Given that 'Gender is not a subordinate issue to that of textuality in [Eavan] Boland,' 1 a prominent concern for the poet is the claustrophobic myth of Mother Ireland whose dominant position in the symbolic Irish order appears to constrain the possible iterations of motherhood, in life as in poetry. It therefore makes sense that Boland's poetry coherently and consistently points to other models for success. Sabina Müller connects Boland's poems of the pomegranate to the Eleusinian Mysteries, while Molly O'Hagan Hardy establishes that 'Boland's work continually refers to her indebtedness to Yeats'. Jody Allen Randolph also cites Sylvia Plath as one of Boland's inspirations during the late 1970s. 2 With each critic tacitly accepting Boland's 'control of ventriloquism', 3 this short list of authors could easily be extended, and represents the beginning of what Boland herself has called a 'usable past': a historical cast of writers and figureheads that can be readily accessed and rewritten at will. 4 Whilst these influences vary by continent, century and gender, no critic has yet examined Shakespeare as one of Boland's inspirations. However marginal he may appear on the surface, in this essay I offer Shakespeare as model for a certain aspect of Boland's liberating poetics: the strategic manipulation of myths of motherhood. In this strategy, daughters are the key to unlocking mothers' potential. This turns what is a 'fatal' strategy that is doomed to failure into what might be called a statuesque one, in which legacies are 77 rewritten through the process of reanimating static and paralytic myths, by restoring those outside history to the real, lived-in narratives of the past. This takes place across Boland's oeuvre, from her first poems in the 1960s to her latest in the 2010s. For Shakespeare, the animating statuesque strategy is clearly evident in Pericles and The Winter's Tale, particularly as they are in dialogue with a posthumous, mythic construction of Elizabeth I as mother to the English nation. Nevertheless, Boland's explicit engagement with Shakespeare is brief, and bears little overt interest in mothers and/or daughters. In the early New Territory (1967), Boland's 'Shakespeare' adapts the sonnet form, mixing Shakespearean with Petrarchan forms. The sonnet is dedicated to Philip Edwards, Boland's Shakespeare professor at Trinity College Dublin, and addresses Shakespeare himself. 'You wrote because you had to' begin both the first and second quatrains, and the first quatrain ends with 'the plague waiting in the wings'. By the final tercet, the conversational address turns to reverence when 'You made of every quill the fire which men / Primitively lit against the beasts, whose flames / Were agile sentries between them and chaos'. 5 Given the dedication, it is unclear how much this poem is in true reverence to Shakespeare, or to the professor who introduced Boland to the Bard. 6 Central to the poem, nonetheless, is the idea that poetry is not a vocation but a living enforced on the individual, owing to financia...