Shakespeare, Holinshed and Ireland: Resources and Con-texts

Abstract

The texts of the Western canon play a dominant part in postcolonial literature, from the title of Achebe’s novel, Things Fall Apart, drawn from Yeats’ ‘The Second Coming’, to the influence of Shakespeare evident in Aime Cesaire’s Une Tempete (1969), and Octave Mannoni’s Prospero and Caliban (1950). Another pair of quotations from the same canonical texts might serve here as reminders of two issues central to postcolonialism, namely, the reversal or displacement of the core—periphery model of development, indeed the questioning of ‘development’ itself, and the issue of whether the colonial subject comprises both colonisers and colonised. ‘The centre cannot hold’ and ‘This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine’ aptly summarise much recent debate.1 Ironically, Yeats was writing from a core hitherto regarded as peripheral. The idea that the Empire writes back signals the decentring or recentring of what was hitherto deemed liminal, while Prospero’s owning of, and owning up to, Caliban, can be read alongside arguments around the colonial subject between Homi Bhabha and Abdul JanMohamed, for example, and the accusations of appropriation, and claims around what or who is properly postcolonial.2