Shakespearean England and Views of the Irish Language

Shakespearean England and Views of the Irish Language

Professor Mícheál B. Ó Mainnín

1st October 2026

The Irish language has been associated with politicisation and conflict, particularly in the context of contemporary Northern Ireland identity politics. As recently as 2017, support for the language became a core element in the failure to agree on the restoration of Northern Ireland’s devolved government at Stormont, a disagreement which was to linger for three years. However, debates around the Irish language extend much further back in time, and some key elements of the discourse may be traced to Giraldus Cambrensis (Gerald de Barri, a royal clerk and priest of mixed Welsh and Norman descent) in the twelfth century. The writings of Gerald (in his Topographia Hiberniae) and, indeed, of St Bernard of Clairvaux (in his Life of Saint Malachy) have been held responsible for the poor reputation of the Irish in this period. In particular, the Topographia Hiberniae is credited with the origins of the discourse which portrayed the Irish as barbarous and lacking in civility and which reached a high point in writings which are associated with the Tudor conquest of Ireland in the sixteenth century. 

This lecture will look at the portrayal of the Irish language by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, and the nature and motivations for some negative stereotypes which were to prove resilient and enduring in later centuries. The question of language plays a major role, in contradistinction to the work of Giraldus in which it is not mentioned. Following the legislation which made King Henry VIII king of Ireland (it previously having been a lordship under the English crown), an act dating to 1537 censured the use of the Irish language as an indelible mark of Irishness which (together with religion, dress and other customs) was seen to be an obstacle to assimilation and, where spoken amongst the descendants of the Anglo-Norman settlers (the 'Old English'), a symptom of degeneracy. There was no sense in which bilingualism was seen to be an advantage (or a necessity) in this view of the situation. In the memorable words of Edmund Spenser: “The speach being Irish, the hart must needes be Irishe.”

The question was one, also, of linguistic legitimacy. William Shakespeare’s Henry V has been described as the most bilingual of his plays, the bilingualism concerned being English-French in the context of the king’s wooing of, and marriage to, Catherine de Valois, daughter of the king of France, Charles VI. French and English are perceived as languages of authority; Henry V was a fluent speaker of French, and French was the language of his ancestors (although his father, Henry IV, is thought to have been the first in the Norman line of succession whose major language was English). Irish and Welsh are languages which may be spoken but which are rendered unfamiliar and require translation. However, there appears to be one line of Irish in the play Henry V, and it has been remarked that Shakespeare’s attitude to linguistic plurality and difference differs in some interesting respects from that of his contemporaries, particularly those who were involved in the conflict in Ireland. The position of the queen herself, Elizabeth I, is also intriguing. An Irish primer survives, which was written especially for her (possibly in 1564), and there is other evidence for some support of the language, particularly the provision of funding by her for a Gaelic fount to enable printing in Irish. There is also ample evidence for speakers of Irish in court circles; might the Queen have been able to greet her visitors in Irish?

© Professor Mícheál B. Ó Mainnín 2026

References and Further Reading

Bourke, Evan, Philip Mac a’ Ghoill and Deirdre Nic Chárthaigh. Spenser and the Filidh in Early Modern Ireland. Woodbridge. 2026.

Canny, Nicholas. “The formation of the Irish mind: religion, politics and Gaelic Irish literature 1580-1750.” Past and Present 95 (May 1982), pp 91-116.

Canny, Nicholas. “England’s New World and the Old, 1480s-1630s.” In Nicholas Canny and Alaine Low (eds), The Origins of Empire. British Overseas Enterprise to the Close of the Seventeenth Century. Oxford and New York. 1998, pp. 148-169.

Cronin, Michael. "’Rug-headed Kerns Speaking Tongues: Shakespeare, translation and the Irish language." In Mark Burnett and Ramona Wray (eds), Shakespeare and Ireland: History, Politics, Culture. Basingstoke and London. 1997, pp. 193-212.

Crowley, Tony. The Politics of Language in Ireland 1366-1992. A Sourcebook. 2000. 

Crowley, Tony. War of Words. The Politics of Language in Ireland 1537-2004. 2005. 

Cunningham, Bernadette, and Raymond Gillespie. “The East Ulster bardic family of Ó Gnímh.” Éigse vol. 20 (1984), pp. 106-114.

Dictionary of Irish Biography. https://www.dib.ie/ 

Edwards, David, Pádraig Lenihan and Clodagh Tait (eds). Age of Atrocity. Violence and Political Conflict in Early Modern Ireland. Dublin. 2010.

Hadfield, Andrew. “Race in Shakespeare’s Histories.” In Ayanna Thompson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race. Cambridge. 2021, pp 62-76.

Helgerson, Richard. “Language Lessons: Linguistic Colonialism, Linguistic Postcolonialism, and the Early Modern English Nation.” The Yale Journal of Criticism 11.1 (Spring 1998), pp 289-99.​

Jiménez, Ramon. “An evening at the cockpit: further evidence of an early date for Henry V.” The Oxfordian vol. 18 (2016), pp 9-22. 

Leersen, Joep. Mere Irish and Fíor-Ghael: Studies in the Idea of Irish Nationality, Its Development and Literary Expression Prior to the Nineteenth Century. Cork. 1996, 2nd edition.

MacMorris. https://macmorris.maynoothuniversity.ie/about-us

Maley, Willy “‘And bloody England into England gone’: Empire, Monarchy, and Nation in King John.” In Margaret Tudeau-Clayton and Willy Maley. This England, That Shakespeare (Aldershot), XX pp 49-61.​

Martin, F.X. “Gerald of Wales, Norman reporter on Ireland.” Studies vol. 58 (1969), pp 279-92.

McErlean, John C. Duanaire Dháibhidh Uí Bhruadair. The Poems of David Ó Bruadair. 3 vols. 1910-17.

Neill, Michael. “Broken English and Broken Irish: Nation, Language and the Optic of Power in Shakespeare's Histories.” Shakespeare Quarterly 45 (1994), pp 1-32.​

Ohlmeyer, Jane. “‘Civiliizinge of those rude partes’: colonization within Britain and Ireland, 1580s-1640s.” In Nicholas Canny and Alaine Low (eds), The Origins of Empire. British Overseas Enterprise to the Close of the Seventeenth Century. Oxford and New York 1998, pp. 124-147.

Ohlmeyer, Jane. Making Ireland English. Yale. 2012.

Ó Mainnín, Mícheál B. “Poetry and Performance in the Gaelic World.” In Moyra Haslett, Conor Caldwell and Lillis Ó Laoire (eds), Oxford Handbook of Irish Song, 1100-1850 (Oxford University Press 2022). https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/38849/chapter/377728529

Sansonetti, L. (2020). “‘An Pettie Tanes, Ie Parle Milleur’: Speaking Foreign Languages in Shakespeare’s Henry V (1600; 1623).” Études anglaises, 73(4), pp 472-492.