Drama, Performance, and Polity in Pre-Cromzvellian Ireland by Alan J. Fletcher, and: Drama and the Performing Arts in Pre-Cromwellian Ireland: A Repertory of Sources and Documents from the Earliest Times until c.1642 by Alan J. Fletcher (review)

Abstract

MLRy 98.1, 2003 177 tolerant?tolerant, that is, by the standards of his day rather than ours. That Middleton propounds a theological view of sodomy is not obvious. Heller's difficultand challengeable project requires that he is able to identifyparticular characters who have committed the act, and to determine their spiritual destiny. Sodomy as an act could not be presented on the stage, and could be mentioned only elliptically. Middleton insinuates without necessary commitment to narrative specificity,daring the auditor to imagine while accepting the condition of unrepresentability. In these provocatively teasing circumstances, a fixed moral authorial intention is hard to ascertain. Grace shares with sodomy in that it too was invisible on the early modern stage. Acts of grace can be manifested only as events that most immediately are something else, and might be no more than that something else. To consolidate these acts in the mind as concretely specific events marking out the gist of a play's purpose and mean? ing can scarcely avoid detracting from both the immediacy and the ambivalence of the theatrical moment. The plays will in some sense accommodate the kind of reading that Heller advocates. Whether they require his specific interpretative horizon and demand the specific reading he advances is another matter. Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham John Jowett Drama, Performance, and Polity in Pre-Cromzvellian Ireland. By Alan J. Fletcher. Cork: Cork University Press. 2000. xvi + 52opp. ?45. ISBN 1-85918-245-3. Drama and the Performing Arts in Pre-Cromwellian Ireland: A Repertory of Sources and Documents from theEarliest Times until c.1642. By Alan J. Fletcher. Cam? bridge: Brewer. 2001. xiii + 624pp. ?90; $160. ISBN 0-85991-573-5. Ben Jonson's The Alchemist famously starts with a fart,a sort of alchemy in reverse, but that unsubtle, in-your-face opening stands as the prologue to an entertainment. In early modern Ireland, however, as Alan Fletcher demonstrates with tremendous wit and verve, not to mention formidable scholarship, the fart is an art in itself, and not just an opening gambit or untimely intervention. Indeed, breaking wind is the peculiar forte of an itinerant company of 'braigetori' (Gaelic Irish for 'farters'). To? gether with face-contortionists (muggers in the theatrical sense of the word), gambler s, harpers, acrobats, tricksters,jesters, jugglers, and hummers?no, not mummers, but hummers?the farters of Gaelic Ireland contribute to a varied and vibrant culture of performance art. Modern Irish drama is the envy of us all, but it is often portrayed as a colonial legacy, English in origin, though Irish in verbal energy. Fletcher's aim is to establish Ireland as a fulcrum of dramatic activity, steeped in traditions, local and vocal, prior to the Restoration, challenging English colonial representations of the country as a cultural vacuum. Ireland has excited a great deal of interest among Renaissance scholars over the past two decades, ever since Stephen Greenblatt's decisive intervention on Edmund Spenser and Ireland in Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1980), an essay which drew on important work by Irish historians such as Brendan Bradshaw, Ciaran Brady, Nicholas Canny, and D. B. Quinn. A constant complaint from historians of early modern Ireland, and from those engaged in re? search on Irish language and literature in the period, has been that the preoccupation with English literary representations of Ireland and the Irish implies that England had a culture which it wished to impose on a country without one. This goes against the grain of Spenser's own perspective, since he argued in^4 View ofthe Present State of Ireland (1596) that the Irish had letters before the English, that the work of Irish poets was worthy of attention (and translation), and that itwas but the other day since England grew civil. In other words, one of the earliest and most canonical of English 178 Reviews colonists and commentators was prepared to concede that Ireland had a rich literary culture that pre-dated that of England. Yet the image ofthe 'wild Irish' promulgated by other planters has persisted. These two major new works offerample evidence of Ireland's complex cultural context from the seventh to the seventeenth century. The critical volume...