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

Abstract

During the long eighteenth century, Irish women including Catherine Clive, Margaret Woffington and Margaret Farren graced Drury Lane and Covent Garden, while male actors included James Quinn, Charles Macklin and John Henry Johnstone. Of major significance were Irish playwrights and theater managers. O’Shaughnessy validates his collection by asking, so what if they were Irish? He concludes that these “chapters . . . collectively make the argument that all of this cultural activity . . . contributed to an important strand of the Irish Enlightenment.”Part I, “Representations and Resistance,” contemplates “Irishness.” Felicity Nussbaum’s “Straddling: London-Irish Actresses in Performance” examines women’s contributions to the stage, estimating that there were probably fifty Irish men and women in London theatres during the period with fewer good Irish roles. Maria Macklin, daughter of playwright-actor Charles Macklin (who wrote parts for his daughter), takes “us to the centre of the gendered politics of Irish identity.” This London-Irish family disrupted conventional notions of identity, Nussbaum demonstrates, assimilating into Irish-English gentility.Jim Davis’s look at “John Johnstone and the Possibilities of Irishness” is followed by Oskar Cox Jensen’s “The Diminution of ‘Irish’ Johnstone.” Posing opposite arguments, both recognize Johnstone as the epitome of the Irish actor. Identified as “Irish Johnstone,” he “generated laughter,” Davis contends, “based on tolerance rather than on contempt.” Jensen counters that Johnstone’s identity as the comic Irishman was “symptomatic of the essential diminution of Johnstone across his career.”Part II, “Symbiotic Stages: Dublin and London,” examines Enlightenment ideas and Irish loyalties/counter-loyalties. Michael Burden’s “Midas, Kane O’Hara and the Italians” addresses a rivalry between Italian companies flooding Dublin and London at mid-century, capturing audiences with burletta performances. Thomas Gray claimed that audiences watching these performances “forgot their prejudices.” Competing with this Italian invasion, Kane O’Hara responded with Midas (1762), a play Burden calls a true “mock-heroic.” These burletta performances attempted to skirt the 1737 Licensing Act by claiming not to be “acting” pieces.Robert Jones’s “Trading Loyalties: Sheridan, The School for Scandal and the Irish Propositions” cites Sheridan’s political loyalties and the 1785 contention that free trade would bind Britain and Ireland. Jones’s reading of variant editions of School claims Sheridan revealed his Irish loyalties in Charles Surface’s family portrait-selling scene: “Here’s a Jolly Fellow—I don’t know what Relation—But he was Mayor of Manchester.” There was no mayor of Manchester when the play emerged, but Manchester was the location for Irish propositions debates on trade. Few copies contain the Manchester reference, but Jones asserts Manchester was “transformative, adding uncertainty” to the debate. English manufacturers feared free trade with Ireland would upset home manufacture. Sheridan believed most harm would be done to Ireland, placing him in the position of supporting his English borough as Whig MP, while balancing Irish loyalties.Colleen Taylor’s “Sydney Owenson, Alicia Sheridan Le Fanu and the Domestic Stage of Post-Union Politics” keeps the spotlight on Sheridan, beginning with Owenson’s agenda as her character Glorvina in The Wild Irish Girl (1806). Glorvina’s red silk mantle became both a fashion and a political statement when playgoers donned capes themselves. Owenson saw “the theatre as a patriotic space, as well as a place where fashion could exude a national message.” Owenson’s mentor, Alicia Sheridan Le Fanu, expressed her patriotic philosophy in Sons of Erin (1812), a feminized variation of Sheridan’s St. Patrick’s Day (1775): “Whereas Owenson chose the subversive route, Le Fanu directly and publicly complicates dramatic renderings of Irishness by presenting her play . . . to counter the Teague figure,” placing the Irish gentleman beside outspoken Lady Ann Lovel, who urges English women to be “social allies for the Irish.”Part III, “Enlightened Perspectives,” concludes the collection. O’Shaughnessy’s “Civility, Patriotism and Performance: Cato and the Irish History Play” examines three history plays echoing Addison’s Cato (1713): William Philips’s Hibernia Freed (1722), Henry Brooke’s Gustavus Vasa (1739), and Charles Macklin’s King Henry the VII; Or The Popish Impostor (1746). O’Shaughnessy traces Irish parallels to Cato, “the most important political play of the century.” Irish history plays were political tools that have been largely ignored, and O’Shaughnessy argues Cato’s influence demonstrates the Irish capacity to “fashion and articulate an Irish political future in harmony with British values.”In “From Ireland to Peru: Arthur Murphy’s (Anti)-Imperial Dramaturgy,” Bridget Orr explores Murphy’s Alzuma. Despite Murphy’s unpopular position as publicist for Henry Fox and Lord Bute, his Zenobia (1767) and Alzuma (1773) were fairly popular; and Alzuma dramatizes the “effects of regime change” after wars. Murphy studied past conflicts and “showed a distinct preference for theatrical vehicles that voiced the suffering and protests of those victimized by national and imperial conflicts.” Alzuma features the Spanish conquest and effects of New World colonization from the perspective of a non-white population. Comparing Alzuma to Dryden’s Indian Emperor and Aaron Hill’s Alzira, Orr argues that Alzuma is more “feminocentric,” presenting women as protecting traditional religion and culture.Declan McCormack’s “Provincial Commencement of James Field Stanfield” leaves Dublin and London for the provinces. Stressing that productions in towns have been dismissed as amateur, he demonstrates how actor James Field Stanfield spent forty years successfully performing in the British provinces. Focusing on biography and Enlightenment-forged experience, he illustrates Stanfield’s contributions to freemasonry, abolition, and improvement literature. Stanfield, who studied for the priesthood, became a mariner. After a voyage on a slave ship to the East Indies (1776), he joined Joseph Younger’s Manchester theatre company, playing alongside John Philip Kemble and Sarah Siddons. Many provincial actors were Freemasons, and Stanfield helped “associate British freemasonry with abolition,” a passion inspired by experience on the slave ship. He complements Irish abolitionists Oliver Goldsmith and Edmund Burke, and association with Professor Dugald Stewart fostered his interests in biography and Enlightenment philosophy.Concluding, Helen Burke’s “Worlding the Village: John O’Keeffe’s ‘Excentric’ Pastorals” returns to O’Keeffe to examine the “pastoral drama that generated [the] charge of ‘excentricity,’” relating it to a “cosmopolitan consciousness.” Irish Catholics were often outsiders in Ireland and opposed arguments about “Catholic duplicity and native Irish savagery,” engaging in a “revisionist history writing.” While O’Keeffe’s pastoral The Shamrock (1783) depicts an imagined nation under inclusive political leaders, his Poor Soldier (1783) depicts an American Revolutionary hero who lacks rights back home because of “religion, ethnicity and social status.” Burke reinforces the Irish theatre community’s contribution to the Enlightenment with views on diaspora, cultural and religious conflict, ethnicity, and slavery.Contributors to Ireland, Enlightenment and the English Stage judiciously cite earlier publications, beginning essays with reviews of research; criticism in each is thoughtful and fresh. While the authors validate Ireland’s cultural contribution to the Enlightenment, Michael Brown (The Irish Enlightenment) believes ultimately the Irish Enlightenment failed because of the 1798 rebellion and 1801 Act of Union, leading to further emphasis on nationalism and sectarianism. Contributors to this collection, however, illustrate that in the long eighteenth century, Irish actors, playwrights, and theatre managers owned Irish roles and invited audiences to abandon prejudices and acknowledge their contributions to drama and society.