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COPYRIGHT 2002 Indiana University, Purdue University of Fort Wayne
By Christopher J. Wheatley. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999. x + 166 pages.
"Some readers will assume this book is mistitled on the grounds that there was no Irish drama in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries" (1). Thus Christopher Wheatley begins his study with a statement at once startling and banal. Startling because anyone familiar with the theatre of the Restoration and eighteenth century associates it strongly with the Irish. What would be left of that theatre without the plays of Boyle, Southerne, Tate, Congreve, Farquhar, Steele, Murphy, Goldsmith, Kelly, Bickerstaffe, and Sheridan? Yet none of these playwrights is included in Wheatley's study. And banal because by the time he has finished, although Wheatley demonstrates that there was some Irish drama, he fails to show why we should regret knowing so little about it.
Determining his principles for selecting a canon of Irish Protestant drama requires that Wheatley negotiate a complex set of methodological problems. Did Irish Protestant dramatists produce unique kinds of plays? Wheatley's answer is a qualified "yes": "In terms of subject matter and generic conventions, Irish dramatists in Ireland wrote plays distinctly different from those produced in London" (2). He cites Henry Burnell's Landgartha (1639) as an example of a tragicomedy different in kind from Fletcher's because its ending is more indeterminate than happy. And he argues that eighteenth-century Irish tragedy differs from its English counterpart because in the Irish version "only the villains die" (4). I would be tempted to dispute both of these assertions of generic innovation were they central to Wheatley's argument (the similarity between the Irish "tragedies" and the Restoration heroic plays, for example, would deserve some attention). But all he really wishes to establish is that his Irish plays are not "simple imitations" of English models. He recognizes that "in the European dramatic tradition the number of playwrights who have produced something that is genuinely sui generis or that initiates an entirely new view of drama are few and far between" (4). I would...
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