Through a selection of essays from a variety of scholarly voices, this volume maps the various ways in which Shakespeare has been adapted, adopted and appropriated in Ireland from the late 17th century through to the present day.
Shakespeare's plays have been performed in Ireland since the 1660s, when Smock Alley theatre was established in Dublin, with Shakespeare serving as its essential stock-in-trade. Since then the playwright's work has played a central role in the formation of Irish culture. Shakespeare's works helped to fashion colonial identity in Ireland from the 18th century and beyond, whilst his presence in Irish cultural life became more dispersed in the 1800s, with Irish writers such as Charles Robert Maturin drawing on Shakespearean sources - something that would become evident in the Irish literary tradition across the ensuing decades.
Considering the ways in which such Irish writers as Samuel Beckett and W. B. Yeats drew on Shakespearean material in producing their own work, whilst analysing Shakespearean influence in both Irish society and its theatrical landscape, essays in this collection explore the history of Irish Shakespeare through the numerous ways in which Shakespeare and his work were reconfigured and recycled into various Irish contexts. Shakespeare in Ireland shows how Shakespeare has been rendered Irish in a variety of complex ways, and is an exercise in tracking how Shakespeare becomes a fully hibernicised figure.

Andrew Murphy MRIA FTCD is Professor of English at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. He has previously worked at the University of St Andrews, UK, and his major authored publications include Shakespeare in Print (2nd ed. 2021); Ireland, Reading and Cultural Nationalism (2018); Shakespeare for the People (2008); and Ireland, Colonialism and Renaissance Literature (1999). He has edited four volumes -- most recently The Nation in British Literature and Culture (2023) -- and served as UK Associate Editor for The Cambridge Guide to the Worlds of Shakespeare (2 vols, 2016). He is currently editing Henry V with expected publication in 2027.

List of Figures
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgements

Introduction: Shakespeare on Aran
Andrew Murphy (Trinity College Dublin, Ireland)
1. Thomas Sheridan's Coriolanus (1752) and the Making of Smock Alley
David O'Shaughnessy (University of Galway, Ireland)
2. Tralee, 1756: Shakespeare on the Atlantic Edge
Marc Caball (University College Dublin, Ireland) and Jason McElligott (Marsh's Library, Dublin, Ireland)
3. Gothic Protagonist, Romantic Icon, Irish Character? The Uses of Shakespeare in the Portrayal of Melmoth the Wanderer
Raphaël Ingelbien and Benedicte Seynhaeve (KU Leuven, Belgium)
4. From Stratford to Galway: W. B. Yeats on Shakespeare
Neil Rhodes (University of St Andrews, UK)
5. Unquiet Ancestors: Beckett Reading Shakespeare through Synge and Joyce
Claudia Olk (LMU Munich, Germany)
6. Shakespeare Iconography in Victorian Belfast: Materiality, Industrialisation, Imperialism
Molly Quinn-Leitch(Queen's University Belfast, UK)
7. Séacspaoir sa Taibhdhearc: Irish Translations
Andrew Murphy (Trinity College Dublin, Ireland)
8. Shakespeare's Irish History Museum: Adapting Richard II
Stephen O'Neill ( National University of Ireland Maynooth)
9. Hamlet the Irishman: Irish Theatre Histories, Re-Invented and Re-Circulated
Patrick Lonergan (University of Galway, Ireland)
10. 'Great Liberties are Taken with the Action': Siobhán McKenna's 'Experimental Version' of Hamlet
Emer McHugh (Queen's University Belfast, UK)
11. 'Looks the Part': Conceptual Casting as Incomplete Adaptation in Corcadorca's Merchant of Venice (2005) and Terra Nova's Belfast Tempest (2016)
Justine Nakase (Independent scholar, USA)
12. 'To tell [Ireland's Shakespeare] story': Filmic Histories / Social Justice
Mark Thornton Burnett (Queen's University Belfast, UK)

Index