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Faculties & Departments
Department of English
Stephen O'Neill, PhD
Office & Contact Details
Office 16,
Arts Building,
North Campus
Tel: +353 (1) 7083489
Email: stephen.oneill@nuim.ie
Consultation Times:
Consultation Hours: Tuesday 3.00-4.00 & Thursday 11.30-12.30 or by appointment.
My main research interest is in the area of early modern studies, in particular Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama; Representations of Ireland in the Early Modern Period; and Representations of Rebellion in Tudor Ireland. I also have a research interest in the cultural currency of "Shakespeare" and contemporary rewritings and appropriations of Shakespeare.
Publications
Staging Ireland: Representations in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama (Four Courts, 2007)
Staging Ireland is a timely study of representations of Ireland and the Irish in the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Staging Ireland questions received views of Ireland as a stable subtext in Shakespearean drama and of the stage Irishman as a static colonialist stereotype, and posits instead that dramatic representations of Ireland and the Irish were dynamically heterogeneous and ideologically unstable. Opening up Renaissance drama to its multivalent Irish contexts, this important intervention in Renaissance and Irish studies raises broader questions about theatre and ideology, censorship, and identity formation in the period. Through detailed contextual readings of a range of plays − from Shakespeare’s histories and Marlowe’s Edward II to important, but overlooked, plays such as The Misfortunes of Arthur, Captain Thomas Stukeley and Sir John Oldcastle − this book reveals significant interconnections between Ireland as it was figured in Elizabethan drama and contemporaneous political and cultural anxieties about Ireland and Irish alterity. Viewing the Renaissance stage as a fluid space where such anxieties were negotiated and confronted, O’Neill persuasively argues that the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, though geographically located in London, was figuratively engaged in Ireland and inflected by the ambiguities and multifaceted realities of English colonization in that setting. Staging Ireland not only makes a vital contribution to of Irish and Renaissance studies, but it also essentially changes the shape of these fields. Click here to order this publication.
‘An academic study that may become something of a milestone.’ Books Ireland.
'O'Neill has clearly understood the power of the stage in the early modern period as creator and modifier of individual and collective stereotypes, identities, and images ... A significant contribution to our understanding of early modern dramatic representation of Ireland and its people,' Irish University Review
'‘Stephen O’Neill’s account of staged representations of the Irish is the logical response to criticism that locked Ireland together with Spenser, reading the poet as a kind of ideological touchstone for English colonialist views at large. Staging Ireland supplements this focus on elite literary modes by highlighting how pervasive Ireland was as a topic for the early modern theatre. In asking how dramatists represented Ireland during the 1590s when the war of conquest escalated, O’Neill follows in the footsteps of a few earlier criticsincluding Christopher Highley and Andrew Murphywho supplemented interpretations of Spenser with readings of Shakespeare’s plays, particularly the histories. But O’Neill’s approach differs in making the stage the exclusive focus, and in moving beyond Shakespeare’s corpus in delimiting the range of meanings and responses that Ireland evoked for early modern dramatists .... Indeed, the book’s richest contribution is its success in identifying a much wider range of plays that ripple with Irish undercurrents .... O’Neill sifts powerfully through a range of readings, paying particular attention to syntax and word choice’, Jean Feerick, Shakespeare Quarterly (Winter 2008).
“1599: Sir John Oldcastle, the Irish Wars and the Elizabethan Stage.” Ireland in the Renaissance, c. 1540-1660. Ed. Thomas Herron and Michael Potterton. Dublin: Four Courts, 2007.
A 'lucid and stimulating monograph', Richard McCabe, The Review of English Studies (April 2008).
‘O’Neill … covers more ground more thoroughly than one is used to in treatments of “staged Ireland” … [O]ne could argue that Ireland means everything and nothing in this book. But as this book makes clear, Ireland did-and does-mean many things and signifies in many directions. O’Neill closes hopefully, too, showing that a flexible approach to the past may help us be more flexible toward the future: “[I]t is in the drama of history that we can continue to challenge and re-imagine the stock roles of national identity, Irish and English and Other, handed down by history”’, Peter G. Platt, Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 (Spring 2008).
Forthcoming publications
Shakespeare and the Irish Writer, edited with Janet Clare (UCD Press 2009).
Media Appearances
The Tubridy Show, RTE Radio 1 - Friday 12th January
This morning on the Tubridy Show we were joined live in studio by actor Alan Stanford and Dr. Stephen O'Neill, lecturer in English at NUI Maynooth to discuss Shakespeare and his relevance in our lives over four hundred years after the bard penned his first play.
The Eleventh Hour, RTE Radio 1 - Friday 2 March
Representations of the Irishman - Tonight we look at the representation of the Irishman on stage, screen and television, from Shakespeare's 'Henry V' right up to the present day with cartoon appearances in 'The Simpsons' and 'Family Guy'.