Jack the Giant Queller: Political Theater in Ascendancy Dublin

JACK THE GIANT QUELLER: POLITICAL THEATER IN ASCENDANCY DUBLIN KEVIN J. DONOVAN ireland’s contribution to the modern theater of the English-speaking world is well known, but the beginnings of the theatrical tradition in Ireland have been ignored by all but a few specialists. The neglect of the eighteenth-century Dublin stage can be partly explained by its essentially provincial and English rather than Irish character, “West British, rather than Gaelic, both in its spirit and in its expression. . . .”1 Such responses usually stem from disappointment over the lack of a distinctly national theater in eighteenthcentury Dublin, an unhistorical expectation in any case. However, there are a number of plays from the eighteenth-century Dublin stage in which Irish themes are prominent and in which we can see the expression of an emerging and distinct Anglo-Irish identity. Such plays may not always have met with great success in the theater, but in them the Dublin stage of the eighteenth century emerges as an important site for the representation and construction of Irish national identity during a time mythologized as both a Golden Age for the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy and a time of humiliation, misery, and oppression for the Catholic majority—the Penal Era. A noteworthy example is Henry Brooke’s ballad opera Jack the Giant Queller, suppressed by the lords justices after only one performance on March 27, 1749. Those few earlier writers who have written on the play’s suppression have been vague in explaining its immediate political context, being content merely to echo or paraphrase the account in Hitchcock’s 1788 Historical View of the Irish Stage: JACK THE GIANT QUELLER: POLITICAL THEATER IN ASCENDANCY DUBLIN 70 1 La Tourette Stockwell, Dublin Theatres and Theatre Customs (1637–1820) (1938; rept. New York: Benjamin Blom, 1968), p. 174. For a recent response to Stockwell’s characterization of the eighteenth-century Irish stage, see John C. Greene and Gladys L. Clark, The Dublin Stage, 1720–1745: A Calendar of Plays, Entertainments, and Afterpieces (Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press; London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1993), pp. 84–89. The utmost attention was bestowed on preparing it for representation, it drew a crowded house, was well performed, and went oV with much applause ; but such was the spirit of party at that time, that the next morning , by order of the lords justices, who sent their prohibitions to the manager , the piece was immediately withdrawn. The reason given for this extraordinary proceeding was, that in several of the songs, satirical hints were thrown out against bad governors, lord mayors, and aldermen.2 However, it is possible to be much more speciWc in identifying the play’s immediate social and political context. The play was, in fact, written in support of the Dublin politician Charles Lucas, sometimes called “the Irish Wilkes,” whose political agitation in 1749 threw the entire government of Ireland into an uproar and ended with Lucas’s condemnation and exile. The alliance between Brooke and Lucas discernible in Jack the Giant Queller constitutes an important chapter in the history of eighteenth-century AngloIrish Protestant patriotism and is highly instructive in demonstrating the ways in which politics and theater sometimes intersected in eighteenth-century Dublin. Henry Brooke is remembered not only as a playwright, but as the author of a widely praised philosophical poem Universal Beauty, and as an important early novelist, whose Fool of Quality was admired by such various readers as the evangelist Wesley and the Romantic poet and theorist Coleridge.3 As a playwright, Brooke is best remembered for the times his JACK THE GIANT QUELLER: POLITICAL THEATER IN ASCENDANCY DUBLIN 71 2 Robert Hitchcock, An Historical View of the Irish State: from the Earliest period down to the close of the season 1788 . . . 2 vols. (Dublin, 1788–94), 1:196–7. The primate, the lord chancellor and the speaker of the House of Commons were usually appointed lords justices , exercising the chief executive authority in the Irish government in the intervals between viceregal visits. See J. L. McCracken, 1986, “The Social Structure and Social Life,” chap. 2 in A New History of Ireland, vol. 4 Eighteenth-Century Ireland, 1691–1800, ed., T. W. Moody and...