Shakespeare and the Cultural Colonization of Ireland

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.