Nótaí na nEagarthóirí: Editors’ Notes

In Eleven Houses (2007), the director and theater historian Christopher Fitz-Simon established himself as one of Ireland’s most engaging memoirists in an often-hilarious account of his peripatetic youth in the years of the Emergency—a wildly untypical childhood studded with eccentricity. Here, Fitz-Simon takes us forward to the early 1950s and his first exposure to the theater that would become his life. The level of these early theatrical experiences varied, to put it mildly. No less a person that Tyrone Guthrie took him to see his first Hamlet, Guthrie’s production at the Dublin Gate Theatre; meanwhile, back at boarding school, he found himself participating in a ludicrous series of school plays featuring all the frailties to which amateur stage is heir, including members of the teaching staff casting themselves in the best roles. The crowning farcicality, though, was surely a return visit to his alma mater in the early 1960s, when he witnessed a dramatic feat for the ages: a production of “Hamlet, Without the Prince.” The most recent of Christopher Fitz-Simon’s many books is “Buffoonery and Easy Sentiment”: Popular Irish Plays in the Decade Prior to the Opening of the Abbey Theatre (2011).

In 2008, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, established the annual Fanning Medal for distinguished work in Irish Studies; the tribute recognizes the achievement of Dr. Charles Fanning, who was instrumental in bringing Irish Studies to that university. Last year, the third recipient of the medal was Dr. Michael Patrick Gillespie, who took the opportunity to interrogate one of the most entrenched assumptions about James Joyce’s oeuvre: the idea that it was only in “The Dead,” at the very end of Dubliners, that the author began to step away from the rancorous memory of Ireland that had shaped the preceding stories. Not so, argues Gillespie. If we set aside the assumption of resentment, we find that Joyce displays not merely a divided heart when it came to his native city, but even a degree of sympathy and indulgence toward its all-too-human residents. Key to his analysis are the humanizing revisions that Joyce made to several stories before publication. Michael Patrick Gillespie has written and edited twenty books, of which Foundational Essays in James Joyce Studies (2011) is the latest.

Reading through new poems from Paddy Bushe of Waterville, County Kerry, we see him setting time and geography in juxtaposition, or stretching their limits. These poems work on the intersection of new with old, tradition with the present, place with place: “A Good Morrow to my Wife in New Zealand” harks back to John Donne and his anitipodes, while “Heron Dreams of Becoming Crane” is both Oriental in its spirit and Gaelic in its resonances, with “The Yellow Bittern” peering through its lines. “My Lord Buddha of Carraig Eanna,” inspired by a plaster-cast statue in his Irish garden, likewise mixes East and West. Bushe closes this suite of poems on a scathing note, as he condemns the tawdriness of a modern grief when viewed alongside Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire. The author of many collections in both Irish and English, Paddy Bushe has lately compiled Voices at the World’s Edge: Irish Poets on Skellig Michael for Dublin’s Dedalus Press.

For more than forty years, Reverend Ian Paisley’s role in the Northern Ireland “Troubles” was inflammatory at worst and obstructive at best. Dr. Richard L. Jordan’s survey of the disruptive aspects of Paisley’s public life finds that the Northern Irish clergyman undoubtedly learned the approach from the Interposition strategy of segregationists in the American South. Jordan tracks Paisley’s longstanding fellowship with North American segregationists, both militant clerics and laymen. It was Paisley’s exposure to the radical changes that civil rights activism and federal policy forced in the United States that drove him to confront the Northern Ireland civil rights movement and to enter the political arena when Irish Bible Protestantism appeared imperiled. Early in the conflict, Paisley’s opposition to Irish civil rights provoked both sectarian violence and—by design—police intervention. Richard Jordan was a co-winner of the ACIS Adele Dalsimer...