The chameleon and the peacock: Kipling and Yeats as creative readers of Shakespeare

Apart from being born in the same year, 1865, Kipling and Yeats seem to have little in common in their writing. They did, however, share at least two abiding interests, India and Shakespeare. The first of these was obviously Kipling’s home for a time, and inspiration for much of his best-loved writing. For Yeats, it was at least a place of the mind, an important, indirect influence. Although he never visited the country, he drew on Hindi philosophy and enjoyed a close relationship with India’s great writer Rabindranath Tagore. The second interest – Shakespeare – was a supremely important literary influence on both writers’ creative lives, but in different ways for each, which in turn may explain some differences between their respective works, as I hope to show in this chapter.