There are always new things to be said when a thoughtful reader revisits old territory. Oliver Hennessey may have felt that the field he was entering was already well cultivated by scholarly books from Rupin Desai's Yeats's Shakespeare (1971) to Adam Putz's The Celtic Revival in Shakespeare's Wake: Appropriation and Cultural Politics in Ireland, 1867–1922 (2013), but he has managed to produce new perceptions on “the role of Shakespeare within the discourse of Irish cultural nationalism” (18).

By that last phrase Hennessey means speech and writing that tend to foster the sentiment of nationality, as distinct from guns that may or may not bring about a new nation. W. B. Yeats, Hennessey's focalizing figure, was a cultural nationalist in that sense—a strong Irish literary voice who did not campaign for revolution. He wrote four early essays to identify “an archaic ‘Celtic’ sensibility, while dismantling the teleological, pseudoempirical framework” that worked in favor of “a British cultural triumphalism” (38). These four were “The Celtic Element in Literature” (1897), “Magic,” (1900), “At Stratford-on-Avon” (1901), and “Edmund Spenser” (1902). His first step was to dislodge Matthew Arnold and Edward Dowden, the major exponents of a discourse that would offer Shakespeare intact to a British ideology. He needed to imagine a different Shakespeare: “Yeats's early Shakespeare stands for a premodern, rural folk life, and the imagery of natural magic” (42). The crucial texts were Shakespeare's history plays, and there he had Walter Pater's “Shakespeare's English Kings”—in his Appreciations (1889)—on his side. Pater's image of Richard II—“an exquisite poet if nothing else”—could easily be drawn over toward a Celtic motif of poetry and magic.

Arnold's essay “On the Study of Celtic Literature” (1866) was designed to show that the Irish could never govern themselves: they went forth to battle, but they always fell, they were born to fail. Like Carlyle, Arnold associated Shakespeare with empire, strong governance, and success. What emerges from Yeats's riposte to Arnold is “an ‘ancient’ Shakespeare aligned with the tenets of an esoteric cultural nationalism, and divorced from an Anglo-Saxon racial signification” (35). Responding to Dowden's Shakspere (his choice spelling), Yeats said that Dowden's book was typical of Victorian criticism that presented Shakespeare as a vulgar worshipper of success, criticism that reached its height “in a moment of imperialistic enthusiasm” (52). Yeats didn't differ much from Dowden in his reading of the history plays, but he emphasized the pathos of their stories. Yeats's Richard II is, as Hennessey says, “a more charismatic figure, a romantic visionary closer in his meditative nature to Yeats's ideal of the occult artist” (53). Besides, Dowden despised Irish literature—“I confess that I am not ambitious of intensifying my intellectual or spiritual brogue”—and had to be punished for that, too.

In the second half of the book, Hennessey shows how Yeats loses interest in Shakespeare, or rather loses confidence in his own ability to retain Shakespeare as exemplar of his cultural discourse: “In this period, Yeats's Shakespeare primarily registers disappointment, and in the final years of his life, disappointment becomes despair” (111). The Shakespeare of Yeats's On the Boiler (1938) “is thus a haughty, scornful aristocrat, a Nietzschean Übermensch and purveyor of authoritarian values” (111). It is in the light of the failure of cultural nationalism, as Hennessey says, “that Protestant, Anglo-Irish figures such as Burke, Berkeley, and Swift come to replace Shakespeare as the writers most frequently invoked in Yeatsian discourse to articulate frustrations with Ireland's sociocultural trajectory” (115–16). By “sociocultural trajectory” Hennessey means the narrow, exclusive politics that started with the first Free State government and reached its climax with de Valera's Constitution of 1937, featuring a state fit only for Roman Catholics to inhabit. In Yeats's last years—he died in 1939—“we find the Bard removed entirely from the salvific cultural nationalism of earlier, more optimistic years” (130).

In the last chapters, Hennessey gives a most interesting account of the reception of Shakespeare not only by Yeats but by some of his contemporaries, including T. S. Eliot, G. Wilson Knight, and Wyndham Lewis. This Modernist survey might appear to be outside Hennessey's remit, but it is not; it casts a valuable light on the wider context, writers who were not concerned to make Shakespeare serve the redemption of Ireland. That, after all, was Yeats's purpose. He had no real hope of making his own verse plays Shakespearean and of producing them as such in the Abbey Theatre. His use of Shakespeare was polemical. Inevitably, the new Ireland would disappoint him, and his essays in cultural nationalism would fail. The Rising turned out to be middle-class and Roman Catholic: even the Communist James Connolly was coaxed into it. No wonder Yeats's long-go voice was not heard. Ezra Pound, writing to John Quinn immediately after the Easter Rising, said, “Yeats don't like Republics. He likes queens, preferably dead ones.” Yeats and his Shakespeare thus serve to embody various conflicts and contradictions within Irish national visions.