Ireland, Enlightenment and the English Stage, 1740–1820 by David O’Shaughnessy

Abstract

Reviewed by: Ireland, Enlightenment and the English Stage, 1740–1820 by David O’Shaughnessy Misty G. Anderson David O’Shaughnessy, ed., Ireland, Enlightenment and the English Stage, 1740–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2019). Pp. 282; 21 b/w illus., 5 tables. $99 cloth. What did Irish theatre, Irish playwrights and actors, and the idea of Irishness in the anglophone theatrical world contribute to Enlightenment values? David O’Shaughnessy, serving as both academic editor and impresario, has answers. His collection brings together some of the top voices in eighteenth-century theater studies to make visible what has been a submerged Irish influence and to consider its collective impact on Enlightenment ideas. Rejecting the “barometer” metaphor [End Page 403] Michael Brown uses in The Irish Enlightenment (2016) to contain theater as reflective, O’Shaughnessy and his contributors read for mediations that shape the anglophone Enlightenment imagination. These essays paint a picture of Irish theatrical contributions that move far beyond Teagues and brogues to show how Irish actors, playwrights, and sensibilities were not peripheral but central. The claim, well substantiated, is that a deep bench of Irish talent, including Catherine Clive, Peg Woffington, Charles Macklin, Oliver Goldsmith, Arthur Murphy, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and John O’Keeffe, defined Georgian theater. Part of the magic of this collection is the conversation O’Shaughnessy has hosted, most directly in the two accounts of London-based Irish actor John Johnstone’s influence, but also through the gracious references to other essays in the volume, evidence of true collaboration that models the values of the cosmopolitan Irish Enlightenment O’Shaughnessy maps out. The three sections of the collection draw our focus first to performance, then place, then political perspective, in ten essays that leave the reader with no doubt about the central function of Irish players and playwrights in eighteenth-century theater and with a new working thesis about an Irishness without borders, figuring and performing the migrant in the metropole that makes so many of these plays “‘excentrically’ cosmopolitan” (Burke, 248). It is fitting that the conclusion, which frames out the overarching thesis, comes from Helen Burke, the theater scholar who has contributed the most to our understanding of Irish influence and representation in the long eighteenth century.1 O’Shaughnessy’s own introduction reflects the partly reparative mission of this collection: to show that Irish plays, playwrights, and influence are everywhere. That celebratory trend, which could drift into encomium, stays within O’Shaughnessy’s deft control, beginning with his introductory, non-exhaustive, yet still impressive overview of a missing Irish theater history. His critical intervention in this volume is to explore why it’s been hiding in plain sight, in bodies and bodies of work that often blurred Irish difference but that collectively defined the Georgian theater world from within the London metropole. Performance and Irishness serve twinned functions in this collection, recalibrating an Irish Enlightenment that is not limited by, or to, negative Irish stereotypes but instead defined by a positive Irish influence on Enlightenment values of mobility, self-improvement, knowledge, and equality. Michael Brown’s “door-stopping” The Irish Enlightenment grounds O’Shaughnessy’s approach, both because it acknowledges theater’s productive work in a field of print Enlightenment studies and because the centering of Irishness or, more accurately, multiple types of Irishness that embody the principle of civility in action, shows how the Irish were fundamental to the Enlightenment concept of civilization. His attachment to the concept of Enlightenment risks what Al Coppola calls “Enlightenolatry” and the need to think through Enlightenment’s Cold War (rather than Kantian) production and twenty-first-century pop culture re-animation. But the notion of a “thick” Enlightenment that isn’t over yet (as Joseph Roach has argued) comports with the overarching vision of a more capacious geography of Enlightenment ideals within imperial Britain, starting at home.2 O’Shaughnessy argues that performances between London and Dublin crossed borders through an Irish Enlightenment that was “energized by its national kinesis and the cosmopolitan environs of London” (13), an Irishness not merely but always peripatetic, always translating, always mediating. This collection is structurally and intellectually engaged with a capacious notion of Enlightenment oriented around political justice, even...