It is hardly coincidental, then, that Garry Hynes’s DruidShakespeare recently chose to return to and engage with these dramas. More significantly and frequently, the word appears in a sequence of four history plays that date from this period: Richard II, the two-part Henry IV, and Henry V. In this period Shakespeare wrote two comedies – The Merry Wives of Windsor and As You Like It – in which the word “Irish” appears in passing. What I find especially striking about these allusions to the “Irish” or “Irishman” is how concentrated they all are within a very narrow band of time, one that stretched from about 1596 to 1599. The adjective “Irish” is spoken 10 times, and the word “Irishman” appears twice. Shakespeare mentions “Ireland” 31 times in his works, or 32 if we include a slip of the pen to which I will return shortly.
When Antipholus asks, “In what part of her body stands Ireland?” Dromio replies, “in her buttocks: I found it out by the bogs.” This Irish slur still gets a big laugh – and, unlike the other ethnic jokes, it is rarely cut in production. He finds Spain in her hot breath, Scotland in the barren palm of her hand, and England in the chalky cliffs of her forehead. In the same vein there is a cheap Irish joke in The Comedy of Errors, where a servant named Dromio tells his master about a kitchen wench who is so fat that “she is spherical, like a globe”, and that he “could find out countries in her”. I am thinking here of the unthinking racism of Much Ado About Nothing, where Claudio says that he will marry a woman “were she an Ethiop”, as well as the repeated catchphrase “I am a Jew else,” or “If I do not love her, I am a Jew,” that litters Shakespeare’s early plays. We don’t consider Shakespeare as especially prejudiced, but given how insular a society Elizabethan England was it’s unsurprising that his works perpetuate contemporary stereotypes. And we have another Irish writer, George Bernard Shaw, to thank for inventing the term “bardolatry.” Yet it remains less well known than it ought to be that the Shakespeare familiar to us today is one that we have come to know through an Irish lens: the most consequential Shakespeare researcher of all time, Edmond Malone, was an Irishman, as was the most influential Shakespeare biographer, Edward Dowden. The past few decades has seen an explosion of scholarly interest in “Shakespeare and the Irish”, which has extended the conversation from what the Bard has to say about the Irish, or done to them – that’s now pretty clear – to what the Irish have to say about Shakespeare, or done to him. Looking back on 1599, I can now say that the best writing in it, and what animated the entire narrative, was this long and undervalued, if not suppressed, Irish story. I think it fair to claim that in all this I was representative of most Shakespeare scholars, raised in the era of New Criticism, which tried to create a firewall between literary works and their historical contexts. I didn’t even know that Edmund Spenser, so admired for his Elizabethan epic The Faerie Queene, had also written a tract arguing for the brutal suppression of the Irish, if necessary by starvation. I had no idea that England had been caught up in a bitter nine-year war to crush an Irish revolt, knew nothing of the difference between the “New” and “Old” English then living in Ireland, and didn’t know that Queen Elizabeth’s popular courtier the earl of Essex had marched out of London leading an army 16,000 strong to resolve England’s Irish problem once and for all. In the late 1980s, when I began research on what turned into my book 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, I had never heard of the Irish leader Hugh O’Neill.