"Bit, by some mad whig": Charles Macklin and the Theater of Irish Enlightenment

Critics invested in Charles Macklin as an Irish playwright have tended to focus on Love à la Mode (1759) and The True-Born Irishman (1761), while those interested in theater censorship have centered their discussion on The Man of the World (1781) but have ignored his Irish background. This essay offers a more nuanced assessment of Macklin's ethnopolitics by bringing these two different emphases into dialogue. David O'Shaughnessy argues that Macklin was an influential figure who, if contextualized within a sustained tradition of London Irish Whiggery, helps make the case for considering the theater as one of the primary institutional structures of the Irish Enlightenment.