Shakespeare, memory, and modern Irish literature

Book excerpt: This original and innovative book proposes ‘dismemory’ as a new form of intertextual engagement with Shakespeare by modern and contemporary Irish writers. Through reflection on these canonical writers and ranging across thirteen Shakespeare plays, Taylor-Collins demonstrates how Irish writers who helped to fashion and critique the Irish nation state carry an indelible, if often subdued, mark of Shakespeare’s early modern English influence. The volume overall renews and revitalises the Shakespeare–modern Ireland connection: Taylor-Collins reveals Hamlet’s hauntological legacy in Playboy of the Western World, Ulysses, and Ghosts; how the corporal economies that exert pressure from Coriolanus and Ben Jonson flicker through to the antiheroes in Beckett’s Three Novels; and how the landed legacies of territorial contests in Shakespeare are engaged with in Yeats’s poetry, and similarly how the diseased muddiness in Hamlet is addressed by Heaney.