Yeats, Shakespeare, and Irish Cultural Nationalism

This book examines Yeats’s writing about Shakespeare in the contexts of his work on behalf of the Irish Literary Revival and contemporary trends in Shakespeare reception. Yeats’s Shakespearean appropriations implicate England’s Elizabethan cultural hero within the idiosyncratic nexus of nationalist, occultist, and aesthetic interests constituting Yeats’s cultural nationalism, and reveal his evolving concerns with the prestige of Irish literature as well as his own status as a national poet.