SOURCE: Ivic, Christopher. “‘Our inland’: Shakespeare's Henry V and the Celtic Fringe.” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 30, no. 1 (January 1999): 85-103.

In the following essay, Ivic contends that the conflicts portrayed between the Irish, Welsh, Scottish, and English characters in Henry V emphasized the fragmented nature of the nation, and explains that England's anxiety concerning its national and cultural identity is symbolized in Shakespeare's King Henry.

More than twenty years ago, in an essay entitled “British History: A Plea for a New Subject,” J. G. A. Pocock invited historians to construct a less anglocentric history of the British Isles, that is, a “plural history of a group of cultures situated along an Anglo-Celtic frontier and marked by an increasing English political and cultural domination” (605). Although the response has been slow, historians of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Britain and Ireland have answered Pocock's plea, as the plethora of recent...