1st Edition
Irish Shakespeares Gender, Sexuality, and Performance in the Twenty-First Century
Acknowledgements
Illustrations
A note on the text
Chapter 1. Introduction
Chapter 2. Unmanly Grief
Chapter 3. Embodied Histories
Chapter 4. Numbered in the Song
Chapter 5. The Aesthetics of Queer Irish Shakespeares
Chapter 6. Epilogue
Index
Biography
Emer McHugh is an Irish writer and academic based in Belfast. She is a visiting scholar at Queen’s University Belfast, where she held a Marie Skłowdowska-Curie Fellowship for the project ‘Shakespeare and the Irish Actor’. She has published widely on Irish Shakespeare performance; theatre and celebrity; and the histories of actors, acting, and acting practices. Her writing for public audiences can be found in The Guardian, Rupture, HowlRound Theatre Commons, and RTÉ Brainstorm.
'Emer McHugh's Irish Shakespeares demonstrates, with brilliant clarity, the ways in which performances of Shakespeare in Irish contexts are not merely neutral engagements with a cultural artefact. Rather, they are tied up with both Irish and Shakespearean conceptions of family, faith, and nationhood; 'charged', as she puts it, with complex histories of 'imperialism, cultural hegemony, and colonial violence' (2-3). This is an urgent and timely work, situated in both place and time but nonetheless speaking to the ways in which the long histories of Ireland, the Irish diaspora, and Shakespeare inflect and influence issues of performance and identity today. This is an essential book for anyone interested in contemporary Shakespearean performance, adaptation and appropriation, and gender and sexuality in performance — and one that I will be returning to and thinking with for a long time to come.'
Nora J. Williams (BIMM University)
