“I found it out by the bogs”: Reviewing Shakespeare in Ireland

Abstract

This paper explores the reviewing of Shakespeare's plays in Ireland. Although his works are often staged in that country, there have been relatively few productions of the eleven Shakespeare plays that explicitly mention Ireland or the Irish. Rather than considering the Ireland that actually appears in those works, some Irish critics instead consider his work from a postcolonial perspective – an approach that does little to advance understanding of Shakespeare's work, and which occludes the rich history of Shakespearean production in Ireland since the late seventeenth century. The article proposes a number of ways in which critics might respond to this situation.