РЕПРЕЗЕНТАЦИЯ ГЛАВ ПРАВИТЕЛЬСТВА ИРЛАНДИИ 1701–1714 ГОДОВ В АНГЛО-ИРЛАНДСКИХ ПОЭТИЧЕСКИХ ПРОИЗВЕДЕНИЯХ

Abstract

In the late 17th and early 18th century, Ireland experienced a constitutional struggle in parliament, as well as the gradual development of a party system along the English partisan lines. Reflection of those events in the public sphere (primarily in the works of Molyneux and Swift) remains a popular research topic for Irish historians. This article attempts to look at the development of the Irish political system by examining poetic works in support of the chief governors of Ireland: lord lieutenants and lord justices of 1701–1714. Irish poems dedicated to governors were usually similar to English odes, which in turn were influenced by Abraham Cowley’s Pindarics. Irish odes to lord lieutenants of 1701–1711 had significant genre similarities, and most of them were also similar in general means of representing the chief governor. It was of utmost importance for the authors to show the brilliant ancestry of the ode’s hero; perhaps even more important for them was to show the similarity between the viceroy and the monarch, since the former was supposed to represent the latter. There were, however, significant differences between the odes, which were attributed to the shifting context of Irish politics. The odes of 1707 and 1711 are much more embedded in politics than the odes of 1701 and 1703: since at least 1707, the authors were more likely to include lord lieutenants in the context of Irish and British partisanship, while simultaneously emphasizing the loyalty of recipients to Queen Anne in her struggle against parties. The zenith of partisanship in Ireland coincides with the appearance of short poems with some features of an ode in 1710, which closely associate the figure of the lord lieutenant or lord justice with the Whigs or Tories.