Abstract
Throughout the purple testament (or dust) that is the history of the English presence in Ireland, memorably since the defeat of Irish and Spaniards by Queen Elizabeth’s Lord Mountjoy at the Battle of Kinsale, during the first year of the seventeenth century, the idea of insurrection has been peculiarly Irish and part of their nation’s daily island life.2 Apart from frequent, crucial urges to subsist and to survive amid deplorable conditions, Irish insurrection among the ordinary Irish has encompassed blurry ideals of family, religion, and homeland — so much in common with wish-fulfillment among conquered peoples since Homer and the Homeridae. And the strife now in Ulster for more than a dozen years somewhat supports this contention. Moreover, then and now the notion of freedom seems to have little to do with victory hard-won over the ancient foe or its aftermath. On closer look, insurrection in Ireland persists in fact and story as a constellation of dreams and half-spent emotions that tend to shape the future beyond mere understanding and reason.
If the Irish theme were deleted from the work of Synge, Colum, Lady Gregory, Stephens, O’Casey, Joyce, O’Flaherty, O’Faolain, O’Connor, or Kavanagh, nothing at all would be left. If it were deleted from the work of Yeats, most of the best would be gone.1
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Notes
Malcomb Brown, The Politics of Irish Literature: From Thomas Davis to W. B. Yeats ( Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1972 ) p. 54.
James Carty, ed. Ireland: From the Flight of the Earls to Grattan’s Parliament, 1607–1782 3rd ed. (Dublin: C. J. Fallon, Ltd, 1957) pp. xiv—xvi, 1–25.
Robert Kee, The Green Flag: The Turbulent History of the Irish National Movement ( New York: Delacorte Press, 1972 ) pp. 46–7.
Liam O’Flaherty, Insurrection ( London: Gollancz, 1950 ) p. 173.
James Stephens, The Insurrection in Dublin ( New York: Macmillan, 1916 ) p. 548.
See also William Irwin Thompson, The Imagination of an Insurrection: Dublin, Easter 1916 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967) pp. iii—vii, 231–43.
Ibid., pp. 179, 200, 208, passim. See also Herbert Howarth, The Irish Writer, 1880–1940 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1959) passim;
and Frank O’Connor, A Short History of Irish Literature: A Backward Look (New York: Capricorn Books, 1968) passim.
Aristotle, The Art of Rhetoric trans. J. H. Freese (London: Heinemann, 1926) 1. 2, 8–9 (13542-1396b), see also The Rhetoric of Aristotle trans. Lane Cooper (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1932/1960), “Introduction,” pp. xvii–xxxv.
See Moses Hadas, “Introduction,” The Complete Plays of Aristophanes (New York: Bantam Books, 1971), trans. Moses Hadas, pp. 1 —12.
Compare Aristophanisr Comoediae eds F. W. Hall & W. M. Geldart. vols I & II (London: Clarendon Press, 1907).
Louis Kronenberger, The Thread of Laughter (New York: Hill & Wang, 1952, 1970) pp. 3–4.
Friedrich Dürrenmatt, “Problems of the Theatre,” tr. Gerhard Nellhaus, Tulane Drama Review 2(Oct. 1958) 2–26. He adds, 26: “Tragedy, on the other hand, predicts a true community, a kind of community whose existence in our day is but an embarrassing fiction.”
Susanne K. Langer, Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art ( New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953 ) p. 351.
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media ( New York: McGraw-Hill; 1965 ), p. 242.
Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature ( Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975 ) P. 154.
M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (New York: W. W. Norton, 1958; Oxford University Press, 1953) p. 6ff.
Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957) p. 162ff, 223: Irony and satire are “attempts to give form to the shifting ambiguities and complexities of unidealized existence.”
See Richard M. Kain, “A Scrapbook of the ‘Playboy riots,’ ” The Emory University Quarterly 22(Spring 1966) 5–17.
See also Denis Johnston, “Sean O’Casey: An Appreciation,” Living Age, 329 [From the Daily Telegraph (London), it March 1926 ].
Gerard Fay, The Abbey Theatre: Cradle of Genius (New York: Macmillan, 1958), p. 5: Yeats’s speech from the stage of the Abbey: “ ‘You have disgraced yourselves again. Is this to be an ever-recurring celebration of the arrival of Irish genius? Once more you have rocked the cradle of genius. The news of what is happening here will go from country to country. You have once more rocked the cradle of reputation. The fame of O’Casey is born tonight.’”
Gabriel Fallon, Sean O’Casey: The Man I Knew ( London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965 ) pp. 56–95.
Saros Cowasjee, Sean O’Casey: The Man and His Work ( New York: Macmillan, 1960 ) pp. 32–4.
Ronald Ayling, “Ideas and Ideology in The Plough and the Stars.” The Sean O’Casey Review 2 (2) (Spring 1976), 115–36; 116.
Una Ellis-Fermor, The Irish Dramatic Movement, 2nd ed. ( London: Methuen, 1954 ) p. 196.
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© 1983 Robert G. Lowery
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Maroldo, W.J. (1983). Insurrection as Enthymeme in O’Casey’s Dublin Trilogy. In: Lowery, R.G. (eds) O’Casey Annual No. 2. Macmillan Literary Annuals S.. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-06209-6_5
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