It’s a Dandy! The Wildean Archetype in Dublin by Lamplight
In the late part of the 19th century a new, highly stylized personality was gracing the British theatre scene – the Irish playwright, Oscar Wilde. Wilde’s plays and personal style embodied the idea of “The Dandy” which was a person closely associated with a certain flamboyant style of dress who cultivated a lifestyle marked by decadence. Wilde embodied the dandy fashion by wearing knee britches, soft, flowing shirts and velvet coats with sunflowers in the lapel as a personal trademark. But he took his dandyism one step further by adding wittiness and verbal repartee to the type. He was known for using humour as way to deflect awkward situations and for getting away with remarks that although witty were not socially appropriate. It is in the character of Martyn that these Wildean characteristics are most clearly seen in Dublin by Lamplight. Firstly, as seen in the photo he has been physically modeled on Wilde, right to the sunflower but more than that his character’s speak follows the witty, irreverent pattern of Wilde’s. Martyn’s banter with the angry landlady in the opening scene or with the police to free Eva from gaol is Wildean as it helps ease uncomfortable situations by using charm and humour rather than resorting to rough words or behavior. In Act 1 Sc. 10. he makes a funny but inflammatory statement about the King. When Trench asks him if he would like to follow the route that the king will be taking, Martyn replies “Be born into a wealthy family and die of gout.” This cheekiness is a typical Wildean response.- Ashley Williamson
The Daughters of Ireland and Cathleen Ni Houlihan
The ambitions of the Daughters of Ireland ranged from political movements, such as the Great Boer War, to theatrical presentations, specifically Maud Gonne’s performance as Cathleen ni Houlihan.In the play, Dublin By Lamplight, Eva St John struggles over the ownership of the role of Emer, in the “Wooing of Emer” with Maggie, the understudy who takes over the role during Eva’s absense. Eva’s participation in the political activist movements, and her eventual capture inflict on her ability to devote herself to her role in the theatre.Eva: She? Her? The costumes? Willy, how could you? Our play.Willy: You weren’t here.Eva: I was in gaol, Willy.Obviously in this scene, the dialogue that transpires between Willy and Eva clearly demonstrates that Eva values her role as a female activist more so than her role as an actress. However, further on in the scene Willy observes that Eva in fact is not serving her purpose in this war, but is merely pretending.Eva: We’re not doing any more plays Willy. It’s not right. Not in the face of suffering.Willy: What do you know about suffering? You’ve never had to haggle or scrounge. You’ve never had to sacrifice anything You’ve never wanted anything in your whole life.In the play, Dublin By Lamplight, Eva St John fails to fill her role as a political leader and activist who wants to see change, in the eyes of her friend and business partner, Willy. In contrast to Eva St John, Maud Gonne was observed as a heroine, regarding her role as Kathleen ni Houlihan. A one act, created by William Butler Yeats, the “play was first performed in a small hall on Clarendon Street in 1902″ shortly after the Boer war, which occured in 1899. The story is that of an old Irish woman who convinces a man to leave his wife as the “Rising” is about to take place. She leaves and the man follows her. Suddenly she changes into a “young girl with the walk of a queen who is Ireland- young, reborn, risen.” (Inghinidhe na hEireann and Kathleen ni Houlihan 26) In her role as Kathleen ni Houlihan, Maud Gonne successfully won the hearts of the Irish people, in contrast to Eva St John who discovered that she was lost as to what she was fighting for.-Amanda Martinali
The Embodiment of Mother Ireland On Stage
In her essay Constance Markievicz, Karen Steele states that “drama afforded Irish women a tantalising opportunity to seize political power” (Steele, Constance Markievicz, 71.) Kathleen ni Houlihan served not only as “a kind of gospel” (Steele, Constance Markievicz,71) to Maud Gonne, but also as a theatrical outlet for members from The Daughters of Ireland to publicly express their nationalist beliefs. The play allowed them to make their pride for Ireland known through a story that revolved around a figure (ni Houlihan) who embodied the wise, inwardly and outwardly beautiful Mother Ireland. As mentioned in the previous paragraph, Eva, unlike real-life heroine Gonne, did not end up believing in the political power of theatre in Dublin by Lamplight. Her destruction of materials from the theatre to create makeshift first-aid items is symbolic of her retreat from the theatre:
Eva: For bandages, Eva had torn up whatever costumes she could lay her hands on, and had requisitioned curtains to make stretchers. (Act III, Scene 5) However, throughout the play Eva continues to take on a very motherly role as a nationalist leader, which reflects the title character in the Kathleen ni Houlihan production. The theme of motherhood in Dublin by Lamplight is also evident in Maggie’s pregnancy. This again relates to Kathleen ni Houlihan and the Daughters of Erin, whose embodiment of Ireland as a mother figure did not stop with theatrical productions. Members of the organisation also played the role of Mother Ireland in their “weekly classes started for children in the Irish language, history, and music” (Biletz, 62) to nurture a knowledge and passion for all things believed to be genuinely Irish. -Kendra Tyre
(The image reflects the notion of Ireland as a wise, strong mother figure- taken from http://homepages.rootsweb.com/~cwirish/)
The Figure of Kathleen ni Houlihan Embodying Mother Ireland
In Kathleen ni Houlihan, written by Lady Gregory and Yeats, mythology is used to dramatize the idea of a lost and homeless Ireland which can be redeemed only by a lonely heroism that stands in opposition of the modern (Innes 44). Several emotive symbols give the play its nationalist appeal (Innes 46) but the strongest and most enduring is Kathleen herself, represented as embodying Ireland. By drawing on the tradition of a beautiful young woman representing Ireland and the older folk tradition of a poor old woman who is Mother Ireland (Innes 46), Yeats and Gregory present the paradox of Ireland’s feminine mythology. For Kathleen is at once an asexual country mother and a sexualized otherworldly maiden.
As a mother figure Kathleen seems oddly bloodthirsty. She “celebrates death [and] summons men to die for an abstract notion … [the] idealised concept of Ireland” (Ryan 109). She portrays the warrior depiction of Mother Ireland calling on her sons to die for her – a depiction whereby blood sacrifice is needed to redeem a pure Ireland. In return Mother Ireland offers glory, and a place in a national memory (Innes 47).
It seems that once the sacrifice is made, Mother Ireland is rejuvenated as Kathleen and becomes a queenly maiden. Yeats and Gregory portray this sexual bride fused into the haggard mother as a force that draws Michael from the material and mundane world into the spiritual and poetic ideal (Innes 46). The re-enactment of sacrifice brings together the Christian myth of redemption by blood sacrifice with the Gaelic nationalist myth of an Ireland who, as Mother or bride, awaits redemption (Innes 47). In this allegory, the young man – a son of Mother Ireland – banishes the political colonial father so that he can “devote himself to a ‘highly idealized version of the mother who is also a lover’” (Innes 48). In an all-consuming femininity, Ireland/Kathleen engulfs the men of Ireland entirely for her own survival.In Dublin by Lamplight the history of Kathleen ni Houlihan is evoked in the performance of “The Wooing of Emer.” Willy wants to enforce an Irish identity by producing the play, which is what Kathleen ni Houlihan did during its production. Both plays depict an Irish feminist mythology that calls upon men to make sacrifices for Ireland. In Dublin by Lamplight we literally see Frank risk his life for the idea of Mother Ireland; he seems so infatuated by this filial duty that he ignores Maggie – a real life love – in order to carry out his sacrifice. – Laura Langlois
Maid and Mother: Maggie, Eva and Mother Ireland
The Nationalist allegory of Ireland emerged in the form of two figures: that of the virginal maiden, and that of the mother. Both of these identities grew out of a strengthening of the Irish Catholic Church in the nineteenth century that saw a shift toward a more “puritanical religion which idealized women as otherworldly creatures of sublime innocence” (Kearney 119). The Catholic ideology in Ireland was “strongly influenced by that of Rome where many aspiring Irish priests received their training” (Innes 38), and in 1854, the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception was promulgated by the Church, which established Mother Mary as asexual (Innes 38).
In a time when Catholicism and nationalism were increasingly identified with one another by Irish Catholics (Innes 23), “nationalist iconography simultaneously drew on the emblematic young virgin or the motherly old woman to stand for, respectively, the mother Mary [and] Mother Ireland” (Ryan 106). The identities of “Erin … and Mother Church and the Mother of Christ [began] to merge in rhetoric, drama and poetry” (Innes 23) until women became motherly virgins who best served to “safeguard the native purity” of Ireland (Kearney 119). “The cult of the Virgin endorsed not merely chastity and motherhood as womanly ideals, but also humility, obedience and passive suffering” (Innes 40).
This shift in the Church coincided with the colonization of Ireland; as Ireland was suffering, the Catholic Church was suffering under the penal laws (Kearney 119). Thus, women simultaneously “became as sexually intangible [under Church ideology] as the ideal of national independence became politically intangible. Both entered the unreality of myth” (Kearney 119), and the more dispossessed the people became the more they sought to repossess an identity in this myth (Kearney 119). However, there is a paradox that runs deep in this mingling of the mother and the maiden identity. This is evident in images of Liberty leading the people during the French Revolution “with blouse unbuttoned and breasts exposed, the very image of sexual desire (the maiden’s breast) or the bountiful social good (the mother’s breast) to be had after the revolution” (Ryan 103). Celtic images of the sexualized, yet motherly breast appear in the form of Mother Ireland suckling her children during the Irish famine. Mother Ireland thus becomes a hybrid of the maiden and the mother, which is important to the characters of Maggie and Eva in Dublin by Lamplight. While Maggie is frequently sexualized by the men in the play, she is also inherently motherly because she is pregnant. Eva exhibits motherly qualities when she is caring for the wounded in Act 3, Scene 5, and yet is sexualized by her appearance on the stage. Furthermore, these two characters come together to say in unison the final lines of Emer, “Men of Ireland, Sons of Erin, rise, rise” (Act 2, Scene 10), which are most reminiscent of a Mother Ireland figure. By uniting, Maggie and Eva are embodying the fusion of the maiden and mother ideologies in the figure of Mother Ireland. – Laura Langlois
The Creators of the Irish National Theatre
Martyn is one of the main character of Dublin by Lamplight; the unconventional spelling of the name pays homage to Edward Martyn, co-creator of the Irish Literary Theatre, and, according to the autobiography of Lady Gregory, the man who brought W. B. Yeats to her home on the fateful day that began the gradual process of creating the Irish National Theatre. Martyn helped Yeats find the Abbey Theatre as a venue for their theatre but stepped out of the project early as he felt that the Irish National Theatre shows a “too exclusive care for the folk drama that has resulted in giving a one-sided appearance to our dramatic activities” (Boyd, 30).
In the Irish Times review of Dublin by Lamplight the playwright Willie is compared to a “kind of failed Yeats”; the similarity in Irish Nationalism and passon for Irish Folk Drama is evident, but the lines of “The Wooing of Emer“ that the audience experiences are nowhere near the stadard beauty of Yeats’ poetic verses. W.B. Yeats was born in Dublin in 1865, spent most of his life in Dublin, and became not only a world renowned poet and playwright, but also was considered to be the name synonymus with the Irish Literary Revival. Yeats worked to restore Irish poetry and literature to Ireland before switching his focus to creating a national theatre. The Irish National Theatre Society owes its creation and successes to the influence and dedicaton of W.B. Yeats.
According to Lady Augusta Gregory‘s autobiography, prior to meeting Yeats she had no interest in the theatre; that all changed in one fateful afternoon when Edward Martyn brought his friend W.B. over to the Gregory household. In one long afternoon conversation the pair decided that Yeats’ Irish Theatre dreams were not as far-fetched as he once believed them to be.Lady Gregory played an active role in fundraising and promotions for the theatre. She also became a well known dramatist and has been widely acclaimed for her rewriting of famous Irish myths and legends including Cuchulain of Muirthemme; this myth is also discussed in Dublin by Lamplight.
Another reference Michael West draws to the creation of the Irish National Theatre in Dublin by Lamplight is the brothers, Willie and Frank Hayes, which is no doubt a tribute to The Fay brothers though there are obvious differences in character, as neither of the Fay brothers were alcoholics or known to strap bombs around them and run through town. W.G. and Frank Fay were, however, great contributors to the Irish National Theatre. Frank was formerly a theatre critic for the United Irishman, who in 1899 called for “(1) a natural acting style and (2) the use of Irish actors in national drama,” and Willie had been hired by Inghinidhe na hEireann in 1900 “to teach its members elocution and to help direct some of their plays” (Talbot 175). The pair taught acting and created roles out of texts for the plays being performd at the Abbey Theatre in its opening years. W.G. specialized in comedy while Frank Fay interpreted poetic drama; Yeats often expressed personal gratitude towards Frank for the way in which his own lines were read (Boyd, 42). After a rift between the founders a few years after the opening of the theatre the Fays left the Irish National Theatre project.
Though the naming references are obvious, there are various other similarities to the history in the text: Wille and Frank come across problems in finding a proper venue, which Martyn and Yeats unquestionably came across before finding the Abbey Theatre; for Yeats and Martyn it was finding one that they could actually perform at, for Willie and Frank it was finding one with the proper acoustics. Also, Yeats and Maud Gonne actually participated in protests against the King, the same way the protests occur in Dublin by Lamplight.By examining the people who were involved in the creation of the Irish National Theatre we set the pace for Dublin by Lamplight – the historical context of when the play is meant to take place with the same hesitation, anxiety and obstacles to create a theatre, much the same as what goes on in the play.- Danielle Sampson