‘Hitherto she ne’re could fancy him’

Shakespeare’s ‘British’ Plays and the Exclusion of Ireland

Bibliographic Data

ID20041842
AuthorsAmelia Hadfield (0000-0003-1608-9524, corresponding author), Andrew Hadfield
Year1997
Pages47-67
Publication date1997-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeCHAPTER
VenueShakespeare and Ireland (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherPalgrave Macmillan UK (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1007/978-1-349-25924-3_4
OpenAlexW2506144218
ISBN9781349259243
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited16

Shakespeare was clearly aware of Ireland and referred to the kingdom and its inhabitants regularly — albeit usually briefly — in many of his earlier works. In The Comedy of Errors (c.1593), Dromio of Syracuse provides a humorous geographical description of Luce (Nell), Adriana’s kitchen maid. He suggests that her forehead is France; England, her chin; Spain, her hot breath; America, her nose; the Netherlands, her nether parts, and Ireland, ‘in her buttocks. I found it out by the bogs’ (III.ii.115–16).1 This might well signal a familiarity with John Derricke’s The Image of Irelande (1581), one of the few books on Ireland published during Elizabeth’s reign, and apart from the sections on Ireland in Holinshed’s Chronicles (1577, 1587), the only description of Ireland readily available to English readers. Derricke explicitly connects the Irish with dirt as an inversion of the clean and proper established order, specifically with the anus. One of the accompanying woodcuts represents figures publicly defecating at a feast, and he tells the story of the Irish eagles (who clearly stand for the Irish) preferring life in ‘the Deuills Arse, A Peake’ and the desolate bogs to that at court.2

Art · Art history · Genealogy · Irish · Kingdom · Reign · History · Irish and British Studies · Law · Medieval Literature and History · Philippine History and Culture · Philosophy

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