Comedy, Misrule and the Irish Revival

Abstract

Abstract By pairing roughly contemporary comedies by two of the Irish Revival’s leading playwrights, this article sets up a case study for comparison, demonstrating how various forms of comedy were received by Dublin audiences during the Revival, and illustrating the ways in which comedy produced, and unsettled, political myths in the context of the nascent Irish theatre. Attending to plays by J. M. Synge and Lady Gregory, alongside the manifestos and political manoeuvring of the directors of the Abbey Theatre and its earlier iterations, the article suggests that, through comedic misrule, the comedies of the Revival challenged the ‘misrule’ of forms of imperialism, capitalism and modernization, clearing the way for new narratives and myths to take shape. In the fraught conditions of the opening decade of the twentieth century, comedy is the genre through which we can most acutely see the parameters of Irishness being tested on stage.