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Placed within a rich social, historical, and cultural context, this study illuminates the Irish theatre over three hundred years, and uses it as a lens that focuses the dialectic of Irish society as the theatre mutated from aristocratic control to radical dissent and subversion. English colonists created the Irish theatre, reflecting the preoccupations and prejudices of the aristocrats and courtiers clustered around Dublin Castle. This was a political theatre, involved in outlining and defining its own society. The playwrights were engaged in leading opinion, presenting alternative realities, and forging the national conscience. Early Irish theatre was the Anglo-Irish talking to themselves, as the playwrights engaged the ruling class in a dialogue as to how the country should be ordered. As the Ascendancy lost or relinquished control over the theatre, the image presented by the playwrights became more unflattering and dismissive. This work studies how this portrait of Irish society and its rulers was encoded and evolved in the plays of the three centuries from 1600 to the foundation of the Abbey Theatre. It shows how the plays traced the continually mutating Ascendancy, the growing self-consciousness and national self-awareness, and a developing class-consciousness among Irish playwrights.
In Ireland, few figures have generated more hatred than Oliver Cromwell, whose seventeenth-century conquest, massacres, and dispossessions would endure in the social memory for ages to come. The Devil from over the Sea explores the many ways in which Cromwell was remembered and sometimes conveniently 'forgotten' in historical, religious, political, and literary texts, according to the interests of different communities across time. Cromwell's powerful afterlife in Ireland, however, cannot be understood without also investigating his presence in folklore and the landscape, in ruins and curses. Nor can he be separated from the idea of the 'Cromwellian': a term which came to elicit an entire chain of contemptuous associations that would begin after his invasion and assume a wholly new force in the nineteenth century. What emerges from all these memorializing traces is a multitudinous Cromwell who could be represented as brutal, comic, sympathetic, or satanic. He could be discarded also, tellingly, from the accounts of the past, and especially by those which viewed him as an embarrassment or worse. In addition to exploring the many reasons why Cromwell was so vehemently remembered or forgotten in Ireland, Sarah Covington finally uncovers the larger truths conveyed by sometimes fanciful or invented accounts. Contrary to being damaging examples of myth-making, the memorializations contained in martyrologies, folk tales, or newspaper polemics were often productive in cohering communities, or in displaying agency in the form of 'counter-memories' that claimed Cromwell for their own and reshaped Irish history in the process.
Irish travellers or 'tinkers' have appeared as characters in Irish literature since the early nineteenth century. Representations of this semi-nomadic cultural and ethnic minority in works by non-traveller authors almost invariably function in some way within the context of Irish identity politics, whereby the 'tinker' often serves as a 'primitive' Other to a modern, civilized Irish Self. This study considers the 'tinker' character in a large body of serious and popular literary texts, some well known, others rarely if ever discussed, and traces how the literary construct of the 'tinker' figure as domestic or foreign Other evolves over time. Three chapters concentrate on specific historical contexts, as the 'tinker' shifts from being a relatively straightforward scapegoat in the literature of the early nineteenth century, to being a more complex and ambiguous embodiment of both the aspirations and anxieties of the Anglo-Irish writers of the Revival, to being a barometer of aspects of modernity and regression in the mid-twentieth-century Irish Republic. Three further chapters focus on thematic contexts that have particular relevance for the development of the 'tinker' figure: children's literature from and about Ireland; fabulist narratives, particularly those with plot configurations derived from Celtic mythology; and crime and detective fiction set in Ireland. Finally the way in which individual travellers represent themselves in autobiographical narratives of the late twentieth century is considered, often in response to the fictional 'tinker' stereotype that has persisted in sedentary society and its cultural expressions for centuries.
Reveals the contribution of Irish writers to the Georgian English stage; argues that theatre is an important strand of the Irish Enlightenment.
In eighteenth-century England, actresses were frequently dismissed as mere prostitutes trading on their sexual power rather than their talents. Yet they were, Felicity Nussbaum argues, central to the success of a newly commercial theater. Urban, recently moneyed, and thoroughly engaged with their audiences, celebrated actresses were among the first women to achieve social mobility, cultural authority, and financial independence. In fact, Nussbaum contends, the eighteenth century might well be called the "age of the actress" in the British theater, given women's influence on the dramatic repertory and, through it, on the definition of femininity. Treating individual star actresses who helped spark a cult of celebrity—especially Anne Oldfield, Susannah Cibber, Catherine Clive, Margaret Woffington, Frances Abington, and George Anne Bellamy—Rival Queens reveals the way these women animated issues of national identity, property, patronage, and fashion in the context of their dramatic performances. Actresses intentionally heightened their commercial appeal by catapulting the rivalries among themselves to center stage. They also boldly challenged in importance the actor-managers who have long dominated eighteenth-century theater history and criticism. Felicity Nussbaum combines an emphasis on the actresses themselves with close analysis of their diverse roles in works by major playwrights, including George Farquhar, Nicholas Rowe, Colley Cibber, Arthur Murphy, David Garrick, Isaac Bickerstaff, and Richard Sheridan. Hers is a comprehensive and original argument about the importance of actresses as the first modern subjects, actively shaping their public identities to make themselves into celebrated properties.
This book examines early and silent cinema and its contexts in Ireland, 1895-1921. It explores the extent to which cinema fostered a new way of looking in and at Ireland and the extent to which the new technology inherited forms of looking from the image-producing cultural practices of the theatre, tourism, and such public events as state occasions, political protests, and sports meetings. It argues that before cinema emerged as an independent institution in the late 1910s, it was comprehensively intermedial, not only adapting to the presentational strategies of such forms as the fairground attraction, the melodrama, and the magic lantern lecture, but actually constituting these forms and altering them in the process. In locating cinema in relation to popular and elite culture during a key period of Irish history, it draws in particular on surviving films and photographs; articles and illustrations in newspapers, magazines, and trade journals; contemporary accounts; and official documents. Working against approaches that see early cinema as a precursor to the so-called 'classical' cinema of the 1920s onwards, it provide its readers with a wealth of contemporary material that allows them to see early cinema in its own terms as an evolving (audio-) visual form.
The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was an era of continuity as well as change. Though properly portrayed as the era of 'Protestant Ascendancy' it embraces two phases - the eighteenth century when that ascendancy was at its peak; and the nineteenth century when the Protestant elite sustained a determined rear-guard defence in the face of the emergence of modern Catholic nationalism. Employing a chronology that is not bound by traditional datelines, this volume moves beyond the familiar political narrative to engage with the economy, society, population, emigration, religion, language, state formation, culture, art and architecture, and the Irish abroad. It provides new and original interpretations of a critical phase in the emergence of a modern Ireland that, while focused firmly on the island and its traditions, moves beyond the nationalist narrative of the twentieth century to provide a history of late early modern Ireland for the twenty-first century.