‘I Feel Bould at All Times’: Irishness in Richard Brinsley Sheridan's St Patrick's Day and Pizarro

Abstract

‘I Feel Bould at All Times’: Irishness in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s St Patrick’s Day and Pizarro David Clare Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s most perceptive biographers have observed that, although Sheridan left his native Ireland shortly before his eighth birthday, never to return, he remained conscious and proud of his Irishness ‘to a degree that [was] ... utterly baffling even to some of those closest to him’ for the rest of his life.1 He repeatedly referred to Ireland as ‘my country’ and pleaded Ireland’s case in some of his most famous parliamentary speeches.2 Sheridan’s relationship to Ireland is often examined within the context of his political career (in particular, the fact that his habit of consorting with Irish rebels may have jeopardised his hopes for political advancement), but I would suggest that his strong attachment to Ireland also crucially informs his work for the stage. This is not simply an allusion to the frequently repeated view that Sheridan, like other Irish-Anglican playwrights before and after him, ‘swoop[ed] down on the English’, passing satirical comment on them with the power given to him by ‘having such a weird, outside view of the English’ (and those words of Elizabeth Bowen’s were very specifically about Sheridan).3 I am referring instead to the fact that three of his stage plays engage directly with matters concerning Ireland and Irishness: The Rivals (1775), St Patrick’s Day (1775), and Pizarro (1799).4 Over recent decades, a number of critics, most notably Joep Leerssen, have written about the ways in which the character of Sir Lucius O’Trigger from The Rivals subverts the traditional figure of the absurd Stage Irishman, and is therefore an expression of Sheridan’s proud Irish identity.5 Therefore, this article will focus mainly on the two other plays mentioned, both of which cannily interrogate Ireland’s political situation and English perceptions of the Irish, and, more particularly, express Sheridan’s curiously strong Irish pride. In the two-act farce St Patrick’s Day, Sheridan argues that the Irish are much more civilised than the English believe (in fact, he slyly suggests that the Studies • volume 109 • number 436 386 Irish are more civilised than the English), and he also establishes the ways in which the English would be portrayed in Anglophone Irish literature down to the present day. In Pizarro, a melodrama and Sheridan’s last play, he uses the Spanish conquest of Peru as a metaphor for, among other things, English subjugation of the Irish. St Patrick’s Day; or, The Scheming Lieutenant The two-act farce St Patrick’s Day, from 1775, was written by Sheridan to reward the Irish actor Lawrence Clinch for his excellent portrayal of Sir Lucius O’Trigger in The Rivals, after the part had been played so offensively and so ineffectually by the English actor John Lee on the play’s disastrous opening night. Sheridan also used the play to express his Irish pride, in the hope of finally laying to rest the accusation that the character of O’Trigger was intended as a slight against Ireland. An indication of Sheridan’s state of mind as he wrote St Patrick’s Day can be gauged from his preface to the first edition of The Rivals (written around the same time as St Patrick’s Day), in which he applauds anyone who opposed The Rivals because they were offended on behalf of Ireland. He explains that he never intended to slight a country he loved and would rather have seen the play fail than hurt Ireland.6 Perhaps because St Patrick’s Day was composed quickly (one report suggests it was written in only forty-eight hours)7 or perhaps because its subject matter was of little interest to them, English and American critics have often dismissed the play as a ‘trifle’.8 And one of Sheridan’s main biographers has even referred to it as ‘a slight piece ... of no particular significance’.9 This, however, radically underestimates the importance of this strong, entertaining, and influential work. Of all of the classic plays written by the great English-based, Irish-Anglican playwrights, St Patrick’s Day was the...