In 1599, the year that Shakespeare finished Henry V, wrote Julius Caesar and As You Like It and the first draft of Hamlet, England was obsessed with one thing: Ireland.

That obsession has increasingly become an interest of one of the world's leading Shakespearian scholars, James Shapiro, who is talking about it in Kilkenny today, as part of the Kilkenny Arts Festival, at 1pm in the Parade Tower. (If you can't get to that, you can sate your appetite for Shakespeare at the Globe Theatre's production of The Taming of the Shrew, which is running till next Sunday – more on that below.)

In Shakespeare's earlier plays, "Ireland was only good for a cheap laugh", says Shapiro. In The Comedy of Errors, two characters discuss a "kitchen wench" who is "spherical, like a globe". "In what part of her body stands Ireland?" asks one. "In her buttocks," comes the answer. "I found it out by the bogs."

But by the late 1590s, that had changed, as Shapiro explains in his acclaimed study, 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare. Hugh O'Neill's military successes against the English forces and the threat of an alliance between the Irish and Spain meant that Ireland was to the fore of the English consciousness.

With great fanfare, the Earl of Essex led a mission to Ireland in early 1599 to suppress O'Neill's forces. He was a favourite of the Queen, Elizabeth, and was expected to return in triumph.

In Henry V, written that year, Shakespeare briefly described a general "from Ireland coming, bringing rebellion broached on his sword".

This was a reference to Essex, and was a remarkably rare reference by Shakespeare to current affairs. Shakespeare was effectively saying, "let's hope the Earl of Essex comes back victorious over Tyrone", says Shapiro, and this was "the closest Shakespeare came to breaking the illusion that he's writing about the past".

The Essex campaign, though, was a disaster, and he returned in disgrace later that year. During that Irish campaign, out of a population in England of four million, over 44,000 men were conscripted and sent to Ireland. "Service in Ireland was much feared and hated," explains Shapiro. "There was a popular proverb at the time, 'better to hang in England than die in Ireland'."

Soldiers returned from Ireland with what would now be called post-traumatic stress disorder. In Shakespeare's home town of Stratford, a local butcher who had been convicted of murder was described in reports as a "maimed soldier from Ireland".

The understanding of Ireland in the English consciousness of the day was akin to that of Vietnam or Iraq in the American consciousness. As Shapiro puts it: "The pressure of Ireland was so great at that moment that it just penetrated the fabric of the play."

But if that was the case, why such a brief mention? The problem for Shakespeare was that the Irish issue was so contentious that it was against the law to speak or write about Ireland. So if he wanted to address the concerns of his audience in the theatre, he had to do so indirectly.

Viewed through that light, Henry V and Richard II (written earlier in the 1590s) can be seen as allegorical treatments of the issue of Ireland, obsessed as they are with threats to the crown and military instability.

If Shapiro's highly accessible scholarship illuminates Shakespeare, so too does the work of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, which has led the way in exploring how Shakespeare's plays were actually performed in his day.

Paradoxically, this return to the past has been ground-breaking, liberating the plays from the dead-hand of 20th-Century reverence.

In this, they have also sought to liberate one of the Bard's most troublesome plays from its glaring misogyny, by giving it an all-female cast.

They're playing on an outdoor stage in the Castle Yard each evening, with a matinee on Sunday. See www.kilkennyarts.ie for details.

colinmurphy@independent.ie

Irish Independent