The Midnight Court / Cúirt an Mheán Oíche: A Critical Edition

The Two Enlightenments of Brian Merriman’s County Clare

59 The Two Enlightenments of Brian Merriman’s County Clare M I C H A E L G R I F F I N he intellectual background of Brian Merriman’s Cúirt an Mheán Oíche/The Midnight Court, and the relative weightings of its ostensible cultural and intellectual provenances, are issues which have long exercised Irish literature’s most accomplished scholars: Because of such ideas the poem has been looked on in the past as a work of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, owning its inspiration to authors such as Rousseau, Voltaire and Swift. This view would scarcely be accepted nowadays. Indeed it has been pointed out that much of the thematic material in The Midnight Court is found already in that bawdy part of the courtly thirteenth-century Roman de la Rose which was added on to the original by Jean de Meung. . . . It is extremely doubtful, however, if Brian Merriman would have read any part of the Roman de la Rose in either French or English. How then did a teacher of mathematics in Feakle, County Clare in the year 1870 become familiar with the medieval court of love conventions? (Ó Tuama 1995, 64) Sean Ó Tuama’s essay, “Brian Merriman and His Court,” composed originally in 1981, opens the question of the origins of Merriman’s Michael Griffin 60 great work; in so doing, he disavows the notion that the poem is in some way a product of the Enlightenment of Rousseau, Voltaire, and Swift and chooses instead to emphasize its place in the medieval European tradition of Court of Love poetry. Having tallied these two strands in favor of the latter tradition, he goes on to conclude that, whatever the poem’s generic and intellectual influences, “the deeper feelings he is expressing throughout are the archaic feelings of his own traditional society” (Ó Tuama 1995, 76). A closer look at developments in County Clare suggests, however, that any one of those strands need not be emphasized at the expense of any other; indeed, to do so might be to neglect substantial elements of the poem’s context and its achievement. As Declan Kiberd argues, “that Merriman managed to express the new Enlightenment ideas of ‘freedom and social mobility’ in ‘that contemporary emergent world’ is an awesome technical as well as intellectual achievement” (2000, 201). In other words, Merriman’s sentiments regarding the threat faced by his community and his culture were filtered through an interweaving of Irish- and non-Irish-speaking enlightenments. Neil Buttimer opines that: this confirmation of the “Court’s” textual interdependence, and, arising from it, the identification of a wider remit, may also encourage speculation on its indebtedness to other broadly based formative influences, particularly those of a more recent kind. The decade preceding its completion saw almost unprecedented levels of publishing on societal organization, internationally and with respect to Ireland, by philosophers, economists and the like. Descriptions of Clare itself, reminiscent of such writings, were made by authors also active in Gaelic composition, suggesting that others from the county, such as Merriman, might not have been immune from these trends. A short five years earlier, the outbreak of the American Revolution in 1775, ongoing until Two Enlightenments of Merriman’s County Clare 61 1782, would have involved widely publicized discussion of government , focusing on the need to end exclusiveness, for instance. North America, furthermore, would not have been unknown in the Irish-language community for its imagined climate of moral toleration. (2006, 345–46) The intellectual and literary life of his native county was in a phase of acceleration just as Merriman was composing Cúirt an Mheán Oíche, as Louis Cullen has written (1996, 186–88). In Ennis, Clare’s principal town, a quorum of talented poets writing in Irish was gathering to recite from, and exchange, manuscripts. Added to this, local print culture was taking off. Clare’s first printing press arrived in Ennis in 1778, when John Busteed and George Trinder launched their Clare Journal, the first newspaper published in the county—the second paper, the Ennis Chronicle, would be launched in 1784. Though Dublin and Limerick newspapers and magazines such as Pue’s Occurrences, Faulkner’s Dublin Journal, and the Limerick Journal circulated widely in Ennis and through County Clare from the 1720s onward, local printing galvanized the rise of English in the county; thus, Irish came to be characterized as an oral or manuscript...