'Emer McHugh's Irish Shakespeares demonstrates, with brilliant clarity, the ways in which performances of Shakespeare in Irish contexts are not merely neutral engagements with a cultural artefact. Rather, they are tied up with both Irish and Shakespearean conceptions of family, faith, and nationhood; 'charged', as she puts it, with complex histories of 'imperialism, cultural hegemony, and colonial violence' (2-3). This is an urgent and timely work, situated in both place and time but nonetheless speaking to the ways in which the long histories of Ireland, the Irish diaspora, and Shakespeare inflect and influence issues of performance and identity today. This is an essential book for anyone interested in contemporary Shakespearean performance, adaptation and appropriation, and gender and sexuality in performance — and one that I will be returning to and thinking with for a long time to come.'Nora J. Williams (BIMM University)