Threshold of a Nation: A Study in English and Irish Drama by Philip Edwards

Abstract

Reviews 379 Beneath the surface of life Watching for ships, Dull, heavy-laden merchant ships, I will destroy them Because the sea is beautiful. But for O’Neill this was the road not taken. If he lacked the verbal felicity of the poet, he lacked as well the temperament, the sustained outrage, of the political revolutionary. The only play that fully combines O’Neill’s youthful rebelliousness and his sardonic humor, so evident everywhere in these poems, is the satiric Marco Millions (1925). How­ ever, his basic impulse was not antagonism toward society but a desire to plumb his own experience. Few of the poems give intimations of the preoccupation of the later plays, but “Nocturne” (1912) is an exception. Silence. Then through the stillness rings The fretful echo of a seagull’s scream, As if one cried who sees within a dream Deep rooted sorrow in the heart of things. In the years that followed, language sometimes failed, but O’Neill’s passion for personal truth and his instinct for dramatic structure gave him ballast to explore the depths. MICHAEL HINDEN The University of Wisconsin Philip Edwards. Threshold of a Nation: A Study in English and Irish Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Pp. xiii + 264. $24.50. William Butler Yeats remarked in 1889 that there is “no fine nation­ ality without literature . . . [and] no fine literature without nationality.” In a series of self-contained but related essays, Philip Edwards tests the validity of this assertion specifically concerning the interactions between drama and society in the age of Shakespeare and in the age of Yeats. He pointedly does not attempt to establish a general thesis about theater and nation; nor is he attempting to write the dramatic history of either period. Instead, in Part One he explores the significant and changing relation­ ship of the English professional theater to the Court and State between 1576 and 1642, especially the sense of national destiny in the Elizabethan history play; and in Part Two he examines the influence of this Eliza­ bethan literary consciousness on the twentieth-century Irish theater in general and on Yeats in particular. Ironically, as Professor Edwards observes, the study documents in one playwright after another the grow­ ing disillusionment, bitterness, or at least ambiguous skepticism of those who initially “responded enthusiastically to the idea of providing by means of a theatre a spiritual core to a nation’s progress” (p. 242). The new English nation, more particularly, gave fresh vitality to the 380 Comparative Drama earlier concept of sacred kingship through emphasis upon strong central government occasioned by the struggle against the power of the feudal lords on the one hand and of the papacy on the other. Not surprisingly, the concept of monarchy provides the great theme and symbol for both the physical and the spiritual perils of the age. In both Marlowe’s and Shakespeare’s stage worlds the agonists are the self-made, conquering, military hero and the legitimate, ordained ruler, the one satisfying “the age’s craving for individualist self-expression” and the other “its deep reverence for order and tradition” (p. 55). Tamburlaine, for example, sympathetically depicts the glowing mind of the ambitious shepherd along with his ultimate inability to render valid his kingship by the mere titanic quality of his life. In Edward 11 the focus is not so much on Edward’s unfitness to rule as on the despicability of Mortimer’s lust for power. The Shakespearean struggles between Henry VI and Richard III and between Richard II and Henry IV are set along similar, if more am­ biguous, lines. And Henry V, in addressing the larger “idea of the justice of invasion where there is an ancient right to a territory” (p. 74), reflects as well on the morality and practicality of the British conquest of Ireland. Since the play was written at a time when England was excited by the possibility of imposing her peace upon the Irish after so many years of bloody struggle, Shakespeare’s insistence on the fragile and transient nature of England’s peace with France in the final lines of the play is especially ironic. The Tempest deals with rights to territory...