Review. William Shakespeare, Henry IV Part One, Abbey Theatre Dublin, and Measure for Measure, Rattlebag Theatre, irish theatre magazine, number 14, Spring 2003.

Almost every European country that gained independence after the First World War had one thing in common: with only one exception, they all tried to stimulate the growth of a national literature by commissioning translations of two key texts – the Bible and the works of Shakespeare. There’s an interesting implication in this: that, for a nation to form an identity, it has to come to terms with God first, and then Shakespeare. The one exception to this trend was, of course, Ireland which (leaving aside our troublesome attitudes to God), found itself in a strange relationship with Shakespeare: too familiar to be translated, his work was also too English to be comfortably assimilated into our culture.