Irish Popular Culture

ELT : VOLUME 35:2 1992 O'Shea reacted to the news of ParneU's death, he wrote: "Willie O'Shea, ... to his utter surprise, began to cry.... He was weeping, not for Parnell, but for himself, a man alone and wretched, who no longer had an enemy in the world." This is good high drama and a faithful presentation of an important historical event in late-Victorian British and Irish history. That great purveyor of accurate, readable history, the late Barbara Tuchman, would have applauded Hugh Leonard for telling the story of the fall of Parnell with such panache and style. J. O. Baylen, Emeritus Eastbourne, England Irish Popular Culture Cheryl Herr. JFbr the Land They Loved: Irish Political Melodramas 1890-1925. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1991. xvii + 366 pp. $34.95 IF YOU ENJOY flirting with popular culture, you will recognize Cheryl Herr as the author of Joyce's Anatomy of Culture (Urbana, 1986). Its treatment of stage, press, and pulpit and how they were embedded in the writings of James Joyce makes the appearance of this work predictable . Its focus on melodramas particularizes the overview of the theatre in the earlier volume, further develops its view of the interrelationship of Irish plays and Irish politics, and furnishes four political plays to exemplify the thesis. Her discussion of them, the volume's first eighty pages, is considerably better than the plays, but they are at least as good as comparable nineteenth-century English melodramas. If they are no better, Herr's commentary makes the journey still worth taking. Herr borrows her title from P. J. Bourke's For The Land She Loved (1915), the last of the four plays included in Part II of the volume. Bourke's other play When Wexford Rose (1910) follows J. W. Whitbread's Lord Edward (1894) and Wolfe Tone (1898). All deal with the several risings of 1798, so the settings move from Dublin to ports of France to Wexford to Antrim and Down. In 1798, Ireland was united in wishing to rid itself of the English, and its various factions attempted to secure arms from France to supplement the homemade pikes. Lord Edward Fitzgerald and Wolfe Tone were especially active in these international plots and schemes, inevitably betrayed, so their activities are the meat and drink of Irish sentiment. Whitbread takes full advantage of the history to include stabbings, shootings, villains, on-stage deaths and many tableaux, but his Wolfe Tone is dramatically the weakest of the 270 BOOK REVIEWS four plays. Its focus upon Tone's early life, courtship, and preparation to leave France for Ireland, instead of his ignominious capture, trial, and execution, is anticlimactic, at best. Both plays did, however, help to educate Ireland's lower and middle classes to some of the facts of their country's history. In this respect, as Herr notes, they helped to create a climate for the Easter Rising of 1916. Bourke's two plays, also based on history, are theatrically more interesting. When Wexford Rose deals with Father John Murphy's battle against the North Cork Militia and Joseph Holt's Wicklow insurgents and their battles against English-trained troops, but these historical figures occupy the background. As in O'Casey's plays later, women are the strong characters. For The Land She Loved, in fact, focuses upon Betsy Gray, a United Irishwoman, who dresses in green, takes part in the battle at Ballinahinch, and is killed in the final moments of the fight. Since she represents Ireland, it is appropriate, as Herr notes, that she comes between her lover and the English leader and is stabbed by the swords of both. All of the plays Herr includes were performed in Dublin between 1894 and 1915. The first three were offered at the Queens Theatre, which Herr believes more accurately reflected the culture of Ireland than did the "high folk plays" of the Abbey. For The Land She Loved, however, was performed at the Abbey and was declared seditious by Dublin Castle. While it appeared only one year prior to the Easter Rising and both reflected and contributed to the growing unrest of Dublin's working class audience, it and the other...