Shakespeare’s 450th birthday: Shakespeare and Ireland
30th April 2014
I was asked to speak at a lunch in Stratford-upon-Avon at the weekend in honour of Shakespeare on the 450th anniversary of his birth. Here is the text I drew on for my remarks.
To adapt his own words, 'I have come to praise Shakespeare and not to bury him', for he lives on today in the hearts and minds of people of all creeds and nations who admire his work.
It is a pleasure to be here on this great occasion when we mark the 450th anniversary of the birth of the world's most famous, and most important, writer, Stratford's William Shakespeare, whose fame stretches into the four corners of the world, or in this case I should say The Globe.
During his recent State Visit, the first by an Irish Head of State, President Higgins spoke at the Royal Shakespeare Company, making the point that the Irish were the first people outside of Britain 'to enter into dialogue with the English language'. We now have a shared language as well as a shared literature in which Shakespeare is an indispensable figure.
English was probably spoken in Ireland almost as soon as it emerged on this island from the grafting of Norman French onto the Anglo-Saxon linguistic stem. Indeed, Shakespeare's contemporaries, Edmund Spenser and Walter Raleigh, lived and wrote in Ireland, albeit in a condition of hostile misapprehension and mutual suspicion between them and their Irish neighbours
Shakespeare has inhabited the imagination of the Irish for centuries. His is often the first major literary work encountered by Irish schoolchildren. In my case, the first exposure to Shakespeare came at the age of 14 when Henry IV Part 1 was part of the syllabus for the Junior Certificate (roughly comparable with English O-Levels). I still remember with fondness the antics of Prince Hal and the roguish John Falstaff, and can recall many lines from that play. Hamlet was the prescribed text for my final school examinations and I have subsequently studied, read and attended many of his plays. At my wedding, I recited 'Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments' together with Yeats's fine romantic poem, 'He wishes for the cloths of heaven'.
Our great Irish writers were all born into a world in which Shakespeare had set the standard. It is clear from Jonathan Swift's correspondence that he knew, or at least remembered parts of, Hamlet, Henry IV Pt. 1, Henry V, Henry VIII, King John, Richard III, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Twelfth Night. This list suggests that this great writer, who was born and spent much of his life in Ireland, had a healthy interest in English history. I wonder if the last two plays on this list might have fuelled his imagination and inspired Gulliver's Travels.
Our great Irish poet, WB Yeats (a writer of Shakespearean stature) saw Dante and Shakespeare as artists who created out of their own experience something so unified that it amounted to 'the recreation of the man through the art, the birth of a new species of man.'
James Joyce was, I would say, obsessed with Shakespeare. Episode 9 of Ulysses consists of an extended debate about Shakespeare, and especially Hamlet. The characters gathered in the National Library are all highly knowledgeable Shakespeare enthusiasts. One reveals that he admires the Bard 'this side idolatry'. Joyce later recalls the view of Alexander Dumas that 'After God Shakespeare has created the most.' There is even a reference in Ulysses to the possibility that Shakespeare might have been Irish. Our genealogists are working on it! We'll let you know if we come up with any Irish roots for your Stratford Bard!
In Finnegans Wake, Joyce pays Shakespeare the ultimate tribute of including him in his literary trinity of 'Daunty, Gouty and Shopkeeper', aka Dante, Goethe and Shakespeare. Late in Joyce's life, his friend Frank Budgen asked which book he would take with him to a Desert Island and Joyce replied: 'I should hesitate between Dante and Shakespeare, but not for long. The Englishman is richer and would get my vote.'
For my final illustration of Shakespeare's impact on our writers, I turn to Sean O'Casey, perhaps our finest 20th century dramatist, whose emergence as a writer was deeply influenced by his exposure to Shakespeare's works at an early age. Towards the end of his life, O'Casey wrote a piece to mark 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's birth in which he identified compassion as a source of his greatness. 'He loved all things; he missed nothing, for nothing was too lowly for him to touch with a beautiful phrase.'
As our President put it during his visit here, the English language may have been acquired by the Irish as a by-product of conquest, but today it is 'the very language in which we have now come to delight in one another, to share our different and complementary understandings of what it means to be human together in this world.’
Today, as the representative of a country whose people have mastered English as a literary language, and, through Yeats, Joyce, Beckett, Wilde, Shaw, Heaney and others, used it 'to point towards the amplified sense of our common humanity' in what President Higgins called 'our doubled English.'
I am happy to pay tribute to William Shakespeare, the first man of literature, treasured property of the world, son of Stratford.
Thank you, William, for inviting us to your birthday party. Thank you for living on into our age. Thank you for continuing to fascinate us with your beautiful phrases and your insights into the human condition, and for helping us, in the words of another English writer 'to see into the life of things'.
Daniel Mulhall, Ambassador