All Dressed Up: Modern Irish Historical Pageantry by Joan Fitzpatrick Dean

Abstract

Joan Fitzpatrick Dean. All Dressed Up: Modern Irish Historical Pageantry. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2014. Pp. xvii + 335 + 8 color plates. $39.95. In 2004, Irish theatre scholar Lionel Pilkington called for an expansion of the focus of Irish theatre studies to include more sustained investigations of forms of performance outside of the theatre itself, including mumming, pageantry, and political demonstrations. Dating from William Butler Yeats, Edward Martyn, George Moore, and Lady Augusta Gregory's founding of the Irish Literary Theatre in 1899 (which would become the Abbey, Ireland's national theatre), the critical cachet of the playwright and the literary power of the legitimate stage have had remarkable staying power in Ireland, and remain in most cases the go-to method for organizing surveys of the Irish theatre. In the ensuing decade since Pilkington's call to action, the field has certainly expanded in a variety of dynamic ways to meet his challenge. Professor Joan Fitzpatrick Dean's All Dressed Up represents a substantial addition to this discourse, focusing as it does on forms of performance occurring outside the traditional theatre. Her work is the summation of years of primary-source research: Dean has mined a vast array of private papers, newspapers, and archival collections to produce a formidable work that shall certainly remain required reading for anyone interested in examining the complex interplay between historical pageantry and the changing cultural realities of postcolonial Ireland in the twentieth century. Pageantry has been critically discussed in Irish cultural debates before, but in a piecemeal fashion, centering (as Dean notes) on events such as the loyalist parades in Northern Ireland celebrating the Protestant victory at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 and the various, opposing nationalist commemorations of events such as the 1798 rebellion and the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin. All Dressed Up builds on earlier works, such as Mairin Ni Dhonnchadha and Theo Dorgan's collection Revising the Rising (1991) and Ian MacBride's edited collection, History and Memory in Modern Ireland (2001) to provide a more comprehensive examination of how pageantry specifically functioned in a vast array of contexts. Dean also situates her work within contemporary theatre and performance studies debates about the interplay between performance and the literary, text-centered tradition of the legitimate stage. Taking her bearing from Diana Taylors well-known work The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (2003), Dean asserts that the various forms of Irish pageantry that covered the century possessed affective, ludic, and cultural powers (2). Developing alongside the more easily archived, literary works of the legitimate stage, she stresses the popular appeal of pageantry as a barometer of cultural memory: if one asks what theatrical experience was both routine and popular with ordinary Irish people in the twentieth century, pageantry surfaces as a likely candidate (2). More people within that time period saw pageants than saw legitimate plays by several orders of magnitude. Equally influenced by the work of Pierre Nora and his conception of lieux de memoire (places of memory), Dean focuses on where and when these pageants transpired and on the cultural work they were doing in their specific milieus. Although it was generally celebrating] rather than interrogating] the past, Dean maintains that historical pageantry consistently reflected a desire to imagine, understand, or recover the Irish past by dramatizing a narrative (3). Pageants occupied and transformed non-traditional spaces: halls, squares, public parks, and sporting arenas attracted people that might not ever attend a play in a traditional theatre. The pageants' enormous popularity and broad appeal demanded a more sustained examination of the cultural work they were doing in Ireland, and Dean certainly delivers such. …