Drama, Ireland and the Question of Civility

Abstract

J. O. Bartley’s ground breaking survey of representations of the Irish on the Renaissance stage, Anneliese Truninger’s and Kathleen Rabl’s further considerations all point to the common feature of most depictions: the Irish are portrayed as wild.¹ As Rabl significantly notes, this wildness undergoes a transformation to a form of ‘wild civility’ over the space of some fifty years: beginning with The Misfortunes of Arthur (1587) where we are told unambiguously that the Irish signify ‘revenge and fury’ to Ben Jonson’s Irish Masque of 1613 and finally Davenant’s presentation of an ancient Irishman initially disorderly but later decorously dancing in the masque Salmacida Spoilia (1637). Yet, the temptation remains to witness representations of the Irish in Renaissance drama in reductive terms. If they are brought to conform to ostensibly civil English or British norms, it is because of the influence of the colonizer’s ‘superior’ civilization upon them. Rabl suggests that Renaissance drama’s Irish characters, whether performed in London or Dublin, were ‘in the act of becoming stereotype “Stage Irishmen”’.²