Modernity, Geography and Historiography: (Re)-Mapping Irish Theatre History in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

The nineteenth century presents Irish theatre historians with an immense lacuna and the inherent limitations of our discipline. Beyond brief historical surveys,3 some studies of Boucicault,4 and recent scholarship on the late Victorian era,5 it is a veritable tabula rasa which vividly contrasts with British theatre history. So, when asked to contribute to a book series dedicated to nineteenth-century theatre and designed to interrogate ‘the methodological... and theoretical bases on which theatre history has been or might be constructed’,6 an enveloping sense of anxiety understandably overwhelmed me. First of all, as one hapless historian declared a decade ago, ‘there was no such thing as Irish drama’ in the nineteenth century; an apparently self-evident fact he finds ‘worth repeating that for nine tenths of the nineteenth century, there was no such thing as an Irish drama’.7 Other historians are equally adamant, ‘It may be said boldly as a fact that all drama in Ireland until the beginning of the twentieth century was English drama.’8 However, such sweeping, simplistic statements in fact describe the ‘determinate absence’ of Irish theatre history of the nineteenth century rather than the absence of Irish drama.9 Given this historiographical void, the tradition of ‘archaeo-historical’ fieldwork of British theatre history, which frustrates historians like Jacky Bratton given its positivist purview of the theatrical past,10 actually provides a methodological process and product that one could get positively nostalgic about, not to mention envious of, as a historian working in Irish theatre in the same period.