Theatre and nation in Irish romanticism: the tragic dramas of Charles Robert Maturin and Richard Lalor Sheil

Charles Robert Maturin's gothic novel Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) describes religion as "the national drama" of Catholic countries (I, 95). Maturin explains the inter-penetration of drama and religion that appears throughout his writings in an 1817 review essay, taking the form of an anonymous response to Richard Lalor Sheil's tragedy The Apostate (Covent Garden, 3 May 1817). Arguing that drama originates in religion, the article traces the history of theater in relation to that of "religion and morality" in Europe—from the "false mythology" and "moral desert" of the Greeks, through the "rude form" of medieval mystery plays, to romantic-era depictions of the Inquisition. Maturin's article suggests that during the Reformation period, theater accepted and absorbed the energies of religion itself: "the key of knowledge was wrested from the jealous and tenacious hands of the Romish priesthood, the doors of the temple were thrown open, all were invited to enter, and multitudes obeyed the call" (Maturin and Gifford, "The Tragic Drama" 254). Sensitive to the religious dimensions of stage culture and simultaneously aware of the theatricality of sectarian disputes, Maturin makes theater itself at once the scene, figure, and ground of confessional confrontation. Maturin and Sheil represent the two major sides of the denominational divide in early nineteenth-century Ireland: the former was a controversial Protestant clergyman of Huguenot origin whose chief literary allies were the Tory circle associated with Walter Scott and the Quarterly Review; whereas the latter was a Catholic barrister best remembered for laying aside his ambitions as a dramatist and joining with Daniel O'Connell to co-found the Catholic Association in 1823. What unites Maturin and Sheil is, however, just as significant as what divides them. Both made their dramatic reputations on the London rather than the Dublin stage. Both wrote plays that thematize characteristically Irish political concerns (violence, suffering, hunger, religious tolerance), but never adopt Ireland as their setting or make it part of the world of their drama. Maturin's as well as Sheil's plays, however, were reviewed and read in relation to metropolitan debates about Catholic suffrage and issues of political representation. Significantly, both wrote powerful literary tragedies that examine the tragic fates of societies and individuals scarred by history—especially by histories of conflict realized in religious terms—in a period when major Romantic writers struggled to forge tragic dramas from the confusion of contemporary life. The result is a shared repertoire of images and styles that serve to unite at the levels of form and reception the dramatic work of figures divided by politics and religion. In Maturin's and Sheil's plays, fate is experienced less as a metaphysical force and more as a set of material consequences that attend upon inequality and injustice. A dramatic investment in extremes of power moves the plays into a Gothic idiom, whereas the tendency to focus on intensely private dilemmas played out against a backdrop of heated public scenes results in a further downward drag into the "lower genre" of melodrama. Each of these stylistic junctures (tragic, Gothic, and melodramatic) involves an encounter with ideas and images associated with religion, resulting in a dramatic oeuvre realizing its tragic vision within a clearly confessional context. A shared investment in religious hatred and intolerance (political, cultural, psychic) leads Sheil and Maturin to incorporate Catholic-associated forms, modes, and topics within the folds of their dramaturgical practices. This tendency is visible both in style (a focus on suffering statues and bodies in pain, as well as on ritualistic and liturgical uses of language) and in content (absolutism, martyrology, intolerance). The reception of the plays filters and processes contemporary debates about the admission of Catholics to British public life in the years leading up to Emancipation (1829). Catholicism is crucial to three major aspects of Maturin's and Sheil's dramatic productions: genre, through their contributions to the romantic redefinition of tragic forms at the moment of a breakdown of theistic..

Four nations feminism: Una Troy and Menna Gallie

The emergence of four nations framework in literary and historical scholarship has helped us to arrive at a fuller understanding of the complex and overlapping histories of the islands of Britain and Ireland, while recent research into Wales and Ireland in particular has helped to make the map of our relations more fully comprehensible. But what is the relevance and meaning of the four nations context for womenâ s writing in Ireland and Wales? What part does gender play in the interconnected histories of Wales and Ireland, and how are questions of sexual and artistic identity addressed within texts that imagine British-Irish history in gendered terms? This lecture identifies finds evidence of a feminist reimagining of archipelagic relationships by two writers: Munster novelist and playwright Una Troy, and Welsh writer Menna Gallie, born into a mining community on the western edge of the South Wales coalfields. Both Troy and Gallie wrote novels that deploy plots of female friendship to interrogate the relationship between gender and national affiliation in a four nations context

Irish romanticism, 1800-1830

Ireland entered the period of Romanticism scorched by what Quaker writer Mary Leadbeater called the ‘ruthless fires’ of the 1798 rebellion.[1] Reacting against the threat of Ireland separating from Britain and becoming a client state of France, William Pitt’s government moved quickly to draw the neighbouring island more securely to its side. Ireland was in future to send its electoral representatives (considerably reduced in number) to Westminster: the uneasy constitutional compromise that was the Dublin parliament was concluded. Other legal anomalies were cleared up also. The Copyright Act of 1709 was extended to Ireland, all but killing off an Irish publishing industry that was reliant on markets for cheap reprints in Ireland, Britain, the American colonies and the West Indies.[2] More profoundly, the Union created a professional literary culture characterised by movement between and across the two islands. A chapter such as this one therefore has to account for an ‘Irish’ literature that developed both outside and inside Ireland: the vast majority of the writers discussed here either lived in Britain or published there, and London and Edinburgh play as important a part in the shaping of Irish Romanticism as Dublin, Belfast or Cork. Moreover, the experience of travel and cultural bi-location was itself to become an object of interest in the literature of the period

A bookish history of Irish Romanticism

This chapter argues that authors of Irish Romantic novels and national tales, such as Maria Edgeworth and John and Michael Banim, are not only concerned with the extent to which their novels sought to copy from Irish culture but are also worried about the slightness of the novel form in relation to the copiousness of that culture. Such concerns led to attempts by Thomas Crofton Croker and others to add texture and tactility to their depictions of the Irish past, through antiquarian methodologies but also facsimiles, lithography, and other developments in print culture. The chapter demonstrates the ways in which Irish literary texts were concerned not only to accurately and minutely detail the past, but also to adduce evidence of such historical and cultural authenticity, working against teleological accounts of the birth of the modern historical method, which see Romantic history as unconcerned with the evidentiary foundations of the past