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

This short but dense book offers profound insights into the political context of Dublin theatre production from the Stuart Restoration of 1660 to the Act of Union of 1800. Each chapter treats events that help to redefine and re-problematize the meaning, not only of the Irish stage, but of ‘Irishness’ itself, as it was performed on stage throughout the period dominated by the Penal Laws. The work is exhaustively researched and entertainingly delivered, and it can appeal both to a general and to a scholarly readership, a readership that is (however) very unlikely ever to access the primary material on which this study is based. Indeed Wheatley frankly acknowledges that historical drama of this period is unlikely to be re-published or restaged.

The introduction consists of a survey of the topic’s many eminent detractors (those who claim there is no real Irish theatre in the eighteenth century) and offers a cautious plea on behalf of this material’s enduring relevance and interest. At no point in the book, however, does Wheatley make great claims for the literary merit of the (overwhelmingly tragic-historical) dramatic material to which he makes reference. The first chapter, devoted to a consideration of Richard Head’s Hic et Ubique, considers Dublin as a Utopian point of confusion and possibility and demonstrates an early staged exploration of the paradox of being ‘English’ in Ireland. The second chapter examines the long career of Charles Shadwell and further considers shifting allegiances that establish new understandings of ways of being Irish in the early eighteenth century. This theme is elaborated in the course of a close reading of William Philips’ Hibernia Freed in the following chapter, which illustrates the various hopes and anxieties that that historical analogy is capable of providing. This state of intoxicatingly confused historical legacy equally informs the chapter titled “Robert Ashton’s Heroic Palimpsest, The Battle of Aughrim.” This play deliberately (it seems) confuses the question of how and why and for whom one should be cheering in the course of the 1691 conflict it describes. As the author proceeds to a discussion of the (very) long career of Charles Macklin, the debate focuses on language and pronunciation. Macklin’s own relationship with Hiberno-English is regarded as symptomatic of tendencies that were (by the end of the century) reinforcing the estrangement of the so-called Anglo-Irish from the inhabitants of the adjacent island. Patriotic historical drama forms the subject of the chapter on Francis Dobbs and Gorges Edmond Howard. In the tantalizingly short epilogue, Wheatley remarks on the reasons for the failure of the complex traditions he has been exploring: “Irish theater failed to develop during the period of Grattan’s Parliament because no one… could conceive of the problems of Irish society in broad enough terms” (128).

The chief complaints with this book are its brevity and a certain over-caution afflicting both author and publisher concerning the level of interest that the reader can sustain. The book, in terms of its scholarship and intellectual imagination, deserves to be roughly twice as long as it is. The success of Riotous Performances (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003), Helen Burke’s more recent study that covers the same terrain, only reinforces this disappointment, particularly as Wheatley’s sense of the complexities of colonial identity is at least as sophisticated as Burke’s. Wheatley stresses the polyvalence and ambiguity of Irish patriotism on stage, always aware that successive theatre managers were economically responsible for placating an eclectic and divided audience. For Wheatley, the challenge for modern readers consists not in recovering the ‘ultimate’ political allegiance of playwrights and managers but rather in understanding the complexities of practical political accommodation in a fragile commercial environment. As Wheatley remarks of Charles Lucas (the paradigmatic protestant Irish patriot of the mid-century): “the confusion in his attitudes is closer to multiple personality disorder” (90). Eighteenth-century Ireland as a whole suffered from something like this very disorder.

A longer book would also serve to justify some of the concluding pronouncements of this author, some of which seem to hang in mid air without adequate justification. Statements such as “The Romantic emphasis on the individual makes it difficult to write drama in any case, as drama is about people in conflict with others, not themselves” (126) are interesting, but controversial, and they deserve to be ventilated over the course of at least a few paragraphs.

Perhaps these irritations, so minor and yet so insistent, are themselves a testimony to the scope and interest of the book. By opening up so many intriguing lines of development, Wheatley has helped stimulate useful trajectories of research for decades to come.