Good afternoon. My name is Christian Dupont and I'm the Director of the John J. Burns Library for rare books and special collections and archives here at Boston College. It is my great pleasure to welcome you and to introduce our speaker, Patrick Lonergan, who has been with us this semester as our spring 2019 Burns Visiting Scholar in Irish Studies. Patrick comes to us from the National University of Ireland, Galway, where he has been Professor of Drama and Theatre Studies since 2013, having previously served as a lecturer in English from 2005. He was also the Director of the Singh Summer School for Irish Drama from 2008 to 2014 and is currently a Director of the Galway International Arts Festival. He is an editorial associate of Contemporary Theatre Review and a member of several other editorial boards. At NUI Galway, Patrick is Academic Leader of the Digitization of the Archives of the Abbey and Gate Theatres, a project to create the world's largest multimedia digital theatre archive. He has lectured on Irish literature at many venues internationally, including, most recently, Tokyo, Florence, Florianopolis, Brazil, Frosthoff, Poland, and this past year, Patrick was elected to the Royal Irish Academy. Patrick has written or edited 12 influential books on Irish Drama. These include Theatre and Globalization, winner of the UK Theatre Book Prize in 2008, The Theatre and Films of Martin McDonough in 2012, and Theatre and Social Media in 2015. His new history of Irish Drama and Theatre since 1950 has been published just this month by Loosbury. This semester at Boston College, Patrick has been teaching the course on Theatre and Globalization, examining how the growth of world theatre has shaped the world of dramatists and expanded their marketplace, all this while utilizing Burns Library resources for his research and writing. He organized and hosted last Saturday a one-day conference on advances in archival research and their effect on teaching research and literature and performing arts. We warmly welcome Patrick to the podium to give us a foretaste of the topic of his next book, with his lecturing title, Shakespeare and the Modern Irish Theatre, staging Anglo-Irish relations from 1916 to Brexit. Patrick. Thank you very much, Christian. So before we get in, I would like to thank Christian Dupont and James Murphy, very sincerely for everything they've done during my time here as the visiting Burns scholar. I also want to thank the staff of the Burns Library and the Irish Studies and the wider BC community. Together with my family, we've been given an extremely warm welcome, a very kind welcome. So the paper I'm going to give today draws on some of the research and some of the writing I've been able to do here, though of course I'm also hoping to get plenty more done before I leave. It's been exceptionally beneficial to have space here, to have time here to think and to work in such a stimulating environment. So this is a paper about Shakespeare, but it's also a paper about Ireland, and for that reason I want to start with James Joyce. James Joyce's Ulysses is famously obsessed with Shakespeare, opening, just like Hamlet does, with a young man who's dressed in black and who is haunted by the ghost of a parent. And it works towards a moment in the Cersei chapter in which Bloom and Stephen look into the mirror and find the reflection of Shakespeare gazing back at them. A reflection that is crowned by the reflection of the reindeer and her hat rack in the hall, as Joyce writes. His novel also responds to Shakespeare's only Irish character, Captain MacMorris from Henry V, by addressing MacMorris's infamous question, what ish my nation?  What ish my nation? Who talks of my nation? So the kind of belligerent Irish and stereotype we see back in the 1590s. And the word ish, in case it's not obvious, is Shakespeare's attempt to render an Irish accent. Well done Shakespeare. And of course the words used to describe Ireland are far from complementary. Now there's been a lot of debate about this passage, you can interpret it from several points of view. Is it Shakespeare being derogatory to the Irish or other things going on? And all I really say about that is that the debate exists, it's not straightforward. But the words are reimagined by Joyce. They're put into the mouth of the civism in the psychops chapter midway through the book. What is your nation, if I may ask, says the citizen to gloom? And gloom's celebrated answer is Ireland. I was born here, Ireland. A response that defines nationality in relation to birth rather than ethnicity. And not to be too fanciful about that, we can say that that's anticipating the provisions of the Good Friday Agreement by almost 80 years. But where I most want to discard is with a joke from the Scylla and Charybdis chapter, which is the one set in the National Library, in which there is a long debate about Shakespeare, who is discussed in the context of the Irish literary revival. Yes indeed, the Quaker librarian said, a most instructive discussion. Mr Mulligan I'll Be Bound has his theory too of Hamlet and of Shakespeare. All sides of life should be represented. He smiled on all sides equally. Book Mulligan paused, puzzled. Shakespeare he said, I seem to know the name. A flying sunny smile reigned in his loose features. To be sure, he said, remembering brightly, the chap that writes like sing. Now there are many ways of interpreting that joke about John Millington Scylla. And the leading dramatist of the Irish literary revival, who died in 1909, quite a long time after Shakespeare. Dying at the tragically young age of 37, leaving behind the playboy of the western world and several other important writings. And the suggestion that sing influenced Shakespeare could be seen in many ways. It's making fun of Irish insularity. It's mocking some of the extremes of Irish cultural nationalism. It's also Book Mulligan just being a bit absurd, as he so often does. But it's a joke that had been made by other people too. In 1913, for example, the playwright Syngin Irvine had written an adaptation of Sheridan's play, The Critics. And in his version, in the 1913 version, a group of Dublin theatre critics stand in the best of view of the Abbey Theatre, while the performance of Hamlet is underway. So if you're in the audience of the Abbey, you're looking at the stage, and on the stage is the best of view of the Abbey. Which is quite interesting. So the critics are talking about the play, trying to identify it, and they mistakenly think that it's not written by Shakespeare, but that it's a new Irish peasant play, such as might have been written by Sing.  It's inconclusive. And somebody suggests to them that they might need to double-check their facts. And one of the critics responds in a passage that I think retains its relevance now. Facts, he said. People don't read newspapers for facts. Good Lord, man, if we started printing facts, the public would go out of its mind. I'm a fact.  He's a fact. But you don't think people want to read about us? They want to read about things that never happen. They want to forget they're alive. They want to be chloroformed. And that's what our job is. 1913 could be 2013 or in 2019. And when the play concludes, the critics are told the name of its author. Ah, yes, Shakespeare said Mr. Barbary.  I should think he comes from Cork. So, same joke. I think it's unlikely that Joyce was aware of the play. I mean, it's a work in progress, so I will certainly try and find out. But I think it's unlikely. But I think either way, Irvine's joke and Bookmoligan's joke both contain a truth that I think it's possible to acknowledge intuitively, if not literally. So, you know, when we think about the history of a national literature, we tend to have a sense of writers influencing each other in a kind of chronological lineage and to believe that Shakespeare begat Joyce, who begat Beckett, who begat Marina Carr, and so on. But in society, the reputation of writers and their works work a bit differently, I think. Joyce's joke in Ulysses shows his awareness that writers' reputations arise not just from the circulation of their books or their plays, but from the recirculation and the reimagining of those texts through time. So, that joke about saying is actually Joyce trying to tell us how to read Ulysses itself, because the entire structure of Ulysses is predicated on the idea that a new book, James Joyce's Ulysses, can change the way we read an old poem, Homer's Odyssey, forever. In such a context, Shakespeare really can seem like the chap that writes like Singh, just as Homer is the chap that writes like James Joyce. Singh's innovation was to poeticize the version of the English language that had first come to Ireland during the Elizabethan period. And what this meant, and this is frequently recorded, is that Irish audiences who had been to Singh's plays commented on how it changed the way they heard Shakespeare afterwards. And this is attested to by Buck Mulligan's joke, as well as by Irvine's adaptation of The Critics. So that's the suggestion that I want to make today, that Shakespeare is a figure that Irish writers and Irish readers and Irish audiences have reimagined and re-read for most of the last century. And with Brexit hanging over us, sorry, it seems important to consider again how Shakespeare could be a figure that might allow Ireland and England to think about each other in new and possibly different ways. But what I'm also suggesting is that maybe paradoxically, Shakespeare has always been a way for Ireland to think about itself, to think about its literature, to think about its history, to think about possible futures. So what I'm going to be suggesting today is that the many versions of Shakespeare, I will be describing, are also many versions of Ireland since 1916. Now, there was Shakespeare before that. And before the opening of the Abbey Theatre in 1904, there had been at least 5,000 individual productions of Shakespeare in Dublin alone, starting in the 1660s and continuing in an unbroken tradition thereafter. So this list, which you're never going to read in its entirety, gives you all the plays listed in order of popularity down through the centuries. You would probably be unsurprised to see that Hamlet is by far the most popular of Shakespeare's plays in Dublin. It appeared there on average once almost every three years. Some of those performances are historically of huge significance. And the first time David Garrick, the great Shakespearean actor, played Hamlet, he didn't do so in London, he did so in Dublin at Smog Alley. And the very first time on record that a woman played Hamlet was not in London, but was in Dublin. And it was in the year 1741 in Smog Alley Theatre, and Hamlet's name was fairly vulnerable. So lots of interesting things there. And the popularity, then, of key plays remains largely unchanged from one decade to the next. So this gives you the three most popular plays listed by decade. And you can see there it's much the same as now, Hamlet, Othello, Lear appear all the time, all the way through. When we were doing this research, I found myself trying to relate this to Irish history. I was interested to imagine what kind of Shakespeare might have been performed in Ireland just after the great famine, thinking surely this would have to be reflected in some way on our stages. And what I found was that the 1850s were the peak period for performances of Shakespeare in Dublin. There were 664 individual performances of Shakespeare in that decade, in the 1850s. So this is an average of more than one a week in Dublin. Like, you don't have one a week on average in London now. So it's an enormous amount, and it tells us something about his place in the culture. Shakespeare then also found his way into the lives of ordinary Dubliners through other means. By the end of the 19th century, many middle-class Irish families owned acting editions of Shakespeare's plays.  And the Irish family acting out Macbeth kind of makes a certain sense, I think. And maybe not. So that's why when you get to a play like Sean O'Casey's The Shadow of a Gunman, premiering in 1923, he gives us two characters, two tenement dwellers, who can call Shakespeare very freely. So one of them dabbled in quotes, the village cock had thrice done salutation to the mooring. And Seamus, his companion, is instantly able to say, Shakespeare, Richard the Third, Act 5, Scene 3, it was Wackler said that to Richard just before the Battle of Bosworth. Now, of course, O'Casey's characters are meant to be seen as different from the other people that they live with. They're meant to be seen as standing out from the crowd, not necessarily in a good way. But the point about this is that Shakespeare was exaggerating a reality and not inventing something that was not true. For those who might be interested in following up on this, all of this is in a database which is available on the Anyway Go Away website and from a project that was completed with the support of the Irish Research Council. So what I want to say really is that the notion that Shakespeare was a vehicle for British imperialism would not really have made sense for most Irish theatre audiences or readers from the 1660s to 1922. Even a play like Henry V, which is now seen by many in Ireland as jingoistic and anti-Irish, was well received when it was played in Dublin, though interestingly the Irishman Captain Mack Morris was usually dropped from any staging of the play there. In fact, I had been unable to find any evidence but the words, what ish my nation, were ever spoken on an Irish stage in the performance of Henry V. But I'm still looking. So there has been a change. What I would suggest is that if we want to find a single turning point in this history, a good place to start might be the 23rd of April, 1960. And depending on your perspective, you'll be able to guess where I'm going with this. And on that day, as it began, the Anglican Archbishop of Dublin, his name is John Henry Bernard, he was giving his Easter sermon on Christ's Church Cathedral, and he was very preoccupied by news of the Great War, appealing to this congregation to pray for their Russian comrades in arms, whom he was keen to characterize as fellow Christians who were celebrating Easter too. Like Ireland and Britain, he said, the Russians were engaged in a war of right against might. I spoke of the war as a crusade, he said, and those who treat the weight of the cross together draw nearer to each other as they draw nearer to the place of the cross. Kind of conveniently forgetting the Christianity of the Germans, but never mind. He then recited some famous lines, For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother, be he nor so wild this day shall gentle his condition. And this is a quotation from, yet again, Henry V. Take it from the famous scene in which the king encourages his troops to put aside the differences of nation, of Ireland, England, Scotland and Wales, to band together in order to defeat their shared enemy. Now the Archbishop saw himself as both Irish and British. The subtitle of the 2007 biography, available here at the Burns Library, refers to him as the leader of the Southern Unionists. So his invocation of Shakespeare was an assertion, I think, of a shared cultural identity between England and Ireland. And given what we know about cultural nationalism at that time, it was inherently a political thing for him to do. But even so, when we read the sermon, we find that he was thinking of Shakespeare in a much broader way, as a force for transcending divisions. It would be well for all of us, he told his congregation, if we learned to apply the great words of Shakespeare at home, as well as abroad, to our own countrymen, no less than to our comrades in arms in other lands. So what we find in the sermon is that the words we and our become extremely slippery. Sometimes it's the congregation, sometimes it's all the people of Ireland, sometimes it's the United Kingdom in its entirety, including Ireland, and sometimes it's all the allies fighting the Great War together. So Shakespeare, whom he calls our great poet, becomes a rallying point, becomes a figure whose artistry is transformed into common ground that might unify the people of Ireland. Now, why was the Archbishop Bernard's allusion to Henry V, particularly topical on that day? The Shakespeare people in the room will know that 23rd of April is a significant day. It is the day not only of Shakespeare's birth, but also of his death. So 23rd of April, 1916, was the 300th anniversary of Shakespeare's death. A variety of events have been planned to separate that occasion in Ireland, albeit that a wish to avoid any suggestion of idolatry meant that most of them had been pushed back to the 1st of May. But there are lots of interesting things. There was an amateur production of Hamlet on the stage of the Abbey Theatre, where it was well received, nobody saw any other comments. People had scheduled lectures, they had scheduled special talks, and very interestingly, the Irish Times had scheduled the publication of a special supplement that would celebrate the Tercentenary, and it was to have appeared on the 24th of April, excuse me, 1916. Why didn't it appear on the 24th of April, 1916? Because of the Easter Rising. The supplement never made it into print. The Archbishop's speech was published, but mostly went unread, and most of these events were cancelled. And the reason is that on the 24th of April, a ban on Irish rebels took over key buildings in Dublin and declared an Irish Republic. But even so, like the Unionist Reverend Bernard, Bernard, the leaders of the 1916 Rising were able to reconcile a sense of national identity with the love of Shakespeare. Parich Pierce had placed the study of Shakespeare firmly within the curriculum of St. Enders, his school, and his sister Mary Bridget recalled the hidden fire and ardent sincerity in Pierce's recitation of Shakespeare's verse, as for instance when he gave Mark Antony's famous speech over the body of Julius Caesar, she says he recited this with the tenderness of a mother cruning over her child. If you know Pierce's works and how mother is bigger in them, that's a really interesting statement. During the Rising itself, some of the volunteers read Julius Caesar to pass the time. One of them, Joseph de Bruyne, recorded in his diary the first Shakespearean play I saw and my favorite, and he observed that the characterisation of Cassius and Brutus made for an interesting study. Now, given that Julius Caesar explores the descent of a country from rebellion to civil war, and from there to tyranny, it kind of displays a bit of evidence that perhaps the Easter Rebels may not have been quite so naive and idealistic about the future of their country, as is sometimes asserted. In any case, it gives us something to think about. That positive attitude to Shakespeare was evident amongst more moderate Irish nationalists too. Douglas Hyde, who had later become the first president of Ireland, celebrated the personitury of Shakespeare's death by contributing a poem in the Irish language to a celebratory book of homage to Shakespeare, edited by Israel Galatz and published in London the day before the Easter Rising began on Deliberty. I was delighted to be able to make use of a copy of the actual volume which is available here at the Burns Library. It's a really fascinating book well worth a look, a beautiful book as well. But Hyde's poem is called or in his own translation how it fared with a gale at Stratford upon Avon. And it presents us with the story of what he calls a charnuk the vunuk, a charnuk or an Irish foot soldier from the province of Munster. The charnuk is exiled from Ireland, wanders through Britain and finds himself in Stratford upon Avon where, as he do, he falls asleep on the banks of a river and has a dream vision. And in the dream vision he meets all of Shakespeare's characters and they so delight him that when he wakes up he has changed his opinion about England and the English. He says, As Andrew Murphy informs us the point of the poem is essentially that a wholly justified hatred of England is assuaged when an Irish man undergoes his Shakespearean experience. It kept really fascinating for 1916. Now that's not to suggest that Hyde's attitude is entirely positive. I think it's probable that his decision to make the character occur, which as I said is an Irish foot soldier, was intended as a subtle rebuke to Shakespeare. Because when Shakespeare mentions the Irish in the play Richard II Richard refers to the Irish as rough, rug-headed curns which live like a venom where no venom else but only they have a privilege to live. So the Irish are seen as a vermin who need to be exterminated. Incidentally, the image that you see there is of some Irish curns and it's prepared by Albrecht Dürer this was from the 1520s and I think it gives us a sense of their reputation in Europe and also I think illustrates what Richard meant by the rug-headed epithet. And the curns also appear in Macbeth which Shakespeare wrote about 10 years later where again they have a fearsome reputation. So all through his writing career he associated the curns with quite negative things. But in any case, I think even that negativity aside Hyde's poem makes the case that even though Hyde believed Ireland should be de-angosized that didn't mean he thought it had to be rid of Shakespeare. Now this was even true at the Abbey Theatre, Ireland's national theatre. I always look at the ads and Abbey show programmes to see not just what people were watching but what kind of products were being sold to them at the time. And I want to talk briefly about an ad that appeared at the theatre from 1910 to about 1914 so in the years leading up to the rising. And what it does is it uses a quotation from Shakespeare to encourage audiences to buy clothing. We can help you to follow Shakespeare's advice they say. But then it reassures readers that products are made only by Irish workers and it offers a written guarantee that every product is Irish. This demonstrates I think how you could be you could have cultural nationalism you could have economic nationalism but you didn't need to get rid of Shakespeare. And that's at the Abbey. So the turning point is 1916. After that year productions of Shakespeare's plays in Ireland diminished massively in number. I think British companies did continue to come to Ireland. Many people still have very fond memories of the tour of the Prime Minister through rural Ireland which took place right up to the 1960s for example. But elsewhere there was a retreat from Shakespeare in national contexts. So the Dublin branch of the British Empire Shakespeare Society had been founded in 1907 but after Irish independence it quietly changed its name to the Dublin Shakespeare Society. There were also intermittent attempts to translate Shakespeare into Irish perhaps the best example being this production of Macbeth by Tiger Cagalliba which was performed in Irish where the young Siobhan McKenna playing Lady Macbeth. That's from 1941. But in general engagements with Shakespeare were half-hearted at best. Towards the end of their lives Yates and Lady Gregory sought to revitalize the Abbey Theatre with new productions of Shakespeare. The first time the theatre performed Shakespeare was in a 1928 version of King Lear which was intended to draw on the influence of German expressionism in its set and costume design as we see here in these images prepared by the designer Dorothy Travis Smith. Really interesting images. After Gregory's death there was a 1934 production of Macbeth which featured a young Mary Manning as one of the witches a production that was reportedly so upsetting for everybody that it confirmed her passion for playwriting over acting forever more. In 1936 Yates hoped to provoke one last Abbey Theatre riot before he died and he did so by encouraging the production of Coréa Lévis because he had known that in Paris French fascists two years previously had also put on the play to think about the rule of the elite over the maw so the theatre did put it on in 1936. Now what I'm showing you here is an image of the lighting plan for that production which has been singed by the Abbey Fire from 1951 but from looking at it it's fairly clear that it was a traditional production and not perhaps as revolutionary as Yates might have wished but I guess my point is that for all three of these Abbey Shakespeare's Irish audiences proved indifferent nobody rioted because nobody went. Now after Coréa Lévis and after the death of Yates Shakespeare disappeared altogether from the repertoire of the Abbey Theatre for 40 years. When asked why its manager Ernest Glyde was bloodsly unrepentant the Abbey do not produce foreign playwrights he said and so Shakespeare disappeared from the repertoire of the theatre until 1971. I think it's worth pointing out here that during those years under Blythe's leadership the theatre stage plays by Chekhov, by Brecht or by Lorca and by a great number of other European and world dramatists so clearly here when he said foreign playwrights he met English playwrights. I think it's really important that we see what a severe change this was. You can see evidence right back to the 1720s that shows that when Irish writers and Irish audiences talked about Shakespeare they thought Shakespeare belonged to them because Shakespeare belonged to everybody but Blythe's Abbey simply ignored Shakespeare and asked that it was completely unprecedented in Irish theatrical history. Now you know we can look at this in a variety of ways some people say this is a necessary act of decolonisation you have to banish Shakespeare in order to find your way back others would say it's an example of Irish provincialism it was the wrong thing to do either way I think it's reasonable to propose but the alienation of Ireland and England from each other especially after the 1930s has some sort of example in the fact that Shakespeare was also absent from the stage of the Abbey during those periods so that is why I see 1916 as a turning point looking back we might see the celebratory Irish time supplement that never made it into print as a powerful emblem for what happened it was intended to celebrate a tradition that had a long and respected place in Irish life but it disappeared we know the supplement existed but no one has been able to find any trace of it so it was with Shakespeare on the Irish stage thousands of productions were seen by hundreds of thousands of Irish people over several centuries and Irish people from all walks of life but most of those productions were written out of history as independent Ireland came into being the history of Irish theatre started in the 1890s was the official line now this is not to suggest that Shakespeare was never performed after 1922 but rather that there was a judge to be at incompatibility between Shakespeare and Irish's so Shakespeare continued to torture generations of Irish school children and so had a central part of the education system and it was also considered acceptable for visiting companies to perform his work if they came from abroad but the idea that Shakespeare might have a place on the Irish stage was not just controversial but in some senses it was quite literally unimaginable it didn't enter people's head to even think about it and I think this gives rise to some interesting but undoubtedly muddled thinking a very clear example of this is the place of Shakespeare in the early years of Ireland's second great theatre which is The Gates so in 1932 they produced an excellent by all accounts an excellent version of Hamlet which was one of the very first professional acting jobs of Horsey Wells who had come to Dublin and essentially lied his way onto the stage of The Gates he played Hamlet's Ghost but later in the 1930s they brought their productions including Hamlet on tour to the Balkans and to Malta and to Egypt and they did this on the eve of the Second World War and they didn't call themselves the Dublin Gates Theatre they called themselves the English Players now why did they do this it was partly because they were funded by the British Council who thought that by sending this theatre company to these strategically vulnerable places they might help to I guess reduce the attractiveness of Nazis in those countries but I think it was also because there was a belief that a theatre company could not be both Irish and Shakespeare at the same time it just didn't seem conceivable there's another interesting example of a kind of cultural confusion and that's in the Irish attitude to Laurence Olivier's version of Henry V the film that perhaps some of you might have seen the idea of this film was put forward by the British Ministry of Information during World War II as a film that might bolster the patriotism and resilience of English audiences so it was premiered shortly after D-Day and if you had seen it in England at that time the first title would have said that the film is dedicated to the commandos and airborne troops of Great Britain the spirit of whose ancestors it has humbly attempted to be captured so I mean this is a war time Henry V however its outdoor scenes were filmed in neutral Ireland which meant that when it was released in Ireland in 1945 there was huge excitement in the country about it you know newspaper reports saying like Agincourt as it was fought outside of Dublin so you get this really interesting blurring of English propaganda British nationalism and the way in which Irish identity on the world stage is started to be affected by cinema all happening at the same time we get a particularly interesting example of this when the film premiered here in Boston in 1946 and the Irish newspapers run reports talking about how impressed the magazine was with the scenery in Counting Wickl and that's the news Time magazine likes this even so Shakespeare remained a subject of indifference in the main given the brilliant exhibition on Flann and Brian that's on here at the moment I had to bring up an example of Flann's responses to some of these productions so when Terrone Guthrie brought his revolutionary modern dress Hamlet to Dublin in 1950 audiences were unimpressed and the person who was most impressed was Flann and Brian and writing in the Irish Times he asked a question is it safe to play classics in modern dress if people suspect that A, the actors are too lazy to arrive at time and to change costume or B that certain characters in crowd scenes were dragged from the pub across the street five minutes ago he said so that's it you make fun of it once done people flocked to it as an example of really exciting practice even the return of Orson Welles to the Belfast in Dublin stages fails to excite much enthusiasm this is a show program from 1959 when Welles staged a version of Trimes of Midnight which is his complication of the two parts of Henry IV and Henry V into one play later becomes one of his most admired films but in Dublin he didn't really get a lot of attention here on the screen on your right this is a publicity shot of Welles playing Falstaff in Belfast I love that photo and then on the left a slightly different photo this is from the film version itself six years later now the Dublin production was seen mostly by Irish school children and there's a line in the Irish Times review that reflects upon this school children in Ireland now at bed with most of seeing times of midnight I hope when an Elvis is long forgotten kind of clearly showing where his cultural values lay but it was a front audiences didn't go so it was withdrawn for a series of evenings with Orson Welles in which he told stories about himself and his time in Dublin in the 1930s they're on YouTube well worth a look this is again showing that they had a preference for stories that are about themselves as seen through the kind of mediating influence not so much of Hollywood but certainly of international cinema so when do things start to change 1971 is when the Abbey's Day facto ban on Shakespeare is lifted and it's lifted when the English director Hugh Hunt stages Macbeth there this is from the show program before that production two things you find in the show program advertisements but then in the first page of texts you get the words why Shakespeare I don't exaggerate this but I think it's likely no national theatre anywhere in the world before ever felt the need to ask that question because the answer is seen as so self-evident of course you say Shakespeare but nevertheless Hunt felt compelled to address it it has rightly been claimed he said by British and American actors that to play Shakespeare is the final test of an actor's quality and he expressed the determination to produce Shakespeare's work in a manner commensurate with his world importance so he's not foreign anymore is the subtext there but in that reference to actors British and American actors kind of detect what is evident for the rest of the decade which is an Irish superiority complex about their ability to stage Shakespeare correctly and as you can see it's not a great photo but this is from the original production you can see that they gave a very traditional version of Macbeth I would say really though that the ghost of the feast in this production of Macbeth was undoubtedly the outbreak of the troubles in Northern Ireland and it's unquestionably true that the renewal of the troubles in Northern Ireland or the outbreak of the troubles in Northern Ireland were thinking about Anglo-Irish relations in new ways and so it's highly significant that this is the period when the National Theatre starts to think about Shakespeare again and you get this in other contexts too in 1972 there was a Celtic hamlet staged by Cyril Cusack when the actors were all dressed in green and all the action was reset to the Emerald Bible so the kind of catchphrase for the production was something's rotten in the state of Ireland so this was compared to the immediate wake of bloody Sunday and the characterisation of Ireland has kind of failed state or at least there's a state that it failed to live up to what people wanted for it was what this production was trying to do Other productions would follow the Abbey many of them directed by younger artists people like Joe Dowell who went on to have such an impact also featuring many emerging actors so this is a 1980 production of The Winter's Tale directed by Patrick Mason and some of you might recognise Paul Meadie depending on whether you know from the commitments or Star Trek depending on your persuasion who's the person on the far left Zinni Mason so this is a young Lee Mason appearing in The Winter's Tale but it was the last time he appeared on the stage because a few months later he was filming Excalibur and it all took off from there we would also see though that Shakespeare was away from Ireland to thumb its nose at its nearest neighbour a great example of this is in 1983 the Abbey staged a production of the Hamlet which was directed by the British director Michael Bogdanov and that choice of director was no accident at all because Bogdanov three years earlier had faced the charge of obscenity when he directed the play Romans and Britain at the National Theatre in London we just think about this Dublin Theatre takes the guy who's been accused of obscenity in London and puts it on their national stage in addition to that as you can perhaps infer from the poster Bogdanov gave a production that was perceived as a criticism of Britain's war in the Falkland Islands at that time as well so very provocative so I think you know we can see this is a mildly provocative act of angle-pirage table turning that has to be seen in the context of contemporary events this is in the immediate aftermath of the hunger strikes they're not trying to be provocative they're not trying to be offensive but there's certainly a bit of saber rattling going on I think and interestingly it would flow in both directions and when Peter O'Toole played Hamlet at the National in London in the early 1960s his performance was very frequently criticized because of his Irishness and when you read the newspaper reviews it becomes clear that the word Irish is kind of used interchangeably with words like drunken and belligerent as if they all mean the same thing and once the troubles began productions of Henry V restored Captain MacMorris where his bomb-making skills were given great emphasis of course audience is thinking about the IRA's bombing campaign in places like Guilford and Birmingham but even so Shakespeare would also become a way for people to think about reconciliation the poems and essays of James Heaney do this at great length there's some very good examples including a 1972 Heaney poem called Traditions in which he follows the example of Joyce in taking on MacMorris from Henry V MacMorris gallivanting around the globe winged to quarter and groundling who had heard televises going very bare of learning as wild hares as anatomies of death what is my nation and Heaney too would explore the Elizabethan roots of hypernal English speech we are proud of our Elizabethan English varsity for example is grassroots stuff with us we deem or we allow when we suppose and some cherished archaisms are correct experience so in essays after this Shakespeare would think about the relationship between Shakespeare and Yeats as what he would call a symbol adequate to our predicament a way of moving things forward and there would be other symbols adequate to our predicament one example is that in 1997 shortly before the second IRA ceasefire was declared Kenneth Branagh staged the European premiere of his film version of Hamlet at the Waterfront Hall in his native Belfast described Belfast audiences as your boy by Julie Christie Branagh ensured that his premiere raised money for local charities quite interestingly aimed to give funding to local actors who wanted a train which really meant they would have to leave Northern Ireland as Branagh had done himself but if we press reports at the time we find that far from being in conflict with each other Britishness and Irishness coexisted harmoniously in the way in which people spoke about Branagh's Hamlet and of course the presence of so many Hollywood actors like Christie was an endangered lubricant in that relationship too so in the years since the Good Friday agreement of 1998 the relationship between Ireland and the UK is often described as having been normalised though admittedly in the last three years that word maybe is less applicable even so Ireland has setted into a pattern of Shakespearean production that mirrors trends in other Anglo-Poem countries in the United States actually so perhaps our tradition has also normalised so as is the case here there are sometimes tensions in Ireland between tradition and innovation in the staging of Shakespeare's plays and we still sometimes get this suggestion that actors whether American or Irish can't deliver Shakespeare's lines properly whatever properly means in Ireland as in other countries Abe and Sermonite's dream is the most frequently abused play as we see here from a Gates Theatre production that seems to reimagine the story that's happening in a kind of sadomasochistic disco there have also been important productions though re-set to rural Ireland making Shakespeare the chap that writes like Martin McDonough perhaps as in a celebrated rough magic production of The Taining of the Shrew directed by Lynn Parker which was part Father Ted that was followed by an impressive Belfast production also by Lynn Parker of Macbeth one that was revelatory in allowing actors to deliver the lines in their own Ulster accents showing us how closely Shakespeare's English matches the dialects of Northern Ireland today since the turn of the century though we are all familiar with the language of the language since the turn of the century though we are also seeing the emergence of a distinctive Irish tradition of staging Shakespeare and again we don't want to exaggerate the links but just as Ireland is now having to contemplate a future in the European Union that does not include Britain within the EU so are Irish theatre makers developing an understanding of Shakespeare where they are not looking for validation from London or from Stratford as would have been the case in the early 19th century there's one really great example of this which occurred last year in Dublin when the Gates Theatre again staged Hamlet but with the Irish actress Ruth Nega playing the lead role so in that casting the Gates were both gesturing to the past of Irish theatre and reflecting upon Irish society today as I've already mentioned Dublin is the site of the first recorded performance of Hamlet in 1941 so Nega was not therefore the first woman to play Hamlet in Ireland she is however the first person of colour to take the role in an Irish production and so while it was not overstated it did feel significant that at a time when Britain's movement towards Brexit was in part caused by fears of migration the Gates was casting an Irish actor whose parents had come from Limerick she herself was born in Bada Sabra as directed by the South African Yale Farber this was a Hamlet that was wholly and unapologetically at home in Ireland it wasn't provocative like the Hamlet from 1983 it just was Irish lines were delivered in the actor's long accent and the cultural context repeatedly referenced Irish Catholicism good example of this is that when Claudius prayed and tries to pray he does so not in Protestant solitude as happens in Shakespeare's script he confesses to a Catholic priest and it worked so this is very different from 1932 when the Gates founders had to pretend to be English in order to stage Hamlet in Ireland but perhaps the most significant event in this context and this is the last one I'm going to talk about is the 2015 production of directed by Gary Hines for her Galway based theatre company Druitt again following the tradition of things like chimes at midnight Druitt Shakespeare is a conflation of some of Shakespeare's history plans taking about 14 hours worth of theatre and condensing it down to 6 hours now interestingly the script which was edited by Marco Rowe cuts most of Shakespeare's references to Ireland so Richard II's line about the rogue-headed curds that stays because it's such a good line but MacMaurice is gone he's cut completely a very good example at the end of Henry V in Shakespeare's script Henry V is wooing the French princess and he says to her I will give you all my kingdoms I'll give you France, I'll give you England I'll give you Ireland which is again quite a provocative line nowadays of course well Druitt cut that entire scene and they replaced it instead with a scene in which false staff dies so the last impression we have in this play is not of Hal's victories which is what Shakespeare wrote it's of his betrayal of his father figure but what's important I think is that these omissions they make very very little difference to the plays themselves and that tells us something about how Ireland was seen in the time of Shakespeare in England you can cut the references and the changes nothing it was seen as very incidental however a role of Heinz did keep a feature of Henry V that is frequently overlooked in discussions of Shakespeare and Ireland and that is that the play includes a brief phrase in the Irish language so yes Shakespeare wrote a little bit of Irish this happens in a scene in which Pistol encounters a French speaking soldier who demands to know if he's a gentleman and because Pistol can't understand him and Pistol is an English soldier he responds with a phrase that is in Irish Coletti Colineau Costuramé he says now it took about 200 years for somebody to work this out it was a Shakespeare scholar from Ireland called Edmund Malone but this appears to be an attempt to render the title of an Irish folk song Colineau Costuramé in order to express Pistol's view that the Frenchman is speaking gibberish that there's a bit of a dispute about what the meaning of the song is some people think it means the girl from the banks of the river shore others that it means a dear little treasure you know Colineau Costuramé but the song was published in London in 1584 and it was said to have been one of the favorites of Queen Elizabeth so Shakespeare most likely was aware of it so when Pistol speaks Irish to a French soldier we find Shakespeare intermixing the Irish Wars of the 1590s with Henry's War in France in 1415 and that's a comparison that runs through the plague and it makes it a comfortable viewing for Irish audiences even now the first time I saw him in the fifth was in England and they had taken out all the references to Ireland and replaced them with the word Iraq and this was just after the invasion of that country so you can get a sense of how provocative the Irish presence is in that play but I think the fragment of Irish language being used in this and it introduces a bit of ambiguity it's a love song after all so it's a play that gives us the Irish's threatening but also as a figure of erotic desire even love as is always true with Shakespeare every time we think we've identified a truth he gives us a completely contradictory statement that is also true so just as Macomorris the Irish man mangles the English language when he says what is my nation so we have pistol the English man mangling the Irish language when he tries to say and we get this all through the play as when the French princess Catherine gets an English lesson but unintentionally inter into lots of hilarious crudity everyone who tries to speak another language in this play ends up getting bogged down in unexpected ways and this is something that the Irish critics have maybe a little bit more statistically overlooked in our rush to always have a problem with Macomorris well, Drew Shakespeare made sure we thought about it again but the other really important feature of the production was the use of cross-gender casting and with women sometimes playing male roles and vice versa so not always but sometimes now as I've already said this approach is far from new with Shakespeare we've had women playing amulets since the 1740s but in Drew's production what this does is it allows us to think about gender and Anglo-Irish culture down through the centuries so in books, in poems and in plays Ireland was often presented as feminine to English masculinity and so we have lots of love stories that are about the desirability of political union between England and Ireland a good example of this is Diane Musico's love story in The Shot Rock and Ireland the woman in this play may have been seen as a humane and amusing where the English soldier is disciplined but dull but there is no mistaking the fact that as the feminine partner in the relationship Ireland was ultimately expected to be passive and subservient and you know the body language shows all of this quite clearly so I think Drew are picking up on this and they do it in the cross-gender casting and some of it just for comedic effects so here we are seeing mistress quickly played by John Alderham who if you can't see the photo clearly or you think your eyes are deceiving you yes it is middle aged man with a beard playing a woman as a self evidently grotesque and camp figure now I've sometimes suspected that this role might have been played in Shakespeare's time not by a boy actor but by a funny grown man because a lot of the jokes that quickly says in the play seem based on the fact that she is asserting having a female body when clearly she doesn't and I think Drew pick up on that but I also think they are gesturing back to pantomime to the idea of the cross-dressing pantomime day and thereby reminding us that Shakespeare in Ireland for most of the 19th century had a popular tradition not a literary one but with Drew the most important thing is that the major male roles too in many ways were played by women Derbly Crotty on your left played Henry IV and Ashling O'Sullivan on your right played Henry V and I think we have to see those transformations in the way that I've described if Ireland was always the blushing bride to England's macho saviour then here we have a re-appropriation when you have these very manly English kings being played by Irish women who make no effort to disguise their gender or their national identity indeed what Crotty did is that as her character's illness progressed as he moved towards death her costume began to reveal more and more of her body making its status as biologically female much more evident to the audience and so Crotty has said what she was trying to do here is to show how masculinity is not something that people are born with it is something that we learn to perform and this affects how we see gender but it also affects how we see political power as well so I think this is all thinking about centuries of gender based stereotyping so really I would say probably the most important feature of this production and this is true for a lot of Irish productions over the last 10 years or so is the use of the Irish voice of accident and this reminds me that of something Brian Freel said when he argued that Irish audiences were forced to make what he called a double assumption when they watched the great plays of world drama so he says when you see something by check off you do so in scripts that are relevant of either Edwardian England or the Bloomsbury set because those translations have been moved from Russian into versions for audiences in London so Freel was saying that Irish readers and actors needed to translate the great world classics twice once from in this case Russian into standard English and then from standard English into English as it's understood in Ireland in some way we are constantly overshadowed by the sound of the English language he said as well as by the printed word this is not inhibitors but it forms us and shapes us in a way that is neither healthy nor valuable so what I want to suggest is where we are now is that Irish theater companies have worked past that double assumption insofar as it affects Shakespeare which in the past usually involves the delivery of lines in an English that was relevant of Edwardian England or the Bloomsbury set and I would suggest that in those productions Shakespeare was made doubly foreign to Irish audiences first by the original language and then by the representation of his words in what was perceived to be the correct way but was merely a tradition that had been handed down to us in the middle of the twentieth century by actors like Olivier and John Gilbert in presenting Shakespeare with Irish rhythms and sounds drew followed heaning and they followed joists in suggesting that the Irish accent might even be more hospitable in some ways to Shakespeare's text after all a great deal of the English spoken in Ireland is the English of Shakespeare's era and the century that followed it in England in the 17th century the word T would have been pronounced T the word Devil would have been pronounced Dibble and the word Fill would have been pronounced Fill and all of those pronunciations are seen now as distinctly to be Irish and as deviations from a correct form of standard English so I think what Drude's mode of line delivery does is it becomes a kind of time capsule that is also a decoration of independence so this is why it's true to say that within the Irish theatre community Shakespeare really is the chap that writes like sin because Drude has said that they would never have been able to find their way to Shakespeare without first achieving mastery over John Millington Singh so we live as we all know in uncertain times the ongoing debates about Brexit mean that it's impossible to predict the status of Irish relations you know next week that long next year I could walk out of this room and something might have happened in Europe that was totally unexpected that's where we are at the moment so there's a lot of uncertainty but I think in looking through that uncertainty we see this century long history of interactions that are sometimes positive, sometimes negative sometimes affectionate, sometimes provocative what we can see is that Shakespeare is a bridge between Ireland and England and at a time when people are putting up walls, literal and real between cultures there's something very valuable about the fact that Ireland now is turning to Shakespeare as a space to think about itself, to think about England and to continue to exchange ideas and people and culture Thank you So like you were saying someone was saying in the conference a couple of days ago a lot of the history of theatre is also the history of the audience So I wonder if you could tell us a little bit more about just who were the audiences through history English ascendancy people Irish Catholic middle class or class girl It varies through time certainly in the early years it was true that it was an ascendancy audience but one of the key moments I think occurs in the early 1720s when there's a benefit production for weavers and the production of Hamlet so the audience goes they pay their money and the money goes to support weavers who are being affected by laws about the importation of clothing from England and Jonathan Swift writes a poll where he calls for it's like the Irish program he calls for Irish audiences to buy Irish products or products made in Ireland so that kind of economic nationalism that we see and he says we're going to take English costumes we'll throw them out we're going to take English food we're not going to buy it but then he says we're going to keep Shakespeare and this to me is there's a lot more to be said about that but this is the beginning of evidence that yes it was an ascendancy audience yes it was Irish but it wasn't quite as simple as the black and white my friend Mark Phelan who's a lecturer at Queen's University tells a story about how there was a visit in English production in I think the late 1880s with a very famous English actor not Henry Irving but somebody of that status who was playing Hamlet in Belfast before a huge audience of thousands of people and he started to give one of the famous Hamlets in Lilliquies and the voice from the very very cheap of seats shouted down to say you're right and so it was a guy from the shipyards in Belfast who came down on stage and told the actor how he shouldn't have done this at Lilliquies and the actor said yeah you're right and he did it the right way the right way and then on other occasions people in Belfast in particular would bring what was called Belfast confetti to productions of Shakespeare and Belfast confetti being rivets from shipyards and things that they didn't like so it varies through time and as I said it's very once we start to look at it in any detail all the generalizations about Ireland and England and the Anglo-Irish quickly become much more interesting So you mentioned the pseudo-Cusack In 1987 I saw the production of Belfast in the other with Sinead Cusack as making a Belfast I believe Was Sinead Irish born? Yeah So does this throw a standard in the works? I'm just wondering if that's part of your interest as well It's a really important thing but so many of the great Shakespearean actors starting with Charles Macklin in the 18th century are Irish and so Kenneth Branagh is an example of that Fiona Shaw is an example of that too and even right now there's King Lear which is on in New York and Glenda Jackson is playing Lear so you might have seen this being reported but actually no syllable, this is actually right here is playing at Regan O'Gonagall and so this is an undeniable element of the thing that Irish actors have been part of the Shakespearean tradition all the way through what begins to feed in with a lot of different things too just to quickly show you this is Fiona Shaw again some of you will know her from being Fiona Shaw, some of you will know her from Harry Potter but in the mid 1990s having established an amazing reputation as a British Shakespearean she came to Ireland to do a production of Hamlet with Irish actors and she took it all through rural Ireland there was a protest in Cork by a school teacher because Shaw's production included nudity and you might think that this was on the grounds of indecency but it was actually because the person thought that's not how you do Shakespeare properly so I think that's very revealing too so this is the point, figures like Cusack they go back and forth all the time and so it's about taking these categories we're used to and seeing that Shakespeare explodes them all I actually saw that it was John Bench who was an entertainer on the New York scene yeah but I actually I was going to ask a different question which was about the regional theatres and theatre festivals and then in the 1930s and 40s was there any evidence of whether they played Shakespeare because they were much more conventional and he did modern ensemble casts Shakespeare continues to draw large popular audiences through Ireland so I mentioned McMaster and some of you might know this, Harold Pinter great Nobel Prize winning dramatist got his start as an actor by going on tours through rural Ireland with McMaster playing Shakespeare and he tells the story of how in 1950 and McMaster's business manager, John Nolan comes into the room and says, guess what all the cinemas in Limerick are on strike and McMaster says book Limerick and so off they go and Pinter, if I remember correctly was playing Yago to McMaster's Othello that's memory so maybe flawed but he certainly had a prominent role and they took over a cinema in Limerick, it was St. Patrick's Night they were supposed to start at half nine but because the pubs were still open nobody showed up until half eleven and as Pinter writes they were all drunk see two thousand people on St. Patrick's Night who had been drinking all day and were coming to see Shakespeare which they didn't know at all and Pinter writes about the skill of McMaster in getting the audience to keep quiet and watch and then two and a half hours later they are rotted with applause so these are kind of memories that people have particularly of McMaster again it's very much in that popular tradition not the elitist literary one that we're associated with so yeah but this is the point it's mostly people like McMaster there are very strong associations with our coming on tour so we're saying in that case we always wouldn't have known Shakespeare so this is a little different type of Russian maybe it was back in the Microsoft game so as an American student I would have read Shakespeare in my classmates probably in secondary school and I certainly had different memories of my English professor as a senior a secondary system beating the class now we learned a lot of Shakespeare when an Irish student in secondary or later where would somebody encounter Shakespeare if not on stage so typically an Irish student who has left school at the age of 18 but was studying two Shakespeare plays one at the intermediate level and one as part of the leading certificate and they're kind of the canon essentially Hamlet Macbeth very few of the comedies not in the history plays at all Oh John of Gaunt, the thrice-huntered mancaster, has that according to that author and volunteer that brought Henry of Perth Bible son, hither to make all good his book his leg book against the Duke of Norfolk, Thomas Albury that's Richard II which I did for the interest yeah it's a number it's a number it's a number yes so that's rare so it's not a long time but what's interesting about it is that as somebody who I teach Irish literature I also do teach Shakespeare and I find that I have students who at the age of 18 will come to university and will be brilliant at identifying kind of bird imagery in King Lear but might not ever have been told by the teachers that the female characters in there will play by the voice Shakespeare is taught as literature and it's still that kind of Victorian idea of Shakespeare's inherent improvement and I'm not mocking Irish teachers, I'm just saying that's the position of the curriculum so yeah Quick question, you've talked a couple of times in Shakespeare in open front and back in the popular tradition and now obviously we have this like a more heated idea that when did that change come about do you think? I think it kind of happened in theatre generally really is that the arrival of cinema meant that the 2000, 3000 seat theatres that dominated Dublin, Belfast, Cork began to do other things and so it's still the case that the biggest popular theatre in Ireland is the Grand Canal Theatre in Dublin, hundreds and hundreds of seats and they recently had a visiting production in Macbeth so it does still happen in that way but it's partly to do with the fact that in Ireland theatre has become it has to say at least that's not true so compared to other countries but the thing where you have 3000 people seeing the show doesn't really help this much either Well I've got this live like that in many instances since 1916 when the political class spoke either pro or con in federal Shakespeare being performed not so much that but he does appear in he does appear in political discourse in interesting ways so Charles Haughty famously said that he had done the state some service for example so in other words when he was looking back on his tenure as a teacher that had been disgraced because of financial deprivation and a lot of other things he drew on a tell-up to say that actually he wasn't all that bad or at least he was bad in some things that were good which I think is a really interesting kind of comparison and the fact that he used Shakespeare to do that is part of it as well beyond that I just don't know yet but I hope to find out in the next couple of years as I continue to explore this his work I have a question related to Shakespeare as an industry Shakespeare's an industry not only in the UK but certainly here in the US there are dozens of large institutional theaters devoted to Shakespeare's work and branding each other Shakespeare's theaters what's the prospect of likelihood of a major institutional theater in Ireland focused and dedicated centrally to the canon of Shakespeare I think it's unlikely that that would happen in certainly any time in the foreseeable future it's hardly to do with the fact that there is still a very strong belief in Ireland but if you're supporting a new theater usually when funding agencies think of that they're imagining a player written by an orange person that is about Ireland and they prioritize that and that's the decision that they've made and not really objecting to it but I think politically it would be difficult to do it I would also add though that after a really strong period of funding and expansion in the late 1990s and the crash that we all know about affected the Irish theater very severely so that now you've got maybe five companies that are making theater full time and everybody else doing it on a project by project basis so at the moment I think Irish theater is quite vulnerable just doing the day-to-day things of bringing an audience and supporting the Irish canon you know what the Irish government will say is that in the next 10 years there will be more funding and that's very positive but I think we have to get there before a project like the one you're describing will be possible Well unless we need a visa Anyway just a few things among the Irish actresses was a guy called Gerard Murphy and they faded a visa though the Abia didn't I see production of the Abia and that's the 79 I mentioned when I streamed which I thought was very good that's alright Anyway I'm finding a little anecdote from my own personal experience as people have mentioned serial cues and check off I've got to bring them together I don't know when this was there was a production of the three sisters not this at the gate with the three cues that grows as the three sisters I've never seen anything more than this So the three sisters played by his daughters were Dan's stage in a very important scene the father was playing a minor role he was upstage sitting at a chair reading newspaper and as they were doing their very important stuff he got off, he stretched he wrapped up the newspaper this is called upstage and he behaved in the most disgraceful way to his own children so you can see it Anyway, I want to thank Patrick very much for that it's a fascinating and wonderful lecture