Abstract
The Anglo-Irish poet and first chair of English literature at Trinity College, Dublin, Edward Dowden, did not hear Shakespeare’s ‘Celtic note’. Instead, he saw expressed in the Shakespearean text the scientific materialism and spiritual positivism taking shape in Elizabethan England. Dowden believed that Shakespeare pushed his inborn idealism to the periphery of his personality by writing plays that increasingly meditated on the theme of freedom through service, especially service to the state. In this way, Dowden’s Shakespeare embodies the virtues not only of the Elizabethan age, but also those shaping the mid-nineteenth-century cultural and political moment.
prospero As you from crimes would pardoned be,
Let your indulgence set me free.
The Tempest (5.1.374–5)
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Notes
Georg Gervinus, Shakespeare Commentaries, trans. by F.E. Bunnètt, 5th edn (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1892), p. 8.
Edward Dowden, Shakspere: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art (London: Henry S. King, 1875), p. 8.
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See Paul Bew, Ireland: The Politics of Enmity1789–2006 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 368–72.
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See Arthur H. Nason, James Shirley, Dramatist (Manchester, NH: Ayer, 1972).
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See Foster, W.B. Yeats: A Life. Volume I: The Apprentice Mage, 1865–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 429–31.
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Quoted in Jonathan Bate, Shakespearean Constitutions: Politics, Theatre, Criticism1730–1830 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), p. 179.
See Alden T. and Virginia Mason Vaughan, Shakespeare’s Caliban: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 140–3 (p. 142),
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Quoted in Kiberd, ‘George Moore’s Gaelic Lawn Party’ (1979), in The Irish Writer and the World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 91–104 (p. 91).
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© 2013 Adam Putz
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Putz, A. (2013). Edward Dowden. In: The Celtic Revival in Shakespeare’s Wake. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137027665_3
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