout is on anxiety, demystification, and "the contradictions of teaching and researching an icon of the British establishment in an Irish context" (p. 1).

It all begins looking like another begrudging display of self-pity and righteous indignation by what Harold Bloom likes to call "the school of resentment." But this would be quite unfair as a general assessment of what this anthology achieves. For one thing this reviewer is the last person in the world who has any right to …