‘Memory Like Mitigation’: Heaney, Shakespeare and Ireland

Abstract

This paper offers a critical discussion of the variety of Shakespearean intertexts that punctuate the work of Seamus Heaney. At the level both of diction and representation, verbal resources from Shakespeare provide Heaney with focal points for an exploration of matters of personal and communal identity. These involve, with varying degrees of explicitness, the challenges and enablements of an individual formative trajectory as much as of a troubled social and political environment. To address the complexities of Irish identity through expressive devices derived from an author who was so often enlisted on behalf of a sense of Englishness (or even Britishness) could be less than obvious or peaceful. But Northern Irish writers—even those who, like Heaney, had their origins in a Catholic and nationalist background—have often opted for a consciously appropriative attitude vis-a-vis the English literary tradition. Through the eminent ‘citability’ that characterises canonical authors, Shakespeare becomes a reservoir of possibilities for bringing out some of the ways in which authors conceptualise themselves through memory. Further, the dramatic can prove an apt generic model for lyrical explorations of a sense of self and circumstance marked by conflict and adversity. Heaney’s poetry is densely intertextual with regard to the English canon, but his use of Shakespeare is arguably exceptional for its regularity and for signposting the various stages in his writing. This combination in Heaney of Shakespeare’s pervasiveness with a structuring function will underpin the argument that Shakespeare provides textual and conceptual landmarks for Heaney’s perfecting of an authorial voice—as he confronts in verse the challenges posed not only by a largely adverse history, but also by a poetic career that made him one of the centrally canonical figures in contemporary letters.