Staging Ireland: Representations in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama (review)

Stephen O’Neill’s account of staged representations of the Irish is the logical response to criticism that locked Ireland together with Spenser, reading the poet as a kind of ideological touchstone for English colonialist views at large. Staging Ireland supplements this focus on elite literary modes by highlighting how pervasive Ireland was as a topic for the early modern theater. In asking how dramatists represented Ireland during the 1590s when the war of conquest escalated, O’Neill follows in the footsteps of a few earlier critics—including Christopher Highley and Andrew Murphy—who supplemented interpretations of Spenser with readings of Shakespeare’s plays, particularly the histories.¹ But O’Neill’s approach differs in making the stage the exclusive focus, and in moving beyond Shakespeare’s corpus in delimiting the range of meanings and responses that Ireland evoked for early modern dramatists.

Indeed, the book’s richest contribution is its success in identifying a much wider range of plays that ripple with Irish undercurrents. Of the eight plays covered, a majority are not by Shakespeare, drawing Peele, Marlowe, and Munday into the period’s cultural discourse of Ireland. Had O’Neill worked with a less event-driven notion of context, that number might have been still higher. I, for one, would have traded another reading of Shakespeare’s Macmorris, featured in a chapter devoted to the events of 1599, for sustained attention to Jacobean plays by Jonson, Dekker, or Fletcher. But the book loses momentum with the surrender of Tyrone, exposing the limitations of O’Neill’s working assumption that historical context is the key that enables and illuminates dramatic production. For Ireland, as O’Neill briefly observes in the book’s concluding pages, hardly vanishes from the Jacobean stage with the flight of the earls, suggesting that drama has a more elastic relation to context than the book sometimes allows.

“Context” and “topicality” are, in fact, key words for O’Neill, whose historicist approach to the drama is lucid and detailed but occasionally rigid. For instance, although O’Neill allows that drama can serve “multifarious ideological functions” (13), he often seeks to narrow the contexts in which its meanings take place. A recurring focus, for instance, is on the Irish “rebel” Hugh O’Neill, who is interpreted as a central symbol across a range of plays. This heuristic becomes stretched, in my view, when O’Neill emerges as the allegorical key that serves to unlock the meaning of Sir John Oldcastle, a play featuring a rebellious Irish servant who is hanged for murdering his master. In part, the reflexive turn to context in order to explicate text might be a function of the brevity of the dramatic passages that contain references of interest to O’Neill. Although he disputes those who have argued that Ireland is an absent presence in the period’s drama, O’Neill spins pages out of brief, even marginal, dramatic moments: a dumb show, a messenger’s report, a reference to offstage location. His ability to do so is what makes this book so remarkable, but it produces a heavy dependence on historical events to flesh out these moments. When O’Neill turns instead to explicating what Ireland’s “offstage” presence means within the context of the drama—as he does when discussing Richard II and Edward II , plays linked in their representation of characters shuttling to and from an offstage Ireland—the results are more satisfying. At such moments, he allows drama to have its own internal logic and make meaning within its own frame, rather than deriving its sense primarily from an external, anchoring context.

Indeed, although many of O’Neill’s analyses build toward a concluding statement that fixes the text’s response to Irish events, it is those moments where he allows for multiple possibilities—for “ambiguous topicality” (168) or “equivocation” (176)—that yield his best readings. For instance, in returning us to the final chorus of Henry V and...