Staging Parnell: Biodrama at the Early Abbey Theatre

Few Irish political figures have captured the imagination of writers so much as Charles Stewart Parnell. He was, famously, a chosen subject in prose and poetry by such luminaries as James Joyce, W. B. Yeats, and Virginia Woolf. But several Irish dramatists also wrote versions of Parnell, and they wrote close to the historical record with plays that appear current with the output of Parnell biographies and reassessments of the Home Rule movement. All the while, critics— beginning with Herbert Howarth in 1958—have been tracking and cataloguing literary representations of Parnell with regularity. Such surveys appear roughly every two decades, are usually undertaken by a Yeats or Joyce scholar, and focus on poetry and fiction. Plays involving Parnell, however, are barely mentioned. But they are worth examining, particularly those staged during the early years of the Abbey Theatre, where Parnell was more often the subject than any other historical figure. This is fitting, as, in the decades after his death, the Abbey Theatre itself was one of the few subjects to draw as much debate as Parnell, particularly in the city of Dublin. The Abbey’s Parnell plays provide a glimpse into those debates and show that the national theater was as engaged with ongoing reassessments of Parnell as were the historians and critics.

The original study of the literary legacy of Parnell was Howarth’s The Irish Writers 1880–1940: Literature Under Parnell’s Star (1958).¹ Howarth’s opening chapter, “A Myth and a Movement,” was the first attempt to examine messianic motifs in literary treatments of Parnell. Howarth limits his discussion of dramatic representations to a passing mention of Lady Gregory’s The Deliverer (1911), an allegorical play that linked Parnell to Moses. In “James Joyce’s Dublin,” published two decades later, F.S.L. Lyons argued that the Parnell split was as much a catalyst for movement as it was for the paralysis motif in Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: the movement being the fall and the betrayal, both of which become embedded archetypes in Joyce’s fiction.² In expanding beyond Joycean borders with “The Parnell Theme in Literature,” Lyons was the first to bring Parnell plays of the Abbey Theatre—The Deliverer and Lennox Robinson’s The Lost Leader (1918)—into the discussion, which John Kelly would continue in his 1991 essay, “Parnell in Irish Literature.” Kelly makes a case for these plays as extensions of a landlord motif begun by the Irish Literary Theatre, an Abbey forerunner. “Although Parnell appears in none of the [ILT] plays by name, the sentiments now associated with him are constantly felt. The theatre itself,” Kelly contends, might even be considered an “institutional by-product of the Parnell split,” considering the social standing of its funders and the plays the ILT produced, particularly George Moore’s The Bending of the Bough, Yeats’s The Countess Cathleen, and Edward Martyn’s The Heather Field.³ The ILT

was underwritten by Edward Martyn, a landlord, and most of its guarantors were of the Ascendancy. The plays presented during its three-year existence were, with one exception, Ascendancy in authorship, and all (apart from a oneact piece in Irish by Hyde) have striking similarities of theme and outlook: they are written from an aristocratic viewpoint, and the leading characters are without exception landlords, or of a superior caste, even when the source is mythical or pseudo-mythical.⁴

Kelly locates these ILT plays within “the myth of Parnell as an Ascendancy gentleman with a mysterious power of inspiring loyalty.”⁵ His privileged social standing would be relegated to the background in Parnell plays at the Abbey— but a preoccupation with the subject of loyalty endured.

The allegorical frames of betrayal and hope emerged within a decade of Parnell’s 1891 death, aided by the publication of R. Barry O’Brien’s two-volume The Life of Charles Stewart Parnell (1898).⁶ It “established the orthodox interpretation” of Parnell as an “enigma” that has seldom been challenged.⁷ The leading turncoats, in literature of the period, are members of the Irish Parliamentary...