Abstract
The texts of the Western canon play a dominant part in postcolonial literature, from the title of Achebe’s novel, Things Fall Apart, drawn from Yeats’ ‘The Second Coming’, to the influence of Shakespeare evident in Aimé Césaire’s Une Tempête (1969), and Octave Mannoni’s Prospero and Caliban (1950). Another pair of quotations from the same canonical texts might serve here as reminders of two issues central to postcolonialism, namely, the reversal or displacement of the core—periphery model of development, indeed the questioning of ‘development’ itself, and the issue of whether the colonial subject comprises both colonisers and colonised. ‘The centre cannot hold’ and ‘This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine’ aptly summarise much recent debate.1 Ironically, Yeats was writing from a core hitherto regarded as peripheral. The idea that the Empire writes back signals the decentring or recentring of what was hitherto deemed liminal, while Prospero’s owning of, and owning up to, Caliban, can be read alongside arguments around the colonial subject between Homi Bhabha and Abdul JanMohamed, for example, and the accusations of appropriation, and claims around what or who is properly postcolonial.2
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Notes
The phrases appear in Vijay Mishra, ‘The Centre Cannot Hold: Bailey, Indian Culture and the Sublime’, South Asia, 12 (1989), pp. 103–14
Paul Brown, ‘“This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine”: The Tempest and the Discourse of Colonialism’, in Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (eds), Political Shakespeare: Essays in Cultural Materialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), pp. 48–71.
See also Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995).
See Homi K. Bhabha, ‘The Other Question: Difference, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism’, in Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, Margaret Iversen and Diana Loxley (eds), Literature, Politics and Theory: Papers from the Essex Conference 1976–84 (London and New York: Methuen, 1986), pp. 148–72;
Abdul R. JanMohamed, ‘The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function of Racial Difference in Colonialist Literature’, in Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (ed.), ‘Race’, Writing, and Difference (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 79–106.
On Shakespeare and Holinshed see, for example, Elizabeth Story Donno, ‘Some Aspects of Shakespeare’s Holinshed’, Huntington Library Quarterly 50 (1987), pp. 229–48;
R. A. Law, ‘Holinshed as a Source of Henry V and King Lear’, The University of Texas Bulletin 14 (1934), pp. 38–44.
Evidence for Holinshed’s presence in Ireland is contained in William Pinkerton, ‘Barnaby Googe’, Notes and Queries 3 (1863), p. 182.
On Shakespeare’s sources more generally, see Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 8 vols. (London: Routledge, 1957–75).
For a crucial new account of Holinshed, see Annabel M. Patterson, Reading Holinshed’s Chronicles (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
See Stephen Booth, The Book Called Holinshed’s Chronicles (San Francisco: The Book Club of California, 1968), p. 72
cited in Annabel Patterson, ‘Censorship and the 1587 “Holinshed’s” Chronicles’, in Paul Hyland and Neil Sammells (eds), Writing and Censorship in Britain (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 23. The irony is that we don’t read Holinshed, at least not with the care it demands.
Francis Barker and Peter Hulme, ‘Nymphs and Reapers Heavily Vanish: The Discursive Con-texts of The Tempest’, in John Drakakis (ed.), AIternative Shakespeares (London; Methuen, 1985), p. 236, n. 7.
See Jacques Derrida, ‘Biodegradables: Seven Diary Fragments’, trans. Peggy Kamuf, Critical Inquiry 15 (1989), p. 873.
See J. B. Sykes (ed.), The Concise Oxford Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982), p. 887. In place of the originary claims of ‘sources’, I offer here a mobile and multiple resourcefulness.
See Michael Cronin, Translating Ireland: Translation, Languages, Cultures (Cork: Cork University Press, 1996), p. 78.
See, for example, Christopher Ivic, ‘Incorporating Ireland: Cultural Conflict in Holinshed’s Irish Chronicles’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 29 (1999), pp. 437–98;
Richard McCabe, ‘Making History: Holinshed’s Irish Chronicles, 1577 and 1587’, in David J. Baker and Willy Maley (eds), British Identities and English Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 51–67.
For earlier work that comprehended the portrayal of the Celtic peoples see, for example, J. O. Bartley, Teague, Shenkin, and Sawney: Being an Historical Study of the Earliest Irish, Welsh and Scottish Characters in English Plays (Cork: Cork University Press, 1954);
Edward D. Snyder, ‘The Wild Irish: A Study of Some English Satires against the Irish, Scots, and Welsh’, Modern Philology 17 (1920), pp. 147–85.
For excellent examples of such work, see David J. Baker, ‘“Wildehirissheman”: Colonialist Representation in Shakespeare’s Henry V’, English Literary Renaissance 22 (1993), pp. 37–61;
Ann Rosalind Jones, ‘Italians and Others: Venice and the Irish in Coryat’s Crudities and The White Devil’, Renaissance Drama, 18 (1987), pp. 101–20;
Michael Neill, ‘Broken English and Broken Irish: Nation, language, and the Optic of Power in Shakespeare’s Histories’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 45 (1994), pp. 1–32.
See also Donna B. Hamilton, Shakespeare and the Politics of Protestant England (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1992);
Terence Hawkes, ‘Lear’s Maps’, in Meaning by Shakespeare (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 121–40;
Christopher Highley, ‘Wales, Ireland, and I Henry IV’, Renaissance Drama 21 (1990), pp. 91–114;
Graham Holderness, ‘“What ish my Nation?”: Shakespeare and National Identities’, Textual Practice, 5 (1991), pp. 74–93;
Stuart Kurland, ‘Hamlet and the Scottish Succession?’, Studies in English Literature 34 (1994), pp. 279–300;
David Norbrook, ‘Macbeth and the Politics of Historiography’, in Kevin Sharpe and Steve N. Zwicker (eds), Politics of Discourse: The Literature and History of Seventeenth-Century England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 78–116;
Alan Sinfield, ‘Macbeth: History, Ideology and Intellectuals’, in Colin MacCabe (ed.), Futures for English (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), pp. 63–77;
Christopher Wortham, ‘Shakespeare, James I and the Matter of Britain’, English 45 (1996), pp. 97–122.
See Roy Foster, ‘Varieties of Irishness’, in Modern Ireland, 1600–1972 (London: Allen Lane, 1988), pp. 3–14;
Willy Maley, ‘Varieties of Englishness: Planting a New Culture beyond the Pale’, in Salvaging Spenser: Colonialism, Culture and Identity (London: Macmillan, 1997), pp. 48–77
Willy Maley, ‘Varieties of Nationalism: Post-revisionist Irish Studies’, in Sarah Briggs, Paul Hyland and Neil Sammells (eds), Reviewing Ireland: Essays and Interviews from Irish Studies Review (Bath: Sulis Press, 1998), pp. 265–72.
Stephen Greenblatt, ‘Invisible Bullets: Renaissance Authority and its Subversion, Henry IV and Henry V’, in Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (eds), Political Shakespeare: Essays in Cultural Materialism (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1985), p. 42.
See David J. Baker, Between Nations: Shakespeare, Spenser, Marvell, and the Question of Britain (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), pp. 23, 29.
See C. Litton Falkiner, Essays Relating to Ireland: Biographical, Historical, and Topographical (London: Longman, 1909), pp. 237–40;
Edward M. Hinton, Ireland Through Tudor Eyes (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1935), p. 203.
Raphael Holinshed, Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 6 vols. (London: printed for J. Johnson, 1807–8; repr. with an introduction by Vernon Snow, ed. Henry Ellis (New York: AMS Press, 1965, 1976), VI, p. 321.
See also Sir D. Plunket Barton, Links between Ireland and Shakespeare (Dublin and London: Maunsel and Company, 1919), where it is noted that: ‘The Anglo-Norman families ... often assumed Irish prefixes ... they never took the prefix O, but they frequently dropped the Norman prefix Fitz and assumed the Irish equivalent Mac’ (p. 121).
Andrew Murphy, ‘“Tish ill done”: Henry the Fift and the Politics of Editing’, in Mark Thornton Burnett and Ramona Wray (eds), Shakespeare and Ireland: History, Politics, Culture (London: Macmillan, 1997), pp. 213–34.
W. J. Lawrence, ‘Was Shakespeare ever in Ireland?’, Shakespeare Jahrbuch 42 (1906), p. 70.
See Philip Edwards, Threshold of a Nation: A Study in English and Irish Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 75–8.
Gary Taylor (ed.), Henry V (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 169.
See Ciarân Brady, ‘Conservative Subversives: The Community of the Pale and the Dublin Administration’, in P. J. Corish (ed.), Radicals, Rebels and Establishments, Historical Studies, 15 (Belfast: Appletree Press, 1985), p. 32, n. 46.
See D. G. White, ‘Henry VIII’s Irish kerne in France and Scotland’, The Irish Sword, 3 (1957–58), pp. 213–25.
For the danger posed to England by the threat of a Franco-Irish alliance, see P. J. Piveronus, ‘The Desmond Imperial Alliance of 1529: Its Effect on Henry VIII’s Policy toward Ireland’, Éire-Ireland, 10, 2 (1975), pp. 19–31;
D. Potter, ‘French Intrigue in Ireland during the Reign of Henri II, 1547–1559’, International History Review, 5 (1983), pp. 159–80.
For the story behind the publication of this text, see D. B. Quinn, ‘Edward Walshe’s The office and duety in fightyng for our country (1545)’, Irish Book Lore 3, 1 (1976), pp. 28–31.
D. B. Quinn, ‘Edward Walshe’s “Conjectures” concerning the State of Ireland’, Irish Historical Studies, 5 (1947), pp. 303–22.
Stanyhurst, ‘A Plaine and Perfect Description of Ireland’, in Holinshed’s Chronicles, VI (London, 1807–8), p. 66.
Edward Walshe, The office and duety in fightyng for our countrey. Set forth with dyverse stronge argumentes gathered out of the holy scripture provynge that the affection to the native countrey shulde mock more rule in us then in the Turkes and infidels, who were therein so fervent, as by the historiis doth appere (London, 1545, p. A’C.
Richard Stanyhurst, ‘The Chronicle of Ireland’, in Holinshed’s Chronicles, VI (1807–8), p. 314.
Steven G. Ellis, Tudor Ireland: Crown, Community and the Conflict of Cultures, 1470–1603 (London: Longman, 1985), p. 268.
See Nicholas P. Canny, The Formation of the Old English Élite in Ireland, 18th O’Donnell Lecture (Dublin: National University of Ireland, 1975), p. 31.
John Derricke, The Image of Irelande, with A Discoverie of Woodkarne (1581), ed. John Small (Edinburgh. Adam and Charles Black, 1883), pp. 42–3.
On Stanyhurst’s connections, see Vincent P. Carey, ‘Collaborator and Survivor? Gerald the eleventh Earl of Kildare and Tudor Rule in Ireland’, History Ireland 2 (1994), pp. 13–17;
Willy Maley, ‘Spenser’s View and Stanyhurst’s Description’, Notes and Queries, 43 (1996), pp. 140–2.
Barnaby Rich, A New Description of Ireland (London, 1610), p. 43.
John Arden, ‘Rug-headed Irish Kerns and British Poets’, New Statesman (13 July 1979), pp. 56–7.
John Bale, The Vocacyon of John Bale to the bishoprick of Ossorie in Irela[n]de his persecucio[n]s in ye same & finall delyveraunce (‘Rome’ [Wesel], 1553).
Conor Cruise O’Brien, ‘Shakespeare: Not Guilty’, New Statesman (27 July 1979), p. 130.
John Arden, ‘Shakespeare Guilty’, New Statesman (10 August 1979), p. 199.
Colm Lennon, Richard Stanyhurst: The Dubliner, 1547–1618 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1981), pp. 72–3, 97, 118, 121, 125.
L. E. Whatmore (ed.), Archdeacon Harps field’s Canterbury Visitations, 1556–1558, Publications of the Catholic Record Society, 45 (1950).
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), p. 217.
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Maley, W. (2003). Shakespeare, Holinshed and Ireland: Resources and Con-texts. In: Nation, State and Empire in English Renaissance Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403990471_4
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