National Identities in Performance: The Stage Englishman of Boucicault's Irish Drama

Abstract

English dramatists created the drunken, stupid, and violent Stage Irishman; the Irish dramatist Dion Boucicault (1820-90) reinvented him as drunken, clever, and charming; and Irish critics have been suspicious of him ever since.' Although Ireland suffered dislocations of culture, language, and identity analogous to those experienced by colonized peoples in India and Africa, the Irish could not be distinguished from their imperial rulers by the color of their skin.2 They were proximate rather than absolute Others, a disturbing mixture of sameness and difference, geographical closeness and cultural distance.3 English dramatists therefore indicated Irish inferiority and need for governance by emphasizing those character traits that signaled political incompetence. Stage Irishmen were not all identical, and some were positively depicted, but they belonged to a well-established theatrical genre that mocked non-English characters as different, dangerous, or ridiculous.4 The Stage Foreigner has always been good for an easy laugh or a frisson of horror: the Elizabethans, for