Frank O’Connor’s Road to New Historicism: Shakespeare, The Road to Stratford, and a New Way of Thinking
Frank O’Connor is best known as one of Ireland’s finest short story writers, however, he had a long and varied career that included novels, plays, autobiography, biography, translations, and critical studies. This essay focuses on O’Connor’s study of Shakespeare, published in first in 1948 under the title The Road to Stratford and republished in 1960 as Shakespeare’s Progress. Generally, critics thought little of O’Connor’s views about the Bard, but in retrospect it becomes clear that O’Connor’s critical approach very much resembles the New Historicism that Stephen Greenblatt and other Renaissance scholars have since employed. In short, this essay argues that O’Connor was a New Historicist, even before the term was created.