Stage Irishman Research Articles

John Ford’s Festive Comedy: Ireland Imagined in The Quiet Man

IN LATE 1951, as his film Quiet Man was being edited into final form, director John Ford sent cautiously optimistic telegram to his friend Lord Killanin in Dublin: The Quiet Man looks better better. There is vague possibility that even Irish will like it. (1) Though Quiet Man would be enormously popular in America, its portrait of rural Irish life in 1920s striking chord of deep sympathetic response among moviegoers of all religious ethnic backgrounds, Ford's hopes for similar response in Ireland were in vain. It was very popular here at first, Killanin would recall years later, and there were strong objections to line from May Craig, `Here's fine stick to beat lovely lady'. (2) Initially, as Killanin's remark suggests, it was film's portrayal of tempestuous relationship between Sean Thornton (John Wayne) Mary Kate Danaher (Maureen O'Hara) that met strongest resistance. To this day, says Margaret Niland, local woman who was there when Quiet Man was filmed in County Mayo, still don't like that bit where he drags her across fields.... That scene is so nice because I think it does Irish down. (3) Today, it is QuietMan's picture of premodern or preindustrial Ireland--an older society of dowries, cattle fairs, donnybrooks--that more often draws objections of Irish commentators. A common move is to portray Ford's image of Ireland--a never-never Golden Age, as Harlan Kennedy describes it, a time of simple pastoral integrity (4)--as mode of cultural imperialism, with Hollywood perpetuating various Irish stereotypes whose origins lay in long centuries of English political domination. Along with outright falsity, remarks James MacKillop, sins attributed to Quiet Man include sentimentalism, condescension, cliche gimcrackery. (5) Taken together, Kennedy argues, such qualities add up to view of Irishness that is not less patronizing oppressive than collar-and-lead colonialism long exercised by Britain. (6) In recent years, as Irish Studies has attempted to make place for itself in Anglo-American postcolonial discourse driven by identity politics, this has become more more standard line. Thus, for instance, Lance Pettitt's recent Screening Ireland approaches Quiet Man from perspective deriving less from film study or Irish history than from postcolonial theorizing of writers such as Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, Ania Loomba, Edward Said. In Ireland, sense that American cinema represents threat to Irish cultural independence is nearly as old as republic. We cannot be sons of Gael citizens of Hollywood at same time, wrote one Irish nationalist in 1930s. (7) This is spirit in which so much contemporary Irish filmmaking has defined itself specifically in opposition to Quiet Man's image of Ireland as, in Luke Gibbons' phrase, a primitive Eden, rural idyll free from pressures constraints of modern world. (8) truth about Ireland is therefore to be sought in bleak social reality that Quiet Man's pastoral idyll hides from sight, as in what Terry Byrne describes as mind-numbing desperately depressing existence of characters in Joe Comerford's Traveller (1978), (9) or rural poverty portrayed in Pat O'Connor's Ballroom of Romance (1982), or squalor of Dublin squatter society--drug addicts, dealers, prostitutes, pimps--in Cathal Black's Pigs (1984). Even commercially successful film like Roddy Doyle's Commitments (1991) is taken to provide modicum of truth in what might be called Corpo flat realism of scenes taking place in Dublin's public housing projects: an alternative body of imagery, as Gibbons calls such material, that can be seen as addressing the realities of Irish life. (10) As Gibbons' phrasing suggests, his sympathies are on side of new Dublin realists against what he describes as straitjacket of stereotype. …

Monologue as Dramatic Action in Brian Friel's Faith Healer and Molly Sweeney

The playwright Brian Friel has always been skeptical of capabilities of language to convey truth. As a citizen of post-Gaelic Ireland, his suspicion both political and philosophical: he finds himself in ironic position of writing about native culture in language of Ireland's colonizer. His plays, especially Translations (1980) and its companion piece The Communication Cord (1982), serf-consciously dissect political and epistemological implications of this imperialist's language. While Friel simply has no choice but to write in English if he to reach a broad audience, he does so ironically and in order to point out enforced nature of his choice. His dialogue in isolation, then, cannot be understood as transparent medium of his meaning. To an extent, of course, this true of all playwrights, whose works must be seen as scripts susceptible to a range of choices by directors, actors, designers, and audiences. As David Hare wrote, the play in air. Yet more often than not, critics of Friel have come closer to Richard Pine's dismissal of stagecraft as contrivance than to a rich understanding of many ways a theater piece makes meaning (Ireland's 138).(1) Richard Tillinghast's 1991 New Criterion article a rare exception to this tendency. He places other critics' focus on language within theatrical tradition: From The School for Scandal by Sheridan . . . to Beckett's Waiting for Godot, we remember great plays for their dialogue rather than for inventiveness of their dramatic structure. Talk, quips Tillinghast, is national (35).(2) Tillinghast reminds us that often for stage Irishman, to speak to act, a pastime as engrossing as fishing or pub crawling. For him, Friel goes beyond his predecessors by firmly grounding his dialogue in theatrical experience. Indeed, Friel often called the father of contemporary drama, allowing such recent talents as Frank McGuinness, Marina Carr, and Tom Murphy to flourish in often hostile genre of theater (Pine, Irish Drama 190).(3) These factors make two of Friel's plays especially worth study. Both Faith Healer (1979) and Molly Sweeney (1994) are monologic. Their status as theater pieces demands that we respect them as performance, but their form encourages us to treat them as prose poems. Their lack of conventional stage action is, however, through a sort of logical hairpin curve, exactly what makes them so dramatic. By replacing action with narration, Friel not only critiques penchant for oratory, but he also dramatizes his contention that events are meaningful mainly insofar as they become stories, fictions told by their participants. Their meaning resides not in what actually happens but in how they are narrated by and to people who participated in them. This not, after all, so very far from way that naming becomes exercise of naked power in Translations. The difference in that play between Gaelic Baile Baeg and English Ballybeg important precisely because it transcends mere language. The eventual dominance of Ballybeg represents political dominance of English. It a meaningful sign simply because it sign of powerful. (And in Translations, these words will be made into literal signs: road signs.) Because naming an action, as meaningful and full of conflict as conventional stage action, theater space and human voices of actors are both indispensable to Friel. Their voices embody, in all these plays, power struggles over reality, in a way that escapes critics looking only at words on page. Faith Healer and Molly Sweeney are united both by their monologic form and by their contention that truth subjective, a matter of perception and recall. Sight becomes a metaphor in both Faith Healer and Molly Sweeney for knowledge. Yet easy equation of sight and insight troubled by unreliability of perception and memory. …

A Dictionary of Anglo-Irish: Words and Phrases from Gaelic in the English of Ireland (review)

Reviews245 The volume concludes with an appendix offering notes on stereotypes and the Stage Irishman and additionally 1 1 small illustrations (with pictures of, among others, the Celtic Cross, Round Tower, Sheela-na-gig, Ogham Stone, Cromlech , Curragh). Strangely enough, however, the respective headwords do not refer the reader to these illustrations. Lis Christensen's First Glossary ofHiberno-English fills to some extent the gap in Anglo-Irish lexicography and will serve many students of Anglo-Irish literature (not only newcomers). For those interested in more detailed lexicological studies the very much awaited and ambitious A Condse UhterDictionary (Macafee 1996) is already available. References Kiberd, Decían. 1979. Synge and the Irish Language. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littiefield. Macafee, Caroline, ed. 1996. A Condse UlsterDictionary. Oxford: Oxford UP. Todd, Loreto. 1989. The Language ofIrish Literature. Houndmills and London: Macmillan. Wales, Katie. 1992. The Language ofJamesJoyce. New York: St. Martin's Press. A Dictionary ofAnglo-Irish: Words and Phrasesfrom Gaelic in the English ofIreland. Diarmaid Ó Muirithe. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1996. Pp. 240. The last two years have seen publication of three important dictionaries presenting different aspects of the varieties of English spoken in Ireland: a selective glossary of Hiberno-English (Christensen 1996), a comprehensive survey of the Ulster dialect (Macafee 1996), and the reviewed volume. Diarmaid O Muirithe, the editor of The English Language in Ireland (Cork, Ireland: Mercier 1997) and author of, among other things, several minor contributions to Anglo-Irish lexicography, has compiled an impressive collection of Irish (Gaelic) words and phrases used in the English of Ireland. In a quote from professor Henry's 1973 radio lecture, 'Anglo-Irish' is defined as "a rural variety compounded of Irish and English or Irish and Scots. This developed chiefly in the last century and a half ..." (11). Given that terms like 'Anglo-Irish', 'Hiberno -English', and 'Irish-English' carry different implications and are variously defined, the cover term, used in the subtitle of the dictionary, 'the English of Ireland', is very helpful. The book opens with a short introduction (11-16), in which Ó Muirithe quotes at length P.L. Henry, the great authority on the linguistic situation in Ireland, and briefly discusses the form and pronunciation of Irish words in Anglo-Irish. This is followed by a list of abbreviations identifying the sources of quotations (17-20), the main body of the dictionary (21-204), bibliography (205-10), and a very useful index of all the words, i.e., the Irish entries , variants, and the Anglicized forms (211-40). 246Reviews Christensen's glossary and Macafee's dictionary both trace etymologies (not only the Irish ones) of appropriate entries. O Muirithe's dictionary, on die odier hand, provides die Irish original forms followed by English glosses and dierefore is in some sense complementary to Christensen's and Macafee's works. Every headword is followed by the part of speech, variant forms (if any), meanings and English glosses, identification of region (and source, not given here) , for example: A babún interj. As a baboon. 'Said with a shudder of horror at the thought of having to go tiirough some terrible experience ' (Westmeadi). Geis ?. As gesh. Taboo or prohibition. 'It is a gesh to cut down fairy bushes' (Cavan). Leis ?. In form lesh. A permanent disfigurement, such as a scar, or other mark; lameness. '"Look at the lesh of him" — said about a person with a lame step' (Kilkenny) . Radalach n. 1. 'Mud, slime' (n. Waterford). 2. ? lanky, untidy person' (n. Waterford). 3. 'Useless matter'. "What hey we have is only radalach" (mid-Tipperary). According to O Muirithe, die glosses "are valuable both as a guide to die meaning of the words in the districts they come from and as an illustration of the Anglo-Irish syntax of those districts" (14). Some characteristic features of Anglo-Irish syntax are clearly visible in die following two examples from literary language: Bionn v. Reflected in he does be, a literal translation of the Irish habitual present of the verb to be — bionn. James Joyce, Grace, 174: ? know you're a friend of his, not like the others he does be with'. Curach ? ... A light coracle used on the western coast . . . J.M. Synge...

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

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

:The Oxford Companion to Irish Literature

The literature of Ireland displays an exceptional richness and diversity - whether in Irish or English, by native Irish and Anglo-Irish writers or by outsiders like Edmund Spenser whose works were deeply imbued with the country in which he lived and wrote. In over 2,000 entries, the Companion to Irish Literature surveys the Irish literary landscape across some sixteen centuries, describing its features and landmarks. Entries range from ogam writing, developed in the 4th century, to the fiction, poetry, and drama of the l990s; and from Cu Chulainn to James Joyce. There are accounts of authors as early as Adomnan, 7th century Abbot of Iona, up to contemporary writers such as Roddy Doyle, Brian Friel, Seamus Heaney, and Edna O'Brien. Individual entries are provided for all major works, from Tain Bo Cuailnge - the Ulster saga reflecting the Celtic Iron Age - to Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent, O Cadhain's Cre na Cille, and Banville's The Book of Evidence. The Companion also illuminates the historical contexts of these writers, and the events which sometimes directly inspired them - the Famine of 1845-8, which provided a theme for novelists, poets, and memoirists from William Carleton to Patrick Kavanagh and Peadar O Laoghaire; the founding of the Abbey Theatre and its impact on playwrights such as J. M. Synge and Padraic Colum; the Easter Rising that stirred Yeats to the 'terrible beauty' of 'Easter 1916'. It offers a wealth of information on general topics, ranging from the stage Irishman to Catholicism, Protestantism, the Irish language, and university education in Ireland; and on genres such as annals, bardic poetry, and folksong. The majority of entries include a succinct bibliography, and the volume also provides a chronology and maps.

A ‘stage Irish identity’ ‐ an example of ‘symbolic power’

This article proposes a notion of a ‘stage Irish identity’ in a bar and applies an analytic concept which explores two intersecting stereotype images which characterise the symbolised identity. The enactment of a ‘stage Irish identity’ in a bar invokes cross‐cutting images of the Irish as inherently prone to drinking and the pub as their natural habitat. For Irish migrant bar keepers, who deploy the symbolised identity as a form of cultural capital to increase pub trade, the strategy is empowering. However, an exploration of a ‘stage Irish identity’ in this form reveals that the essence of the celebrated identity and associated imagery is shot through with ambiguities. Its own identity construct renders an ‘unresolvable contradiction’ because it necessitates Irish people to be simultaneously the target and producers of an image of Irish culture, which is positioned within a structure characterised by unequal power relations. It is my contention that Pierre Bourdieu's concept of ‘symbolic power’ mediates the ambiguities that are evident in this process of social action and contributes to our understanding of how the cultural capital of minority group members, can be positioned and utilised in a power relationship. The argument is based on comparative research on Irish bar entrepreneur ship, particularly the accounts of 42 Irish bar proprietors and their partners, who were trading in Birmingham (UK) and Chicago (USA) in 1993/94.

American laughter: immigrants, ethnicity, and 1930s Hollywood film comedy

This text aims to demonstrate the immigrant and ethnic vision that informed Hollywood comedies, and by extension American mass culture, of the 1920s and 1930s. Beginning with a pre-history of American comedy that ranges from the Spanish explorers to Moss Hart, the author then discusses the refashioning of slapstick, team, and romantic comedy by an immigrant Hollywood for a predominantly urban, ethnic audience. With observations on more than 300 films - many of which have never been studied - the three main chapters uncover an unexamined immigrant and ethnic aesthetic in the films of Chaplin, the Marx Brothers, and William Powell and Myrna Loy. In the process, Winokur employs a broad range of contemporary concepts in film history and culture studies, while intertwining subjects as diverse as Balkan politics, Art Deco, the Jewish landsmanshaft, psychoanalysis, vaudeville, Sicilian peasant life, orientalism, the stage Irishman and body criticism. Winokur includes over 50 black and white photos, stills and reprints of promotional pieces that illustrate and complement his analysis of Hollywood film in the 1920s and 1930s.

Edna O'Brien's 'Stage-Irish' Persona: An 'Act' of Resistance

Edna O'Brien's 'Stage-Irish' Persona: An 'Act' of Resistance

Stage Irish

Stage Irish

Quinn's Book: Reconstructing Irish-American History

William Kennedy's Quinn's Book, like Toni Morrison's Beloved, is an act of historical imagination that encourages reader to reconsider events in nineteenth-century America. Both works revive painful memories from American past in order to provide basis for new perspectives. Of his own Irish-American family's sense of that period, Kennedy commented in O Albany!, if they remembered anti-Irishness that prevailed in nineteenth-century America, they repressed it (40). Examining how novel resurrects that aspect of nineteenth-century Irish-American life and establishes basis for reevaluating anti-Irishness through cultural comparisons with African American experience can enable readers to recognize how novel reconstructs of period to encourage comparison between experiences of two immigrant communities forced to America's shores. The illustration entitled and Paddy Go To Town, pictured at right, introduces final section of Quinn's Book (237) and stands as an emblem of novel's bridge-building dynamic.(1) This pairing of stage Irishman and black-faced minstrel visually underscores novel's challenge for reader to explore comparisons between stock types. Such comparisons can lead to recognizing similarities in complex cultural identities that lie beneath. In that way supplementary illustrations in novel suggest thematic issues. For example, just as reader puzzles over significance of disk-like object centered on title page illustration and riddle of whether minstrel in later illustration is white man in blackface, so, throughout novel, Quinn puzzles over the mystery of disk (74) and over mystery of African American Joshua, about whom Quinn claims I have never presumed to truly understand (250). That final illustration reintroduces linkage introduced early in novel when title Tambo and Paddy Go to Town is referred to as music-hall production two genres: minstrel show and Irish frolic (92).(1) How text establishes such bridging of Irish-American and African American traditions is focus of this essay. Within this historical novel that is presented as Quinn's autobiography, Quinn's reflections on Joshua's experience as an African American becomes central in widening his understanding of his own identity as an Irish American. The fiction of Quinn writing his autobiography provides clearest basis for comparing novel's technique with major genre of African American writing tradition. As Elizabeth Fox-Genovese has observed, Autobiographies of black women, each of which is necessarily personal and unique, constitute running commentary on collective experience of black women in United (161). Moreover, previous studies of African American autobiographies have asserted applicability of insights about genre to fiction: Autobiography and fiction are simply different means of arriving at, or recognizing, same truth: manner in which and by which African American makes and is made by his historical, political, and social condition in United States of America (Cudjoe 276-277). Morrison's and Kennedy's novels each create commentary on American history, though critical difference results from Morrison's emphasis on pain involved in struggle to remember. Selwyn Cudjoe's comments on fiction and autobiography provide partial frame for an approach to Kennedy's creation of an African American character. Other insights contained in Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s collection of contemporary criticism, Reading Black, Reading Feminist, provide means for comparing novels under discussion. In that collection, Hazel Carby writes of Jesse Fauset's attempt to create a new relation to history (80) for black middle class, while Barbara Christian presents perspective more directly applicable to Morrison's novel: we have moved to excavate past and restore to ourselves words of many of our foremothers who were buried in rumble of distorted history (49). …

The Imaginary Irish Peasant

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the Irish peasant was a figure encoded with literary, social, and political meaning, and to speak or write about that central image of Irish identity in the context of the time was to participate in a special kind of cultural discourse, far removed from the changing realities of rural life. The portraits of the peasant generated by different Irish poets, dramatists, fiction writers, and antiquarians were often radically opposed to one another; in fact, each writer undertook to rewrite or to reconceptualize the peasant characters imagined by predecessors and contemporaries. Thus W. B. Yeats and Douglas Hyde created portraits that not only rivaled each other but aimed primarily at overturning the prevailing English colonial stereotype reflected in the stage Irishman. These portraits were in turn rewritten by John Synge, even as Yeats's, Hyde's, and Synge's were reworked in divergent ways by James Joyce, Flann O'Brien, and Patrick Kavanagh.

“Stage Irish” in “Britain’s Oldest Colony”: Introductory Remarks Towards an Analysis of the Influence of the McNulty Family on Newfoundland Music

The McNulty Family, a New York based Irish-American trio, had a pervasive influence on Newfoundland music from the 1930s to the 1970s. The group’s music was introduced to the island by a St. John’s merchant who sold their records throughout the island and sponsored local radio programs for over thirty years. The group’s popularity and influence on the repertoires of local singers are directly related to Newfoundlanders’ search for musical autonomy during a period of political and social change — the change from a British Colony to a Canadian Province, and the emergence of a new middle class.

Beyond the Apron: Archetypes, Stereotypes, and Alternative Portrayals of Mothers in Children's Literature

Beyond the Apron:Archetypes, Stereotypes, and Alternative Portrayals of Mothers in Children's Literature Lois Rauch Gibson (bio) As every school child knows—or, in any case, has surely been told by some well-meaning adult—books are our friends; books can take us on journeys of the mind; books are our windows on the world. But school children probably do not know and adults rarely tell them that books are also an important way for a culture to transmit its varied social values to its children. One set of social values children's books transmit involves attitudes toward certain groups of people: races, nationalities, classes, occupations, sexes, religions, and so on. Not surprisingly, a group frequently represented in children's literature are mothers, and the mother-figures children encounter vary widely, from the archetypal images of myth and folklore to the caricatures of Lewis Carroll, from the stereotypes of J.M. Barrie and many modern picture books to the welcome alternatives in such books as Mary Poppins. By now, most of us recognize stereotypes fairly readily. Still, it may prove useful to distinguish clearly between archetypes and stereotypes before examining closely the portrayals of mothers in three of the more enduringly popular children's books: Peter Pan, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and Mary Poppins. To state it simply, archetypes provide foundations to build on and allow endless variety; stereotypes label and limit by assuming all members of a group share similar traits. Jung says an archetype is a "primordial image" somewhat like Plato's "idea," except that instead of existing in "a place beyond the skies," the archetype exists in the human mind (Four Archetypes 9-13). The archetype itself is just a form or idea—like the general idea of mother, or father, or spirit. The idea exists in all human minds, but the concrete manifestations, the representations or expressions of the idea, may vary from era to era and country to country. As Jung says, "Like any other archetype, the mother archetype appears under an almost infinite variety of aspects" (15). In other words, archetypal images resonate and reverberate in the richness of their implications while stereotypes flatten and stifle. A typical archetypal image appears in the Demeter/Kore (or Persephone) myth. It incorporates the image of mother as mother, as goddess, as daughter, as earth, as maiden, as creative nature, and so on. It suggests the flowers of spring and the fruits of harvest. It reverberates with suggestions of death in the daughter's sojourn underground as well as suggestions of sexuality in the union with Hades. It incorporates resurrection and new life in Kore-Persephone's reunion with Demeter in the archetypal spring. In contrast, the stereotyped mother in children's literature wears aprons and bakes pies. In 1971, Alleen Pace Nilsen made special note of the preponderance of aprons on the comparatively few female characters in Caldecott Award winners and other selected children's books. Surveying representative recent books will leave readers surprised at how little this has changed since 1971. Like the stage Irishman defined by his red nose, or the little girl in a 1749 children's book by Sarah Fielding, who is defined by her name (Lucy Sly), the mother in children's literature is defined and limited by her apron. We move from the sublime to the ridiculous, from the multidimensional to the flat character. This is not to say, however, that the apron-clad stereotype exercises exclusive control over all mothers in children's books. In fact, one may go beyond the apron in a variety of ways. An examination of Peter Pan, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and Mary Poppins uncovers an array of archetypal images, stereotypes, caricatures, and alternative roles for the mother figure. Like J. M. Barrie himself, Peter Pan is virtually obsessed with the figure of the mother. The central mother figure is, of course, Wendy—who agrees to go to Neverland in order to learn to fly and see mermaids, but mostly to be mother to Peter and the Lost Boys as well as to her own brothers. In Neverland, Wendy becomes a kind of Persephone, lured away from her own mother to...

A Vocabulary of Ethnic Perception: Content Analysis of the American Stage Irishman, 1820–1860

“The Americans,” observed a European expatriate in 1837, “do not laugh at honest bluntness, or good-natured simplicity.… If Jonathan is to laugh, he must have a point given him, or, in other words, he must laugh to some purpose.” To Vienna-born Francis Grund, contemporary comic melodrama and its first cousin minstrelsy demonstrated beyond all doubt that his adoptive countrymen were decidedly “fond of laughing at the expense of their neighbors.” “English, French, Dutch, and German,” he noted, “are in turn made to suffer the stings of American wit.… The Irish, of late, has [sic] become very popular.” Grund's commentary reflected both the frequency with which ethnic characters of all sorts were portrayed upon the mid-nineteenth century American stage and, in particular, the emerging public taste for the stage Irishman. A tourists' guidebook to New York City published in 1850 pointed out that six of its seven principal theaters had been turned over to the “burlesque and broad fun” of melodrama and minstrelsy and to Irish character pieces especially. Twice during the 1830s, the British actor Tyrone Power conducted triumphal tours of the United States by relying upon a repertoire of Irish parts.

Paddy and the Paycock: A Study of the Stage Irishman from Shakespeare to O'Casey

Paddy and the Paycock: A Study of the Stage Irishman from Shakespeare to O'Casey

Short reviews

Mícheál Mac Gréil, Prejudice and Tolerance in Ireland: Based on a survey of intergroup attitudes of Dublin adults and other sources. Dublin: Research Section, College of Industrial Relations 1977. xxiv+634 pp. £9.90. E. E. O'Donnell, Northern Irish Stereotypes. Dublin: College of Industrial Relations, 1977. 219 pp. £4. William B. Gould, Black Workers in White Unions. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977. 506 pp. $20.00.

Irish Poetic Drama in St. Louis

On April 17, 1904, T. W. H. Rolleston, of Pembroke Road, Dublin, boarded Cunarder Etruria bound for New York. He was shepherding Historic Loan Collection for Irish Industrial Exhibition at that frontier extravaganza, St. World's Fair. Rolleston thus became a central figure in a transatlantic episode that unfolded between May and July 1904 and reached back into pre-history of Abbey Theatre; it was both an outcome and a cause of some interesting tensions in Dublin dramatic circles, and it touched upon issues of Irish national loyalty, Irish stereotypes, and Irish cultural revival in both Ireland and United States. In published memoirs of leaders, associates, and observers of Irish theater movement, record of what Rolleston called the theatre row in St. Louis is incom-

Teg: The Stage Irishman

Teg: The Stage Irishman

The Development of a Stock Character I. The Stage Irishman to 1800

The Development of a Stock Character I. The Stage Irishman to 1800

The Stage Irishman A History of the Irish Play and Stage Characters from the Earliest Times. By G. C. Duggan. Pp. 331. Dublin: Talbot Press. 1937. 15s.

The Stage Irishman A History of the Irish Play and Stage Characters from the Earliest Times. By G. C. Duggan. Pp. 331. Dublin: Talbot Press. 1937. 15s.