Shakespeare and the Cultural Colonization of Ireland

Using a combined lens of cultural materialist and postcolonial studies to read the early modern inclusion of the Irish in the culture of the British empire, this study explores the cultural colonization or "impressment" as a way of understanding for Shakespeare’s representations of the Irish.

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Focusing on plays (Richard II, Henry V, and Hamlet) which appear prominently in the writing of the Irish nationalist movement of the early twentieth century, this study explores how Irish writers such as Sean O’Casey, Samuel Beckett, W. B. Yeats, G. B. Shaw, James Joyce, and Seamus Heaney resisted English cultural colonization through a combination of reappropriation and critique of Shakespeare's work.