On 26 April 1916, British authorities imposed martial law throughout Ireland in the wake of the Easter Rising, an insurgent paramilitary movement that had seized control of strategic landmarks throughout Dublin and proclaimed an independent Irish republic. On 27 April, the day after the announcement of the military curfew, an editorial in The Irish Times urged citizens to turn their ‘enforced domesticity’ to intellectual advantage by reading Shakespeare by the fireside. Why would The Irish Times suggest that Dubliners brush up their Shakespeare while gunfire and artillery shells shattered the city around them – causing, among other casualties, the fiery destruction of Dublin’s grand and newly constructed Coliseum Theatre? This essay uses the editorial and the short history of the Coliseum to explore the significance of Shakespeare in Ireland – first, within the wartime historical context of the Easter Rising, and then within the broader history of Shakespearean performance and reception in Ireland. It explores the often-fraught relationship of Ireland’s writers and revolutionaries to Shakespeare, from the period leading into the Easter Rising up to the present – notably including Irish director Caroline Byrne’s decision to set her 2016 production of The Taming of the Shrew in Ireland in 1916, as a mediation on the evolving legacies of the Rising and Shakespeare.

The career of Dora Sigerson (1866–1918), also known as Dora Sigerson Shorter, moves between the worlds of the nineteenth-century nationalist ballad and the Edwardian lyric. Born a year after W. B. Yeats, she established herself on the British literary scene, becoming a friend of Thomas Hardy and reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement by Virginia Woolf, but experienced the Easter Rising as a traumatic call to reconnect with Ireland. A vein of agnostic anxiety runs through her work, which engages with themes of depression, ghostly visitations, and suicide. The poems of her final period move between private and public dramas, aspiring to a monumental framework (Sigerson was also a sculptor) but exploring Anglo-Irish relations through the familiar prism of a strained marriage. Her final work tackles wider themes of imperial wrongs, including slavery, while teetering on the edge of breakdown. Moving as she does between contrasting modes, Sigerson is a poet who has arguably still to find her audience, but whose work has much to tell us about how Irish poetry has been read and received over the last century.

The centenary commemorations of the 1916 rebellion, heavily scripted by the official state policies of 2016, has, mainly through the uncritical recycling of pious commonplaces, fixed a specific interpretation of the event in the public memory: a Rising timed to coincide with that of Christ, involving Pearse reading out a proclamation from the GPO  steps and canonized by Yeats’s poem as to its utterly transformative effect. This chapter deconstructs these commonplaces and traces their banal-nationalistic effect on the public commemorations.

The Great War altered the means by which women conducted political activity as they adapted to wartime circumstances, while also bringing new opportunities for women’s mobilisation and politicisation. Competing loyalties of suffrage, nationalism, republicanism and unionism also affected attitudes towards Irish women’s role in the war effort and provided dissenting voices against the mechanisms of wartime mobilisation. This chapter examines the mobilisation of suffragist, nationalist and unionist women for the war effort, the participation of women in acts of dissent and the impact of the war on the achievement of female suffrage in 1918. It contrasts the opportunities for politicisation offered by the nationalist and unionist movements and argues that the differing approaches to the war effort resulted in the further polarisation of unionist Ulster and southern Ireland. The chapter argues that the war created a space for political activism, evident through the mass mobilisation of previously unorganised women in the 1918 anti-conscription campaign and the actions of working-class soldiers’ wives in Ireland in defending their interests against the growing republican movement.

This chapter focuses on the ways in which Act Two of Sean O’Casey’s 1926 play, The Plough and the Stars, has appeared onstage at the Abbey theatre between 1991 and 2016. The chapter shows how these four versions of O’Casey’s script navigate a set of contemporary concerns, from historical revisionism, through the Celtic Tiger boom, to the economic crash, and into the era when various kinds of institutional and state abuse have been revealed. Shifts in performance style also reveal changes in thinking about theatrical form in Ireland and help illuminate the role of the Irish national theatre during a period when other nearby national theatres have come to operate in profoundly different ways.

This chapter discusses the Easter Rising of 1916 and its aftermath. The rebellion had a largely Catholic cast, which has produced a belief that Catholicism and republicanism are connected. This chapter traces the experiences of those Protestants, members of the Irish Volunteers and Irish Citizen Army, who rebelled in 1916. It also discusses those Protestant nationalists who did not take part but who observed the rebellion. This chapter discusses religious conversion and the Rising, and shows that the majority of Protestant rebels did not convert to Catholicism. Many Protestant rebels first realised the increasingly Catholic nature of their movement while held in internment camps in Britain. The final section assesses the occasionally negative reactions of Protestant republicans to this realisation.