Download PDF by Oliver Hennessey: Yeats, Shakespeare, and Irish Cultural Nationalism

This publication identifies 3 phases of Yeats’s cultural nationalism, every one of which appropriates England’s nationwide poet in an idiosyncratic demeanour, whereas reflecting modern developments in Shakespeare reception. therefore Yeats’s fin-de-siécle Shakespeare is a symbolist poet and folk-artist whose pre-modern sensibility detaches him from modern English tradition and aligns him with the population of Ireland’s rural margins. subsequent, within the commencing decade of the 20 th century, following his stopover at to Stratford to determine the Benson background cycle, Yeats’s paintings for the Irish nationwide Theatre adopts an avant-garde, occultist stagecraft to advance an Irish dramatic repertoire able to unifying its viewers in a shared feel of nationhood. Yeats writes often approximately Shakespeare in this interval, finding at the Elizabethan level the type of transformational emotional have an effect on he sought to recuperate within the Abbey Theatre. ultimately, as eire strikes in the direction of political independence, Yeats turns back to Shakespeare to sign up his sadness with the social and cultural course of the nascent Irish country.

In every one case, Yeats’s considering Shakespeare responds to the outstanding conflation of aesthetic and non secular philosophies constituting his cultural nationalism, therefore creating a distinct case of Shakespearean reception. Taken jointly, Yeats’s writings deracinate Shakespeare, and so give a contribution considerably to the method in which Shakespeare has end up obvious as a world artist, instead of a in particular English possession.