'Coupled and Inseparable': Shakespeare and Irish Romanticism

Shakespeare and irish Romanticism This project investigates how Irish writers in the Romantic period appropriated Shakespeare in their work. The corpus consists of selected works from three authors writing in the wake of the 1801 Act of Union: Lady Morgan (c. 1776-1859), Charles Robert Maturin (1782-1824), and James Clarence Mangan (1803-1849). The thesis will unfold, contextualize, and interpret the sustained patterns of intertextual references to Shakespeare they set up in their novels, plays, and essays. These references take the shape of quotations and allusions but also of elaborate rewritings of plots and characters. By comparing their appropriations of Shakespeare with English contemporaries’ intertextual use of the Bard on the one hand, and with later Irish writers’ responses to Shakespeare on the other hand, my purpose is to reveal whether or not their work displayed the same ambivalence to Shakespeare that has characterized many modern Irish engagements with the central figure of the English literary canon. Did Romantic Ireland already ‘write back’ to Shakespeare in the same way later Irish writers did? In answering this question, I hope to shed new light on Shakespeare’s reception in Ireland and thereby to redress a critical omission in scholarship.status: publishe