STEPHEN O'NEILL. Staging Ireland: Representation in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama.

Abstract

‘Offstaging Ireland’ would, perhaps, be a more accurate title for Stephen O'Neill's lucid and stimulating monograph. Of the eight plays he examines only one, The famous historye of the life and death of Captain Thomas Stukeley, has a scene set in Ireland. The others either contain Irish characters (The Battle of Alcazar, Henry V, Sir John Oldcastle), or characters who are reported to journey to and from Ireland (2 Henry VI, Edward II, Richard II), or relate to Ireland through their use of Arthurian myth (The Misfortunes of Arthur). The remarkable absence before 1600, the point at which O'Neill cuts off, of even a single play dedicated to Irish affairs raises a number of significant issues. If Ireland was the urgent source of popular anxiety that O'Neill describes, why did none of the dramatists rise to the challenge? Can it all have been a matter of censorship—Captain Macmorris being absent from the quarto of Henry V—or were there other forces at work? O'Neill opts for the theoretically fashionable, not to say Pavlovian, explanations of ‘containment’ and ‘occlusion’, but the detailed cogency of his arguments for subtextual allusion and ‘contextual mnemonics’ (p. 146) resist such facile responses. As he demonstrates, the subject of Ireland recurs again and again even when it appears to be ‘somewhat marginal to the general thematic concerns of the plays’ he examines (p. 61). Can it possibly be that the imaginative impact of Ireland was, like the murder of Duncan or the topography of Hell, all the more powerful for not being seen? It is well to remember that for the vast majority of the Elizabethan audience Ireland was ‘offstage’ in every sense of the term. It was glimpsed, if at all, only through the woodcuts of John Derricke's Image of Irelande (1581) or the lurid pen-portraits of pamphleteers such as Anthony Munday, Thomas Churchyard and Barnaby Rich. O'Neill is surely closer to the mark when he suggests that, presented as a strictly ‘offstage’ area, Ireland channelled some of England's darkest fears—rebellion, invasion, miscegenation, degeneration.