Mythologizing Shane O'Neill

Mythologizing Shane O'Neill

In the foreword to her 1955 historical novel The Proud Man, Elizabeth Linington claims for herself the role of first biographer for her subject, Shane O'Neill (1530–67), the first earl of Tyrone who became clan chief in 1559. She writes,

The sixteenth century produced many colorful personalities. In what is now called the British Isles lived two queens, Elizabeth Tudor and Mary Stuart—and many stories have been written of them. But as there were more than two nations in those islands, there was a third ruler—Shane O'Neill, Prince of Ulster—and of that one no stories have been written. This is his story.¹

Linington's claim was patently untrue; numerous versions of O'Neill's story predated her own. Even before his untimely death at the hands of the Scots MacDonnells in 1567, Shane O'Neill's life was entering romanticized accounts; such early historians as William Camden (1625) and Edmund Campion (1571) may claim to draw on eyewitness accounts, but the tellings are highly colored—as indeed, are many of the State Papers.² Almost forty years before Linington's novel, in The History of Ulster, Ramsay Colles lamented that Shane O'Neill, despite his dramatic and determinative life, had never been the subject of a work of fiction. He, too, was wrong.²

Linington's admission that The Proud Man is a "story" and not an historical rendering is an attempt to free her book from some of the constraints of veracity. It also identifies her as successor to myriad writers over the centuries who have attempted to chronicle events, only to find themselves inventing characters, scenes, interior monologues, and dialogue to better convey the events they record. Despite the absence of any evidentiary apparatus, Colles—who was what we would now call a literary critic—calls his version of events a "history," thereby claiming for his work a certain level of authority, and a seriousness of intent.³

Existing narratives about Shane O'Neill include most recent historical accounts, but also lesser-known versions, some of which claim to be fictions, and others of which purport to carry historical weight.⁴ All of the versions of Shane O'Neill's story, from William Camden's putative "first-person" narrative in 1625 through the 2002 biography by P. L. Henry, share the tendency to mythologize O'Neill. That is to say, the materials of O'Neill's life seem to cause these writers either to exaggerate his vices or to idealize his virtues. Alone among O'Neill biographies, Ciaran Brady's learned historical account Shane O'Neill (1996) avoids this pitfall and presents a balanced approach.⁵ Brady rightly notes that most of the details of O'Neill's life have been forgotten, or confused with those of his renowned successor, Hugh. He observes as well that from the first, both the admirers and detractors of Shane O'Neill have contributed to the shadowy specifics of his life by including the stuff of legend, and by repeating well-worn but unsupported tales and traditions.⁶ Indeed, the claim that Shane O'Neill's story has been forgotten is itself one of those well-worn traditions: for example, before Linington, an anonymous 1895 monograph titled The Story of Shane O'Neill claimed that Shane was known to the mass of Irishmen only "in a vague and shadowy manner."⁷ In 1939, E. Boyd Barrett, author of the historical novel The Great O'Neill, saw his book as a correcting the longstanding neglect of Shane's story.⁸

Among the often reiterated truths about Shane O'Neill that Brady interrogates are that he was inordinately proud, sexually depraved, and in possession of a savagely powerful persona. Beginning with Shane O'Neill's contemporaries, writers have borrowed these Irish stereotypes as a shorthand to describe him. James A. Froude's famous assessment of O'Neill has been imitated...