‘Doing her spiriting’: Lady Morgan's Irish Tempests

Abstract

Several studies have tried to answer the question ‘where is Ireland in The Tempest?’, while others have assessed Ireland's sense of its own postcoloniality through Irish writers' engagement with Shakespeare's most ‘colonial’ play. This essay argues that Lady Morgan's national tales offer the first significant Irish rewritings of The Tempest. It shows how her allusions to the play constitute coherent intertextual patterns, informed by a clear sense of parallels between the enchanted isle of Shakespeare's imagination and Ireland around the time of the Act of Union. Those parallels, however, challenge the idea that The Tempest illustrates a (post)colonial relation between Ireland and Britain. Instead, Morgan's focus on the spells cast on foreign visitors by the island and by the native magic of Prospero and Ariel suggests that she used the play in order to allegorize possible ways of making the Union work, rather than to impugn the illegitimacy of colonial rule. Her last and most pessimistic national tale embryonically sketches a wild, native Irish Caliban who would later recur in both British and Irish imaginations with the rise of militant radical nationalism, but Morgan's version of the figure still shows important differences with subsequent postcolonial embodiments of Irish otherness. Although seminal in many ways, Morgan's rewritings of The Tempest only later make room for more conflictual uses of the play as an allegory of British-Irish relations.