The playwright for the globe

Shakespeare has transcended his English roots to become the universal playwright, yet despite a centuries-old heritage of Irish interaction with the legacy of the immortal bard, modern Irish theatre still refuses to embrace his work, writes Fintan O'Toole

In Eugene O'Neill's great autobiographical epic, Long Day's Journey Into Night, the ageing Irish actor James Tyrone is accused by his son of believing only what he wants to believe: "Shakespeare was an Irish Catholic, for example." Tyrone, based on O'Neill's father, the Kilkenny-born actor James O'Neill, stubbornly insists on his own truth: "So he was, the proof is in his plays." James Tyrone's insistence betrays an underlying ambivalence in Irish attitudes to Shakespeare. On the one hand, the plays have moved Irish audiences for centuries, and have shaped our culture in many obvious ways. On the other, this attachment is not quite decent.

As James Tyrone later recalls, to make himself worthy of becoming a Shakespearean actor, he "got rid of an Irish brogue you could cut with a knife". Hovering around the reluctance of the modern Irish theatre to embrace Shakespeare is the assumption that Shakespeare cannot be spoken with an Irish accent, and that - worse still - the proper voice is English.

These assumptions are entirely unnecessary. Without going as far as James Tyrone, it is surely time to accept that Shakespeare belongs here. If we see his works not just as a set of texts written by an Englishman four centuries ago, but as a living tradition of interpretation and performance, that tradition very obviously includes Ireland.

Ireland is, of course, part of Shakespeare's own world. He wrote at a time when the identity of the English state was defining itself in opposition to the nationalities that surrounded it: Scotland, Wales, France and Ireland. The last stand of the Gaelic aristocracy against Tudor power at the end of the 16th century forms a part of the background to his great plays.

The history plays, in particular, are full of analogies between earlier wars and the contemporary campaigns in Ireland. In Henry V, for example, when the Chorus wants to describe the king's triumphant return from France, it compares the scene to what would happen "Were now the General of our gracious Empress, As in good time he may, from Ireland coming".

The general in question is the Earl of Essex, whose return from Ireland would not, in fact, be at all triumphant.

In the same play, the appearance of the first stage Irishman, Captain MacMorris, suggests Shakespeare's own ambivalence about Ireland. On the one hand, MacMorris is an early version of the enduring stereotype: hot-headed, over-sensitive to any slight on his nation, brave, passionate. On the other, his presence alongside a Scottish and a Welsh captain is an expression of an idealised proto-British identity of which, in Shakespeare's eyes, Ireland is a part.

Inevitably, within such a mentality, stray fragments of Gaelic culture find their way into Shakespeare's texts. In Henry V, for example, when Pistol is addressed in French by a captive, he replies by trying out a bit of foreign lingo of his own: "Caleno custore me." This is not just gibberish. He is remembering the words of an Irish song that had become popular in Tudor England, the refrain of which is "Cailín óg, a stor." Edmund Mortimer in Henry IV, Part One is a chivalrous and sentimental Anglo-Irish lord, who is gently teased by Hotspur when he remarks that, rather than hear Mortimer's wife sing in Welsh, he would rather hear "my brach howl in Irish" - brach being an Irish hunting dog.

In Macbeth, Macduff reports that the body of the murdered King Duncan is "Carried to Colmekill", in other words to Saint Columbkille's monastery at Iona. Donalbain in the same play flees to Ireland.

When Hamlet's father comes back from the dead, Hamlet swears "by Saint Patrick", because the strongest European image of the Purgatory from which the ghost has returned is Saint Patrick's Purgatory on Lough Derg. (Holinshed's Chronicles, one of Shakespeare's primary sources, refers to Saint Patrick's Purgatory as "most notoriously known").

Some surprisingly specific knowledge of Gaelic culture is evident in the plays, so much so that some lines become incomprehensible without it. In the third act of As You Like It, for example, Rosalind, looking at Orlando's love poems in her honour, remarks that "I was never so berhymed since Pythagoras's time that I was an Irish rat, which I can hardly remember." The image mixes Pythagoras's doctrine of the transmigration of souls with the legend that the Irish bards could get rid of rats by killing them with enchanted verses.

Much more important than these and other references, however, is the hugely significant role of Irish actors and scholars in the creation of Shakespearean tradition.

The first great Shakespeare scholar was an Irishman, Edmund Malone. Born in Dublin in 1741, he came to love Shakespeare by performing him at school in Molesworth Street. Settling in London in the mid-1770s, he transformed the amateurish and unsystematic bardolatry of the time into a serious field of study. Malone was the first to bring textual analysis to bear on the dating of the plays.

He produced the first decent attempt at a chronology, the first critical edition of the sonnets, the first genuinely scholarly biography, and a monumental 10-volume edition of the complete works that provided the template for all subsequent Shakespeare texts. He unmasked the infamous Shakespeare forgeries of William Henry Ireland. He rescued Shakespeare's texts from the "improvements" of Nahum Tate and Colley Cibber.

A century later, another Irish scholar Edward Dowden, had a profound influence on the re-shaping of Shakespeare's image. Dowden's Shakespere: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art, published in 1875, had an enormous impact. Dowden pioneered a subjective approach to the development of Shakespeare's career, in which the twists and turns of his various relationships is linked to the writing of the plays. It is an open question whether this is altogether a good idea, but not that it shaped popular and critical thinking for a long time.

As the doyen of Shakespeare studies Samuel Schoenbaum notes, "No biographical pattern imposed on Shakespeare before or since has made so profound an impact as Dowden's. The Dublin professor is the only academic critic of Shakespeare whose work would remain in print uninterruptedly for almost a century."

Most profoundly of all, however, it is Irish actors who have helped to shape the theatrical legacy of Shakespeare. The whole idea that Shakespearean roles could be played with a degree of realism and that his lines could be delivered with a natural tone is in large measure an Irish invention.

James Quin, born in Dublin around 1693, was perhaps the most successful Shakespeare actor before Garrick, and was celebrated for his performances of Lear, Othello, Hotspur, and, above all, Falstaff, whose modern image he did much to fix.

The Donegal actor Charles Macklin (McLoughlin) astounded London in 1741 with his Shylock in the Merchant of Venice, rescuing the role from crude anti-Semitic stereotype and drawing from Alexander Pope the couplet: "This is the Jew/ That Shakespeare drew." Macklin was also the first to dress Macbeth in Scottish costume.

Macklin famously played Iago to the Othello of another Dublin actor, Spranger Barry, who rivalled the great Garrick in the roles of Romeo, Lear and Richard III.

Peg Woffington, born in Dublin around 1714, had a lasting impact on a number of Shakespeare roles, including Ophelia, Beatrice, Cordelia and Rosalind. A few decades later, Mary Robinson was so successful in the role of Perdita in The Winter's Tale that she was universally known as Perdita Robinson.

The immense influence of Irish performers on the development of the Shakespeare tradition in the 18th and early 19th centuries gradually faded, however. The development of Irish cultural nationalism in the 20th century slowly squeezed out the sense of ownership which had once made it possible for the Irish to have such a profound influence.

The towering exception is Tyrone Guthrie, who pioneered modern dress productions and established two of North America's most important Shakespeare institutions, the Stratford Festival in Ontario and the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis (now in the deft hands of Joe Dowling). Yet the very fact that Guthrie's great career barely touched the Irish theatre is in itself evidence that the Irish Shakespearean tradition had practically ceased to exist in the late 20th century.

There was a certain irony recently in seeing the greatest living Irish exponent of Shakespeare, Fiona Shaw present his case as a Great Briton in the BBC's gimmicky series. That very sense of great Britishness has allowed us to forget that there is also a great tradition of Irish Shakespeare. Without going as far as James Tyrone, it is surely time to approach the plays for what they are - a body of work that has long outgrown its Englishness.

Fintan O'Toole's Shakespeare Is Hard But So is Life has been published recently by Granta, £6.99.