Review
The bard provides food for thought as always, says Sean McMahon.
- Shakespeare and the Irish Writer
- UCD Press
A Bheith nó gan a Bheith
The title of this elegant book with the most famous soliloquy in the world given as Gaeilge on the cover might suggest that we have a special relationship with Liam of Stratford not equally claimable by writers worldwide.
There is indeed an essay by Tadhg Ó Dúshláine called ‘Shakespeare as Gaeilge’ and much deconstructing of The Mind and Art of Shakespeare by Edward Dowden the Unionist Trinity professor, whose book was the bible of late Victorian academics.
The Irish writers dicussed include Beckett, Heaney, McGuinness, Joyce, Wilde, Yeats and Shaw (who claimed to be a better dramatist). Though the Irish Captain MacMorris in Henry V with his riddle ‘What ish my country?’ inevitably figures, no one mentions that Pistol in the same play gives us ‘Cailín as chois tSiúire mé’ (‘I’m a lass from beside the Suir.’) or that Moth in Love’s Labour’s Lost sings, ‘Can, Chailín Gheal (‘Sing, fair maiden.’). Trivial strictures aside this is a book not only for post-docs but those many lay people from whom Shakespeare is meat and drink and not just bread and butter.
