A New Stage for Eighteenth-Century Irish Theater Studies

Abstract

A New Stage for Eighteenth-Century Irish Theater Studies David O'Shaughnessy (bio) Recent work on the Irish Enlightenment has reinserted Ireland into debates on the history of ideas in the eighteenth century.1 Moreover, reappraisals of figures such as Oliver Goldsmith, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Edmund Burke, and Frances Sheridan have insisted on acknowledging the Irish heritage of these successful writers who played out the majority of their careers in Britain.2 Goldsmith, to take one example, can no longer seriously be considered a "court jester to the English," whatever James Joyce might have thought.3 The fact of authorial Irishness is no longer hurriedly thrust into a dark cupboard but is an object of scholarly analysis when we consider eighteenth-century texts. While this is by and large a welcome trend, there has been some judicious critical blowback to some of the earlier work in this vein, skeptical of an approach that seems to relentlessly hone in on Irishness as some sort of exegetical panacea, an ineffable solution to every question posed by a text or its author. We are now perhaps at a stage when we can enjoy scholarship that recognizes the importance of Irish influences without needing to reduce everything to that happy accident of birth. Eighteenth-century texts should no longer be twisted into improbable contortions by well-meaning but single-minded readings. In parallel to this development, theater has come much more to the fore in the past twenty years or so of eighteenth-century literary studies. The extraordinary and exceptional mobility of persons and productions between [End Page 355] the theaters of Dublin and London—whose relationships border on the symbiotic—make it the ideal field in which to think through ideas of Irish Studies in less hermetic ways. Transnationalism defines and complicates these figures and productions in ways that are not found in the other major literary genres of poetry and fiction.4 It is also an area of study that is considerably underdeveloped pace work on major dramatists such as Farquhar, Goldsmith, and Sheridan.5 While such canonical writers have been reasonably well served, there is a slew of figures, very successful in their contemporary moment, that deserve further study—Mary Davies, Arthur Murphy, Hugh Kelly, Frederick Pilon, Richard Lalor Sheil, and Alicia Le Fanu are only a few of such writers. Happily, the recognition that theater is one of the remaining "institutional structures" of the Irish Enlightenment requiring examination has coincided with a major publication that will enable work proper to begin.6 John C. Greene's Theatre in Dublin, 1745–1820: A Calendar of Performances in six volumes accompanied by Theatre in Dublin, 1745–1820: A History in two volumes, all published by Lehigh University Press in 2011, are the monumental result of a quarter-century of research.7 Historians of the London theater are all too aware of the importance of the London Stage 1660–1800 (1960–68) to work on English drama, so the advent of this Dublin calendar will allow scholarship on Irish theater to advance in ways simply not possible up to this point. The six volumes of calendars provide records of 15,000 performances—some 1,780 different plays—over the period, mainly in Smock Alley, Crow Street, and Fishamble Lane. The two volumes of history give an extraordinary wealth of information on theatrical practice in Dublin, covering topics such as the repertory, finance, scenery, management, regulation, acting conditions, and the Dublin audience.8 While it is evidently wonderful news to historians of the Dublin theater to be able to draw on this rich data, there are broader scholarly implications. Given what we know about the remarkable mobility of both plays and theater practitioners (here understood in the widest sense to include actors, dramatists, managers, scenographers, theater critics, and newspaper journalists) across the Irish Sea, theater historians interested in Drury Lane, Covent Garden, and other London theaters must now take note of Greene's work. The special relationship between the Dublin and London theatrical worlds speaks to the remarkable cultural energies enabled by the free movement of persons and performances across borders.9 Even leaving aside the canonical figures of Steele, Goldsmith, and Sheridan, the...