Beneath Iërne's Banners: Irish Protestant Drama of the Restoration and Eighteenth Century

In his Short History of Irish Literature (1986), Seamus Deane makes short work of the dramas of Anglo-Irish playwrights from George Farquhar to Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and from the lesser lights of John O'Keefe to Hugh Kelly. Deane finds that in these writers' work the "political coloration is very slight indeed" and that in general "Irish theatre scarcely engaged with the dominant political issues of the day" (p. 118). As Deane points out, the Dublin theater depended on Vice-regal approval-which tended toward Drury Lane and Covent Garden fare. In the movements between Dublin and London, London was clearly the winner getting a string of great actors, actresses and playwrights from Ireland-while Ireland got Charles Shadwell, "son of Thomas the undistinguished English poet laureate" (p.18). Deane's brisk summaries and dismissals are in part a feature of the "short history" genre, but they are also typical of what until very recently has been the master narrative of Irish literary history. Indeed, in Writing Ireland: Colonialism, Nationalism and Culture (1988) David Cairns and Shaun Richards do not mention the many dramas of this period.

Christopher Wheatley's 1999 study of Restoration and eighteenth-century Irish protestant drama helps to complicate this narrative. His book can be seen as part of a more general movement to widen our understanding of the varieties and complexities of literature in Ireland that includes works such as Andrew Carpenter's anthology Verse in English from Eighteenth-Century Ireland (1998). Indeed, Wheatley's work read alongside-or after-Alan J, Fletcher's recent Drama, Performance and Polity in Pre-Comwellian Ireland (2001), establishes that invasions, massacres, and the dead hand of colonial rule did not eradicate drama, or the ability of drama to articulate political and cultural conflict.

Wheatley's opening chapter works cautiously through the question of how to define the dramas and dramatists of the period 1660-c.1800. He concentrates on dramatists who wrote primarily for the Dublin stage and on "Irish" topics-whatever their precise nationality (or however one defines nationality). As Wheatley explains, "if playwrights claim Irishness, and nobody else wants them, they should probably be described as such posthumously, whether or not they were so pluralistic themselves" (11). English born and bred Charles Shadwell (who had Irish connections), who wrote in Ireland for the Dublin stage, dedicated plays to prominent members of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, and mined Irish history for his tragedy Rotherick O'Connor (1719) is included. However, Anglo-Irish dramatists such as Farquhar, Cumberland, Goldsmith, and Sheridan who wrote plays set in England for the English stage are excluded. This rather self-denying act is, I think, a limitation. A close examination of their work, their treatment of "stage" Irishmen, and in Cumberland's case of colonial topics, would further illuminate the extent to which the specific politics and culture of Ireland in the eighteenth century produced a characteristic drama of inverted wit and displacement. However, Wheatley's aim is to characterize plays, which even if imitative of English models, were tailored for the Dublin stage.

Above all, what unites the dramatists he considers is their increasing identification of themselves and their dramas with Ireland, Irish history and Irish concerns. Cairns and Richards describe nineteenth-century Anglo-Irish intellectuals as seeking to produce "forms of sentimental connection which would make it possible for the Ascendancy to assume the leadership of the people-nation-with their material and cultural dominance preserved" (21). Wheatley's study suggests that this endeavor can be back-dated to the eighteenth century. As the century progressed, the Anglo-Irish protestant ruling class became less fearful of Stuart invasions and more frustrated by their status as a lesser bred of English ruled to their disadvantage from London. Without wishing to grant any large concessions to the native population, they were at increasingly anxious to envisage Ireland as a united country, owing allegiance but not servitude to an Empire. The dramatists who are considered and are each accorded a chapter can be seen as moving in this direction-a direction end-stopped by the savage events of 1798. Writing from a position within and for the Anglo-Irish of the ascendancy, the dramatists Wheatley studies frequently perform agile leaps of allegiance and indulge in wishful dramatizations of unions between invaders-often depicted as Danes-and native nobility of Ireland-often figured as female. Increasingly, nobility is granted to all sides, so that even in defeat, as in Robert Ashton's The Battle of Aughrim (1728), the Irish emerge as heroes, and worthy enemies, villainy being accorded to the French. As Wheatley shows this play entered into folk repertory and had something to offer the complex spectrum of possible viewers-native Irish, Old English, as well as the increasingly alienated new Ascendancy.

Beginning with Richard Head, whose Jonsonian comedy Hic et Ubique; or, the Humours of Dublin (1663) depicts Dublin as a kind of wild utopia where English projectors dream of profit and rogues seek refuge, the study moves on to more complex representations of Ireland. In Charles Shadwell's dramas, written between 1725 and 1720, cautious intermarriages between Irish and English settlers take place to dramatize an Ireland which is "part of a prosperous and virtuous Whig empire, while preserving elements of the indigenous culture" (47). Shadwell's Rotherick O'Connor is an heroic drama of the Norman conquest of Ireland, and also a Whig drama of the defeat of arbitrary (Stuart) rule by stern but just English who will provide the conquered with the fruits of civilization. However, Hibernia Freed, premiered in London in 1722, by the Tory and Jacobite sympathizer William Philips, which also mines Irish history, goes further back in time to depict instead the defeat of a Danish tyrant by brave Irish warriors. Although the tyrannical behavior of the Danish ruler inspires successful revolt, the possibility that the "good" on both sides can live together-and intermarry-makes this an uneasy plea for alliance rather than an incitement to rebellion.

Charles Macklin is perhaps an uneasy fit in Wheatley's collection since a convert to Protestantism he changed his name from Cathal McLaughlin and made his career on the English stage. However, his "allegiance to his own Irishness" and his "patriot politics"(93, 96) in his plays merits his inclusion and demonstrates the possibility by the 1760s of portraying Irish characters as proud to be Irish, while loyal (to England). Indeed, Wheatley sees his work as marking a new phase in which the "English of Ireland are now Irish-or at least think they are" (100). The last playwrights to be considered are Gorges Edmund Howard, a government official and Francis Dobbs, a patriot reformer, both having plays performed in the 1770s. Despite their very different politics, both turned to pre-Conquest Irish history to write romantic dramas of heroic conflict and ultimate unification. In the trajectory Wheatley traces, the Anglo-Irish dramatists now treat Irish history as their own and their political concerns are internal to Ireland .They are not seeking to justify (or condemn) colonial rule so much as to envisage an Ireland in which peoples of differing religions and origins can cooperate.

Throughout his study, Wheatley examines the constantly shifting and often brutal politics that created the embattled and ambiguous culture of the Anglo-Irish. He demonstrates convincingly that far from failing to engage with the "dominant political issues of the day," those issues-issues of identity, allegiance, and ultimately action-shaped plots, language, characterizations, and informed the use of source materials. The plays he examines indicate a growth of confidence and a shift from semi-allegorical dramatizations of metropolitan London politics to a profound (if erroneous) belief in the possibility of a united Ireland.