Inventing Ireland (37 page)

In the week of the Easter Rising
The Irish Times,
then an ascendancy paper (known as
The Squireish Mimes
among disdainful nationalists) had carried little news of the cataclysmic events passing just a few hundred yards from its office door. Its editorial mind was
on higher things. "How many citizens of Dublin have any real knowledge of the works of Shakespeare?", it enquired in its emergency edition
of
Wednesday 27 April 1916: "Could any better occasion for reading them be afforded than the coincidence of enforced domesticity with the poet's tercentenary?"
¹
If the
explorer Stanley had carried a copy
of
Shakespeare with him on his civilizing mission into central Africa in earlier decades, the Anglo-Irish ascendancy in its moment of crisis could urge loyal citizens to immerse themselves in the culture which their soldiers were fighting to defend.

There was only one problem with this. Irish young people who studied English literature at the end of the nineteenth or beginning of the twentieth century found themselves reading the story of how they had been banished from their own home. Until the Gaelic League's campaign bore fruit, the Irish language had been banned from schoolrooms, in which children recited at morning assembly:

I thank the goodness and the grace
That on my birth have smiled;
And made me in these Christian days
A happy English child.

Hidden in the classic writings of England, however, lay many subversive potentials, awaiting their moment like unexploded bombs. So the young Irish man and woman could use Shakespeare to explore, and explain, and even perhaps to justify, themselves. For Yeats, the failure of
Richard the Second was due not to bumbling ineptitude but to a
sensitivity and sophistication in the man far superior to the merely administrative efficiency of Bolingbroke. In his reading,
Richard the Second was,
with Arnoldian inflections, the story of England despoiling Ireland. His was a Celtic
Shakespeare who loved Richard's doomed complexity and despised the usurper's basely political wiles.

Edward
Dowden of Trinity College Dublin, as leader of the efficiency-worshipping literary critics of the Victorian age, had heroicized Bolingbroke and belittled Richard: so Yeats proposed to restore to Shakespeare's texts an openness which they had once had, but long since lost under the distortions of an imperial interpretative psychology. "The more I read the worse does the Shakespeare criticism become", he reported after a period of study, "and Dowden is about the climax of it".
²
Whereas the Celt was held to be unable to cope with the despotism of fact, the greatness of Shakespeare for Dowden lay in his vivid perception of "the chief facts of the world" and in his acceptance of "the logic of facts". Dowden's playwright was distinguished by his "capacity for perceiving, for enjoying, for reproducing facts, and facts of as great variety as possible".
³
In other words, the Trinity don converted Shakespeare into an eminent Victorian, one whose imagination could confront and master the entire material world. Against that backdrop of prevailing orthodoxy, Yeats's re-reading of Shakespeare seemed iconoclastic indeed.

"Professor Dowden", explained Yeats, "lived in Ireland where every-thing has failed, and he meditated frequently upon the perfection of character which had, he thought, made England successful".
⁴
This was a polite way of phrasing the matter, which Yeats put a little differently when he wrote at the start of a new century about the literary revival: "The popular poetry of England celebrates her victories, but the popular poetry of Ireland remembers only defeats and defeated persons".
⁵
Yeats's reinterpretation of Shakespeare's history plays was massively influential; and the reversal which he brought about in criticism had consequences for creative art too. For one thing, it emboldened Yeats himself to write that epic cycle of dramas in which he reimagined the contest between Richard and Bolingbroke as the clash between Cuchulain and Conchobar, "a wise man who was blind from very wisdom, and an empty man that thrust him from his place and saw all that could be seen from very emptiness".
⁶
Yeats's Richard was no peripheral victim, but the centre of meaning, moral and poetic, in Shakespeare's play: if Bolingbroke epitomized the failure of triumph, then Richard embodied the triumph of failure. It was that very paradox which informed the thinking of the 1916 rebels, so it would not be
completely fanciful to list Shakespeare among the revolutionary weapons available to the insurgents.
The Irish Times
had got it wrong again. The attraction of Shakespeare for Yeats lay in the skill with which he tapped popular lore. "Every national movement", he wrote, "as in Elizabethan England, has arisen out of a study of the common people, who preserve national characteristics more than any other class".
⁷

Edward Dowden's desperate attempt to recruit Shakespeare to the ranks of the efficient imperialists was doomed: even if there might be some sanction for the imperial theme in the plays themselves, the very
notion
of the theatrical was itself the antithesis of the imperial idea. Theatre, it has been shown, allowed a people to play with freedom and so to realize it. Stage plays were "the symbolic opposite of the lasting colony": as far back as 1610,
William Crashaw in a sermon given to a group of planters embarking for Virginia, declared that "the enemies of the godly colony were the devil, the pope and the players".
⁸
Three hundred years later, the founders of the Irish National Theatre Society could only have agreed. It was hard, however, for English critics to live with the consequences. Even after Yeats's successful completion of a revolution in Shakespearian studies, there were some muscular minds left in England to complain that "there is something in Richard which calls out the latent homosexuality of critics".
⁹
The Celtic feminine, in its insurrectionary mode, was beginning to bring out the
homophobe.

In the summer of 1900, the Chief Examiner of Secondary Schools in Ireland had written a querulous note: "the answering of a number of candidates showed that they had not used the edition of
The Tempest
prescribed in the programme".
¹⁰
Was the youthful James Joyce one of the dissidents, bent on producing a more Celtic Shakespeare too? For Joyce, the entire Shakespearian canon was an ongoing narrative of exile and of loss: he even took time off in the middle of
Ulysses
to set mock-questions for the revised Celtic school's syllabus:

Why is the underplot of
King Lear
in which Edmund figures lifted out of
Sidney's
Arcadia
and spatchcocked onto a Celtic legend older than history?

And, what was more, he answered them:

Because the theme of the false or the usurping or the adulterous brother or all three in one is to Shakespeare what the poor are not, always with him. The note of banishment, banishment from the heart, banishment from home, sounds uninterruptedly from
The
Two Gentlemen of Verona
onward
till Prospero breaks his staff, buries it certain fathoms in the earth and drowns his book.
¹¹

Friedrich Engels had complained that the object of British policy was to make the Irish feel like strangers in their own land;
¹²
but he seriously underestimated their capacity to reformulate the culture which had been used as an instrument to "civilize" them.

A rereading of English literature thus began. Newspapers began to complain about the insulting renditions by visiting English actors of Irish parts. Joseph Holloway noted in his diary that "a music-hall knockabout Irishman would appear a lifelike portrait of the genuine article beside the Captain MacMorris as he was presented, in speech, action and appearance".
¹³
Resentment was expressed – and not for the first time – against English texts which misrepresented Irish persons, or which treated them as if they would never be in a position to understand or to challenge such writings. The comedy which Wilde extracted from the spectacle of the
upper classes conducting intimate conversations in the presence of servants who are assumed to hear nothing was his exposure of the point of crisis which had been reached. The idea that the lower orders might store and use this information in future attacks on their masters never seems to have greatly exercised the official mind, anymore than English educators expected Irish students of Shakespeare to treat his works like captured weapons which might one day be turned back upon the enemy.

The Irish could use Shakespeare to repudiate those critics who "produced" him in their classrooms and on their syllabi; and, more vitally, they could feed their subversive rereadings back to England. Yeats's insistence that the Abbey Theatre tour London, Oxford and Cambridge with its plays, though criticized by touchy nationalists as a provincials abject plea for metropolitan blessing, was in fact a masterful attempt to unfreeze English theatre from its petrified condition and to restore to classic texts an openness to many interpretations. Previous attempts at such feedback – Charlotte Brooke's Preface to the
Reliques of Ancient Irish Poetry
in 1789, for example – had proved abortive and were limited, anyway, by the desire of the ascendancy class to clear its name. Now, however, for the first time in history, most sections of the Irish population had a mastery of English, and so the traffic could flow in both directions. The Irish, often mocked as brainless lyricists, could practise
criticism,
in both the essayistic and creative mode, and could set themselves up as the brains (as well as the poets) of the United
Kingdom. Wilde, for instance, took a perverse delight in proclaiming that his own republicanism derived from that of Milton, Blake and Shelley; and he was caustic about attempts by literary critics to write such embarrassing details out of their histories. In his Commonplace Book, kept while at Oxford, he wrote: "To Dissenters we owe in England
Robinson Crusoe,
Pilgrim's Progress,
Milton: Matthew Arnold is unjust to them because not to conform to what is established is merely a synonym for progress".
¹⁴

This rereading of English literature was accompanied by an initial investigation of much that the academic canon suppressed, including texts from the United Sates by writers such as Hawthorne and Whitman, both of whom were exercised by the search for a republican
tradition. Yeats's "The Lake Isle of Innisfree", as an early example, took its long running line from Whitman, and its underlying idea from
Thoreau's
Walden.
Irish writers became increasingly aware of how the fate of their own country and that of other colonies had been interwoven through many points in history: as an instance, the first attempt at "modernizing" the societies which lay beyond Europe was made in 1798, when
Napoleon abandoned his plans for a further, comprehensive invasion of Ireland and instead set his sights
on Egypt. Accordingly, Irish writers became interested in the books beginning to emerge from other colonial outposts of what would later be called the "Third World", from India, Africa and Latin
America. There were far fewer of these at the start of the century, of course, so the Irish knew that they must lead the way; but men like Yeats and Pearse were pleased to use the Abbey Theatre as the place in which to produce a play like
The Post Office
by the Indian Tagore. "Yeats thinks
The Post Office
a masterpiece" confided his friend
William Rothenstein in a letter to Tagore in 1912; and the Cuala Press published four hundred copies in a special edition in 1914. Two years later, Yeats crafted a glowing introduction to Tagore's book
Gitanjali.
¹⁵

Throughout this period, there was a developing affinity with other colonized peoples. An uncompromising person, such as Joyce, could regret the mindless complicity with empire of those examinees who studied approved versions of
The Tempest as
a prelude to taking on the white man's burden in some equatorial land:

They turned into Lower Mount Street. A few steps from the comer a fat young man, wearing a silk neckcloth, saluted them and stopped.

– Did you hear the results of the exams? he asked. Griffin was plucked. Hatpin and O'Fiynn are through the home civil. Moonan got fifth place in
the Indian. O'Shaughnessy got fourteenth. The Irish fellows in Clarke's gave them a feed last night. They all ate curry.

His pallid bloated face expressed benevolent malice and, as he had advanced through his tidings of success, his small fat-encircled eyes vanished out of sight and his weak wheezing voice out of hearing.
¹⁶

There was, necessarily, a thinly-veiled aggressiveness about such readings of the national condition, rooted in a pivotal sense of hurt and grievance. But that mood soon passed as intellectuals began to notice, with interest and surprise, the equally deforming effects of imperialism on the sponsors themselves. Edward Dowden had written that the pervasive idea of
The Tempest
was that "the true freedom of man consists in service" whereas to a lout like Caliban "service is slavery".
¹⁷
As a Victorian exponent of evolution, Dowden had pronounced himself a scientific gradualist and, therefore, an enemy of the French Revolution: "no true reformation was ever sudden",
¹⁸
he opined. There spoke a nervous Anglo-Irishman of the later nineteenth century, the offspring of a family of landlords in a nation convulsed by the Land War and by the rise of a native intelligentsia, who could only read such interpretations of
The Tempest
with amused contempt.

Yeats, as has been seen, launched many sallies against Trinity College in general and Dowden in particular, but by the time he came to write
Autobiographies
anger had given way to pity for a talented man who failed to trust his own nature. The hostility to books all through
Autobiographies
is not just based on a desire to defend oral traditions, but on Yeats's distrust of the use made of the approved colonizer's books to pass on second-hand opinions. In a similar trajectory through
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,
Stephen Dedalus's initial feeling for the Englishman who is Dean of Studies at the National University is "a smart of dejection that the man to whom he was speaking was a countryman of Ben Jonson"; but, after the professor has failed to understand the old English word "tundish", his final attitude is "a desolating pity" for "this faithful serving-man of the knightly Loyola".
¹⁹
By the time he wrote
Ulysses,
Joyces complex and rather fraught dealings with the representatives of Britain overseas had led him to conclude that many of these functionaries were verging on madness. A similar strain is apparent in Haines's insistence on keeping a loaded gun at his bedside in the chapter set in the tower at the start of
Ulysses.