Surprising no one at this point, I’m still curious about accents and dialects onstage, and I’m still keen to explore the social, political and theatrical relationships between the stage and given historical periods. Specifically for my research today, I’ve decided to take a look at Irish theatre history and the Anglicizing of the Irish language.
Ireland, as we have touched on a little, has had a very long, complicated relationship with England. The Normans first invaded Ireland in the late 12th century, but things got especially tense when Henry VIII declared himself King of Ireland and attempted to enforce the English Reformation in Ireland. This didn’t go over very well, but it did open the door for an influx of English and Scottish Protestant settlers-- who ended up displacing the existing Catholic landowners, leading to a distinct “Englishing” of the Irish gentry and society. Ireland did maintain its own Parliament after the establishment of the United Kingdom in 1707, though by the end of the 18th century, Catholic representation (which was about 85% of the population at the time) was banned by the Protestant newcomers. This Irish Parliament was disbanded in 1801 following the Irish Rebellion of 1798, when Catholic Irish nationalists attempted to overthrow the control of Protestant unionists. Ireland was then represented in England’s Parliament entirely by Protestants until the 1829 Catholic Emancipation. In 1922, most of Ireland seceded from the UK and became the Republic of Ireland, since which time there has been occasional continued conflict.
It’s not surprising that Ireland became increasingly “Englished” in the last 500 years or so. Much of the Irish population managed to maintain their language through the 18th century, particularly in the west and southwest regions of Ireland, furthest from immediate British influence. Some contemporaries estimate that about two-thirds of the Irish population spoke Irish as of 1731. However by 1791, in the midst of the great Standard English conversation, Irish speakers dropped to about 50%-- much of this demographic was bilingual, with English as their second language. But by 1800, Irish was increasingly associated with poverty and illiteracy. There became a real concern that native Irish would cease to exist altogether by 1900. [Slide 4 - maps of Ireland] The map on the left here was drawn in 1871 and records the general linguistic patterns of the country based on census records, dark red indicating Irish-speaking majority regions and white is where less than 10% of the population was speaking Irish. The map on the right is from 2011 with dark green highlighting Irish-speaking regions. Despite an upswing in national pride following Irish independence, Irish-speaking populations remain very low. There has been an interest in relearning Irish and about 30% of the nation consider themselves “passably” bilingual. However it has been suggested that only somewhere between 2-8% currently speak Irish as their primary language.
To make matters more complicated, a vital aspect of the Anglo-linguistic influence in Ireland stems from the fact that the Irish people first learned English from speakers of non-standard English-- either from settlers who came from the English countryside or Irish people were learning English from other Irish people. This made the Irish-English dialect (or Hiberno-English, from the classical Latin name for Ireland, Hibernia) particularly Irish, and during a period of time where Irish culture and people were considered especially “low class” (to put it diplomatically), the 18th century Irish weren’t found to be “English enough,” even those with ties to English culture.
Simultaneously, Ireland was introduced to another aspect of English society: in 1601, the first public stage production in Ireland was performed in the Great Hall at Dublin Castle-- the English play Gorbaduc. By 1634 the first Irish theatre was built-- an indoor “private” theatre that was very popular and closed in 1641 only because of the Irish Rebellion and the start of the Civil War. This theatre was actually sought after by English actors who fled London during a bad plague outbreak in the late 1630s, and it was here that the first “Irish” plays were premiered. James Shirley was from London, but he wrote the plays specifically for the Irish troupe and Irish audiences, which had not been done before 1637. His association with the Warburgh Street Theatre began a close relationship between London theatre and Dublin that remains today.
Smock Alley Theatre was built in 1662, following the building of Lincoln’s Inn Fields and Drury Lane in London, and received the third Theatre Royal patency in the British Isles. It was eventually managed by Thomas Sheridan, actor, playwright and eventual champion of standardized English, whom I discussed last term. Smock Alley premiered plays by George Farquhar, Oliver Goldsmith and Richard Sheridan, many of which plays are now considered staples in the “English” theatre canon. David Garrick first played his infamous Hamlet at Smock Alley and it has been estimated that about 25% of the greatest English actors visited Dublin at some time in their careers-- a great many began fabulously successful careers there, such as Peg Woffington, Charles Macklin, and George Anne Bellamy. Ireland’s rich association with the London stage paved the way for quintessentially “British” playwrights to epitomize “Britain” (meaning “England”) in the late Victorian and Edwardian eras-- such as Irish-born Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw-- illustrating a truism about English stage comedy: it is very often Irish.
Of course, the very association with London in the Irish theatre is also a very real example of the widespread codependency and tension between English and Irish cultures. While many London actors and playwrights were well-received in Dublin, their popularity decreased opportunities for Irish actors to work-- and in the opposite way, embracing Irish actors and writers into London society only managed to erase their “Irishness” and make them more English. But without this relationship, the theatre was vital in providing voice models for the Irish gentry to study standardized English. Aaron Hill noted that the stage should be where “the delicacies of good-breeding might be learnt, in their sublimest purity; and the elegancies of language, in its most refined and absolute perfection.” Grammar could be learnt in one of the many new readers and dictionaries of the age, but in the generations before sound recordings, the stage was the most immediate place to hear good pronunciation. It was thought (at least among the educated gentry and socially ambitious) that pursuing a “pure English” would provide access to the dominion of London, despite its physical and social distance.
In a way, using the stage as a way for Anglo-Irish gentry to be taught created an even wider divide between social classes in Ireland. Theatre and culture created more of a stigma surrounding uneducated Irish natives or those who couldn’t or wouldn’t become more Englished. While of course theatrical tradition provided opportunities for classes to mix in the audience of a play-house, political uprising and early crop failures divided classes more than ever-- who can afford to see a play if they can’t feed their families, much less spend time studying grammar and pronunciation (if they could even speak or read English at all)?
This cultural dichotomy is really well-illustrated in The Veil, as we have discussed throughout rehearsals. But we haven’t touched much on the very real linguistic implications of the play and the time period, and the vast social chasm between the Lambrokes and their native staff. Like other regional English dialects, Hiberno-English developed (and continues to develop) grammatical rules, structure and pronunciation unique to itself. In other words, though the dialect may be related to or a kind of corrupted form of Standard English, Irish-English and Standard English are not the same language. For example, a Hiberno-English speaker would hear the Standard English phrase “How long are you staying here?” and understand it to mean “How long have you been staying here?” whereas Standard English speakers take it to mean “How long will you be staying here”? “How long are you staying here” and “how long have you been staying here” are two distinct questions with very different answers depending on your understanding of the questions.
This doesn’t prevent our characters from speaking to or generally understanding each other. However, there are plenty of examples throughout the play that deal with misunderstanding, social divide, generational gaps, etc. Structurally, Grandie speaks much more like Mrs. Goulding than Madeleine or Hannah. Mrs. Goulding, Fingal and Clare speak to each other with the same structure and idiom, which they do not share with the rest of the cast. And of course, perhaps Fingal is fueled to an extreme response based on a simple misunderstanding-- but emotion and alcohol aside, linguistically and socially, he and Madeline do not actually speak the same language, which provides enormous opportunity to request and carry out the wrong task.
Given all there is to be learned in studying the history and social context of period plays, it gives me hope that William Hazlitt is right. While cultural and political invasion and the importance of the arts within society have and will remain delicate aspects of history and the future, I think “the stage is the epitome, a bettered likeness of the world…. What brings the resemblance nearer is, that, as they imitate us, we, in our turn, imitate them.”
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