Edmund hosts William

In Mutabilitie (1997), Irish playwright Frank McGuinness alludes to and cites specific works by William Shakespeare and Edmund Spenser. The play also more loosely appropriates Spenser and Shakespeare as participants in colonial and cross-cultural discourses: writers whose works and their reception are enmeshed in ongoing (post)colonial histories. Incorporating and departing from the facts of Spenser’s years as colonial administrator in Ireland in the 1580s and 1590s, McGuinness dramatizes the two writers as the staged characters Edmund and William. ¹ He weaves their late sixteenth-century world together with various Irish figures from what Nicholas Grene calls “totally different parts of the Irish mythological wood” (Grene 2010: 93). In so doing, McGuinness creates a polytemporal fantasia that blends multiple eras and narrative universes, what Michael Caven, the director of the 2000 Irish premier of the play, calls “historical mischief making” (Caven and Lojek 2002: 176). As his essay title, “Mutabilitie: In Search of Shakespeare,” suggests, like most critics of Mutabilitie, Grene focuses on McGuinness’s engagements with Shakespeare, leaving the appropriations of Spenser largely unanalyzed. In addition to borrowing his title from the Mutabilitie Cantos (Spenser 2007), ² the posthumously published fragments of the unfinished seventh book of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, McGuinness forces Shakespeare to share his status as appropriated precursor with a range of other figures, often with arch humor and a sense of play. Dethroning Shakespeare alone, McGuinness explores the possibilities for and demands on dramatists and poets during times of conflict, violence, and crisis. Scholars of global appropriation can learn much from McGuinness’s engagements with both Shakespeare and Spenser in Mutabilitie, given the questions he poses about hybrid identities and artistic complicity in oppressive power structures. McGuinness, in fact, engages in a project common to both appropriation and postcolonial studies: disrupting the binary between colonizer and colonized with polytemporal crossovers between early and contemporary, English, and Irish texts. Close examination of passages that interact intertextually with the two English writers’ works, such as Shakespeare’s Henry V and Spenser’s View of the State of Ireland, reveals how McGuinness triangulates Shakespeare with both Spenser and himself as authors, thus forcing Shakespeare to share the role of appropriated precursor. McGuinness dislodges Shakespeare from his pedestal as principal source for postcolonial literature, even as he raises more questions than he answers about the imaginative possibilities of cross-cultural collaborations and about the function of poetic drama as fuel for, or sanctuary from, violent conflict.