Examining the commonalities and differences in addressing a notionally 'Celtic' Shakespeare, this collection brings together the best scholarship on the individual nations of Ireland, Scotland and Wales in a way that emphasizes cultural crossovers and crucibles of conflict. The essays in this volume cohere in a wide-ranging treatment of Shakespeare's direct and oblique references to the archipelago, and the problematic issue of national identity.

Celtic Connections and Archipelagic Angles; 1: Tudor Reflections; 1: A Scum of Britons?: Richard III and the Celtic Reconquest; 2: The Quality of Mercenaries: Contextualizing Shakespeare's Scots in 1 Henry IV and Henry V 1; 3: War, the Boar and Spenserian Politics in Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis; 4: 'The howling of Irish wolves': As You Like It and the Celtic Essex Circle; 5: Shakespeare's Elizabethan England/Jacobean Britain; 2: Stuart Revisions; 6: Othello and the Irish Question; 7: 'Why should I play the Roman fool, and die / On mine own sword?': The Senecan Tradition in Macbeth; 8: 'To th' Crack of Doom': Sovereign Imagination as Anamorphosis in Shakespeare's 'show of kings'; 9: Warriors and Ruins: Cymbeline, Heroism and the Union of Crowns; 10: 'I myself would for Caernarfonshire': The Old Lady in King Henry VIII; 3: Celtic Afterlives; 11: The Nation's Poet? Milton's Shakespeare and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms; 12: Shakespeare and Transnational Heritage in Dowden and Yeats; 13: Cymbeline and Cymbeline Refinished: G. B. Shaw and the Unresolved Empire; 14: Beyond MacMorris: Shakespeare, Ireland and Critical Contexts; Epilogue Hwyl and Farewell