This essay explores the intertextual use of Hamlet in Sydney Owenson's Wild Irish Girl and Germaine de Staël's Corinne to shed new light on these writers' interventions in European Romantic politics. Both Owenson and Staël associated their male protagonists with the figure of Hamlet at a time when Shakespeare's Danish prince was being reinvented as an embodiment of Romantic weltschmerz and as a symbol for the powerless, isolated intellectual. Instead of contributing to the Romantic cult of a melancholy Hamlet, Owenson and Staël confront their protagonists with the influence of empowered Ophelias who illustrate a less solipsistic version of melancholy. Thus both authors criticize the inertia that gripped their male counterparts directly after the French Revolution. Staël's novel ultimately follows a tragic pattern, while Owenson's gestures toward the possibility of a comic ending. But beyond the different levels of optimism implied by those endings, Owenson and Staël deliver a similar message to the Romantic intellectual, a message that most Romantics ignored in their persistent cultivation of Hamletic attitudes.
Several studies have tried to answer the question ‘where is Ireland in The Tempest?’, while others have assessed Ireland's sense of its own postcoloniality through Irish writers' engagement with Shakespeare's most ‘colonial’ play. This essay argues that Lady Morgan's national tales offer the first significant Irish rewritings of The Tempest. It shows how her allusions to the play constitute coherent intertextual patterns, informed by a clear sense of parallels between the enchanted isle of Shakespeare's imagination and Ireland around the time of the Act of Union. Those parallels, however, challenge the idea that The Tempest illustrates a (post)colonial relation between Ireland and Britain. Instead, Morgan's focus on the spells cast on foreign visitors by the island and by the native magic of Prospero and Ariel suggests that she used the play in order to allegorize possible ways of making the Union work, rather than to impugn the illegitimacy of colonial rule. Her last and most pessimistic national tale embryonically sketches a wild, native Irish Caliban who would later recur in both British and Irish imaginations with the rise of militant radical nationalism, but Morgan's version of the figure still shows important differences with subsequent postcolonial embodiments of Irish otherness. Although seminal in many ways, Morgan's rewritings of The Tempest only later make room for more conflictual uses of the play as an allegory of British-Irish relations.
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