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Declan Kiberd has made the point that Ireland, as specific identity, can be seen as the creation of English rulers at a specific moment in English history (Kiberd 1985, 5), and the categorization of Irishness as ‘a villain, and a basterd, and a knave, and a rascal’ is a locus classicus of seeing the other in terms less favourable than the self, and as such, providing a differentiated place upon which the edifice of colonial identity can be constructed. Thus, there is a binary temporal perspective at work in this definition of Ireland: that of the imaginary time of King Henry V and the French wars which is seen through the perspective of Queen Elizabeth’s time and the Irish wars. This attitude to Ireland, in the reality of the time, is fused with the fictive time of Henry V in the play’s prologue, where history and fiction are joined in a symmetrical equation, an equation which provides answers to MacMorris’s question, and to the matter of his answer to that question. 2 Hence, the attitudes to Irishness in this text would have been coloured by the feelings of national pride engendered by the martial expedition, allied to feelings of personal loyalty and gratitude, on Shakespeare’s part, to the Earl of Southampton. Henry V was probably written after the expedition set out in April 1599 and before its ignominious return in the autumn of that year (Cairns and Richards 1988, 9). In 1599, Shakespeare’s patron, the Earl of Southampton had gone with the Earl of Essex’s expedition against Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, to attempt to put down the Tyrone rebellion. What ish my nation? Who talks of my nation? (Shakespeare 1965, II, ii, 124-126)Ī possible reason for this interchange can be drawn from the historical context. Of my nation? What ish my nation? Ish a villain, and a basterd, and a knave, and a rascal. Qualifying his anticipated questioning of MacMorris’s mining techniques with ‘I think, look you, under your correction’ he only gets as far as saying that ‘there is not many of your nation –’ (123) before he is interrupted by the violent non sequitur wherein is uttered the famous question of identity. The context of this question is a fictive one, the final part of Shakespeare’s second tetralogy Henry V, where the Welsh captain, Fluellen, is criticizing MacMorris’s mining techniques. Therefore, this question, and its putative answers, must be studied in some detail if one is to come to any reasonable modus operandi regarding the search for some form of answer. It is certainly of overwhelming importance in the context of the ongoing violence and tension between the two communities in Northern Ireland, as well as in the context of the often vexed relationship between Ireland and Britain.
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Given the agonies of identity that have plagued Irish social and cultural history, it assumes the status of what Prufrock might term an ‘overwhelming question’ (Eliot 1963, 13).
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There is hardly a more quoted line from Shakespeare in the overall context of Irish Studies than the above question from Henry V. A timeline of Shakespeare’s plays / Creative Commons