Suport Curs Irish Lit.2

IRISH LITERATURE
a course for 2nd year students in English
Ioana Mohor-Ivan
Ioana Mohor-Ivan Irish Literature
TOPICS
I. Conquests, colonialism and

literary themes
• Conquests
• Colonial literatures
II. Space and nation in literary

representation
• The ‘pastoral’ in Irish Literature.

• The ‘city’ in Irish Literature.
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THE MATTER OF IRELAND
(brief chronology of historical events)
c. 6000 BC probable date of first human settlements in Ireland

c. 300 BC possible date of arrival of Celts
432 AD traditional date of the beginning of St Patrick’s mission
795 first raids of Viking invasion
1006 Brian Boraime recognised as high king
1169 Norman invasion begins
1541 Declaration Act, Henry VIII is declared King of Ireland
1586 Plantation of Munster
1595-1601 Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, heads rebellion
1607 Flight of the Earls
1609 Plantation of Ulster
1641-1646 Irish Catholic Rebellions
1649-1654 Cromwellian campaigns and Plantation
1689 James II lands at Kinsale. Williamite War begins.
1690 Battle of the Boyne
1695 Penal Laws restrict Catholic rights
1791 United Irishmen founded in Belfast
1795 Foundation of Orange Order
1798 United Irishmen’s Rebellion
1800 Act of Union
1803 Rising of Robert Emmet
1829 Catholic Emancipation (Daniel O’Connell)
1845 First year of the Great Famine
1848 Young Ireland Rising
1858 Irish Republican Brotherhood founded
1867 Fenian Rebellion; Manchester Martyrs
1879 Michael Davitt founds the Land League.
1800 Parnell elected leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party
1893 Gael League founded
1899 Opening season of the Irish Literary Theatre
1913 Ulster Volunteers, Irish Volunteers, Irish Citizen Army
1916 The Easter Rising
1919-1921 Anglo-Irish War
1922 Irish Free State established. Civil War begins
1937 De Valera’s Constitution
1948 Irish Free State declares itself a republic
1968 Beginning of the “Troubles”
1972 “Bloody Sunday” in Derry. Direct Rule imposed in N.I.
1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement
1994 IRA and Loyalist ceasefires
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CONQUESTS (1)
ANGLO NORMAN TRADITIONS

AND THE IRISH WRITER
• After the death of the famous High King Brian Boru in 1014, Ireland was at almost
constant civil war for two centuries. The various families which ruled Ireland's four
provinces were constantly fighting with one another for control of all of Ireland.
• At that time Ireland was like a federal kingdom, with five provinces (Ulster,
Leinster, Munster and Connaught along with Meath, which was the seat of the High
King) each ruled by kings who were all supposed to be loyal to the High King of
Ireland.
1. THE NORMAN INVASION
1152 Dermot Mac Murrough, King of Leinster, abducts O’Rourke’s wife, Dervorgilla
1155 The Pope gives Ireland by papal Bull to Henry II
1166 Rory O’Conor and o’Rourke attack Dermot, forcing him to take refuge in
Aquitaine.
1169 A Norman army, led by Richard FitzGilbert de Clare, Earl of Pembroke
(Strongbow) lands in Ireland.
1171 Following Dermot’s death, Strongbow assumes the office of King of Leinster
1199 On John’s ascension to the English throne, the second phase of the Norman
conquest is innitiated.
1366 The Statutes of Kilkenny acknowledge the Irish Revival of the 14th c.
• In the mid-1100's, two competing Irish Kings, Dermot MacMurrough of Leinster

and Rory O’Connor of Connacht, feuded over the high kingship of Ireland.
• O'Connor was victorious, and MacMurrough was sent into exile.
• MacMurrough sought aid from Henry II, King of England, and invited the Anglo-
Norman Earl of Pembroke, subsequently known as Strongbow, to invade part of
Ireland and help him subdue his rival.
• Strongbow conquered much of the east, including Waterford, Wexford, and Dublin.
Henry II wanted to insure that his lords did not set up an independent, rival
kingdom in Ireland; hence Henry subsequently claimed the conquered lands as
English domains. When O’Connor formally submitted to Henry in 1175 (thereby
becoming the last High King in Irish history), the English conquest of Ireland (and
the first holding in the future British Empire) had begun.
• During the next two centuries English occupation in Ireland consolidated itself, and
the English married and mingled with the "native" Irish to form the Old Anglo-Irish
or Old English, the elite ruling class who constituted the great earldoms of the 14th
century.
• Though English by descent, this class soon considered itself Irish, so much so that
an anxiety arose among the English about the "gaelicization" of the Anglo-Irish,
resulting in the passage of the Statutes of Kilkenny in 1366.
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2. NORMAN CULTURAL INFLUENCES:
o Within the Pale feudal estates are evolved. Gradually English civil government
established in Ireland: exchequer, chancery, courts of justice, division into counties,
parliament (Anglo-Irish only). During this time the great Old English (Anglo-
Norman) families—Fitzgerald, de Burgh, Butler—form their power, and the Old
Irish Kings—O’Connor, O’Brien, and O’Neill—still retain much of their ancient
kingdoms.
o Southern varieties of English are introduced within the Pale. These mediaeval
varieties of Hiberno-English become the language of commerce and administration,
and still survive in rural Wexford and the north of Dublin.
o After the plantations of the 16th and 17th century, northern dialects of English and
Inglis (dialect of the Scottish lowlands) are introduced in Ireland, forming the basis
of modern Hiberno-English.
3. LITERARY PRODUCTIONS:
a) Chansons des geste: The Song of Dermot and the Earl
• Chansons de geste (Old French for "songs of heroic deeds“) are the epic poetry that
appears at the dawn of French literature. The earliest known examples date from the
late eleventh and early twelfth centuries, nearly a hundred years before the
emergence of the lyric poetry of the troubadours and the earliest verse romances
• Composed in Old French, and made up of strophes of varying length linked by
assonance - apparently intended for oral performance by jongleurs - the chansons
de geste narrate legendary incidents (sometimes based on real events) in the history
of France in the eighth and ninth centuries, the age of Charlemagne and Louis the
Pious, with emphasis on their combats against the Moors and Saracens.
• The Song of Dermot and the Earl, is a chanson de geste, composed in the mid-
thirteenth century, and assigned to Morice Regan, secretary to Dermot
MacMurrough.
• The Song records Dermot’s journey to enlist the Norman support for regaining his
kingdom, and the victory of Strongbow, followed by the latter’s subsequent
marriage to Aoife, Dermot’s daughter.
THE SONG OF DERMOT AND THE EARL (c.1200-25)
Quant dermod, li reis vaillant,

Al rei henri par deuant
Esteit uenus a cele fiez,
Par deuant li rei engleis,
Mult le salue curteisement,
Bien ebel deuant la gent:
‘Icil deu ke meint en haut
Reis henri, vus ward e saut,
E vu donge ensement
Quer e curage e talent
Ma hunte uenger e ma peine,
Que fet me hunte le men demeine!(…)
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(When Dermot, the valiant king, before King Henry had come at this time,
before the English king, very courteously he saluted him fairly and finely
before his men: ‘May God who dwells on high guard and save you, King
Henry, and give you also heart and courage and will to avenge my shame
and my misfortune that my own people have brought upon me! Hear, noble
King Henry, whence I was born, of what country. Of Ireland I was born a
lord, in Ireland a king; but wrongfully my own people have cast me out of
my kingdom. To you I come to make my claim, good sire, in the presence of
the barons of your empire. Your liege man I shall become henceforth all the
days of my life, on condition that you be my helper so that I do not lose at
all: you I shall acknowledge as sire and lord, in the presence of your barons
and lords.’ Then the king promised him, the powerful king of England, that
wilfully would he help him as soon as he should be able.)
Li quens al hort iert bacheler.

Femme naueit ne mullier,
Si entent del rei dermot
Que sa fille doner lui uolt
Par si que od lui uenist
E sa terre lui conquist.(…)
(The earl at this time was a bachelor. He had neither spouse nor wife. When
he hears from King Dermot that he was willing to give him his daughter on
condition that he would come with him and subdue his land for him, the earl
replies before his men: ‘Rich king, hearken unto me. Here I assure you
loyally that I shall assuredly come to you. But I should wish in these matters
to crave licence of the English king, for he is the lord of my landed estate;
wherefore I cannot go from his territory without obtaining licence in this
way.’ The king assured the earl that he would give him his daughter when
he would come to his aid to Ireland with his barons. When they had
concluded this accord, the king turned straight towards Wales and never
ceased journeying there until he came to St. David’s)
Historical characters:
• Diarmait Mac Murchada (also known as Diarmait na nGall, "Dermot of the

Foreigners"), anglicized as Dermot MacMurrough (died 1 May 1171) is often
considered to have been the most notorious traitor in Irish history.
• Richard de Clare, 2nd Earl of Pembroke (1130 – 20 April 1176), known as

Strongbow, was the son of Gilbert de Clare, 1st Earl of Pembroke and Isabel de
Beaumont. De Clare was a Cambro-Norman lord notable for beginning the Norman
conquest of Ireland.
• Derbforgaill , Anglicised as Dervorgilla, (1108-1193) was a daughter of Murchad

Ua Maeleachlainn, king of Meath. She is famously known as the "Helen of Ireland"
as her abduction from her husband Tigernán Ua Ruairc by Diarmait Mac Murchada
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in 1152 played some part in bringing the Anglo-Normans to Irish shores, although
this is a role that has often been greatly exaggerated and often misinterpreted.
• Unlike many other women, she is mentioned no less than five times in
contemporary annals: her abduction by Diarmait in 1152 (Annals of
Clonmacnoise), her donation to the Cistercian abbey of Mellifont of altar cloths, a
gold chalice, and 60 ounces of gold during the consecration ceremony in 1157
(Annals of the Four Masters); her completion of the Nuns' Church at Clonmacnoise
in 1167 (Annals of the Four Masters); her retirement to Mellifont in 1186 (Annals
of Ulster, Annals of Loch Ce); and her death in Mellifont in 1193 (Annals of Ulster,
Annals of the Four Masters).
Modern treatments of Dermot and Dervorgilla’s story:
• Augusta Gregory, Dervorgilla (1907): 20 years after the events, Dervorgilla has
retired to the Abbey of Mellinfont, spending her declining years in pray, self-denial
and good works. But the news of the casual slaughter of the Irish by the Normans
prove that her acts of charity are but a futile attempt to allay her sense of guilt.
• W.B. Yeats, The Dreaming of the Bones (1919): A rebel soldier who has taken
part in the Easter Rising flees to Corcomroe Abbey, where he encounters the ghosts
of Dermot and Dervorgilla, who beg him to absolve them of their guilt. The soldier
refuses, renewing the curse:
“My curse upon all that brought in the Gall
Upon Dermot’s call, and on Dervorgilla!”
b) Goliardic poems: The Land of Cockayne
• The Goliards were a group of clergy who wrote bibulous, satirical Latin poetry in
the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. They were mainly clerical students at the
universities of France, Germany, Italy, and England who protested the growing
contradictions within the Church, such as the failure of the crusades and financial
abuses, expressing themselves through song, poetry and performance.
The Land of Cockayne (c. 1340)
Fur in see bi west Spayngne

Is a lond ihote Cokaygne.
þer nis lond vnd' heuen riche
Of wel, of godnis, hit iliche.
þo3 Paradis be miri and bri3t,
Cokaygn is of fairir si3t.
What is þer in Paradis
Bot grasse and flure and grene ris?
(…)I Cokaigne is met and drink

Wiþvte care, how, and swink;
þe met is trie, þe drink is clere,
To none, russin, and sopper.
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Far in the sea to the west of Spain

There is a land that we call Cokaygne;
Under God's heaven no other land
Such wealth and goodness has in hand
Though paradise be merry and bright,
Cokaygne is yet a fairer sight.
For what is there in paradise
But grass and flowers and green rice?
(…)
In Cokayne there is food and drink
Without care, anxiety and labor.
The food is excellent, the drink is splendid,
At dinner, snack time, and supper.
• This poem survives in only one manuscript, Harley MS 913, British Library,
London.
• Probably compiled in Ireland in the early-mid 1300s, The Land of Cokaygne is not
an isolated poem; its fictional and parodic otherworld belongs to a tradition of
poems dealing with an imaginary paradise where leisure rules and food is readily
available.
• Classical: going back to Lucian's True History, a Greek work of the second century
AD, that describes a comical paradise full of food, drink, and loose women.
• Christian: descriptions of both Heaven and the garden of Eden (which was seen as
a real, though remote, place on earth). Believed visited by Alexander the Great, it
often was placed far to the East.
• Goliardic: one Latin poem of the twelfth century (Carmina Burana 222) is spoken
by an abbas Cucaniensis, an 'abbot of Cockaygne' who presides over drinking and
gambling, and the descriptions of the two abbeys in Cockaygne, which invert the
usual norms of religious life.
• The fantastic descriptions of plenteous food may be compared to those in The
Vision of MacConglinne, a parody of the medieval vision and voyage tales, which
also mocks the conventions of heroic literature and the institutions of Church and
State. Influenced by goliardic satire, the tale was composed in the 12th century.
c) The Danta Gradha: O Woman Full of Wile
• The Danta Gradha is an Irish adaptation of the Courtly love poetry.

• Courtly love was a medieval European conception of ennobling love which found
its genesis in the ducal and princely courts in southern France at the end of the
eleventh century. In essence, courtly love was a contradictory experience between
erotic desire and spiritual attainment, "a love at once illicit and morally elevating,
passionate and self-disciplined, humiliating and exalting, human and transcendent."
• Gerald Fitzgerald, the 4th Earl of Desmond (1333-1398) was the first to adapt the
courtly love tradition of the Norman French to the Irish. In the poetry of courtly
love, the love of woman is exalted, a redemptive force for both the lover and his
beloved. Gerald's poem is a rebuttal of the fierce clerical misogyny that was
prevalent in the Middle Ages:
Woe to him who slanders women.
Scorning them is no right thing.
All the blame they've ever had
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is undeserved, of that I'm sure . . .

He draws on the older, Celtic tradition, in which women were held in high esteem.
Sweet their speech and neat their voices,
They are a sort I dearly love . . .
• Geoffrey Keating (Seathrún Céitinn) (c. 1580-1644) was a renowned priest, poet,
prose-writer, and scholar. It is thought that in his youth he studied at a bardic school
in South Tipperary, close to his birthplace. In common with many of his educated
Catholic contemporaries, he went abroad to pursue his philosophical and
theological training as a priest.
• Keating's most significant work, Foras Feasa ar Éirinn, a history of Ireland from
the creation of the world to the coming of the Normans in the twelfth century, was
completed about 1634.
• Keating's literary works reveal his great knowlege of Irish style, native history,
legendary lore and theology, and an adept use of Irish, Latin, and English.
• His poem O Woman Full of Wile is one of the finest examples of the Irish Danta
Gradha.
O WOMAN FULL OF WILE
O woman full of wile,

Keep from me thy hand:
I am not a man of the flesh,
Tho’ thou be sick for my love.
See how my hair is grey!

See how my body is powerless!
See how my blood hath ebbed!
For what is thy desire?
Do not think me besotted:

Bend not again thy head,
Let our love be without act
Forever, O slender witch.
Take thy mouth from my mouth,

Graver the matter so;
Let us not be skin to skin:
From heat cometh will.
‘Tis thy curling ringleted hair,

Thy grey eye bright as dew,
Thy lovely round white breast,
That draw the desire of eyes.
Every deed but the deed of the flesh

And to lie in thy bed of sleep
Would I do for thy love,
O woman full of wile!
Trans. Padraic Pearse
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CONQUESTS (2)
ENGLISH NARRATIVES OF IRELAND

1. PLANTATIONS:
1509 Henry VIII succeeds to the throne of England

1534 The English Reformation
1551 Henry VIII is declared King of Ireland, leading to his policy of “surrender
and regrant”
1558 Accession of Elizabeth I
1580 The Munster rebellion is crushed by the English
1586 Plantation of Munster
1588 Defeat of Spanish Armada
1595 Hugh O’Neill’s rebellion
1599 Essex in Ireland as Lord Deputy
1601 Battle of Kinsale
1607 Flight of the Earls
1608 James I’s accession. Plantation of Ulster
1641 Irish rebellion
1649 Cromwell begins his Irish campaign after the King’s execution
1654 Cromwellian Plantation
• The Reformation and the declaration by Henry VIII in 1534 that England would no
longer acknowledge the Catholic Church led to the establishing of the Church of
England or Anglican Church, thereby making England a Protestant nation.
• The native Irish, and many of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy, refused to follow this
split from Rome, and so the division between Irish and English became also a
division between Catholic and Protestant.
• This split created turmoil in both English and Irish politics throughout the 16th and
17th centuries, as Mary, Queen of Scots (1542-1587) restored Catholicism, and
Queen Elizabeth (1533-1603) then restored Protestantism.
• Under Elizabeth’s rule, the Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity were passed,
making the Anglican Church the "official" Irish Church (now called "the Church of
Ireland"), enforcing strict Anglican rule, and suppressing the rights and privileges
of Catholics.
• Such policies resulted in several rebellions in the late 16th century by great Irish
and Anglo-Irish aristocratic families, all of which were put down by the English.
• Finally in 1607 the Earls of Tyrone (Hugh O'Neill) and Tyrconnell (Rory
O'Donnell), the last of the native Irish aristocracy--fled the country for the
continent. This "Flight of the Earls" becomes a paradigm in Irish thought for the
abandonment of the country by the very leaders who needed to save it.
• The Munster Plantation (colonised by English Anglicans in the second half of the
16th century) was followed at the beginning of the 17th century by the Ulster
Plantation, when mainly Scottish Presbyterians flocked to the North of Ireland.
These colonists came partly to escape England, where the official Anglican Church
persecuted the more radical sects of Protestantism.
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• Gradually these radical Protestants, called "dissenters," would present a third term
in Anglo-Irish politics, along with native Irish Catholics and ruling British
Anglicans.
2. ENGLISH NARRATIVES OF IRELAND:
a) Colonial Discourse Theory (Edward W. Said)

• Discourse (Michel Foucault): groupings of statements, utterances enacted
within a social context, determined by this social context and contributing to its
continuing existence.
• Colonial discourse: language in which colonial thinking was expressed;
literary and non-literary texts produced within the period and context of colonialism
about the colonised society.
• In Orientalism, Edward Said describes the discursive features of the 19th-
century body of knowledge on the Orient, produced by scholars, travel writers,
poets, or novelists.
• The Orient was thus produced as a repository of Western knowledge, not a
society and culture functioning on its own terms:
The Orient was almost an European invention . . . one of its deepest and
most recurring images of the Other. In addition the Orient has helped to
define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality,
experience.
• Produced in relation to the West, the Orient was described in terms of the
way it differed from it, being represented as the Other to the civilised image of the
West.
Everyone who writes about the Orient must locate himself vis-à-vis the
orient, translated into his text; this location includes the kind of narrative
voice he adopts, the type of structure he builds, the kind of images, themes,
motifs that circulate in his text - all of which adds up to deliberate ways of
addressing the reader, containing the Other, and finally representing it or
speaking on its behalf.
• Colonial oppositions:
The West The Orient
Colonist Colonised
Self Other
Civilisation Barbarism
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Modernity Backwardness
• Discursive structures of colonial discourse:
• The colonised countries become objects of knowledge;

• The colonised become stereotyped: the docile Hindu, the sneaky Arab;
• They are labelled as “backward”, “primitive” (i.e. existing on a different
time-scale);
• The use of ethno-graphic present freezes their society at the time of its
observation;
• The use of the 3rd person singular reduces the colonised to a single
specimen;
• Negativity: idle, weak, corrupt, etc.
b. Othering Ireland
“If Ireland had never existed, the English would have invented it; and since it never
existed in English eyes as anything more than a patch-work-quilt of warring fiefdoms,
their leaders occupied the neighbouring island and called it Ireland. . . Ireland was
soon patented as not-England, a place whose peoples were, in various ways, the very
antitheses of their new rulers . . . These rulers began to control the developing debate;
and it was to be their version of things which would enter universal history. At the
outset they had no justification other than superior force and cohesive organisation.
Later an identity was proposed for the natives which cast them as foils to the
occupiers.” (Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, Vintage, 1996, p. 9)
A. Civilians and Barbarians
• Anglo-Irish Chronicles: a body of political writings about Ireland

produced during the 16th and 17th centuries, which were primarily concerned
with justifications for the expropriation of the country by the English crown,
commonly recycling prejudices and misconceptions that compared the Irish to
other uncivilised races in different historical and geographical contexts.
• Fynes Moryson (1556-1630): English traveller and writer, Moryson became in
1600 secretary to Sir Charles Blount, lord-deputy of Ireland. In 1617 he
published an account of his travels and of his experiences in Ireland, (where he
had witnessed O'Neill's rebellion) in a voluminous work entitled An
Itinerary.Another part of the Itinerary was republished in 1735 with the title
History of Ireland 1599-1603, with a short Narrative of the State of the
Kingdom from 1169.
• John Derricke: English engraver who accompanied Sir Henry Sidney on
campaigns against Hugh O’Neill in the 1570s. His detailed and skilfully
composed woodcuts in The Image of Ireland with A Discovery of Woodkarne
(1581) depict contemporary scenes in camp and battle, with illustrations of Irish
plundering from an English standpoint.
• Sir John Davies (1569-1626) English poet and lawyer, Davies became in 1603
attorney general in Ireland. Davies was very much committed to reform not just
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in the law but in religious affairs too, aiming to banish the catholic clergy from
Ireland and for enforcing church attendances. He also became heavily involved
in government efforts to establish the plantation of Ulster. In 1610 he wrote the
Discoverie of the True Causes why Ireland was never entirely subdued
(pub.1612), a well-written account of the constitutional standing of Ireland.
• Edmund Spenser (1552-1599): One of the most famous English Renaissance
poets and Poet Laureate, Spenser went to Ireland in the 1570s , probably in the
service of the newly appointed lord deputy, Arthur Grey. From 1579 to 1580, he
served with the English forces during the rebellions in Munster. After the defeat
of the rebels he was awarded lands in County Cork. Among his acquaintances in
the area was the poet Walter Raleigh, also a fellow colonist. In the early 1590s
Spenser wrote a prose pamphlet titled, A View of the Present State of Ireland.
Due to its inflammatory content, the pamphlet remained in manuscript form
until its publication in print in the mid-seventeenth century. The text argued that
Ireland would never be totally 'pacified' by the English until its indigenous
language and customs had been destroyed, if necessary by violence.
From A VIEW ON THE PRESENT STATE OF IRELAND (1596)
EUDOXUS: What is this that ye say of so many as remain English of them?

Why are not they that were once English abiding English still?
IRENIUS: No, for the most part of them are degenerated and grown almost
Irish, ‘yea and more malicious to the English that the very Irish themselves.
EUDOXUS: What hear I? And is it possible that an Englishman brought up
naturally in such sweet civility as England affords could find such liking in that
barbarous rudeness that he should forget his own nature and forgo his own
nation? How may this be, or what, I pray you, may be the cause hereof?
IRENIUS: Surely nothing but the first evil ordinance and institution of that
commonwealth. But thereof now is here no fit place to speak, lest by the
occasion thereof offering matter of a long discourse, we might be drawn from
this that we have in hand, namely the handling of abuses in the customs of
Ireland.
(. . . )
IRENIUS: . . . My reason is, for that those which will afterwards remain without
are stout and obstinate rebels, such as will never be made dutiful and obedient,
nor brought to labour or civil conversation, having once tasted that licentious
life, and being acquainted with spoil and outrages will ever after be ready for
the like occasions, so as there is no hope of their amendment or recovery, and
therefore needful to be cut off.
EUDOXUS: The end I assure me will be very short and much sooner than can
be in so great a trouble (as it seemeth) hoped for. Although there should none of
them fall by the sword, nor be slain by the soldier, yet thus being kept for
manurance, and their cattle from running abroad by this hard restraint, they
would quickly consume themselves and devour one another. The proof whereof
I saw sufficiently ensampled in those late wars in Munster, for notwithstanding
that the same was a most rich and plentiful country, full of corn and cattle, that
you would have thought they could have been able to stand long, yet ere one
year and a half they were brought to so wonderful wretchedness, as that any
stony heart would have rued the same. Out of every corner of the woods and
glens they came, creeping forth upon their hands, for their legs could not bear
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them. They looked anatomies of death, they spoke like ghosts crying out of their
graves, they did eat of the dead carrions, happy were they could find them, yea
and one another soon after in so much as the very carcasses they spared not to
scrape out of their graves. And if they find a plot of water cress or shamrocks,
there they flocked as to a feast for the time, yet not able long to continue
therewithal, that in short space there were none almost left and a most populous
and plentiful country suddenly left void of man or beast. Yet sure in all that war
there perished not many by the sword, but all by the extremity of famine, which
they themselves had wrought.
• English / Irish Polarities
CIVILISATION BARBARISM
PROTESTANTISM CATHOLICISM
ORDER LAWLESSNESS
RESTRAINT VIOLENCE
REASON IRRATIONALITY
B. THE STAGE IRISHMAN
• A term for stereotypical Irish characters on the English-language stage from the
17th century.
• As a product of colonialism, the first stage Irishman reflected a desire to stigmatise
the Irish as savages or anathemise them as traitors.
• Later versions sought to provide amusement to English audiences by exaggerating
the traits which differentiated the Irish from the English.
Irishmen on the stage, prior to the foundation of the Irish Literary Theatre of 1898
tend to fall into one or other of two categories - one, the lazy, crafty, and (in all
probability) inebriated buffoon who nonetheless has the gift of good humour and a
nimble way with words. . . ; the other the braggart (also partial to a ‘dhrop of the
besht’) who is likely to be s soldier or ex-soldier, boasting of having seen a great
deal of the world when he has probably been no further from his own country than
some English barracks and camp. (Fitz-simons 1983: 94)
He [the Stage Irishman] has an atrocious Irish brogue, makes perpetual jokes,
blunders and bulls in speaking, and never fails to utter, by way of Hibernian
seasoning, some wild screech or oath of Gaelic origin at every third word: he has
an unsurpassable gift of ‘blarney’ and cadges for tips and free drinks. His hair is of
a fiery rea; he is rosy-cheeked, massive and whiskey-loving. His face is one of
simian bestiality, with an expression of diabolical archness written all over it.. . .
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His main characteristics . . . are his swagger, his boisterousness and his pugnacy.
(Maurice Bourgeois, q in Styan 1991)
• William Shakespeare, Henry V

• Also known as The Cronicle History of Henry the fifth, it is a play by William
Shakespeare (thought to date from 1599) based on the life of King Henry V of
England.
• It deals with the events immediately before and after the Battle of Agincourt during
the Hundred Years' War.
• The play can be seen as a glorification of nationalistic pride and conquest, with the
Chorus, Archbishop of Canterbury, Fluellen, and Henry himself all being prime
examples.
• The play is connected to the English military ventures in Ireland that were
important at the time of the play's writing, notably the Earl of Essex's attempted
suppression of revolts in Ireland, since the Chorus directly refers to Essex's military
triumphs in the fifth act.
. . . the General of our gracious Empress -
As in good time he may - from Ireland coming,
Bringing rebellion broachèd on his sword,
How many would the peaceful city quit
To welcome him! . . .’ (V.1. 30-34)
• The Irish Captain Macmorris is considered to be the prototype for the Stage
Irishman.
HENRY V, ACT III, SCENE 2
Enter Fluellen, Gower following

GOWER Captain Fluellen, you must come presently to the mines. The Duke
of Gloucester would speak with you.
FLUELLEN To the mines? Tell you the Duke, it is not so good to come to
the mines, for, look you, the mines is not according to the disciplines of
the war. The concavities of it is not sufficient; for, look you,
th’athversary, you may discuss unto the Duke, look you, is digt himself
four yard under the countermines. By Cheshu, I thin ‘a will plow up all,
if there is not better directions.
GOWER The Duke of Gloucester, to whom the order of the siege is given,
is altogether directed by an Irishman, a very valiant gentleman, I’faith.
FLUELLEN It is Captain Macmorris, is it not?
GOWER I think it be.
FLUELLEN By Cheshu, he is an ass, as in the world; I will verify as much
in his beard. He has no more directions in the true disciplines of the wars,
look you, of the Roman disciplines, than is a puppy-dog.
Enter Captain Macmorris and Captain Jamy
GOWER Here ‘a comes, and the Scots captain, Captain Jamy, with him.
FLUELLEN Captain Jamy is a marvellous falorous gentleman, that is
certain, and of great expedition and knowledge in th’auchient wars, upon
my particular knowledge of his directions. By Cheshu, he will maintain
15
his arguments as well as any military man in the world, in the disciplines
of the pristine wars of the Romans.
JAMY I say gud-day, Captain Fluellen.
FLUELLEN Good-e’en to your worship, good Captain James.
GOWER How now, Captain Macmorris, have you quit the mines? Have the
pioneers given o’er?
MACMORRIS By Chrish, la, ‘tish ill done! The work ish give over, the
trompet sound the retreat. By my hand I swear, and my father’s soul, the
work ish ill done: it is give over. I would have blowed up the town, so
Crish save ma, la, in an hour. O, ‘tish ill done, ‘tish ill done - by my
hand, ‘tish ill done!
FLUELLEN Captain Macmorris, I beseech you now, will you voutsafe me,
look you, a few disputations with you, as partly touching or concerning
the disciplines of the war, the Roman wars, in the way of argument, look
you, and friendly communication? - partly to satisfy my opinion, and
partly for the satisfaction, look you, of my mind, - as touching the
direction of the military discipline, that is the point.
JAMY It sall be vary gud, gud feith, gud captens, bath, and I sall quit you
with gud leve, as I may pick occasion: that sall I, marry.
MACMORRIS It is no time to discourse, so Crish save me! The day is hot,
and the weather, and the wars, and the King, and the Dukes - it is not
time to discourse, the town is beseeched, and the trumpet call us to the
breach, and we talk, and, be Chrish, do nothing; ‘tis shame for us all: so
God sa’ me, ‘tis shame to stand still, it is shame, by my hand - and there
is throats to be cut, and works to be done, and there ish nothing done, so
Chrish sa’ me, la!
JAMY By the mess, ere theise eyes of mine take themselves to slomber,
ay’ll de gud service, or ay’ll lig I’th’grund for it, ay, or go to death! And
qy’ll pqy’t as valorously as I may, that sall I suerly do, that is the breff
and the long. Marry, I wad full fain hear some question ‘tween you tway.
FLUELLEN Captain Macmorris, I think, look you, under your correction,
there is not many of your nation -
MACMORRIS Of my nation? What ish my nation? Ish a villain, and a
bastard, and a knave, and a rascal. What ish my nation? Who talks of my
nation?
FLUELLEN Look you, if you take the matter otherwise than is meant,
Captain Macmorris, peradventure I shall think you do not use me with
that affability as in discretion you ought to use me, look you, being as
good a man as yourself, both in the disciplines of war, and in the
derivation of my birth, and in other particularities.
MACMORRIS I do not know you so good a man as myself. So Chrish save
me, I will cut off your head.
GOWER Gentlemen both, you will mistake each other.
JAMY Ah, that’s a foul fault! (A parley is sounded)
GOWER The town sounds a parley.
FLUELLEN Captain Macmorris, when there is more better opportunity to
be required, look you, I will be so bold as to tell you, I know the
disciplines of war; and there is an end.
(Exeunt)
16
• English / Irish Polarities
KING BUFOON
MASTER SERVANT
KNOWLEDGE IGNORANCE
RESTRAINT BOASTFULNESS
ENGLISH HIBERNO ENGLISH
SUPERIORITY INFERIORITY
• Stage Irishmen in Anglo-Irish Literature:
• A recurrent strategy of Anglo-Irish dramatists was to subvert the stereotype

by enabling their Irish characters to defeat with comical aplomb the ruses of
English tricksters who try to gull them.
George Farquhar (c. 1677-1707): The Twin Rivals
Thomas Sheridan: The Brave Irishman
Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816): The Rivals
• In the 19th century, Irish melodrama brought further changes to the cliché.
The comic melodrama transforms the stage Irishman into an intelligent and
witty rustic who becomes an agent of mediation between Englishness and
Irishness.
• Dion Boucicault (1820-1890): playwright, actor, and producer, Dion

Boucicault's remarkable career began in 1841 with the successful production
of his own London Assurance and continued virtually unabated until his
death in 1890. As a playwright, he embraced varied genres: historical
romance (Louis XI), domestic plays (Dot -an adaptation of Dicken's The
Cricket in the Hearth-), when Irish plays ( Arrah na Pogue, The Shaughraun
and Robert Emmet), American plays (The Octoroon), detective plays
(Mercy Dodd or Presumptive Evidence), farces (Forbidden Fruit). He also
wrote the acting version of Rip Van Winkle.
• The Irish Trilogy (The Colleen Bawn, Arrah-na-Pogue, The Shaughraun)
o The Colleen Bawn: The play is focused on the story of the beautiful
but untutored country girl, Eily O’Connor, whom her gentleman
lover (Cregan) wants to kill in order to avoid a misalliance. Myles-
na-Goppaleen (Boucicault’s modified stage-Irishman) is an engaging
17
rustic who foils the murder attempt and makes Cregan accept Eily as
his bride.
o The Shaughraun: The play is a political melodrama in which
Boucicault’s sympathetic version of the stage-irishman has advanced
to the title role. Conn the Shaughraun, a good-hearted wanderer, has
helped an ex-Fenian rebel, Robert Ffolliott, escape from Australia.
With the help of Harvey Duff, traitor and police spy, Robert is
arrested by the English Captain Molineaux. When Duff and the
villain Kinchela stage an escape for the prisoner in order to shoot
him on the run, Conn takes his place and is apparently killed. A
pardon for the Fenians arrives in time to secure the happy ending,
with Conn turning well and alive, and Molineaux marrying Robert’s
sister, Claire.
C. CONTEMPORARY REVISIONS OF THE ANGLO-IRISH

NARRATIVES
a) Seamus Heaney: Traditions.

• Seamus Heaney (1939 - ) was born into a nationalist Irish Catholic family
at Mossbawn, in a rural area thirty miles to the north-west of Belfast. His
work is often set in rural Londonderry, the county of his childhood. Hints of
sectarian violence can be found in many of his poems, even works that on
the surface appear to deal with something else. Like the Troubles
themselves, Heaney's work is deeply associated with the lessons of history,
sometimes even prehistory. In 1995 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for
literature
TRADITIONS
Our guttural muse

was bulled long ago
by the alliterative tradition,
her uvula grows
vestigial, forgotten
like the coccyx
or a Brigid’s Cross
yellowing in some outhouse
while custom, that ‘most

sovereign mistress’,
beds us down into
the British Isles.
We are to be proud
18
of our Elizabethan English:

‘varsity’, for example,
is grass-roots stuff with us;
we ‘deem’ or we ‘allow’
when we suppose
and some cherished archaisms
are correct Shakespearean.
Nor to speak of the furled

consonants of the lowlanders
shuttling obstinately
between bawn and mossland.
III
MacMorris, gallivanting
round the Globe, whinged
to courtier and groundling
who had heard of us
as going very bare

of learning, as wild as hares,
as anatomies of death:
‘What ish my nation?’
And sensibly, though so much

later, the wandering Bloom
replied, ‘Ireland,’ said Bloom,
‘I was born here. Ireland.’
b) Brian Friel: Making History

• Brian Friel (1929 - ): born in a Catholic family, in Omagh, County Tyrone
in Northern Ireland, Brian Friel is one of Ireland's most prominent
playwrights. Though his father was a teacher, his grandparents were
illiterate peasants from County Donegal whose first language was Irish.
Thus his own family exemplifies the divisions between traditional and
modern Ulster and Ireland, a recurring theme for Friel. Donegal, where he
moved in 1969, is another influence that features strongly in Friel's life and
work. Many of his plays are set in fictional Ballybeg, ‘a remote part of
Donegal‘. In 1980, Friel helped found the Field Day Theatre Company
which is committed to the search for "a middle ground between the
country's entrenched positions" to help the Irish explore new identities for
themselves.
• Making History (1988) dramatizes the writing of Irish history as well as

the historical events themselves before and after the Battle of Kinsale
(1601). Its main hero is the historical persona of Hugh O'Neill, Earl of
Tyrone, the leader of the last Gaelic rebellion against the Tudor re-conquest
19
of Ireland. This figure has accrued contradictory meanings from the late
16th-century onwards. Vilified in Anglo-Irish chronicles as traitor and rebel,
he was construed as a mythic hero by the nationalist discourse. Given the
persistence of this ambiguity in colonial writings, Brian Friel attempts to
dismantle traditional representations of the Ulster chieftain, re-constructing
him in accordance to a post-colonial agenda. Making History employs
intertextuality in order to question the mechanics of historical definition
through which previous texts like Peter Lombard’s De Regno Hiberniae
Commentarius (1632), which promoted O’Neill as the leader of a European
counter-Reformation, the Anglo-Irish Chronicles who viewed him as an
Irish barbarian, or Shakespeare’s Henry V that transformed him into a “stage
Irishman” have fixed men and events in their “official” readings.
MAKING HISTORY , FABER AND FABER, 1989
LOMBARD: I don’t believe that a period of history - a given space of time -

my life - your life -that it contains within it one ‘true’ interpretation just
waiting to be mined. But I do believe that it may contain within it
several possible narratives: the life of Hugh O’Neill can be told in many
different ways. And those ways are determined by the needs and the
demands and the expectations of different people and different eras.
What do they want to hear? How do they want it told? [. . .] (pp.15-16)
O’NEILL: This is my last battle, Peter.

LOMBARD: Battle? What battle?
O’NEILL: That [book].
LOMBARD: What are you talking about?
O’NEILL: That thing there.
LOMBARD: Your history?
O’NEILL: Your history. I’m an old man. I have no position, no power, no
money. No, I’m not whingeing - I’m not pleading. But I’m telling you that
I’m going to fight you on that and I’m going to win. [. . . ]
LOMBARD: Hold on now -wait -wait- wait - wait. Just tell me one thing. Is
this book some kind of a malign scheme? Am I doing something
reprehensible?
O’NEILL: you are going to embalm me in - in - in a florid lie.
LOMBARD: Will I lie, Hugh?
O’NEILL: I need the truth, Peter. That’s all that’s left. The schemer, the leader,
the liar, the statesman, the lecher, the patriot, the drunk, the soured, bitter
émigré - put it all in, Peter. Record the whole life - that’s what you said
yourself. [. . . ]
LOMBARD: Let me explain what my outline is. May I? Please? And if you
object to it - or any detail in it - I’ll rewrite the whole thing in any way you
want. That is a solemn promise. Can I be fairer than that? Now. I start with
your birth and your noble genealogy and I look briefly at those formative
years when you were fostered with the O’Quinns and the O’Hagans and
received your early education from the bards and the poets. I then move -
O’NEILL: England.
20
LOMBARD: What’s that?

O’NEILL: I spent nine years in England with Leicester and Sidney.
LOMBARD: You did indeed. I have all the material here. We then look at the
years when you consolidated your position as the pre-eminent Gaelic ruler
in the country, and that leads to those early intimations you must have had
of an emerging nation state. And now we come to the first of the key
events: that September when all the people of Ulster came together at the
crowning stone at Tullyhogue outside Dungannon, and the golden slipper
is thrown over your head and fastened to your foot, and the white staff in
placed in your right arm, and the True Bell of St Patrick peals out across
the land, and you are proclaimed . . . The O’Neill.
O’NEILL: That was a political ploy.
LOMBARD: It may have been that, too.
O’NEILL: The very next month I begged Elizabeth for pardon.
LOMBARD: But an occasion of enormous symbolic importance for your
people - six hundred and thirty continuous years of O’Neill hegemony.
Right, I then move on to that special relationship between yourself and
Hugh O’Donnell; the patient forging of the links with Spain and Rome; the
uniting of the whole Ulster into one great dynasty that finally inspired all
the Gaelic chieftains to come together under your leadership. And
suddenly the nation state was becoming a reality. [. . . ] Now, the second
key event: the Nine Years War between yourself and England culminating
in the legendary battle of Kinsale and the crushing of the most magnificent
Gaelic army ever assembled.
O’NEILL: They routed us in less than an hour, Peter. Isn’t that the point of
Kinsale?
LOMBARD: You lost a battle - that has to be said. But the telling of it can still
be a triumph.
O’NEILL: Kinsale was a disgrace. Mountjoy routed us. We ran away like rats.
LOMBARD: And again that’s not the point.
O’NEILL: You’re not listening to me now. We disgraced ourselves at Kinsale.
LOMBARD: And then I come to my third and final key point; and I’m calling
this section - I’m rather proud of the title - I’ve named it ‘The Flight of the
Earls’. That has a ring to it, too, hasn’t it? That tragic but magnificent
exodus of the Gaelic aristocracy -
O’NEILL: Peter -
LOMBARD: When the leaders of the ancient civilisation took boat from
Rathmullan that September evening and set sail for Europe -
O’NEILL: As we pulled out from Rathmullan the McSwineys stoned us from
the shore!
LOMBARD: Then their journey across Europe when every crowned head
welcomed and fêted them. And then the final coming to rest. Here. In
Rome.
O’NEILL: And the six years after Kinsale - before the Flight of the Earls -
aren’t they going to be recorded? When I lived like a criminal, skulking
round the countryside - my countryside! - hiding from the English, from
the Upstarts, from the Old English, but most assiduously hiding from my
brother Gaels who couldn’t wait to strip me of every blade of grass I ever
owned. And then when I could endure that humiliation no longer, I ran
away! If these were ‘my people’ then to hell with my people! The Flight of
21
the Earls - you make it sound like a lap of honour. We ran away just as we
ran away at Kinsale. We were going to look after our own skins! That’s
why we ‘took boat’ from Rathmullan. That’s why the great O’Neill is here
- at rest - here - in Rome. Because we ran away. [. . .] Those are the facts.
There us no way you can make unpalatable facts palatable. And your point
- just what is your point, Peter? [. . .]
LOMBARD: That’s exactly what my point is. People think they want to know
the ‘fact’; they think they believe in some sort of empirical truth, but what
they really want is a story. And that’s what this will be: the events of your
life categorised and classified and then structured as you would structure
any story. No, no, I’m not talking about falsifying, about lying, for
heaven’s sake. I’m simply talking about making a pattern. That’s what I’m
doing with all this stuff - offering a cohesion to that random catalogue of
deliberate achievement and sheer accident that constitutes your life. And
that cohesion will be a narrative that people will read and be satisfied by.
And that narrative will be as true and as objective as I can make it - with
the help of the Holy Spirit. Would it be profane to suggest that that was the
method the Four Evangelists used? - took the haphazard events in Christ’s
life and shaped them into a story, into four complementary stories. And
those stories are true stories. And we believe them. We call them gospel,
Hugh, don’t we? (He laughs suddenly and heartily) Would you look at that
man! Why are you so miserable about? This of this [book]as an act of
pietas. Ireland is reduced as it has never been reduced before - we are
talking about a colonised people on the brink of extinction. This isn’t the
time for a critical assessment of your ‘ploys’ and your ‘disgraces’ and your
‘betrayal’ - that’s the stuff of another history for another time. Now is the
time for a hero. Now is the time for a heroic literature. So I’m offering
Gaelic Ireland two things. I’m offering them this narrative that has the
elements of myth. And I’m offering them Hugh O’Neill as a national hero.
A hero and the story of a hero [. . .](pp 63-67)
22
COLONIAL LITERATURE(1):
LITERARY THEMES AND TROPES

OF NATIONALISM
1. KEY EVENTS in the Unionist vs. Nationalist sense of history:
1689 James II lands at Kinsale. The siege of Derry (The Apprenticeboys

March).
1690 William III lands at Carrickfergus. Battle of the Boyne (12 July).
1690-91The siege of Limmerick (Patrick Sarsfield).
1695 Penal Laws restrict Catholic rights. Scots Presbyterians are also
disabled.
1715; 1745Jacobite risings in Scotland.
1776 American Declaration of Independence
1789 Fall of Bastille.
1791 United Irishmen founded in Belfast.
1795 Foundation of Orange Order.
1798 United Irishmen’s Rebellion helped by French troops (Wolfe Tone).
1800 Act of Union
1803 Rising of Robert Emmet
1829 Catholic Emancipation (Daniel O’Connell)
1845-49The Great Potato Famine
2. Feminine Tropes of Ireland
• If the colonial discourse is based on a binary model of thought predicated upon the
basic opposition established between self and other, in terms of gender, the colonial
project has often been metaphorically constructed as the attempt “of the male
colonizer to subdue and penetrate the female territory of the colonized people”[1].
Very often, the western imagination has translated the conquered territories of India
or Africa, for example, into images of exotic women, “seductive, seducible, and
ultimately at the mercy of the masculine forces competing for domination over
them”[2]. In response to this colonial feminization, the colonized have attempted to
“produce a reverse discourse of overdetermined masculity”[3], in which the land
becomes a “mother forced into penury by foreign invaders”[4], requiring her sons to
fight the oppressors in order to restore her former possessions. Ireland, though
placed in the paradoxical position of being at once Western and a colony, has not
escaped being culturally cast as “other” and “female” in both colonial and
countercolonial contexts.
• As such, in the principal discourses of Irish nationalism, the two main feminine
figurations for Ireland were: the Spéar-bhean (literally meaning a ‘sky-woman’), a
beautiful maiden queen in search for a redeemer for her occupied nation, or as the
Sean Bhean Bocht (the ‘Poor Old Woman), a sorrowful mother summoning her
sons to protect and defend her homestead.
23
• Early Irish Literature

o Yet both figures claim their ancestry in the distant Gaelic tradition, where
Celtic mythology features a number of formidable divine matriarchs who
stand, at times, as female personifications of Ireland. Starting with the mythic
Danu – the mother goddess of the Tuatha de Danaan, the divine race of Irish
myth -, some of the attributes of this archetypal female agency are further
embodied across a range of goddesses associated with the sovereignty and
prosperity of the land (Eriu, Banbha and Fodla), with sexual potency, war
and death (Mórrigan, Babh and Macha), or with the landscape itself, as in the
popular tradition of Cailleach Beara (the Old Woman of Beara, one of the
great peninsulas of the South-West Irish coast), a queen who supposedly
lived seven lifetimes, each time with a new husband. If early Irish literary
texts of the vision type present future kings of Ireland having their claims to
the land legitimated through prophetic encounters with one such sovereignty
goddess, the Irish folklore rescripts the narrative of the legitimacy theme by
turning the Old Woman of Beara into a shape-shifting hag who displays
youthful loveliness to the rightful king.
• The 18th century “aisling”

o Nevertheless, in the context of a colonized Ireland, where the Gaelic culture
and the clan system were inevitably broken, the nature and identity of the
true king become problematic. After the Williamite War and the enactment
of the Penal Laws, native Irish poetry of grows increasingly political in
character, though hiding its expectation of political deliverance “in what
seemed like harmless love songs” [11] which rework the conventions of the
Gaelic vision tale. Thus the eighteenth-century aisling (vision) poem
repeatedly looked outside the country for liberation and the true sovereign,
evoking the former sovereignty goddess into the image of “a willing [and]
defenceless spéirbhean [sic] or ‘sky-woman’, who would only recover her
happiness when a young liberator would come to her defence.” [12]
o Aogan O Rathaille (c. 1675-1729): Gile na Gile (Brightness Most

Bright) (c. 1709) and the “spear-bhean”
BRIGHTNESS MOST BRIGHT (GILE NA GILE)
The brightness of Brightness I saw in a lonely path,

Crystal of crystal, her blue eyes tinged with green,
Melody of melody, her speech not more with age,
The ruddy and white appeared in her glowing cheeks.
Plaiting of plaiting in every hair of her yellow locks,

That robbed the earth of its brilliancy by their full sweeping,
An ornament brighter than glass on her swelling breast,
Which was fashioned at her creation in the world above.
24
A tale of knowledge she told me, all lonely as she was

News of the return of HIM to the place which is his by kingly
descent,
News of the destruction of the bands who expelled him,
And other tidings which, through sheer fear, I will not put in my
lays.
Oh, folly of follies for me to go up close to her!

By the captive I was bound fast a captive;
As I implored the Son of Mary of aid me, she bounded from me,
And the maiden went off in a flash to the fairy mansion of Luachair.
I rush in mad race running with a bounding heart,

Through margins of a morass, through meads, through a barren
moorland.
I reach the strong mansion - the way I came I know not -
That dwelling of dwellings, reared by wizard sorcery.
They burst into laughter, mockingly - a troop of wizards

And a band of maidens, trim, with plaited locks;
In the bondage of fetters they put me without much respite,
While to my maiden clung a clumsy, lubberly clown.
I told her then, in words the sincerest,

How it will became her to be united to an awkward, sorry churl,
While the fairest thrice over of all the Scotic race
Was waiting to receive her as his beauteous bride.
As she hears my voice she weeps through wounded pride,

The streams run down plenteously from her glowing cheeks,
She sends me with a guide for my safe conduct from the mansion,
She is the Brightness of Brightness I saw upon a lonely path.
o In a late eighteenth-century text composed by the blind poet Liam O

hIfearnain this female persona of Ireland is specifically named Caitlin ni
Uallachain (Cathleen ni Houlihan), and identified both with the sovereignty
of Ireland and with the Blessed Virgin, a cluster of associations that will be
carried over by subsequent invocations of Ireland under a female aspect [13].
o Such associations inform James Clarence Mangan’s (1803-49) My Dark

Rosaleen (1846).
MY DARK ROSALEEN
O my Dark Rosaleen,
Do not sigh, do not weep!
The priests are on the ocean green,
They march along the Deep.
25
There’s wine . . . from the royal Pope

Upon the ocean green;
And Spanish ale shall give you hope,
My Dark Rosaleen!
My own Rosaleen!
Shall glad your heart, shall give you hope,
Shall give you health, and help, and hope,
My Dark Rosaleen.
Over hills and through dales

Have I roamed for your sake;
All yesterday I sailed with sails
On river and on lake.
The Erne . . . at its highest flood
I dashed across unseen,
For there was lightning in my blood,
My Dark Rosaleen!
My own Rosaleen!
Oh! There was lightning in my blood,
Red lightning lightened through my blood,
My Dark Rosaleen!
All day long in unrest

To and fro do I move
The very soul within my breast
Is wasted for you, love!
The heart . . . in my bosom faints
To think of you, my Queen,
My life of life, my saint of saints,
My Dark Rosaleen!
My own Rosaleen!
To hear your sweet and sad complaints,
My life, my love, my saint of saints,
My Dark Rosaleen!
Woe and pain, pain and woe,

Are my lot night and noon,
To see your bright face clouded so,
Like to the mournful moon.
But yet . . . will I rear your throne
Again in golden sheen;
‘Tis you shall reign, shall reign alone,
My Dark Rosaleen!
My own Rosaleen!
‘Tis you shall have the golden throne,
‘Tis you shall reign and reign alone,
My Dark Rosaleen!
Over dews, over sands
26
Will I fly for your weal;

Your holy delicate white hands
Shall girdle me with steel.
At home . . . in your emerald bowers,
From morning’s dawn till e’en.
You’ll pray for me, my flower of flowers,
My Dark Rosaleen!
My fond Rosaleen!
You’ll think of me through daylight’s hours,
My virgin flower, my flower of flowers,
My Dark Rosaleen.
I could scale the blue air,

I could plough the high hills,
Oh, I could kneel all night in prayer,
To heal your many ills!
And one . . . beamy smile from you
Would float like light between
My toils and me, my own, my true,
My Dark Rosaleen!
My fond Rosaleen!
Would give me life and soul anew,
A second life, a soul anew,
My Dark Rosaleen!
O! the Erne shall run red

With redundance of blood,
The earth shall rock beneath your tread,
And flames wrap hill and wood,
And gun-peal and slogan cry,
Wake many a glen serene,
Ere you shall fade, ere you shall die,
My Dark Rosaleen!
My own Rosaleen!
The Judgement Hour must first be nigh,
Ere you can fade, ere you can die,
My Dark Rosaleen!
• The popular ballad and the “sean bhean bhocht”

o In their turn, the popular ballads of the late eighteenth- and
nineteenth-centuries blend the traditions of the Old Woman of Beara
with those of the goddesses of war and death, which stand for the
darker side of the Celtic matriarch. Their favourite trope becomes
thus the Sean Bhean Bocht, an idealised persona of the land who
suffers historic wrongs, and, Kali-like, requires the sacrifice of
successive generations of sons in the hope that the recurring heroic
failures to eject the invader will finally prove successful. Richard
Kearney has suggested that the Sean Bhean Bocht has been turned
into an emblem of Irish nationalism because it is closely linked to its
27
sacrificial mythology in which the blood sacrifice of the heroes is

needed to free and redeem Ireland, at the same time in which these
heroic sacrificial martyrs are rewarded by being “remembered for
ever” [14]. Moreover, this nationalist sacrificial mythology can be
further tied to pagan concepts of “seasonal rejuvenation” and the
sacrificial aspects of Christianity in the Crucifixion and tradition of
martyrdom [15].
THE WEARIN’ OF THE GREEN
Oh, Paddy dear! an’ did ye hear the news that’s goin’ round?
The shamrock is by law forbid to grow on Irish ground.
No more St. Patrick’s Day we’ll keep, his colour can’t be seen,
For there’s a cruel law agin the wearin’ o’ the green!
I met wid Napper Tandy, and he took me by the hand.

And he asaid, “How’s poor Ould Ireland, and how does she stand?”
She’s the most distressful country that iver yet was seen,
For they’re hangin’ men and women there for wearin’ o’ the green.
An’ if the color we must wear is England’s cruel red,

Let it remind us of the blood that Ireland has shed;
Then pull the shamrock from your hat, and throw it on the sod, -
And never fear, ‘twill take root there, tho’ under foot ‘tis trod!
When law can stop the blades of grass from growing’ as they grow,
And when the leaves in summer-time their color dare not show,
Then I will change the color, too, I wear in my caubeen,
But till that day, praise God, I’ll stick to wearin’ o’ the green.
• Cathleen Ni Houlihan
o William Butler Yeats’s Cathleen Ni Houlihan, the play written in
1902, epitomizes this tradition, constituting a mythic nexus for
personifications of Ireland. The play makes use of what Valente calls
the double-woman trope (i.e. the combination of the Spéar-bhean
and the Sean Bhean Bocht who is both young and old, mother and
bride, sexual and pure) in order to create its dynamic tension.
Located with naturalistic precision in 1798, the time of the historical
French landing at Killala, which signalled the beginning of the
United Irishmen Rebellion, the play is set in the cottage of the
Gillane family, where the eldest son, Michael, is about to be married
the next day. An old woman arrives who, taken for a beggar at first,
starts to bemoan that she has been set wandering by “too many
strangers in the house,” who took from her “four beautiful green
fields”[17] and then tells of the sacrifices young men have made for
her across the ages. Mesmerized by her words, Michael decides to
forsake his family and bride in order to go off to fight in the brewing
insurrection, and, as the son leaves, the old woman offers no doubt
as to what his fate will be.
28
W.B. YEATS
CATHLEEN NI HOOLIHAN (1902)

PERSONS IN THE PLAY: PETER GILLANE
MICHAEL GILLANE (his son, going to be married)
PATRICK GILLANE (a lad of 12, Michael’s brother)
BRIDGET GILLANE (Peter’s wife)
DELIA CAHEL (engaged to Michael)
THE POOR OLD WOMAN
NEIGHBOURS
Interior of a cottage close to Killala, in 1798. Bridget is standing at a table

undoing a parcel. Peter is sitting at one side of the fire, Patrick at the other.
[. . . ]
Bridget: Do you see anything?
Michael: I see an old woman coming up the path.
Bridget: Who is it, I wonder?
Michael: I don’t think it’s one of the neighbours, but she has her cloak over her
face.
Bridget: Maybe it’s the same woman Patrick saw a while ago. It might be some
poor woman heard we were making ready for the wedding, and came to look for
her share.
Peter: I may as well put the money out of sight. There’s no use leaving it out for
every stranger to look at.
Michael: There she is, father! [An old woman passes the window slowly. She
looks at Michael as she passes.] I’d sooner a stranger not to come to the house
the night before the wedding. [. . .]
[The old woman comes in, Michael stands aside to make way for her.]
Old Woman: God save all here!
Peter: God save you kindly.
Old Woman: You have good shelter here.
Peter: You are welcome to whatever shelter we have.
Bridget: Sit down there by the fire and welcome.
Old Woman [warming her hands]: There’s a hard wind outside. [Michael
watches her curiously from the door. Peter comes over to the table.]
Peter: Have you travelled far to-day?
Old Woman: I have travelled far, very far; there are few have travelled so far as
myself
Peter: it is a pity, indeed, for any person to have no place of their own.
Old Woman: That is true for you, indeed, and it is long I am on the road since I
first went wondering. It is seldom I have any rest. [. . .]
Bridget: What was it put you astray?
Old Woman: Too many strangers in the house
Bridget: Indeed you look as if you had had your share of trouble.
Old Woman: I have had trouble, indeed.
Bridget: What was it put the trouble on you?
Old Woman: My land was taken from me.
Peter: Was it much land they took from you?
29
Old Woman: My four beautiful green fields.

[. . .]
Bridget[to the old woman]: Will you have a drink of milk?
Old Woman: It is not food or drink that I want.
Peter[offering the shilling]: Here is something for you.
Old Woman: That is not that I want. It is not silver I want.
Peter: What is it you would be asking for?
Old Woman: If anyone would give me help, he must give me himself, he must
give me all.
Michael: Have you no man of your own, ma’am?
Old Woman: I have not. With all the lovers that brought me their love, I never
set out the bed for any.
Michael: Are you lonely going the roads, ma’am?
Old Woman: I have my thoughts and I have my hopes.
Michael: What hopes have you to hold to?
Old Woman: The hope of getting my beautiful fields back again, the hope of
putting the strangers out of my house.
Michael: What way will you do that, ma’am?
Old Woman: I have good friends that will help me. They are gathering to help
me now. I am not afraid. If they are put down to-day, they will get the upper-
hand to-morrow. [She gets up.] I must be going to meet my friends. They are
coming to help me, and I must be there to welcome them. I must call the
neighbours together to welcome them.
Michael: I will go with you
Bridget: It is not her friends you have to go and welcome, Michael; it is the girl
coming into the house you have to welcome. You have plenty to do; it is food
and drink you have to bring to the house. [. . .]
Peter[to Bridget]: Who is she, do you think, at all?
Bridget: You did not tell us your name yet, ma’am.
Old Woman: Some call me The Poor Old Woman, and there are some that call
me Cathleen ny Hoolihan.
Peter: I think I knew someone of that name once. Who was it, I wonder? It must
have been someone I knew when I was a boy. No, no, I remember I heard it in a
song.
Old Woman [who is standing in the doorway]: They are wondering that there
were songs made for me; there have been many songs made for me. I heard one
on the wind this morning. [She sings.][. . .]
Michael: I do not know what that song means; but tell me something I can do
for you.
Old Woman: Come over to me, Michael. [. . .][She goes out. Her voice is heard
outside, singing.] They shall be remembered for ever;
They shall be alive for ever;
They shall be speaking for
ever;
The people shall hear them for
ever.
[. . . ]
[Michael breaks away from Delia and goes towards the neighbours at the
door.]
30
Michael: Come, we have no time to lose; we must follow her. [Michael and the
neighbours go out.]
Peter [laying his hand on Patrick’s arm]: Did you see an old woman going
down the path?
Patrick: I did not; but I saw a young girl, and she had the walk of a queen.
THE END
• While essentially a colonial by-product, the figure of Cathleen has

"congealed into republican rhetoric," [21], and the woman-nation equation
has carried over into the post-colonial imagination, where such traditional
feminine figures of the nation have been reduced “to a metaphor for national
identity and a powerful interpellative figure in the nationalist struggle for
the state”[22]. As Fleming remarks, any feminine national icons, “while
seeming to empower women, actually displace them outside history into the
realm of myth. This effectively re-inscribes the woman as devoid of
agency”[23]. No wonder then that Cathleen has become an extremely
problematic symbol not only in contemporary Irish literary and cultural
studies, but also for the writers who attempt to reproduce such symbolic
figures of women in their work. The trope is thus deconstructed in a series
of texts that include James Joyce’s short-story A Mother (included in his
Dubliners, 1905), Samuel Beckett’s Miss Counihan, the Irish mistress of the
title character of his novel Murphy (1938), or contemporary plays like Brian
Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa (1990) and Tom Murphy’s Bailengangaire
(1985).
31
COLONIAL LITERATURE (2)
THE “BIG HOUSE” THEME

IN IRISH LITERATURE
1) 18th-century events:
• 1704 : The Sacramental Test Act, making political office & membership in
municipal corporations available only to those who receive communion according
to the Church of Ireland (excluding both Roman Catholics and Protestant
dissidents); penal laws reduce Catholic landowners; English trade laws restrict Irish
export & trade industries. The Protestant Ascendancy begins.
• 1720: The Declaratory Act, gave to the British Parliament legislative jurisdiction
over Irish affairs, the authority “to make laws and statutes of sufficient force and
validity to bind the kingdom and people of Ireland.”
• 1767-1722: Lord Townsend establishes a resident Lord Lieutenant-ship in Ireland,
as direct representative of Royal English power in Irish government
• 1778: First Protestant Volunteer Force forms, a national volunteer army formed by,
and for the defense of, the Protestant Ascendancy. Their threat, combined with the
crisis in America, leads to removal of most restrictions on Irish trade.
• 1782 “The Constitution of 1782”: a series of concessions to the Irish Parliament,
including repeal of Declaratory Act, initiated largely due to British concern over the
revolutions in France and America
• 1782-1800“Grattan's Parliament”: under leadership of Henry Grattan, the Irish
Parliament holds its greatest legislative independence. Irish economic revival
follows. As English and Anglo-Irish aristocracy settle in Ireland, the splendor of
Georgian Dublin reaches its height
2) ASCENDANCY: term used to refer to the Protestant landed class

• The 18th century is termed the Protestant Ascendancy, for Ireland was ruled by
Anglican (not radical Protestant) aristocrats who were determined to sustain their
power over Ireland. These were the descendants of some of the oldest Anglo-Irish
families who had switched their loyalties to the Protestant Church over the centuries,
and now were firmly established as the great land-owning families throughout
particularly the eastern half of Ireland.
• Among the achievements of this ruling class are: Trinity College established as their
seat of learning; the Irish Parliament in Dublin--the only independent Parliament in
any British colony in the entire empire-; and Dublin, the center of the Protestant
power, turned into a true capital.
• Prominent Ascendancy writers include:
o Edmund Burke (1729-97): political philosopher
o George Berkeley (1685-1753): empiricist
o Oliver Goldsmith (?1730-74): novelist, poet, playwright
o Jonathan Swift (1667 –1745): satirist, poet, essayist
• In 1925, addressing the Irish Senate, Yeats claims kinship with this class and its
heritage: "We are no petty people. We are one of the great stocks of Europe. We
are the people of Burke; we are the people of Grattan; we are the people of Swift, the
people of Emmet, the people of Parnell. We have created the most of the modern
32
literature of this country. We have created the best of its political intelligence."
Thus in "Blood and the Moon," his poem with which this History text opens, Yeats
aligns himself with the cultural achievements of this era-at least as he poetically
imagines those achievements-the poetic work of "Goldsmith and the Dean, Berkeley
and Burke."
3) 19th-century events:
• 1798: On 24 May the United Irishmen Rebellion arises, with particularly fierce
fighting in Wexford; it is crushed within six weeks; Wolfe Tone, leader of the
“Rebellion of 1798,” dies, reportedly by suicide, in prison.
• 1801: The Act of Union, dissolving the Irish Parliament and merging England and
Ireland into a single legislative body within the United Kingdom, passes the Irish
Parliament, despite protests led by Henry Grattan.
• 1803: Robert Emmet leads failed rebellion in Dublin; captured and executed along
with 20 followers. Leads to harsher coercion acts from British parliament.
• 1823:The Catholic Association founded, organized at the parish level and funded
by the “Catholic Rent”; becomes the main instrument and resource for O'Connell's
emancipation campaign
• 1829: Led by Daniel O'Connell, “The Liberator,” Catholic Emancipation occurs
after decades-long campaign
• 1840-42O'Connell leads campaign for Repeal of the Act of Union, unsuccessfully;
new national schools virtually destroy Irish as a spoken language.
• 1845“Queen's Colleges” established at Belfast, Cork, Galway
• 1850: Irish Tenant Right League forms, to work on behalf of tenants against
landlords and proprietors
• 1870: The Home Government Association, soon to become the Home Rule League,
is founded by Isaac Butt
• 1875: Charles Stewart Parnell enters Parliament; soon assumes leadership of Home
Rule League
• 1879: Michael Davitt forms the Irish Land League, working for land reform and the
opposition to evictions; Parnell soon becomes its president.
• 1881: Gladstone’s Second Land Act, further improving lot of tenants and
decreasing power of landlords
4) Post-Union patterns:
o Following the Union, England took direct control over the island. But the effect of
this would be to diminish the power of Ireland’s native ruling Protestant class, and
embolden the growing Catholic middle and lower classes. The slow decline of the
Protestant Ascendancy, and the growing discontent of the Catholic middle class,
would be the dominant pattern of Irish political life in the 19th century.
Ever since the time of Jonathan Swift there had been a pressure on the Anglo-Irish
to throw in their lot with the natives…Over the century and a half which followed it
became more and more clear that a strange reciprocity bound members of the
ascendancy to those peasants with whom they shared the Irish predicament. Many
decent landlords genuinely cared for their tenants and felt responsible for their fate:
that care was often returned with a mixture of affection and awe. Others were
33
negligent and some cruelly exploitative: but these attitudes served only to emphasize
the kindness of the better sort…When the doom of the big house was sealed by the
Land Acts, Shaw was not the only commentator to wonder whether the lot of
landless labourer would prove happier under peasant proprietors than it had under
paternalistic landlords… (Kiberd:1996,67)
The Anglo-Irish, who in language and thinking were moving farther and farther
away from England, developed a “divided mind”…..What followed from this
cultural dislocation was a basic insecurity about identity and language which has
since determined the literary discourse in Ireland….”off-centredness”…appears to
be the dominant ingredient in the Irish mind (Zach:1989, 185)
5) ANGLO-IRISH LITERATURE: term used to describe Irish writing in English,

which helps to distinguish this tradition from English literature and literature in Gaelic
(applied mostly to Protestant Ascendancy writers).
6) THE “BIG HOUSE”: A recurrent theme in Anglo-Irish Literature, referring to the

big houses of the ascendancy, and reflecting the anxieties and uncertainties of this
Protestant landowning class in their decline, from the early 19th century, through
Catholic Emancipation, the Famine, the Land League, and the growth of modern
militant Irish nationalism, to the founding of the Irish State.
• It appears mainly in the novel, but also in poetry, drama and memoir.
• It is always pictured in a state of crises, experiencing its isolation from the Ireland
outside the walls of its demesne.
• Conventions:
• The decaying house and declining gentry family;
• The improvident, often absentee, landlord;
• The rise of a predatory middle class seeking to wrest power from
landowners.
a) Novel:
o Maria Edgeworth (1767-1849): Castle Rackrent (1800)
o Thady Quirk, an old steward, narrates the eccentricities and excesses
of three generations of landowning Rackrents, until Thady’s own
son, Jason, gains possession of the estate by loans and litigation.
From CASTLE RACKRENT
Monday Morning.
Having, out of friendship for the family, upon whose estate, praised be Heaven! I
and mine have lived rent-free, time out of mind, voluntarily undertaken to
publish the Memoirs of the Rackrent Family, I think it my duty to say a few
words, in the first place, concerning myself. My real name is Thady Quirk,
though in the family I have always been known by no ther than “honest Thady”
- afterward, in the time of Sir Murtagh, deceased, I remember to hear them
calling me ‘old Thady’ and now I’m come to “poor Thady”; for I wear a long
great coat winter and summer, which is very handy, as I never put my arms into
34
the sleeves; they are as good as new, though come Holantide next I’ve had it
these seven years; it holds on by a single button round my neck, cloak fashion.
To look at me, you would hardly think “poor Thady” was the father of attorney
Quirk; he is a high gentleman and never minds what poor Thady says, and
having better than fifteen hundred a year, landed estate, looks down upon honest
Thady; but I wash my hands of his doings, and as I have lived so will I die, true
and loyal to the family. The family of the Rackrents is, I am proud to say, one of
the most ancient in the kingdom. (. . .) Sir Tallyhoo only never gave a gate upon
it, it being his maxim that a car was the best gate. Poor gentleman! He lost a fine
hunter and his life, at last, by it, all in one day’s hunt. But I ought to bless that
day, for the estate came straight into the family, upon one condition, which Sir
Patrick O’Shaughlin at the time took sadly to heart, they say, but thought better
of it afterwards, seeing how large a stake depended upon it, that he should, by act
of parliament, take and bear the surname and arms of Rackrent.
Now it was that the world was to see what was in Sir Patrick. On coming
into the estate, he gave the finest entertainment ever was heard of in the country;
not a man could stand after supper but Sir Patrick himself, who could sit out the
best man in Ireland, let alone the three kingdoms itself. (. . .)
Sir Patrick died that night: just as the company rose to drink his health with three
cheers, he fell down in a sort of fit, and was carried off: they sat it out, and were
surprised, on inquiry, in the morning, to find that it was all over with poor Sir
Patrick. Never did any gentleman live and die more beloved in the country by
rich and poor. His funeral was such a one as was never known before or since in
the country! (. . .)But who’d have thought it? Just as all was going on right,
through his own town they were passing, when the body was seized for debt - a
rescue was apprehended from the mob; but the heir who attended the funeral was
against that, for the fear of consequences, seeing that those villains who came to
serve acted under the disguise of the law: so, to be sure, the law must take its
course, and little gain had the creditors for their pains. First and foremost, they
had the curses of the country: and Sir Murtagh Rackrent, the new heir, in the
next place, on account of this affront to the body, refused to pay a shilling of the
debts, in which he was countenanced by all the best gentlemen of property, and
others of his acquaintance; Sir Murtagh alleging in all companies, that he all
along meant to pay his father’s debts of honour, but the moment the law was
taken of him, there was an end of honour to be sure. It was whispered (but none
but the enemis of the family believe it), that this was all a sham seizure to get
quit of the debts, which he had bound himself to pay in honour.
o Charles Robert Maturin (1780-1824): Melmoth the

Wanderer(1820)
o Joseph Le Fanu (1806-1872): Uncle Silas (1864)
o Charles Lever (1806-1872): Lord Kilgobbin (1872)
o Sommerville and Ross(Edith Somerville (1858-
1949)and Violet Martin (1862-1915): The Real
Charlotte (1894)
o Charlotte, an intelligent but plain-looking middle-class Protestant of
40, wants to make her way up the social scale in the village of
35
Lismoyle by marrying her pretty cousin Francie Fitzpatrick to

Christopher Dysart, son and heir of the local ascendancy family in
Bruff Castle. At the same time, Charlotte tries to win the Dysart’s
land agent Roddy Lambert for herself, using prospects of property as
the main enticement. Her plan fails on both fronts when Francie falls
in love with a member of the garrison in town, and, when he jilts her,
marries the infatuated Lambert.
THE REAL CHARLOTTE
“Well, your ladyship”, she said, in the bluff, hearty voice which she felt
accorded best with the theory of herself that she had built up in Lady
Dysart’s mind, “I’ll head a forlorn hope to the bottom of the lake for you,
and welcome; but for the honour of the house, you might give me a cup
o’tay first!”
Charlotte had many tones of voice, according with the many facets
of her character, and when she wished to be playful she affected a vigorous
brogue, not perhaps being aware that her own accent scarcely admitted of
being strengthened.
This refinement of humour was probably wasted on Lady Dysart.
(…)
He had the saving, or perhaps fatal power of seeing his own handiwork with
as unflattering an eye as he saw other people’s. He had no confidence in
anything about himself except his critical ability, and he did not satisfy that,
his tentative essays in painting died an early death. It was the same with
everything else. His fastidious dislike of doing a thing indifferently was
probably a form of conceit: it brought about him a kind of deadlock.
(…)
Where’s Charlotte Mullen, till I tell her to her face that I know her plots and
her thricks? ‘Tis to say that to her I came here, and to tell her ‘twas she lent
money to Peter Joyce that was grazing my farm, and refused it to him
secondly, the way he’s go bankrupt on me, and she’s to have my farm and
my house that my grandfather built, thinking to even herself with the rest of
the gentry . . .
o Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973): The Last September

(1929)
o Set in the Naylors’ big house, Danielstown, it explores their niece
Lois Farquahar’s emotional and sexual awakening against the
background of the Anglo-Irish War in 1920.
THE LAST SEPTEMBER
She shut her eyes and tried - as sometimes when she was seasick, locked in
misery between Holyhead and Kingstown - to be enclosed in a nonentity, in
some ideal no-place, perfect and clear as a bubble.
(…)
36
And she could not try to explain . . . how after every return - awakening,
even, from sleep or preoccupation - she and those home surroundings
further penetrated each other mutually in the discovery of a lack.
(…)
He had seemed amazed at her being young when he wasn’t. She could not
hope to explain that her youth seemed to her rather theatrical and that she
was only young in that way because people expected it. She had never
refused a role . . . She could not hope to assure him she was enjoying
anything he had missed, that she was now convinced and anxious but
intended to be quite certain, by the time she was his age, that she had once
been happy. For to explain this - were explanation possible to so courteous,
ironical and unfriendly a listener - would, she felt, be disloyal to herself, to
Gerald, to an illusion both were called upon to maintain.
(…)
It must be because of Ireland he was in such a hurry . . . She could not
conceive of her country emotionally . . . His intentions burned on the dark
an almost invisible trail; he might well have been a murderer he seemed so
inspired.
o Joyce Cary (1888-1957): Castle Corner (1938)
o Molly Keane (1907 - ): Good Behaviour (1981)
o Jennifer Johnston (1930 - ): The Old Jest (1979)
b) Poetry:
o W.B. Yeats (1865-1939) : Coole Park 1929; Coole Park and
Ballylee 1931
COOLE PARK
I meditate upon a swallow’s flight,

Upon an aged woman and her house,
A sycamore and lime-tree lost in night
Although that western cloud is luminous,
Great works constructed there in nature’s spite
For scholars and for poets after us,
Thoughts long knitted into a single thought,
A dance-like glory that those walls begot.
There Hyde before he had beaten into prose

That noble blade the Muses buckled on,
There one that ruffled in a many pose
For all his timid heart, there that slow man,
That meditative man, John Synge, and those
Impetuous men, Shawe-Taylor and Hugh Lane,
Found pride established in humility,
A scene well Set and excellent company.
They came like swallows and like swallows went,
37
And yet a woman’s powerful character

Could keep a Swallow to its first intent;
And half a dozen in formation there,
That seemed to whirl upon a compass-point,
Found certainty upon the dreaming air,
The intellectual sweetness of those lines
That cut through time or cross it withershins.
Here, traveller, scholar, poet, take your stand

When all those rooms and passages are gone,
When nettles wave upon a shapeless mound
And saplings root among the broken stone,
And dedicate - eyes bent upon the ground,
Back turned upon the brightness of the sun
And all that sensuality of the shade -
A moment’s memory to that laurelled head.
COOLE AND BALLYLEE
Under my window-ledge the waters race

Otters below and moor-hens on the top,
Run for a mile undimmed in Heaven’s face
Then darkening through ‘dark’ Raftery’s ‘cellar’ drop,
Run underground, rise in a rocky place
In Coole demesne, and there to finish up
Spread to a lake and drop into a hole.
What’s water but the generated soul?
Upon the border of that lake’s a wood
Now all dry sticks under a wintry sun,
And in a copse of beeches there I stood,
For Nature’s pulled her tragic buskin on
And all rant’s a mirror of my mood:
At sudden thunder of the mounting swan
I turned about and looked where branches break
The glittering reaches of the flooded lake.
Another emblem there! That stormy white

But seems a concentration on the sky;
And, like the soul, it sails into the sight
And in the morning’s gone, no man knows why;
And is so lovely that it sets to right
What knowledge or its lack had set awry,
So arrogantly pure, a child might think
It can be murdered with a spot of ink.
Sound of a stick upon the floor, a sound

From somebody that toils from chair to chair;
Beloved books that famous hands have bound,
Old marble heads, old pictures everywhere;
38
Great rooms where travelled men and children found

Content or joy; a last inheritor
Where none has reigned that lacked a name and fame
Or out of folly into folly came.
A spot whereon the founders lived and died

Seemed once more dear than life; ancestral trees,
Or gardens rich in memory glorified
Marriages, alliances and families,
And every bride’s ambition satisfied.
Where fashion or mere fantasy decrees
We shift about - all that great glory spent -
Like some poor Arab tribesman and his tent.
We were the last romantics - chose for theme

Traditional sanctity and loveliness;
Whatever’s written in what poets name
The book of the people; whatever most can bless
The mind of man or elevate a rhyme;
But all is changes, that high horse riderless,
Though mounted in that saddle Homer rode
Where the swan drifts upon a darkening flood.
c) Drama:
o Lennox Robbinson (1886-1958): Killycregs in Twilight
(1937)
o W.B. Yeats: Purgatory (1938)
o An old pedlar and his 16-year-old son return to the ruined big house
where the father was conceived. The old man relates how his mother
married a drunken stable-hand who wasted her inheritance, eventually
burning the house down. At the age of 16 the pedlar, hating his father
who had kept him ignorant and made him coarse, killed him on the night
of the fire. The ghost of the stable-hand and his bride now re-enact the
pedlar’s conception, and in an attempt to exorcise guilt and remorse, he
stabs his own son with the knife he used on his father. To his horror the
hoof-beats start again, as the ghosts live through their passion and their
suffering once more.
PURGATORY
OLD MAN. But there are some

That do not care what’s gone, what’s left:
The souls in Purgatory that come back
To habitations and familiar spots.
BOY. Your wits are out again.
OLD MAN. Re-live
Their transgressions, and that not once
But many times; they know at last
The consequence of those transgressions
39
Whether upon others or upon themselves;

Upon others, others may bring help,
For when the consequence is at an end
The dream must end; if upon themselves,
There is no help but in themselves
And in the mercy of God.
BOY. I have had enough!
Talk to the jackdaws, if talk you must.
OLD MAN. Stop! Sit there upon that stone.
That is the house where I was born.
( . . .)
OLD MAN. Looked at him and married him,
And he squandered everything she had.
She never knew the worst, because
She died in giving birth to me,
But now she knows it all, being dead.
Great people lived and died in this house;
Magistrates, colonels, members of Parliament,
Captains and Governors, and long ago
Men that had fought at Aughrim and the Boyne.
Some that had gone on Government work
To London or to India came home to die,
Or came from London every spring
To look at the may-blossom in the park.
They had loved the trees that he cut down
To pay what he had lost at cards
Or spent on horses, drink and women;
Had loved the house, had loved all
The intricate passages of the house,
But he killed the house; to kill a house
Where great men grew up, married, died,
I here declare a capital offence.
(. . .)
Listen to the hoof-beats! Listen, listen!
BOY. I cannot hear a sound.
OLD MAN. Beat! Beat!
This night is the anniversary
Of my mother’s wedding night,
Or of the night wherein I was begotten.
My father is riding from the public-house,
A whiskey-bottle under his arm.
[A window is lit showing a young girl.]
( . . .)
OLD MAN: Do not let him touch you!
It is not true that drunken men cannot beget,
And if he touch he must beget
And you must bear his murderer.
Deaf! Both deaf! If I should throw
A stick or a stone they would not hear;
And that’s proof my wits are out.
40
(...)
Come back! Come back!
And so you thought to slip away,
My bag of money between your fingers,
And that I could not talk and see!
You have been rummaging in the pack.
( . . .)
BOY. What if I killed you? You killed my grand-dad,
Because you were young and he was old.
Now I am young and you are old.
(...)
OLD MAN. That beast there would know nothing, being nothing,
If I should kill a man under the window
He would not even turn his head.
[He stabs the boy.]
My father and my son on the same jack-knife!
That finishes - there -there - there-
[He stabs again and again. The window grows dark.]
(. . .)
Dear mother, the window is dark again,
But you are in the light because
I finished all that consequence.
I killed that lad because had he grown up
He would have struck a woman’s fancy,
Begot and passed pollution on.
(...)
Hoof-beats! Dear God,
How quickly it returns - beat - beat -!
Her mind cannot hold up that dream.

Twice a murderer and all for nothing,
And she must animate that dead night
Not once but many times!
( . . .)
o Sean O’Casey (1880-1964): Purple Dust (1945)

o Samuel Beckett (1906-1989): A Piece of Monologue (1979)
o The lonely speaker’s memories recall familiar pictures of the Protestant
Ascendancy, now “dead and gone”.
A PIECE OF MONOLOGUE
Covered with pictures once. Pictures of . . . he all but said of loved ones. . . .
Down one after another. Gone. Torn to shreds and scattered. . . . Over the
years. Years of nights. . . . So stands there facing blank wall. Dying on. No
more no less.
(…)
41
Grey light. Rain pelting. Umbrellas round a grave. Seen from above.
Streaming black canopies. Black ditch beneath. Rain bubbling in the black
mud. Empty for the moment. That place beneath. Which . . . he all but said
which loved one? . . . Coffin out of frame. Whose? Fade. Gone. Move on to
other matters. Try to move on. To other matters.
(…)
Thirty thousand nights of ghosts beyond. Beyond that black beyond. Ghost
light. Ghost nights. Ghost rooms. Ghost graves. Ghost . . . he all but said
ghost loved ones. Waiting on the rip words. Stands there staring beyond at
that black veil lips quivering to half-heard words. Treating of other
matters. . . . Never but the one matter. The dead and gone. The dying and the
going.
o Brian Friel (1929 - ): Aristocrats (1979)

o Friel’s play permutes a Catholic family into a big house setting, in order
to chronicle its disintegration at a reunion in Ballybeg Hall. The
wedding of the youngest daughter Claire to a small local greengrocer
coincides with the death of the patriarch of the family, District Justice
O’Donnell, who has oppressed his children in his need for absolute
authority. Eamon, married into the family, is aware of the decline and is
the only one to experience a sense of loss, as the play moves slowly and
lyrically towards an extended scene of Chekhovian leave-taking where
the members of the family say goodbye to each other and to their past.
ARISTOCRATS
EAMON: What political clout did they wield? (Considers. Then sadly
shakes his head.) What economic help were they to their co-religionists?
(Considers. Then sadly shakes his head.) What cultural effect did they have
on the local peasantry? Alice? (Considers. Then sadly shakes his head.) We
agree, I’m afraid. Sorry, Professor. Bogus thesis. No book.
(. . . ) You know what will happen, don’t you? The moment you’ve left the
thugs from the village will move in and loot and ravage this place within a
couple of hours. (. . . ) Well I know it’s real worth - in this area, in this
county, in this country. And Alice knows. And Casimir knows. And Claire
knows. And somehow will keep it going.
(. . .)Sorry . . .Sorry . . . sorry again . . . Seems to be a day of public

contrition. What the hell is but crumbling masonry. Sorry. (Short laugh.)
Don’t you know that all that is fawning and fore-lock-touching and Paddy
and shabby and greasy peasant in the Irish character finds a house like that
irresistible? That’s why we were ideal for colonising. Something in us needs
this . . . aspiration.
42
THE PASTORAL IN IRISH LITERATURE
1. POLITICAL NATIONALISM
• 1848 the Young Irelanders, a splinter group from O'Connell's repeal

association, attempt a failed insurrection
• 1858 the Irish Republican Brotherhood, a secret insurrectionary group, is
formed out of the Fenian Movement, under the leadership of James
Stephens; it attempts a failed insurrection in 1867.
• 1870 the Home Government Association, soon to become the Home Rule
League, is founded by Isaac Butt
• 1875 Charles Stewart Parnell enters parliament; he soon assumes leadership
of the Home Rule League from Butt
• 1886 the first Home Rule bill is defeated in parliament
• 1889 Parnell is named co-respondent in O’Shea divorce petition, leading to
his split with catholic clergy and condemnation by British public.
• 1893 the second Home Rule bill is defeated in parliament; the Gaelic league
is founded by Douglas Hyde
2. CULTURAL NATIONALISM: main premises
• The essential, spiritual life of a people subsists in its culture;

• Language bears the gifts of the past into the present and supplies a
living link with a racial spirituality, expressed in legends, literature
and songs.
• Irish independence is translated in terms of the country’s distinctive
cultural inheritance (i.e. Celtic).
3. THE PASTORAL MODE:
• Archetypal human response to the countryside, viewed either as a

mythic Golden Age, or as rural simplicity and morality to be
contrasted to the present urban existence.
• If the Anglophone view has invariably constructed the Irish identity as
the negative term of the basic opposition established between
barbarism and civilisation, the native representational range for
Irishness has mainly nurtured on the pastoral, and rural Ireland,
variously seen as Romantic Golden Age or peasant community has
been discursively used to signify the nation.
4. CELTICISM:
• Cultural discourse on the Irish identity, emerging in the second half of

the 19th century, influenced by Matthew Arnold’s lectures collected
and published as On the Study of Celtic Literature (1876)
43
• Matthew Arnold (1822 – 1888): poet and cultural critic. His principal
writings are:
o in poetry, Poems (1853), containing "Sohrab and Rustum,"

and "The Scholar Gypsy;" Poems, 2nd Series (1855),
containing "Balder Dead;" Merope (1858); New Poems (1867),
containing "Thyrsis," "A Southern Night," "Rugby Chapel,"
"The Weary Titan," and his masterpiece, "Dover Beach."
o in prose, On Translating Homer (1861 and 1862), On the
Study of Celtic Literature (1867), Essays in Celtic Literature
(1868), Essays in Criticism, 2nd Series (1888), Culture and
Anarchy (1869), Literature and Dogma (1873), God and the
Bible (1875), Last Essays on Church and Religion (1877),
Mixed Essays (1879), Irish Essays (1882), and Discourses in
America (1885).
o He also wrote some works on the state of education in
mainland Europe.
o On the Study of Celtic Literature (1876) is influenced by the

thesis propounded by Ernest Renan in his Poésie des Races
Celtique, which, drawing on contemporary philological
discourses, had advanced the notion of the Celt as the producer
of civility and culture within the mutually interdependent Indo-
European family of races, Matthew Arnold developed this
view in the context of British cultural imperialism, paying thus
the Celtic world the first valuable compliment it had received
from an English source in several hundred years1. Indeed, the
Englishman’s work sets out to provide a list of attributes
pertaining to the Celtic race, emphasising the qualities of
melancholy, other-worldliness, indifference to fact, bravery in
defeat, sensitivity to verbal and musical magic, but his
intention is far from being that of outlining these virtues as the
basis of a separate Celtic culture and, consequently, power.
Careful to put a politically independent future for the Celts
beyond the bounds of possibility, Arnold argues that it is not in
the outward and visible world of material life that the Celtic
genius of Wales and Ireland can at this day hope to count for
much2, because, having ineffectualness and self-will for its
defect3, it lacks the capacity for political self-government: the
skillful and resolute application of means to ends which is
needed both to make progress in material civilisation and also
to form powerful states, is just hat the Celt has least turn for . .
. as in material civilisation he has been ineffectual, so has the
Celt been ineffectual in politics4.
1
John V. Kelleher, Matthew Arnold and the Celtic Revival, in Perspectives in
Criticism, edited by Harry Levin, Chicago, 1971, p. 197.
2
Quoted from D. Cairns and S. Richards, op. cit., pp. 46-47.
3
Quoted from J.V. Kelleher, op. cit., p. 210.
4
Ibid.
44
o Arnold’s aim is ultimately that of getting his fellow

Englishmen accept that an invigorated British culture may stem
only of the blending of the positive aspects of Saxon common
sense and steadfastness5 with Celtic sensibility, which would
provide the only antidote to what he calls the Philistinism of
modern economic society: . . . we may use German faithfulness
to Nature to give us science and to free us from insolence and
self-will; we may use the Celtic quickness of perception to give
us delicacy and to free us from hardness and Philistinism6.
o As Cairns and Richards note, the importance of Arnold’s study
resides with the fact that the critic managed to produce a
context for the cultural incorporation of the Celts which
flattered them into accepting a subsidiary position for
themselves vis-à-vis the English7, the recognition of the values
of their cultural products being a ‘healing measure’ in Anglo-
Irish relations on the cultural plane. More than this, due to the
fact that the sensibility of the Celtic nature, its nervous
exaltation, have something feminine in them, and the Celt is
peculiarly disposed to feel the spell of the feminine
idiosyncrasy8, the centrality of the Celts within the British
culture was guaranteed - through this resort to the categories of
sexuality - by the needs of the “masculine” Saxons.
o According to Seamus Deane, one major outcome of the
English critic’s study was that of introducing the ‘Celtic’ idea
as a differentiating fact between Ireland and England,
managing to give this word a political resonance it has not yet
entirely lost.9 Consequently, it was accepted that the Celtic
spirit was utterly different from the Saxon one, and Spenser’s
dichotomy between the English order and the Irish lawlessness
was re-written as that between Saxon pragmatism and Celtic
spirituality:
• Celt / Saxon dichotomies:

ENGLISH IRISH
Saxon Celt
material spiritual
reasoned emotional
realist idealist
objective visionary
scientific mystic
modern primitive
masculine feminine
5
The Oxford Companion to Irish Literature, edited by Robert Welch, Oxford:
Oxford U.P., 1996, p. 21.
6
Quoted from D. Cairns and S. Richards, op. cit., p. 47.
7
Ibid., p. 49.
8
Ibid., p. 48.
9
Seamus Deane, Celtic Revivals: Essays in Modern Irish Literature, London:
Faber and Faber, 1985.
45
5. “GAEL”-ICISM:
o Cultural discourse emerging in opposition to Celtism
o Promoted by the members of the Gaelic League
o Irish identity based on the “Gael”: masculine, warrior-like, antagonistic
to the Anglo-Saxon.
o Institutions like the Gaelic Athletic Association (founded in 1884
as a powerful rural network emphasising physical training), or
the Gaelic League (established nine years later and mainly
dedicated to the revival of the Gaelic language) promoted a
definition of Irishness based on the Gael, seen as masculine,
warrior-like, and, consequently, antagonistic to the Anglo-Saxon.
Consequently the Gaeltacht people of the rural west were turned
into the ideal of Irishness, becoming endowed with every virtue
known to Gaelic civilisation.
o On the other hand, this Gaelic idea of Irishness soon came to
fuse with the other important discourse shaping rural Ireland,
namely familism10.
O FAMILISM:
o The Great Potato Famine which had struck Ireland in 1846, had
led to a sudden drop in population among the rural Catholic
class11, and, as a consequence, during the latter half of the 19th
century, the Irish countryside underwent a complex series of
economic, social and cultural accommodations with the new
circumstances brought by the simplification of rural social
relations, caused by the decline in number and importance of the
landless labourers, and the rise in prominence of the tenant
farmers, who became the most numerous class in the land. These
social changes found a counterpart in the distinct culture which
this class evolved in response to these novel social and economic
factors, marked by a series of practices and procedures,
collectively termed familism, which the tenant-farmers used in
order to consolidate, extend and transmit family holdings from
generation to generation. Among these practices, Cairns and
Richards note:
10
See D. Cairns and S. Richards, op. cit., Chapters 3 and 4.
11
According to Hugh Kearney (The British Isles: A History of Four Nations,
Cambridge, Cambridge U.P., 1989), the Famine enhanced once more the differences
between the Irish Catholic south and the mainly Scots Presbyterian north, due to their
contrasting experiences. While the northern rural areas, were the main element of
popular diet was oats, were spared in the main by the failure of the potato crops, the
southern ones of small farming and labouring classes, heavily dependant on the
potato, were decimated by starvation and disease. By 1847 large numbers of small
farmers were obliged to emigrate to the United States, while by 1851 statistics showed
that Ireland had lost one quarter of its population, either by emigration or by death, a
social tragedy that had its greatest impact on the Catholic poor.
46
. . . a number of procedures to control access to marriage,

including the imposition and perpetuation of strict codes of
behaviour between men and women, general endorsement of
celibacy outside marriage and postponement of marriage in
farmers’ families until the chosen heir was allowed by the father
to take possession of the farm [ . . . ]the spread of matchmaking
as a preliminary to marriage; pressure on ‘surplus’ sons and
daughters to emigrate; pressure on them to observe strict
chastity and not, through following their own desires, to risk the
transmission of the farm under unfavourable circumstances
through a mésalliance . . .12
o The codes of belief and behaviour upon which familism rested,
particularly the regulation of sexuality, and unquestioned
patriarchal authority13, were also discursively controlled by
Catholicism, hence the merging of the two provided the
additional marks of identity to the Gaelic Irishness.
o Thus, while retaining what were perceived as positive
characteristics of Celticism, such as the assumed spirituality and
anti-materialism of the Irish, the rural definition of Irishness
deployed linguistic, religious and moral categories not only as
criteria of national identity, but also as a code for anti-
Englishness14. In this view, anything English could not be but a
corrupting influence on the Gaelic mentality.
o Declan Kiberd in his study of modern Irish literature and culture,
Inventing Ireland, shows how this definition of Irishness mainly
aimed at projecting the country as not-England, where anything
English was ipso facto not for the Irish [. . . ], but any valued
cultural possessions of the English were shown to have their
Gaelic equivalents15:
O GAEL / SAXON DICHOTOMIES:

IRISH ENGLISH
Gael Saxon
Irish language English language*
Brehon law English law*
Gaelic football soccer*
Catholic Protestant
moral corrupt
manly effeminate
rural urban
12
D. Cairns and S. Richards, op. cit., pp. 42-43.
13
Ibid., p. 60.
14
R. F. Foster, Modern Ireland: 1600-1972, London: Penguin Books, 1989, p. 449.
15
Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation,
London: Vintage, 1996, p. 151.
* These categories are presented in Kiberd’s study as instances of “national
parallelism”
47
6. THE IRISH LITERARY REVIVAL

o The Irish Literary Revival stimulated new appreciation of traditional
Irish literature. The movement also encouraged the creation of works
written in the spirit of Irish culture, as distinct from English culture. This
was, in part, due to the political need for an individual Irish identity. An
important symbol of the literary revival became the Abbey Theatre,
which served as the stage for many new Irish writers and playwrights of
the time.
o It was influenced by both celticism and gaelicism.
o Main representatives:
o W. B. Yeats (1865-1939): Poet, dramatist, mystic and public

figure, W. B. Yeats was born to an Anglo-Irish Protestant
family, but turned into a committed Irish nationalist, becoming
thus the primary driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival –
a movement which stimulated new appreciation of traditional
Irish literature, encouraging the creation of works written in the
spirit of Irish culture, as distinct from English culture.Yeats was
also co-founder of the Abbey Theatre, another great symbol of
the literary revival, which served as the stage for many new Irish
writers and playwrights of the time. After the establishment of
the Irish Free State, Yeats was appointed to the first Irish Senate
Seanad Éireann in 1922 and re-appointed in 1925. He was
awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923 for what the Nobel
Committee described as "his always inspired poetry, which in a
highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole
nation".
Introduction to “Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish

Peasantry”(1888)
These folk-tales are full of simplicity and musical occurences,

for they are the literature of a class for whom every incident in
the old rut of birth, love, pain and death has cropped up
unchanged for centuries; who have steeped everything in the
heart: to whom everything is a symbol. They have the spade over
which man has leant from the beginning. The people of the cities
have the machine, which is prose and a ‘parvenue’.
from Manifesto for the establishing of the Irish Literary

Theatre (1897)
We propose to have performed in the spring of every year

certain Celtic and Irish plays, which whatever be their degree of
excellence, will be written with a high ambition, and so to build
up a Celtic and Irish school of dramatic literature. We hope to
find in Ireland an uncorrupted and imaginative audience,
trained to listen by its passion for oratory, and believe that our
desire to bring upon the stage the deeper thoughts and emotions
48
of Ireland will ensure for us a tolerant welcome, and that

freedom of expression which is not found in the theatre in
England, and without which no new movement in art or
literature can succeed. We sill show that Ireland is not the home
of buffoonery and easy sentiment, as it has been represented, but
the home of an ancient idealism.
o Isabella Augusta, Lady Gregory (1852-1932): With William

Butler Yeats and others, she co-founded the Irish Literary
Theatre and the Abbey Theatre, and wrote numerous short works
for both companies. She also produced a number of books of
retellings of stories from Irish mythology. However, Lady
Gregory is mainly remembered for her driving force of the Irish
Literary Revival. Her home at Coole Park, County Galway
served as an important meeting place for the leading Revival
figures and her early work as a member of the board of the
Abbey was at least as important for the theatre's development as
her creative writings were.
o Douglas Hyde (1860-1949) (Irish: Dubhghlas de hÍde) was an

Anglo-Irish scholar of the Irish language and founder of the
Gaelic League. His famous pamphlet, The Necessity for De-
Anglicising Ireland, argued that Ireland should follow her own
traditions in language, literature and even in dress. He also wrote
one-act plays in the Irish language which were staged by the
Irish Literary Theatre and then by the Abbey. He served as the
first President of Ireland from 1938 to 1945.
from
THE NECESSITY FOR DE-ANGLICISING IRELAND
(1892)
When we speak of ‘The necessity for De-Anglicising the Irish
Nation’, we mean it, not as a protest against imitating what is
best in the English people, for that would be absurd, but rather
to show the folly of neglecting what is Irish, and hastening to
adopt, pell-mell, and indiscriminately, everything that is English,
simply because it is English. (. . .)
I shall endeavour to show that this failure of the Irish people
in recent times has been largely brought about by the race
diverging during this century from the right path, and ceasing to
be Irish without becoming English. I shall attempt to show that
with the bulk of the people this change took place quite recently,
much more recently than most people imagine, and is, in fact,
still going on. I should also like to call attention to the illogical
position of men who drop their language to speak English, of
men who translate their euphonious Irish names in English
monosyllables, of men who read English books, and know
nothing about Gaelic literature, nevertheless protesting as a
49
matter of sentiment that they hate the country which at every

hand’s turn they rush to imitate.(…..)
What we must endeavour to never forget is this, that the
Ireland of today is the descendant of the Ireland of the seventh
century, then the school of Europe and the torch of learning.
(. . .) What the battleaxe of the Dane, the sword of the Norman,
the wile of the Saxon were unable to perform, we have
accomplished ourselves. We have at last broken the continuity of
Irish life, and just at the moment when the Celtic race is
presumably about to largely recover possession of its own
country, it finds itself deprived and striped of its Celtic
characteristics, cut off from the past, yet scarcely in touch with
the present. It has lost since the beginning of this century almost
all that connected it with the era of Cuchullain and of Ossian,
that connected it with the Christianisers of Europe, that
connected it with Brian Boru and the heroes of Clontarf, with the
O’Neills and O’Donnells, with Rory O’Moore, with the Wild
Geese, and even to some extent with the men of ’98. It has lost
all that they had - language, traditions, music, genius and ideas.
o J.M. Synge (1871 – 1909): Dramatist, poet, prose writer, and

collector of folklore, Synge was a key figure in the Irish Literary
Revival and was one of the cofounders of the Abbey Theatre.
Although he came from a middle-class Protestant background,
Synge's writings are mainly concerned with the world of the
Irish-speaking peasants of rural Ireland (Gaeltacht) and with
what he saw as the essential paganism of their world view. He
suffered from Hodgkin's disease, a form of cancer that was
untreatable at the time and died just weeks short of his 38th
birthday.
from the Preface to “The Tinker’s Wedding”:
Of the things which nourish the imagination humour is one of

the most needful, and it is dangerous to limit or destroy it.
Baudelaire calls laughter the greatest sign of the Satanic
element in man; and where a country loses its humour, as some
towns in Ireland are doing, there will be morbidity of mind, as
Baudelaire’s mind was morbid.
In the greater part of Ireland, however, the whole people,
from the tinkers to the clergy, have still a life, and a view of life
that are rich and genial and humorous. I do not think that these
country people, who have so much humour themselves, will mind
being laughed at without malice, as the people in every country
have been laughed at in their own comedies.
o Plays:
 In the Shadow of the Glen (1902)
50
 Riders to the Sea (1904): a one-act play which tells of an

old woman, Maurya, who has lost her husband and five
of her six fishermen sons to the sea, and who earnestly
begs the last – Bartley – not to undertake a treacherous
crossing to sell a pig on the mainland. When Bartley’s
body is returned, dripping in a sailcloth, the old woman
transcends her agony by accepting her loss.
RIDERS TO THE SEA
CHARACTERS: MAURYA (an old woman); BARTLEY (her son);

CATHLEEN (her daughter);NORA (a younger daughter);MEN and
WOMEN.
SCENE. An island off the West of Ireland. (Cottage kitchen, with nets, oil-
skins, spinning wheel, some new boards standing by the wall, etc.
Cathleen, a girl of about twenty, finishes kneading cake, and puts it
down in the pot-oven by the fire; then wipes her hands, and begins
to spin at the wheel. Nora, a young girl, puts her head in at the
door.)
NORA (in a low voice): Where is she?

CATHLEEN: She’s lying down, God help her, and may be sleeping, if she’s
able.
(NORA comes in softly, and takes a bundle from under her shawl.)
CATHLEEN (spinning the wheel rapidly): What is it you have?
NORA: The young priest is after bringing them. It’s a shirt and a plain
stocking were got off a drowned man in Donegal.
(CATHLEEN stops her wheel with a sudden movement, and leans out to
listen.)
NORA: We’re to find out if it’s Michael’s they are, some time herself will
be looking by the sea.
CATHLEEN: How would they be Michael’s, Nora. How would he go the
length of that way to the far north?
NORA: The young priest says he’s known the like of it. ‘If it’s Michael’s
they are’ says he, ‘you can tell herself he’s got a clean burial by the
grace of God, and if they’re not his, let no one say a word about
them, for she’ll be getting her death,’ says he, ‘with crying and
lamenting.’(The door which NORA half closed is blown open by a
gust of wind.)
CATHLEEN (looking out anxiously): Did you ask him would he stop
Bartley going this day with the horses to the Galway fair?
NORA: ‘I won’t stop him,’ says he, ‘but let you not be afraid. Herself does
say prayers half through the night, and the Almighty God won’t
leave her destitute,’ says he, ‘with no son living.’
CATHLEEN: Is the sea bad by the white rocks, Nora?
51
NORA: Middling bad, God help us. There’s a great roaring in the west, and
it’s worse it’ll be getting when the tide’s turned to the wind. (She
goes ever to the table with the bundle.) Shall I open it now?
CATHLEEN: Maybe she’d wake up on us, and come in before we’d done.
(Coming to the table.) It’s a long time we’ll be, and the two of us
crying.
NORA (goes to the inner door and listens): She’s moving about on the bed.
She’ll be coming in a minute.
CATHLEEN: Give me the ladder, and I’ll put them up in the turf-loft, the
way she won’t know of them at all, and maybe when the tide turns
she’ll be going down to see would he be floating from the east.(They
put the ladder against the gable of the chimney; CATHLEEN goes
up a few steps and hides the bundle in the turf-loft. MAURYA comes
from the inner room.)
MARYA (looking up at CATHLEEN and speaking querulously): Isn’t it turf
enough you have for this day and evening?
CATHLEEN: There’s a cake baking at the fire for a short space (throwing
down the turf) and Bartley will want it when the tide turns if he goes
to Connemara.
(NORA picks up the turf and puts it round the pot-oven.)
(......)
MAURYA: I went down to the spring well, and I stood there saying a
prayer to myself. Then Bartley came along, and he riding on the red
mare with the grey pony behind him. (She puts up her hands, as if to
hide something from her eyes.) The Son of God spare us, Nora!
CATHLEEN: What is it you seen.
MAURYA: I seen Michael himself.
CATHLEEN (speaking softly): You did not, mother; It wasn’t Michael you
seen, for his body is after being found in the far north, and he’s got a
clean burial by the grace of God.
MAURYA (a little defiantly): I’m after seeing him this day, and he riding
and galloping. Bartley came first on the red mare; and I tried to say
‘God speed you,’ but something choked the words in my throat. He
went by quickly; and ‘the blessing of God on you,’ says he, and I
could say nothing. I looked up the, and I crying, at the grey pony,
and there was Michael upon it - with fine clothes on him, and new
shoes on his feet.
CATHLEEN (begins to keen): It’s destroyed we are from this day. It’s
destroyed, surely.
NORA: Didn’t the young priest say the Almighty God wouldn’t leave her
destitute with no son living?
MAURYA (in a low voice, but clearly): It’s little the like of him knows of
the sea . . . . Bartley will be lost now, and let you call in Eamon and
make me a good coffin out of the white boards, for I won’t live after
them. I’ve had a husband, and a husband’s father, and six sons in this
house - six fine men, though it was a hard birth I had with every one
of them and they coming to the world - and some of them were
found and some of them were not found, but they’re gone now the
lot of them. . . . There were Stephen, and Shawn, were lost in the
great wind, and found after in the Bay of Gregory of the Golden
52
Mouth, and carried up the two of them on the one plank, and in by
that door.(She pauses for a moment, the girls start as if they heard
something through the door that is half open behind them.)
NORA (in a whisper): Did you hear that, Cathleen? Did you hear a noise in
the north-east?
CATHLEEN (in a whisper): There’s some one after crying out by the
seashore.
MAURYA (continues without hearing anything): There was Sheamus and
his father, and his own father again, were lost in a dark night, and
not a stick or sign was seen of them when the sun went up. There
was Patch after was drowned out of a curagh that turned over. I was
sitting here with Bartley, and he a baby, lying on my two knees, and
I seen two women, and three women, and four women coming in,
and they crossing themselves, and not saying a word. I looked out
then, and there were men coming after them, and they holding a
thing in the half of a red sail, and water dripping out of it - it was a
dry day, Nora - and leaving a track to the door.(She pauses again
with her hand stretched out towards the door. It opens softly and old
women begin to come in, crossing themselves on the threshold, and
kneeling down in front of the stage with red petticoats over their
heads.)
MAURYA (half in a dream, to CATHLEEN): Is it Patch, or Michael, or
what is it at all?
CATHLEEN: Michael is after being found in the far north, and when he is
found there how could he be here in this place?
MAURYA: There does be a power of young men floating round in the sea,
and what way would they know if it was Michael they had, or
another man like him, for when a man is nine days in the sea, and the
wind blowing, it’s hard set his own mother would be to say what
man was it.
CATHLEEN: It is Michael, God spare him, for they’re after sending us a bit
of his clothes from the far north. (She reaches out and hands
MAURYA the clothes that belonged to Michael. MAURYA stands up
slowly and takes them in her hands. NORA looks out.)
NORA: They’re carrying a thing among them and there’s water dripping out
of it and leaving a track by the big stones.
CATHLEEN (in a whisper to the women who have come in): Is it Bartley it
is?
ONE OF THE WOMEN: It is surely, God rest his soul. (Two younger
WOMEN come in and pull out the table. Then men carry in the body
of Bartley, laid on a plank, with a bit of sail over it, and lay it on the
table.)
CATHLEEN (to the women, as they are doing so): What way was he
drowned?
ONE OF THE WOMEN: The grey pony knocked him into the sea, and he
was washed out . . . . .
 The Well of the Saints ( 1905)
 The Tinker’s Wedding (1906)
53
 The Playboy of the Western World (1907): it tells how

Christy Mahon arrives in a Co. Mayo village and wins
the hearts of the local women by boasting that he has
killed his father. His prowess at the local sports confirms
him in the role of a hero and as fitting mate for Pegeen
Mike, daughter of Michael James (Flaherty), a widower
who owns the country pub where Christy stays. Christy
woos Pegeen Mike away from her cousin, Shawn Keogh,
a pathetic, priest-fearing peasant, by his fine talk and
athletic feats. When the supposedly murdered father
enters the scene, the community turn upon their hero,
despite his offer to ‘slay his da’ a second time. Escaping
from their clutches, he tames his father, and the two leave
the stage, disdainful of the gullible Mayo peasants.
Christy, the servile son, has been transformed into a
figure of power and dignity by this rite of passage, and
Pegeen Mike is left to lament her loss of ‘the only
playboy of the western world’. The play was condemned
by nationalists as a travesty of western Irish life which
evoked a peasantry of alcoholics and ineffectual
fantasists rather than a people ready to assume the
responsibilities of self-government.
FROM
THE PLAYBOY OF THE WESTERN WORLD (1907)
. . . not a play with a ‘purpose’ in the modern sense of the world, but
although parts of it are, or are meant to be extravagant comedy,
still a great deal more that is behind it is perfectly serious when
looked at in a certain light. . . There are, it may be hinted, several
sides to ‘The Playboy’.
1) Christie [twisting round on her with a sharp cry of horror]: Don’t

strike me. I killed my poor father, Tuesday was a week, for doing
the like of that.
Pegeen [with blank amazement]: Is it killed your father?
Christie [subsiding] With the help of God I did, surely, and that the
Holy Immaculate Mother may intercede for his soul.
Philly [retreating with Jimmy]: There’s a daring fellow.
Jimmy: Oh. Glory be to God!
Michael [with great respect] That was a hanging crime, mister honey.
You should have had good reasons for doing the like of that.
Christie [in a very reasonable tone]: He was a dirty man, God forgive
him, and he getting old and crusty, the way I couldn’t put up with
him at all.
Pegeen: And you shot him dead? [. . .]
Christie: I did not, then. I just riz the loy and let fall the edge of it on the
ridge of his skull, and he went down at my feet like an empty sack,
and never let a grunt or groan from him at all.
54
2) Christie: . . .Well, this’d be a fine place to be my whole life talking

out with swearing Christians, in place of my old dogs and cats; and
I stalking around, smoking my pipe and drinking my fill, and never
a day’s work but drawing a cork an odd time, or wiping a glass, or
rinsing out a shiny tumbler for a decent man. [He takes the looking-
glass from the wall and puts it on the back of a chair; then sits
down in front of it and begins washing his face]. Didn’t I know
rightly, I was handsome, though it was the divil’s own mirror we
had beyond, would twist a squint across an angel’s brow; and I’ll
be growing fine from this day, the way I’ll have a soft lovely skin
on me and won’t be the like of the clumsy young fellows do be
ploughing all times in the earth and dung. [. . .]
3) Christie [impressively]: With that sun came out between the cloud
and the hill, and it shining green on my face. ‘God have mercy on
your soul,’ says he, lifting a scythe. ‘Or on your own,’ says I,
raising the loy.
Susan: That’s a grand story.
Honor: He tells it lovely.
Christie [flattered and confident, waving bone]: He gave a drive with
the scythe, and I gave a lep to the east. Then I turned around with
back to the north, and I hit a blow on the ridge of his skull, laid him
stretched out, and he split to the knob of his gullet. [He raises the
chicken bone to his Adam’s apple.]
Girls [together]: Well, you’re a marvel! Oh, God bless you! You’re the
lad, surely!
4) Christie [to Pegeen]: And what is it you’ll say to me, and I after
doing it this time in the face of all?
Pegeen: I’ll say, a strange man is a marvel, with his mighty talk; but
what’s a squabble in your back yard, and the blow of a loy, have
taught me that there’s a gap between a gallous story and a dirty
deed. [. . .]
Christie: You’re blowing for to torture me. [His voice rising and
growing stronger]. That’s your kind, is it? Then let the lot of you
be wary, for, if I’ve had to face the gallows, I’ll have a gay march
down, I tell you, and shed the blood of some of you before I die.
[. . .]If I can wring a neck among you, I’ll have a royal judgement
looking on the trembling jury in the courts of law. And won’t there
be crying out in Mayo the day I’ll stretch upon the rope, with ladies
in their silks and satins snivelling in their lacy kerchiefs, and they
rhyming songs and ballads on the terror of my fate?
5) Christie: Ten thousand blessings upon all that’s here, for you’ve
turned me a likely gaffer in the end of all, the way I’ll go romancing
through a romping lifetime from this hour to the dawning of the
Judgement Day.
 Deirdre (1910)
55
7. THE PEASANT PLAY:
o A dramatic subgenre established during the 20th century on the Abbey

stage;
o A play focusing on peasant characters, depicting their lives, habits and
customs in a manner true to life;
o Characteristic features: peasant cottage setting; peasant life themes (rural
marriage, habits and ownership of lands, emigration.)
o Rural Ireland started to display gloomier contours once Padraic Colum,

Lennox Robinson and T. C. Murray changed the peasant play’s focus on the
seamy side of the farmers’ lives: agrarian disputes, the fight for
landownership, conflicts between fathers and sons, the unhappiness of
matches made to conform to the dictates of familism. Where Synge exploited
the image of the Irish tramp as a symbol of imagination and freedom, Colum’s
Broken Soil (1903), revised as The Fiddler’s House (1907) showed his
audiences the real cost involved in having one in the family. Con Hourican, an
instinctive artist and wanderer brings his daughters endless worry, shame and
poverty, driving Mairie into a loveless marriage in order to save her family.
The Land (1905), set at the end of the Land Wars, dealt with the generational
conflicts between Murtagh Cosgar and his son, Mat, over the value of the old
rural way of life. Pressed by the ambitious school-teacher Ellen Douras to
seek his fortune by emigrating to America such as all of his elder brothers had
attempted, Mat left behind the land for which his father had fought so hard to
keep intact. Like the previous play, The Land embodied a theme of intimate
and recognisable social significance in its real setting, and though love was
presented as a disruptive force, it was not improper. Moreover, it raised the
question of the worth of the fields won after the Land War in the changing
conditions of the countryside where the fittest chose emigration, while the
relatively dull and unenterprising Sally Cosgar and Cornelius Duras remained
behind to marry and succeed their parents.
o It was this latter version of the peasant play which became the popular
genre of the Irish theatre after the Independence. Theatre as a means for the
self-expression of a rural society had followed the social changes underwent
by the class representing it. If, in the beginning of the dramatic movement, the
peasants had been discovered as a kind of primordial rural society, untouched
by modern forms of life, as landowners and citizens of an independent nation
they could no longer play this role. While the pastoral idyll became the focus
of satire in plays such as Denis Johnston’s The Moon in the Yellow River
(1931), the traditional subjects and style of the peasant play remained in the
limelight of the Abbey stage helped by successive playwrights like George
Shiels, Bryan MacMahon, Tom Coffey, John Murphy, or John B Keane.
Shiel’s The Rugged Path (1940) introduced the audience into a peasant
cottage setting provided with electric light and a radio, a metaphor for
progress which is set into violent contrast to the traditional notions of law and
order based on colonialist conditions marked by the Irish tolerance for
lawlessness and contempt for the informer. The members of the Tansey
family become the microcosm within which the play explores the two
contrasting attitudes related to rural violence, exemplified by the wild Dolises
56
from the mountains who terrorise the local farmers and kill an old man for
two pounds. While the older generation are afraid to accuse them partly
because of their fear of retribution and partly because of the old prejudice
against informing, the younger ones decide to give evidence against the Dolis,
embarking thus on the “rugged path” of change and confrontation. John
Murphy’s The Country Boy (1959) picked up the thread of the story from
where The Land had left it by focussing on the figure of the returned
emigrant, the homecomer who, having left his parents’ farm and established
himself in a non-farming society could be contrasted to the peasants. Where
Colum’s play looked at the causes leading to the rural exodus, Murphy’s The
Country Boy treats emigration as an individual and not a social problem.
Eddie Maher, having left fifteen years ago for America, returns home for a
vacation with his American wife Julia to find his younger brother Curly
planning to emigrate for much the same reasons like his own: their father, the
voice of an unyielding past is obstinate in his intention not to turn over the
control of the farm to his son. Nevertheless, the old Maher does not stand for
the abuse of patriarchy, but for the values of rural existence and even the flaw
in his character, his contrariness, is finally revealed as a virtue: it is the test of
Curly’s resolution, for he must prove mature and self-willed enough not to be
afraid of his father’s anger before he can take over the farm. Moreover, the
simple rural virtues of the native place are set in contrast to the flimsiness of
Eddie’s and Julia’s make-believe: the first trying to hide his story of failure
under an air of snobbery and a trunk filled with the American homecomer’s
symbols of prosperity, the latter disguising her lower-class origin and
proletarian status under the mask of the tourist, always comparing Ireland to
America in a condescending manner. The play’s nostalgic stance towards
rurality as an embodiment of what T.K. Whitaker calls a sort of Paradise
Lost16 ensures the happy ending whereby exposure to his forsaken roots in the
country prompt Eddie undergo a recognition crises with a purging effect that
enables him to reconcile with his situation and admit its truth in front of his
family, helping thus Curly learn the lesson and remain by the farm. Keane’s
Many Young Men of Twenty (1961) is an angry response to the same
phenomenon which reached some of its highest rates at the end of the fifties.
The play, set in a country pub where the emigrants gather for a last drink
before their departure, one of the characters protests against the political
establishment for their neglect of this human tragedy. The Field (1965) treats
a similar theme like that of Shiel’s The Rugged Path, with the action being
set in motion by a dispute over land and money, followed by “The Bull”
McCabe’s murder of his rival and his terrorising of his neighbours against
informing. But, unlike in Shield where the farmers eventually testify against
the murderer, in The Field the villagers do not inform, justice is not done, and
the picture of the rural world is harsh and joyless. In other plays like The Year
of the Hiker (1963) and Big Maggie (1969) Keane addressed the theme of
the sexual repression with deep roots in the cultural and religious definitions
of rurality, making a strong case for the joys of sex and the evil of its
suppression.
16
T.K. Whitaker, “Economic Development 1958-1985” in Kieran A. Kennedy (ed.), Ireland in Transition,
Cork and Dublin: Mercier, 1986, p. 10.
57
THE CITY IN IRISH LITERATURE

1. Political context:
• 1905 Sinn Fein ("ourselves alone"), a radical nationalist group, is formed by

Arthur Griffith
• 1912-1913 The Home Rule bill is passed in the House of Commons. In
response, the Ulster Volunteers (Protestant military force) and then the Irish
Volunteers (Catholic military force--soon to become the Irish Republican
Army) form; Civil War seems imminent, when World War I begins, and both
Nationalists and Unionists agree to suspend the conflict.
• 1913 The labor movement, led by James Connolly, stage a series of effective
strikes in the cities; the strikes are violently put down, but Connolly had
managed to connect the plight of urban workers with that of the rural tenants in
opposition to British rule.
• 1916 The Easter Rising: Catholic insurgents seize central areas of Dublin, and
proclaim a provisional government; fighting lasts for one week before
insurgents are forced to surrender; all but one of the leaders (Eamon de Valera)
are executed, to increasing public and international outrage.
• 1918 Sinn Fein wins the parliamentary elections. De Valera takes over
presidency of Sinn Fein from Griffith, establishes new provisional government;
the Irish Republican Army forms, begins guerilla warfare campaign against
British soldiers; most Irish police resign, replaced by British recruits referred to
as “the Black and Tans.” The fighting is fierce, covert, bitter, and cruel on all
sides.
• 1919-1921 “Anglo-Irish War”: armed conflict between British forces and Irish
Nationalists
• 1921 The Anglo-Irish treaty establishes two self-governing areas, Northern
Ireland (the six counties of Antrim, Armagh, Down, Fermanagh, Londonderry,
and Tyrone) and Southern Ireland (called the Irish Free State)
• 1922-23 Civil War in Irish Free State between supporters of the treaty
(“Nationals” or “Free State” troops), led by Griffith and Michael Collins, and
opposition, led by de Valera (“Irregulars”). Armed struggle ends in 1923, and
the Irish Free State begins its rule.
• In Northern Ireland, the Protestant majority succeeds in suppressing the armed
rebellions of the Catholic minority; they institute legal, political, and police
restrictions assuring Protestant control of virtually every level of government. A
bitter hatred and pattern of violence is established in the North that remains to
this day.
2. Perceptions of the urban space:

o The definition of “Irishness”, as it was concocted both at the political and cultural
level at the end of the 19th century, may be seen as an attempt to fix the two
categories of rural versus urban Ireland into a taxonomic relationship assigning
priority to the countryside over the city. While rural Ireland was discursively used
to represent the national essence, an oppositional “un-Irishness” became crystallised
in the materialist, modern, industrialist and party-biased values of England and the
city alike. With independence and the division of the country at the birth of the
58
state, the antithesis was internalised in the opposing stances towards the two
different political territories, metonymically represented through the same space of
the city. On the one hand, republican Dublin, stamped in public memory as an
exemplar of heroic nationalism associated with the 1916 Easter Rising, was
perceived as intrinsic to Irishness. On the other hand, the northern Belfast, the only
large industrial centre in the island and the home of a large Scots-Irish Presbyterian
minority stern in displaying its Unionist sense of identity, became fatally marked
off as Ireland’s “Other”.
• THE “ALIEN” CITY • THE

“HEROIC”CITY
• Belfast • Dublin
• Unionist • Nationalist
• Industry • Revolution
• Protestant • Catholic
• Materialist • Idealist
• Entrepreneurial • Sacrificial
• Decadent • Moral
• English • Irish
3. The “heroic city”: W.B. Yeats’s Easter 1916.
I HAVE met them at close of day

Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking take or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn:
All changed, changed utterly:
59
A terrible beauty is born.
That woman’s days were spent

In ignorant good-will,
Her nights in argument
Until her voice grew shrill.
What voice more sweet than hers
When, young and beautiful,
She rode to harriers?
This man had kept a school,
And rode our winged horse;
This other his helper and friend
Was coming into his force;
He might have won fame in the end,
So sensitive his nature seemed,
So daring and sweet his thought.
This other man I had dreamed
A drunken, vainglorious lout.
He had done most bitter wrong
To some who are near my heart,
Yet I number him in the song;
He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly:
Hearts with one purpose alone

Through summer and winter seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.
The horse that comes from the road,
The rider, the birds that range
From cloud to tumbling cloud,
Minute by minute they change;
A shadow of cloud on the stream
Changes minute by minute;
A horse-hoof slides on the brim,
And a horse plashes within it;
The long-legged moor-hens dive,
And hens to moor-cocks call;
Minute by minute they live:
The stone’s in the midst of all.
Too long a sacrifice

Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven’s part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
60
When sleep at last has come

On limbs that had run wild.
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse -
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
4. Post-Revolutionary Revisionism
o playwrights like Sean O’Casey, Denis Johnston and Brendan Behan engaged in “a
postrevolutionary theatrical revisionism” (Grene: 2002, 137) aimed at redrawing the
nationalist map of the “heroic” Dublin. With the one notable exception provided by
O’Casey’s Dublin trilogy (staged at the Abbey), such plays were also to find
alternative venues of production, provided by the small art-house theatres of
Dublin.
o Sean O’Casey (1880-1964), The Dublin Trilogy

o The Shadow of A Gunman (1923)
o Juno and the Paycock (1924)
o The Plough and the Stars (1926)
o O’Casey’s Dublin trilogy engages with the episodes of recent nationalist

history (the 1916 Easter Rising, the 1919-21 War of Independence and the
Civil War of 1922-23) with the aim of revising cherished loci of the
republican tradition, especially its much revered myth of the hero-martyr.
On his stage such heroes will no longer hold the lime-light, but, by contrary,
they will be either peripheral to the action or cast as mere shadows,
emphasising thus their imaginary status. In their place, the ordinary,
unimportant people will be shown struggling to steer the course of their
lives through the chaotic and violent background of the national struggle.
Most of these characters will be eventually drawn into the maelstrom and
crushed by the impersonal forces of international hatred (Edwards: 1979,
231), though they too are responsible for their fate: due to their own
pettiness, selfishness, cowardice, or vanity, but mostly by allowing
themselves to be governed by illusion. Once shadows are believed in they
are no longer insubstantial but acquire an ominous physicality which will
prove fatal for the dreamer.
61
o In The Shadow of A Gunman Minnie Powell is attracted to the idea of a

‘gunman’, the hero of the nationalist myth, so Donal Davoren accepts the
persona of a gunman in hiding in order to secure her admiration. Once he
becomes a “shadow” of a gunman the engine of the play is set in motion:
Minnie falls in love with an imaginary hero and not a real person, and lets
herself be governed by an illusion which will eventually destroy her. Trying
to save her hero’s life when a suitcase full of bombs, planted by the real
gunman, are discovered in Davoren’s room, Minnie removes it, but is
herself arrested by the Black and Tans, and killed when trying to escape.
Minnie has glorified the gun and the gun finally kills her. Hero-worshipping
has proved a dangerous illusion: Minnie has died for a shadow, which
makes her sacrifice futile. Moreover, her death was not only pointless, but
also unnecessary because Minnie is killed by mistake, when the lorry taking
her away for questioning is ambushed by the IRA, and, trying to jump off,
she is shot in the confusion.
Seumas: I wish to God it was all over. The country is gone mad.
Instead of counting their beads now they’re countin’ bullets; their
Hail Marys and Paternosters are burstin’ bombs - burstin’ bombs,
an’ the rattle of machine guns; petrol is their holy water; their Mass
is a burnin’ building’; their De Profundis is ‘The Soldier’s Son’, an’
their Creed is, I believe in the gun almighty, maker of heaven an’
earth - an’ it’s all for ‘the glory o’ God an’ the honour o’ Ireland’.
Davoren: I remember the time when you yourself believed in
nothing but the gun.
Seumas: Ay, when there wasn’t a gun in the country; I’ve a different
opinion now when there’s nothin’ but guns in the country
o In Juno and the Paycock The Boyles also believe in a shadow: the legacy
which they are to inherit is actually an illusion, arising from the
misinterpretation of a relative’s will. But this legacy is also a metaphor for
the newly won national sovereignty (Innes: 1990, 83), with the imagined
rise and real fall of the Boyles paralleling the disparity between
revolutionary ideal and embittering actuality. In the same way in which the
material expectations aroused by the will be contrasted to the family’s being
irrevocably reduced into debt and poverty, nationalist idealism will be
juxtaposed against the fate of the Boyles’ children: Johnny, the son crippled
by a bullet during the Easter Rising, will be executed by his former
comrades; Mary, left pregnant and deserted by her lover, as well as by her
morally-outraged father, will be forced to leave the home. Nevertheless,
while Juno’s departure at the end of the play may be seen to carry with it,
despite Johnny’s death, the promise of new life in her unborn grandchild, no
such emblematic hope will be afforded to Jack Boyle, left to face the terrible
reality that, in fact, “th’ whole whorl’s … in a terr … ible state of …
chassis” (O’Casey: 1985, 101).
Juno: . . . What was the pain I suffered, Johnny, bringin’ you into the
world to carry you to your craddle, to the pains I’ll suffer carryin’
you out o’ the world to bring you to you grave! Mother o’ God,
Mother o’ God, have pity on us all! Blessed Virgin, where were you
62
when me darlin’ son was riddled with bullets? Sacred Heart o’ Jesus,
take away our hearts o’ stone, and give us hearts o’ flesh! Take away
this murdherin’ hate, an’ give us Thine own eternal love!
o In The Plough and the Stars the shadow is the Speaker, who, in the second
act, is silhouetted outside the window of the public house where most of his
tenement dwellers are gathered. The voice preaches the sanctity of hate and
the redemption of bloodshed, the words being culled by O’Casey from a
number of Pearse’s actual writings. Against these awesome, rousing words
is juxtaposed the informal life of the pub, engaged in comical, mundane
activities, which, nevertheless, concretise the dialectic between vibrant life
and the ‘heroic death’ preached by the Speaker. As shadow, the voice is
insubstantial for the existence of the pub-denizens, but once believed in, its
voluptuous vision of death turns into terrifying actuality. The real deaths
which occur onstage, both of the warriors like Clitheroe, Brennan and
Langan, and of the by-standers like Bessie Burgess and Nora’s unborn child
exhibit the distance between the emotive rhetoric of nationalism and what it
leads to in terms of its human cost.
VOICE: Bloodshed is a cleansing and sanctifying thing, and the

nation that regards it as the final horror has lost its manhood. . .There
are many things more horrible that bloodshed and slavery is one of
them! . . . The old heart of the earth needed to be warmed with the
red wine of the battlefields. Heroism has come back to the earth. . .
When war comes to Ireland she must welcome it as she would
welcome the Angel of God!
CAPT. BRENNAN [catching up The Plough and the Stars]
Imprisonment for th’ independence of Ireland!
LIEUT. LANGDON [catching up the Tri-colour]. Wounds for th’
Independence of Ireland!
CLITHEROE: Death for th’ Independence of Ireland!
THE THREE [together]: So help us God!
o Denis Johnston (1901-1984)

• The Old Lady Says 'No!' (1929)
• The Moon in the Yellow River (1931)
• A Bride for the Unicorn (1933)
• Storm Song (1934)
• Blind Man's Buff (1936) (with Ernst Toller)
• The Golden Cuckoo (1939)
• The Dreaming Dust (1940)
• A Fourth for Bridge (1948)
• The Scythe and the Sunset (1958)
• The same gap between illusion and reality lies at the centre of Denis
Johnston’s The Old Lady Says ‘No!’, a play written in 1926, but
first produced in 1929 at the Gate Theatre, following its rejection by
the Abbey. Using an expressionistic technique of collage, the play
aims to juxtapose the complexities and complacencies of the Irish
63
Free State, metonymically rendered through the urban experience of

his contemporary Dublin, against the revolutionary imaginings of a
Robert Emmet. The play begins thus as a sentimental re-creation of
Ireland’s heroic past – with a playlet staging Robert Emmet’s
unsuccessful rising of 1803 and his love for Sarah Curran. But the
actor in the play is knocked out and has a nightmare about being the
real Emmet wandering round 1920s Dublin, and struggling to give
coherence to the bewildering scenes he encounters. At one point the
crowd becomes menacing, questioning his identity and threatening
him. ‘Emmet’, excited, gets hold of a revolver which goes off and a
young man whom he has shot apparently dies interminably. The
other death Emmet has to confront in the play is the historical
gratuitous slaughter of Lord Kilwarden for which the bitter figure of
Grattan blames the hero’s followers. Grattan accuses Emmet of
prolonging the cult of bloodshed endemic in Irish history: “Oh, it is
an easy thing to draw a sword and raise a barricade. It saves
working, it saves waiting. It saves everything but blood. And blood
is the cheapest thing the good god has made” (Johnston: 1988, 375).
As with the ‘murder’ of the young man, Emmet is forced to face the
unintended violent consequences of his romantic ideals. Johnston’s
image of the mythical hero-martyr is emblematically that of a
somnambulist and an actor, a two-fold shadow facing a de-glorified
society achieved with so much human blood. But, significantly,
towards the end of the play, Emmet comes to see that he is but a
play-actor, free to rebel and repudiate the tradition of violence that
history has assigned to him. Flinging away his sword, he “forgives
the strumpet city Dublin, metonymy for Ireland” (Murray: 2000,
124), and, instead of delivering the famous historical speech from
the dock, he adds: “There now. Let my epitaph be written”
(Johnston: 1988, 421), before lying down in his previous state of
concussion. This is a recognition that words can alter the shape of
history and a plea to abandon traditional pieties in favour of new,
revised and enabling alternatives.
o Brendan Behan (Breandán Ó Beacháin) (1923 - 1964)

• The Quare Fellow (1954)
• An Giall (1958), The Hostage (1958)
• Richard's Cork Leg (1972)
• Brendan Behan’s The Hostage, performed in 1958 as An Giall at the

Pike Theatre, is written in the context of the renewed IRA border
campaigns in the 1950s, questioning the revolution for what its
history did to make Irish politics a muddle. The song which
celebrates Michael Collins sums up the political dilemma entailed in
the split between the Laughing Boy’s ideal of a free Ireland and the
reality of the partially fulfilled republican project, the legacy of
which materialised in the obstinate movement to continue “the
quixotic struggle for Ireland’s total liberation from English control”
(Murray: 2000, 150). The Hostage is set in an old house, once a
Republican sanctuary, now a brothel, which is owned by Monsewer,
64
a Gaelic-speaking English aristocrat and also a convert to Irish

nationalism. As Pat, a former IRA member who runs the place, says:
“He was born an Englishman, remained one for years . . .He had
every class of comfort until one day he discovered he was an
Irishman..”(Behan: 1962, 14-5) The absurdity of this situation sets
the note for Behan’s mockery of the Irish political fanaticism. The
new I.R.A campaign is seen as part of Monsewer’s lunacy which
makes him plan “battles fought long ago against enemies long since
dead” (Behan: 1962, 6), while he also engineers a scheme to get hold
of a British hostage in order to forestall the execution of an IRA man
in Belfast. Leslie, the English soldier who ends up in the brothel,
gradually gets the affection of its occupiers and develops a romantic
relationship with Teresa, the Irish servant-girl. Nevertheless, since
the IRA youth has been hanged, Leslie’s fate seems sealed, but his
death comes accidentally, at the end of the play, being shot in the
confusion of a police raid. As in Minnie’s case, nobody knows who
has killed Leslie: probably the IRA, as Minnie was probably shot by
the Auxiliaries, but in both cases the odds speak also for the other
side, and Behan leaves the question open to any of the two
alternatives: “It’s no one’s fault. Nobody meant to kill him.”(Behan:
1962, 108)
5. The Troubles
• 1968 Riots in Londonderry in October between Catholics demanding increased

civil rights and Protestants seeking to maintain their political superiority.
• 1969 Great Britain pushes for reform in Northern Ireland; extremists of both
sides (Unionist and Republican) intensify fighting in August, and British troops
are deployed to restore order.
• 1970-71 The I.R.A. resumes activities with renewed vigor, firmly establishing
itself in the Catholic districts of Londonderry and Belfast and titling itself the
"Provisional I.R.A." They conduct a guerilla war against the Ulster police
(Royal Ulster Constabulary), the Ulster volunteer army (UVA), and the British
army.
• 1972 British soldiers kill 13 Catholic civilians on 30 January (Bloody Sunday)
in Londonderry; the Northern Ireland constitution is suspended, and government
transferred directly to London; Provisional I.R.A. kills 19 and wounds 130 in
Belfast bombings on 21 July (Bloody Friday).
• 1979 Provisional I.R.A. kill 18 British soldiers in Co. Down, and assassinate
Lord Mountbatten in the Republic.
• 1981 Series of hunger strikes in Maze prison by Catholic prisoners to protest
living conditions, culminating in death of Bobby Sands after a 66-day strike.
• 1983 Provisional I.R.A. kill 5 and injure 80 in Christmas bombing in London.
• 1985 The Anglo-Irish agreement is signed between Great Britain and Eire in
effort to work out Northern Ireland conflict.
• 1998 Easter Agreement signed on April 10, setting up provisions for cease-fire
and joint government of Northern Ireland among Protestants, Catholics, and the
Irish Republic. Three months after the Agreement is ratified, bombs erupt in
65
Omagh, Northern Ireland, killing 29 and injuring hundreds more - the single
greatest loss of life since "the troubles" began.
o Since 1970 dozens of plays dealing with various aspects of the troubles in
Ulster have been written, developing into what D. S. Maxwell considers to
represent a subgenre of modern Irish drama (Maxwell: 1990). With the
actuality of violence, an insoluble conflict emerged once the sense of
difference translated now “on one side into a sense of superiority and on the
other into a sense of grievance” (Murray: 2000, 187). This inevitably led to
a revival of Irish nationalism in ways which harked back to the early
decades of the century in its persistent belief in the unfinished nature of the
Irish revolution. As such, both Protestant and Catholic playwrights often
find a common ground in aligning themselves to the post-revolutionary
theatrical revisionism of O’Casey, Johnston or Behan as one dramatic
option through which the present turmoil may be artistically framed.
o Brian Friel, The Freedom of the City (1973)
 Although set in 1979, the play recalls Bloody Sunday in Derry,

1972, and the ensuing Widgery Report that exonerated the British
soldiers of guilt. When an unauthorised civil-rights march is
dispersed by CS gas, three demonstrators take refuge in the Mayor’s
Parlour in Derry’s Guildhall. Lily, Skinner, and Michael represent a
cross-section of the Catholic population of Derry. In the public
world outside, rumour and romantic nationalism inflate the trio into
armed terrorists and freedom fighters, and when they try to leave the
building with hands above their heads they are shot dead by British
soldiers. Parallel to this, a tribunal examines the events and
exonerates the security forces. In another strand, Dr Dodds, a
sociologist, lectures the audience directly on the subculture of
poverty, while intermittent scenes provide brief comment on the
influence of the media and the clergy. . In opposition to the abstract
and inflexible figures which represent the official world, Friel turns
to the naturalist mode to delineate his central trio in fundamentally
humanistic terms, as confused, frightened but also high-spirited
human beings, who, like O’Casey humble innocents, are caught in
the crossfire of powerful partisan forces.
LILY: At this minute Mickey Teague, the milkman, is shouting up from the
road, ‘I know you’re there, lily Doherty. Come down and pay me for the six
weeks you owe me.’ And the chairman’s sitting at the fire, like a wee thin
saint with his finger in his mouth and the comics up to his nose and hoping
to God I’ll remember to bring him home five fags. And below us Celia
Cunningham’s about half-full now and crying about the sweepstake ticket
she bought and lost when she was fifteen. And above us Dickie Devine’s
groping under the bed for his trombone and he doesn’t know that Annie
pawned it on Wednesday for the wanes’ bus fares and he’s going to beat the
tar out of her when she tells him. And down the passage aul Andy Boyle’s
lying in bed because he has no coat.
66
[ . . . ] I was at the back of the crowd, beside wee Johnny Duffy - you know
- the window cleaner - Johnny the Tumbler - and I’m telling him what the
speakers is saying ‘cos he hears hardly anything now since he fell off the
ladder last time. And I’m just after telling him ‘The streets is ours and
nobody’s going to move us’ when I turn round and Jesus, Mary and Joseph
there’s this big Saracen right behind me. Of course, I took to my heels. And
when I look back there’s Johnny the Tumbler standing there with his fists in
the air and him shouting, ‘The streets is ours and nobody’s going to move
us.
MICHAEL: It was a good, disciplined, responsible march. And that’s what

we must show them - that we’re responsible and respectable; and they’ll
come to respect what we’re campaigning for. [. . .] a decent job, a decent
place to live, a decent town to bring up your children in, [. . .] fair play. . .so
that no matter what our religion is, no matter what our politics is, we have
the same chances and the same opportunities as the next fella.
SKINNER: . . .Because you live with eleven kids and a sick husband in two
rooms that aren’t fit for animals. Because you exist on a state subsistence
that’s about enough to keep you alive but too small to fire your guts.
Because you know your children are caught in the same morass. Because for
the first time in your life you grumbled and someone else grumbled and
someone else, and you heard each other, and became aware that there were
hundreds, thousands, millions of us all over the world, and in a vague
groping way you were outraged. That’s all it’s all about, Lilly. It has nothing
to do with doctors and accountants and teachers and dignity and boy scout
honour. It’s about us - the poor - the majority - stirring in our sleep.
LILY: . . .it’s for him I go all the civil rights marches. Isn’t that stupid? You
and him [Michael] and everybody else marching and protesting about
sensible things like politics and stuff and me in the middle of you all,
marching for Declan. Isn’t that the stupidest thing you ever heard?
MICHAEL: I knew they weren’t going to shoot. Shooting belonged to a

totally different order of things. And then the Guildhall Square exploded and
I knew a terrible mistake had been made. And I became very agitated, not
because I was dying, but that this terrible mistake be recognized and
acknowledged. . .
LILY: And in the silence before my body disintegrated in a purple
convulsion, I thought I glimpsed a tiny truth: that life had eluded me
because never once in my forty-three years had an experience, an event,
even a small unimportant happening been isolated, and assessed and
articulated. . .
SKINNER: And as we stood on the Guildhall steps, two thoughts raced
through my mind: how seriously they took us and how unpardonably casual
we were about them; and that to match their seriousness would demand a
total dedication, a solemnity as formal as theirs.
67
Bibliografie minimala:
1. Bradshaw, Brenna, Andrew Hadfield and Willy Maley (eds.), REPRESENTING
IRELAND: LITERATURE AND THE ORIGINS OF CONFLICT, Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1993.
2. Brady, Ciaran, Mary O’Dowd and Brian Walker (eds.), ULSTER: AN ILLUSTRATED
HISTORY, foreword by J. C. Beckett, London: B .T. Batsford, 1989.
3. Brophy, James D. and Raymond J. Porter, CONTEMPORARY IRISH WRITING,
Boston: Iona College Press, Twayne Publishers, 1983.
4. Brown, Terence IRELAND’S LITERATURE, Mercier Press, 1992.
5. Cairns, David and Shaun Richards, WRITING IRELAND: COLONIALISM,
NATIONALISM AND CULTURE, Manchester, Manchester UP, 1988.
6. Crotty, Patrick (ed.) MODERN IRISH POETRY. AN ANTHOLOGY, Lagan Press,
1993.
7. Deane, Seamus, A SHORT HISTORY OF IRISH LITERATURE, London et al.:
Hutchinson; Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986.
8. Deane, Seamus, CELTIC REVIVALS: ESSAYS IN MODERN IRISH LITERATURE,
1880-1980, London: Faber and Faber, 1985.
9. Foster, John Wilson, COLONIAL CONSEQUENCES: ESSAYS IN IRISH
LITERATURE AND CULTURE, Mullingar: The Lilliput Press, 1991.
10. Gibbons, Luke, TRANSFORMATIONS IN IRISH CULTURE, Cork: Cork
University Press; Field Day, 1996.
11. Grene, Nicholas, THE POLITICS OF IRISH DRAMA: PLAYS IN CONTEXT
FROM BOUCICAULT TO FRIEL, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002.
12. Kenneally, Michael (ed.), IRISH LITERATURE AND CULTURE, Gerrards Cross:
Colin Smythe, 1992
13. Kiberd, Declan INVENTING IRELAND: The Literature of the Modern Nation,
Vintage, 1998.
14. LANDMARKS OF IRISH DRAMA, Methuen, 1996.
15. Mohor-Ivan, Ioana REPRESENTATIONS OF IRISHNESS: CULTURE,
THEATRE AND BRIAN FRIEL’S REVISIONIST STAGE, EDP, 2004.
16. Moody, T.W. (ed.) THE COURSE OF IRISH HISTORY, Mercier Press, 1994.
17. NATIONALISM, COLONIALISM AND LITERATURE, with an introduction by
Seamus Deane, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990.
18. Vance, Norman, IRISH LITERATURE: A SOCIAL HISTORY, Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1990.
19. Welch, Robert (ed.) THE OXFORD COMPANION TO IRISH LITERATURE,
Oxford UP, 1996.
68
Suggested essay topics:
1. THE ‘SHAN VAN VOCHT’ LITERARY TROPE.
2. CULTURAL TRADITIONS AND THE IRISH LYRIC.
3. THE ‘BIG HOUSE’ THEME IN IRISH LITERATURE.
4. NATIONALISM AND THE IRISH WRITER.
5. DRAMATIC REPRESENTATIONS OF IRISHNESS.
6. THE ‘VISION’ THEME IN IRISH LITERATURE.
7. PLACE AND DISPLACEMENT WITH THE IRISH WRITER.
8. STEREOTYPES OF IRISHNESS AND THEIR LITERARY
REPRESENTATIONS.
9. THE “COMIC IRISHMAN”.
10. IRISH WOMEN’S WRITING.
11. LINGUISTIC EXPERIMENTATION WITH THE IRISH WRITERS.
12. ENGAGING WITH THE CRISIS: CONTEMPORARY IRISH
WRITERS.
13. THE ‘PEASANT’ THEME IN IRISH LITERATURE.
14. THE ‘CITY’ IN IRISH LITERATURE.
15. IRISHNESS AND THE LITERATURE OF THE ‘DOUBLE’SELVES.
16. IRELAND’S “TRAVELLERS’ TALES”.
17. POST-COLONIAL READINGS OF IRELAND/IRISHNESS.
69
INDIVIDUAL AUTHORS & TEXTS (Recommended):
1. “The Land of Cockayne”

2. Geoffrey Keating, “O Woman Full of Wile”
3. Edmund Spenser, “A View on the Present State of Ireland”
4. William Shakespeare, “Henry V”
5. Dion Boucicault, “The Irish Trilogy” (Arrah-na Pogue, The Colleen Bawn, the
Shaughraun)
6. “The Quiet Man” (directed by Boris Ford)
7. Brian Friel, “Making History”
8. Seamus Heaney, “Traditions”, “Ocean’s Love to Ireland”
9. James Clarence Mangan, “My Dark Rosaleen”
10. W. B. Yeats, “Kathleen Ni Houlihan”
11. James Joyce, “A Mother” (from “The Dubliners”)
12. Samuel Beckett, “Murphy”
13. Dancing at Lughnasa (film)
14. Thomas Murphy, “Bailegangaire”
15. Maria Edgeworth, “Castle Rackrent”
16. Lennox Robinson, “Killycregs in Twilight”
17. W.B. Yeats, “Purgatory”
18. Jennifer Johnston, “How Many Miles to Babylon?”, “The Invisible Worm”
19. J.M. Synge, “In the Shadow of the Glen”, “Riders to the Sea”, “The Well of the
Saints”, “The Playboy of the Western World”
20. J.B.Keane, “The Field”
21. Patrick McCabe, “The Butcher Boy”
22. W.B.Yeats, “Easter 1916”
23. Sean O’Casey, “The Dublin Trilogy” (In the Shadow of a Gunman, Juno and the
Paycock, The Plough and the Stars)
24. Denis Johnston, “The Old Lady Says ‘No’!”
25. Brian Friel, “The Freedom of the City”
26. Bernard MacLaverty, “Cal”
70
Pronunciation Guide
á (long), as in "aught;" a (short), as in "hot."

c with slender vowels (e, i), as in "king;" never as s.
c with broad vowels (a, o, u), as in "car;" never as s.
ch with slender vowels (e, i), as in German "Ich;" never as in "church."
ch with broad vowels (a, o, u), as in German "Buch;" never as in "church."
d with slender vowels (e, i), as in French "dieu."
d with broad vowels (a, o, u), as in "thy."
é (long), as in ale; e (short), as in "bet."
g with slender vowels (e, i), as in "give;" never as j.
g with broad vowels (a, o, u), as in "go;" never as j.
gh with slender vowels (e, i) is slender ch voiced.
gh with broad vowels (a, o, u) is broad ch voiced.
í (long), as in "feel;" i (short), as in it.
mh and bh intervocalic with slender vowels, as v.
mh and bh intervocalic with broad vowels, as w.
ó (long), as in "note;" o (short), as in "done."
s with slender vowels (e, i), as in "shine," never as z.
s with broad vowels (a, o, u), as s.
t with slender vowels (e, i), as in "tin."
t with broad vowels (a, o, u), as in "threw."
th, like h.
ú (long), as in "pool;" u (short), as in "full."
The remaining consonants are pronounced almost as in English
71
72

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IRISH LITERATURE

a course for 2nd year students in English

I. Conquests, colonialism and

II. Space and nation in literary

• The ‘pastoral’ in Irish Literature.

THE MATTER OF IRELAND

(brief chronology of historical events)

c. 6000 BC probable date of first human settlements in Ireland

ANGLO NORMAN TRADITIONS

1. THE NORMAN INVASION

• In the mid-1100's, two competing Irish Kings, Dermot MacMurrough of Leinster

2. NORMAN CULTURAL INFLUENCES:

a) Chansons des geste: The Song of Dermot and the Earl

THE SONG OF DERMOT AND THE EARL (c.1200-25)

Quant dermod, li reis vaillant,

Li quens al hort iert bacheler.

• Diarmait Mac Murchada (also known as Diarmait na nGall, "Dermot of the

• Richard de Clare, 2nd Earl of Pembroke (1130 – 20 April 1176), known as

• Derbforgaill , Anglicised as Dervorgilla, (1108-1193) was a daughter of Murchad

Modern treatments of Dermot and Dervorgilla’s story:

b) Goliardic poems: The Land of Cockayne

The Land of Cockayne (c. 1340)

Fur in see bi west Spayngne

(…)I Cokaigne is met and drink

Far in the sea to the west of Spain

c) The Danta Gradha: O Woman Full of Wile

• The Danta Gradha is an Irish adaptation of the Courtly love poetry.

is undeserved, of that I'm sure . . .

O WOMAN FULL OF WILE

O woman full of wile,

See how my hair is grey!

Do not think me besotted:

Take thy mouth from my mouth,

‘Tis thy curling ringleted hair,

Every deed but the deed of the flesh

Trans. Padraic Pearse

ENGLISH NARRATIVES OF IRELAND

1509 Henry VIII succeeds to the throne of England

a) Colonial Discourse Theory (Edward W. Said)

The West The Orient

• Discursive structures of colonial discourse:

• The colonised countries become objects of knowledge;

A. Civilians and Barbarians

• Anglo-Irish Chronicles: a body of political writings about Ireland

From A VIEW ON THE PRESENT STATE OF IRELAND (1596)

EUDOXUS: What is this that ye say of so many as remain English of them?

• English / Irish Polarities

B. THE STAGE IRISHMAN

• William Shakespeare, Henry V

HENRY V, ACT III, SCENE 2

Enter Fluellen, Gower following

• English / Irish Polarities

ENGLISH HIBERNO ENGLISH

• Stage Irishmen in Anglo-Irish Literature:

• A recurrent strategy of Anglo-Irish dramatists was to subvert the stereotype

• Dion Boucicault (1820-1890): playwright, actor, and producer, Dion

• The Irish Trilogy (The Colleen Bawn, Arrah-na-Pogue, The Shaughraun)

C. CONTEMPORARY REVISIONS OF THE ANGLO-IRISH

a) Seamus Heaney: Traditions.

Our guttural muse

while custom, that ‘most

of our Elizabethan English: