Rewriting the Past: Historical Pageantry in the Dublin Civic Weeks of 1927 and 1929

Abstract

Rewriting the Past: Historical Pageantry in the Dublin Civic Weeks of 1927 and 1929 Joan FitzPatrick Dean Pageantry has its origins in ritual public displays and takes on special importance during periods of momentous change. Erika Fischer-Lichte’s Theatre, Sacrifice, Ritual: Exploring Forms of Political Theatre (2005) traces the re-emergence of pageantry in late nineteenth-century Europe to philosophers, artists, and anthropologists who operated in the shadow, or the light, of Darwin. Among them were Friedrich Nietzsche, whose The Birth of Tragedy (1872) located the origins of Western drama in the obliteration of the individual, and James Frazer, whose The Golden Bough (1890) scandalously stressed “the sameness of all societies and cultures.”1 Nietzsche, Frazer, and others looked back to the ritual origins of theater, long before drama contracted into realism, the narrowly defined dramaturgy of ordinary language set in a comfortably recognizable environment. The fourth wall of realistic theater created a confining dramaturgy that denied and renounced what was, at root, theatrical. Fischer-Lichte surveys the commonalities animating Richard Wagner’s Bayreuth Festival (1876), Pierre de Coubertin’s revitalization of the Olympic Games and Max Reinhardt’s “Theatre of the Five Thousand” (both phenomena in the early decades of the twentieth century), and Leni Riefenstahl’s documentation of Nazi rallies in the early 1930s. These disparate events all staged pageantry to create community through the re-theatricalization of theater. Throughout the twentieth century, pageantry was the most pervasive, far-reaching experience of theater in the lives of ordinary Irish people. The most familiar pageants in Ireland—and elsewhere—are associated with religious commemorations: Christmas and Nativity plays, passion plays, Easter reenactments (including the Quem Quaritis), First Communion and Corpus Christi processions, and the localized celebration of the feast days of saints. In Ireland, the allied confessional, sectarian spectacles such as July 12 parades have venerable [End Page 20] histories.2 Whereas Irish political demonstrations, rallies, protests, marches, sit-ins, and the like have been extensively analyzed, their counterparts in Irish pageantry are neglected by both historians and theater historians. An important exception is Padraic Pearse’s pageantry at St. Enda’s and St. Ita’s, which Mary Trotter, Elaine Sisson, and others have analyzed.3 Noteworthy, too, are James Moran’s Staging the Easter Rising: 1916 as Theatre and Anne Dolan’s Commemorating the Irish Civil War: History and Memory, 1923–2000 in their treatment of formation and manipulation of historical memory.4 In twentieth-century Ireland, three periods stand out as times when considerable resources were invested by political, governmental, and other authorities to create the historical and mythological pageantry that shaped identity and community. The pageantry associated with all three epitomizes the distinctly modern phenomenon that Eric Hobsbawm called the “invention of tradition,” the construction of symbolic and ceremonial actions to which are imputed venerable histories.5 The first such period occurred during the Irish Literary Revival, partially as a demotic reaction against early Abbey Theatre productions, and partially as a vehicle for nationalist activism that involved large numbers of nonprofessional enthusiasts in pageant production. The second flurry of pageantry occurred in the decade following independence, between 1922 and 1932, when the new Irish Free State deployed pageantry to reinforce its legitimacy, to instill pride in its citizens, and to offer the popular imagination an alternative to an oppressive colonial history. The third period occurred in the mid-1950s in the early seasons of An Tóstal, the hoped-for international homecoming and celebration of the Irish people. Of these three eras, perhaps the most critically neglected period occurred in newly independent Ireland when historical pageantry imbricates theater, nationalist commemoration, and nation-building. Between 1922 and [End Page 21] 1932, the Irish Free State and its citizens undertook four attempts to “resurrect” the Aonach Tailteann or ancient games of Ireland, in 1922, 1924, 1928, and 1932.6 In the same era, they created the many historical pageants of the 1927 and 1929 Dublin Civic Weeks in 1927 and 1929—experiences that whetted the appetite to host the 1932 Eucharistic Congress. Until recently, most critics characterize the Irish Free State in its first decade as, in Seamus Deane’s formulation, a “provincial backwater.”7 More recently...