Congratulations to Professor Andrew Murphy on the publication of his new book which seeks to explore the many complex links between Shakespeare and Ireland.
Shakespeare’s plays were first performed in Ireland in the middle 1600s, and a lively tradition of productions continues to the present day, with companies such as the Gate and Druid staging highly innovative versions of the plays in recent years. Shakespeare has also had a profound impact on the work of generations of Irish writers – and not just playwrights. James Joyce’s Ulysses, for instance, includes an episode where the principal characters have an in-depth discussion of Hamlet, with the novel as a whole being haunted by the same issues of father-son relationships that are so central to Shakespeare’s original play.
But connections between Shakespeare and Ireland run deeper than stagings of his plays and his influence on Irish writers. Strikingly, Shakespeare was a major influence on a range of central Irish political figures. Wolfe Tone, for instance, quoted Shakespeare more than 200 times in his work and, in one publication, he adapted Shylock’s famous speech against anti-Semitism to repurpose it as a plea for Catholic rights. Likewise, Pádraig Pearse was deeply devoted to Shakespeare, making gramophone recordings of scenes from the plays with his siblings, staging extracts from the works with his pupils at St Enda’s and keeping a bust of the English playwright in his study.
Particularly interesting is the fact that there is a small, but significant, tradition of translating Shakespeare into Irish. In fact, 2025 marks the 100th anniversary of the first significant Irish translation of Shakespeare – S. Ladhrás Ua Súilleabháin’s An Brón-chluiche Macbeit (The Tragedy of Macbeth), which was well received when it was staged at An Taibhdhearc in Galway.
This new book, edited by Professor Andrew Murphy of the School of English at Trinity College Dublin seeks to explore the many complex links between Shakespeare and Ireland. Featuring contributions from scholars in Ireland, the US, the UK, Germany and Belgium, the book explores such topics as performances of the plays by a travelling company in Tralee in 1756; Shakespeare’s influence on W. B. Yeats; Shakespearean iconography in industrial Belfast; Irish film versions of the plays; and the history of Irish language translations of Shakespeare’s work.
Shakespeare in Ireland is published by Bloomsbury and is available now. Read more about the book on the Bloomsbury website.