Chapter 5

“Terrible beauty”

The Easter Rising

On the Monday after Easter in 1916, a small group of armed rebels seized the General Post Office on Sackville Street (now O’Connell Street) in Dublin. Like other Irish rebels before them, they were protesting the British government’s control over Ireland. Like others before them too, they were defeated and their leaders executed. The doomed revolutionaries rose to Ireland’s pantheon of patriots. One of the major literary works on the Rising, William Butler Yeats’s poem “Easter, 1916,”1 commemorates the rebel leaders’ ascension from the ordinary to the heroic. But in Ireland as elsewhere, larger-than-life political figures provoke questioning as well as adulation. In Tom Murphy’s play The Patriot Game, first staged in 1991, a group of actors commemorate the Rising but present the event as more a piece of linguistic, and especially dramatic, artistry than a serious attempt at political change. In Murphy’s version one of the historical reasons for the Rising’s failure as a military action was that, contrary to the idealistic words of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic, far too few Irishmen and Irishwomen recognized the claims of the Republic to their allegiance. Sebastian Barry’s 1995 play, The Steward of Christendom, looks at the Rising from the point of view of one such nonrebel, Thomas Dunne, a character based on Barry’s own great-grandfather. Read in juxtaposition, the two plays demonstrate the ambivalence of these two playwrights as they depict the lives of those who died, or did not die, for Ireland.

“Easter, 1916,” written several months after the events, is often anthologized in college textbooks and thus more likely to be known to educated American readers than any other piece of writing about the Rising. Those who know little else about this event nevertheless might well know that, according to Yeats, the leaders of the Rising were ordinary people whose lives were transformed by the “terrible beauty” of violence. In the poem he expresses some reservations about the necessity of violence; he thinks that it was possible that England might yet “keep faith” (l. 68), presumably with regard to allowing Ireland some measure of what was known as “Home Rule.” Yet, even given his reservations, Yeats is in awe of the leaders’ absolute commitment, the “excess of love” that “bewildered them until they died” (ll. 72–73). While he is not above taking potshots at Rising participants that he disliked (he considers Countess Constance Markievicz too contentious, her voice too “shrill” [ll. 19–20]; John MacBride is a “drunken, vainglorious lout” who did “bitter wrong” to Maud Gonne, Yeats’s longtime unrequited love [ll. 32–33]), he names four men, all of whom were “changed, changed utterly” by the “terrible beauty” of the rebellion (ll. 74–80).

MacDonagh, MacBride, Connolly, and Pearse: Yeats’s list of Rising participants is now part of the literary canon. Historians may debate whether the rebellion was poorly planned, hopeless, and especially in the case of Rising leader Patrick Pearse (1879–1916), designed more as a “blood sacrifice” of his own life than to free Ireland;2 or whether it was less the rebellion itself than the British overreaction to it that moved the Irish people along the path to national independence. Whatever refinements later historians may offer, the main point is that these rebels came to be “central to ideas of Irishness.”³ This despite the fact that, at the time, the Rising surely must have seemed a catastrophic failure. The population did not rise up en masse along with its would-be liberators; those who did participate were disorganized and poorly equipped. The complexities surrounding the event grow rather than diminish with the passage of time. The two political dramas discussed here, first staged in the 1990s, offer their own interpretations of the events of Easter Monday 1916.

“Words! … Words?” Tom Murphy’s Patriot Game

The Patriot Game by Tom Murphy (b. 1935) “concentrates on the build-up to Easter Week, the slow teetering into calamity which becomes a headlong rush. And in that portrayal of Ireland before the Rising, there is no sense of a single, unified people waiting to emerge into nationhood.”⁴ Murphy sees this process as full of even more contradictions than the usual Irish versus English, Catholic versus Protestant polarities of the past. In this discussion one must keep in mind the distinction between the historical figures (Patrick Pearse and James Connolly [1868–1916]) and their namesakes in the play, Pearse or Connolly. In the play Murphy calls attention to one of the great ironies of the “game” of patriotism in 1916: the leaders of the Rising are playing by different sets of rules. In particular the two key theoreticians of the movement, Pearse and Connolly, disagree on the ideological underpinnings of the revolution. This incompatibility is apparent in the language with which they discuss their theories. While both were political orators, Pearse’s thought was an amalgam of Christian theology and Celtic mythology, while Connolly was more interested in international socialism than in Irish nationalism. So in the play, “Language is the rebels’ privileged medium and battlefield”; Pearse and Connolly are the main combatants; but the other members of this “poets’ and speechmakers’ revolution”5 add their contribution to the war of words. Of the would-be revolutionaries, the Narrator notes that “all they needed was men, money, arms, a date to start the fight and whip up national spirit with speeches.”⁶ Of these requirements they are best supplied with speeches, Pearse and Connolly in particular. Men kill and die because of words. Literary allusions, semantic distinctions, specialized vocabulary, poems, prayers, songs, slogans, lists, jargon, newspaper articles, words read, written, proclaimed, and signed, when necessary forged; speech acts such as interruptions and hesitations; all have a place in this rebellion made of words, to culminate in that ritual/liturgical speech act, the litany. Murphy’s verbal “collage”⁷ of different types of linguistic constructs serves the modern reader as an introductory or refresher course in the core beliefs of the rebels of 1916.

England and Ireland had waged linguistic warfare since long before Patrick Pearse was born, as was discussed earlier. Pearse’s contribution to this battle was to make a firm connection between Irish language and literature and Irish nationalism and to make both central to his educational as well as political agenda. As a young man, Pearse studied Irish in order to read ancient Celtic literature; his stage counterpart sings in Irish and uses short passages of Irish in his oratory. As headmaster of St. Enda’s School, the actual Pearse developed a program of Irish language and literature study specifically to train the boys as future revolutionaries. His biographer, Ruth Dudley Edwards, cites a passage from the Irish-language version of the school’s prospectus describing its mission as “to inculcate in [the students] the desire to spend their lives working hard and zealously for the fatherland and, if it should ever be necessary, to die for it.”⁸ Pearse wanted the St. Enda’s boys to imagine themselves as the “boy-troops” of the Cúchulainn sagas, from the Irish mythological tales dating back at least to the seventh century and collected in the Táin Bó Cuailnge. This suggests that Pearse thought of himself as Cúchulainn, leader of the boy-troops.

So strong was the influence of this literary character on Pearse’s thought that he made it into a tool of his pedagogy as well as a template for his own life. He wrote a play for the St. Enda’s students based on the Irish superhero’s adventures, gave lectures to them on the hero tale, and exhibited a painting in the school of an armed Cúchulainn.⁹ The inscription on that painting was the same words from the Táin that Pearse uses to make an explicit connection between himself and Cúchulainn:

NARRATOR: He’d be dreamin’ a lot, d’yeh know, an’ looking at pictures he had of Cuchulainn an’ the likes, heroes of ancient times, being warned by old Druids not to—whatever else in the world they did wrong, d’yeh know?— not to take up arms or they’d die young—d’yeh know?

PEARSE: I care not if my life have only the span of a day and night if my deeds be spoken of by the men of Ireland. (98)

Pearse’s words, spoken by Cúchulainn in the Táin, explained the historical Pearse’s life choices. In life and in the play, the Táin quotation is an example of the way in which “words precede reality and lives are lived as roles, according to pre-written script.”10 A life devoted to emulating this particular hero will be heroic, but brief.

Another literary component of Pearse’s political theories—the Fenian myth—was expressed in his eulogy for Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa. O’Donovan Rossa (1831–1915), Irish Nationalist, recruited Irish Americans to the cause, whose support—as the British in the play realize (107)—is crucial to the Nationalist enterprise. O’Donovan Rossa’s political followers were dubbed the Fenians to echo the name of a warrior troop, the Fionn, in another of the mythological cycles. The Fionn function in Irish myth much as King Arthur and his knights do in English storytelling, as exemplars of military might in service of the nation. Like King Arthur, who will return from Avalon at the time of England’s greatest need, so the Fenians can save Ireland. In his eulogy Pearse elevates O’Donovan Rossa into a paragon of all the Nationalist virtues, an inspiration for the future in the battle against those who “think that they have purchased half of us and intimidated the other half … but the fools, the fools, the fools! They have left us our Fenian dead, and while Ireland holds these graves, Ireland unfree shall never be at peace” (101). After O’Donovan Rossa is buried and the Rising is well under way, however, Pearse’s funerary oratory is echoed ironically when, at St. Stephen’s Green, Countess Constance Markievicz and fellow rebel Michael Mallin are “hemmed in … sitting ducks” (138). The Narrator echoes Pearse’s own rhetoric in the eulogy regarding the Fenian myth to express the futility of the rebels’ vain hope that “help would come. From where? Be-cause, be-cause all Ireland did not rise up once the fighting started: The fools, the fools, the fools, they did not wish to become Fenian dead!” (138). All very well, in other words, to praise famous men: but to die as they did? Except for a core group—most of whom were executed with Pearse—few Irishmen wished to die like a Fenian.

Pearse, however, did. In addition to his identification with the Fenians and with Cúchullain, he also identified with another figure who died young but lives on in the written word: Jesus Christ. Christ’s death and resurrection are echoed in imagery associated with the Rising. While in the play the timing of the Rising is depicted as haphazard, the revolutionaries agree on the Easter season because of its religious symbolism (112); having come to this agreement too late in the day on Easter itself, however, they settle on the following Monday (129). Murphy’s Pearse says that “bloodshed is a cleansing and sanctifying thing” (129), and the historical Pearse’s poetry reflects his perception of himself as emulating what Christians believe to be the redemptive sacrifice of Christ’s death. In a poem written from the point of view of Pearse’s own mother and quoted in the play, he equates his mother’s suffering with that of Christ’s mother, Mary (doubled in the case of Mrs. Pearse, who lost two sons, Patrick and William [1881–1916], in the Rising). Murphy’s stage directions, however, allow for a more cynical interpretation of the “mother” poem. He suggests that “the actor playing MOTHER is free in interpretation to question the sentiments” (115). Pearse was not himself a parent and could therefore not have fully understood the impact of his and Willie’s deaths on their mother. Once the character named Mother interprets or questions the sentiments, “the male heroic voice of romantic sacrifice dissolves in the mouth of a woman, the rhetoric becoming bitter, incredulous, and grief-stricken,”11 in effect unsaying itself—yet another linguistic act in a play about the impact of words.

Pearse was not the only poet among the Easter Rising central command; the poetry of Thomas MacDonagh (1878–1916) and Joseph Mary Plunkett (1887–1916), some of which is repeated in the play, is still anthologized alongside Pearse’s.¹² Connolly, however, is portrayed in The Patriot Game as scornful of his colleagues’ literary leanings (“Let’s become poets and eat poetry” [113; italics in original]). Connolly’s own speeches eschew poetic diction and employ the specialized vocabulary of Marxism—“comrades,” “ruling class,” “despotic government” (108)—rather than either Celticism or Catholicism. Connolly sees the issue confronting Ireland as not specifically Irish but pan-European and class-based. His goal is not so much to separate Ireland from England as to “be the one to set the torch to a European conflagration that will not burn out until the vulture classes that rule and rob the world are finally dethroned. In America, in Russia, in Scotland, in Europe” (103).

Other characters in the play call Connolly’s socialist agenda into question as unsuitable for the Ireland of 1916. For one thing the average man on the Dublin street is anything but international in his political thinking. As one listener interjects in response to Connolly’s speech about Russia, Scotland, and Europe, “Them’re middlin foreign places, sir!” (103). He knows little and cares less about foreign places, apparently making no distinction between America and Russia, and seems unaware not only that Scotland is a close neighbor, but also even that Ireland is part of Europe. The crowd insists that Connolly consider the needs of Ireland first, and he does concede by the end of the scene that the movement will need to “forget Europe and clean up this mess of nationalism first” (104)—not that everyone agrees on the definition of nationalism. A side conversation between attendees at the funeral of O’Donovan Rossa intersperses economic analyses with phrases from the Catholic Hail Mary prayer. The events of 1916 are taking place at a time of agricultural prosperity, and the speakers do not want politics to interfere with this: “what with the high prices for the stock and the grain an’ the exportin’ wholesale since the war started: we’ll be made-up if it lasts, an’ secure if the Volunteers don’t go upsettin’ us” (102). Connolly’s socialist message will have little resonance in a time of war-fueled prosperity but will only be “upsettin’.” Connolly, then, is persuaded to switch his approach from Marxism to nationalism, a change that he believes to be temporary.

On Easter Monday 1916, Pearse read the Proclamation of the Irish Republic outside the General Post Office, and in the play this key document in Irish history is included in its entirety (136–37). The Proclamation is the point at which speech, writing, and theater intersect; it is the culmination of all that had gone before and the cause of all that was to come after, including Pearse’s own death. The power of words to shape a life even involves the values embodied in one’s name: Patrick Henry Pearse, named for the American revolutionary whose famous ultimatum, “Give me liberty or give me death,” had inspired rebellion in the Colonies. The Proclamation of the Irish Republic combines more language echoing that of the American Declaration of Independence (“national freedom,” “religious and civil liberty,” “happiness and prosperity of the whole nation”) with the language of Roman Catholicism (“We place the cause of the Irish Republic under the protection of the Most High God, Whose blessing we invoke”). Both language systems are emotionally resonant for the Irish and are thus rhetorically effective. The scene ends with Connolly and Pearse sharing a moment of triumph.

But at the same time the might of empire, personified by Gen. Sir John Maxwell, is mobilizing against them. Maxwell’s own speech, with its long sentences laden with military jargon, mark him off as the quintessential bureaucrat: “I will take all such measures as may in my opinion be necessary for the suppression of insurrection here and I am accorded a free hand in regard to the movement of all troops now in Ireland or which may be placed under may command hereafter and also in regard to such measures as may seem to me advisable under the Proclamation dated 26th April under the Defence of the Realm Act” (144). Maxwell’s Proclamation competes with that of the rebels, and it is clear that Maxwell will win. What is really meant by all his bureaucratese is contained in a casual aside: “Dig a grave for a hundred men” (144).

Coexisting alongside the elevated diction of the Proclamation or Maxwell’s jargon are slogans and song lyrics, oversimplified but motivational for the average Dubliner. The play is full of songs, opening with a “distorted version of ‘God Save the King,’ the British National Anthem” to express the disillusionment of the Irish people with regard to their poor-relation status in the British Empire; the relationship, like the recording of the anthem, has long since “unwound itself” (93). A singer offers a rendition of Yeats’s poem “The Rose Tree,” the theme of which is the uselessness of “lightly spoken” words compared to bloodshed—only the “red blood” of martyrs can nourish the “rose tree” of a free Ireland (119). Like many other political protest songs in Ireland, “The Rose Tree” includes those elements of deniability that protect a subordinate people in that the meaning of the central image, the rose tree, is vague. Does it symbolize freedom from empire or some other lofty, but unthreatening, ideal? Other singers interject scraps and phrases of similar rebel songs, as for example when the Narrator quotes the rebel song “Kelly, the Boy from Killane,” in praise of one of Ireland’s “brave sons who died/For the cause of long-downtrodden man” (139)—here again, the cause for which Kelly dies nobly is left unspecified. The rebel songs in general, with their bouncy rhythms and rousing choruses, make military action seem almost a form of manly camaraderie. When the singing stops, however, the death and destruction of war is represented by a drum-beating man. This character’s drumming, along with his memento mori function, highlights how the synergy of words and music increases the emotional appeal of the ideas contained in the lyric.

A political play, not surprisingly, uses the verbal tags of its movement. Catchy phrasing is the stock in trade of the political sloganeer; at best these word bytes encapsulate the highest ideals of a movement, at worst they substitute oversimplifications for deep, or even rational, thought. Because England was involved in World War I in 1916, this may have been a good time for Ireland to challenge the status quo: “England’s difficulty is Ireland’s opportunity” (94). Short and punchy, with rhythmic, repetitive phrasing juxtaposing difficulty with opportunity, the slogan seems convincing, distracting attention from the practical logistics that Ireland faces in seizing said opportunity, assuming that it in fact exists. When Connolly cautions his hearers against working for the British government, his slogan “Don’t take the shilling!” (111) ignores the realities of supporting a family in nonagricultural areas such as Dublin. Announcing rebellion, Connolly appropriates (without attribution) the phrase of labor leader James Larkin (1876–1947) from the Dublin Lockout three years earlier: “The great appear great because we are on our knees! Let us rise!” (115). But will enough people consider themselves sufficiently part of “us” to risk rising? And what form will that rising take? Finally, adopting the Nationalist slogan “UP THE REPUBLIC!” (149), as the hitherto skeptical Narrator does by the end of the play, does not necessarily guarantee that the Republic will achieve the hoped-for elevation.

The rebels act on the basis of words, but words are slippery. Characters cannot agree on the definition of important terms, and misinformation abounds. Even sympathetic characters such as Connolly, in an argument with Eoin Mac-Neill, leader of an opposing Nationalist group, combine sloganeering with ambiguities of language. “Constitutional action in normal times, revolutionary action in exceptional times. These are exceptional times,” he says, assuming that he, not MacNeill, will define normal and exceptional (96). A group of comic characters who are reminiscent of the stereotypical “culchies” or perhaps the stage Irishmen of comedy—Molly, Biddy, Jim, and Mick—are, in the midst of the Rising, “huddled together, waiting, trying to get into a pub” rather than joining in (140). Meanwhile they report absurd untruths: the Pope has been killed; London has been taken by Irish Volunteer Reserves; Jim Larkin is marching from the West “with a million even American soldiers” (140). This last, a variant of the Fenian myth, shows that some of the would-be revolutionaries are coming to believe their own legends. Forgeries and counterforgeries turn the plot, and the media of the time, a local newspaper, plays its role. MacNeill, heading a rival Nationalist group, issues orders countermanding Pearse’s: “he composed a longer an’ a better notice an’ put it in the Sunday Independent that everybody’d be readin’” (124).

The British are no better at confronting linguistic ambiguity than the Irish are. The Prime Minister of England apparently thinks that changing the names of things or adopting conciliatory language is going to help; so Asquith offers an “Irish Brigade” or “Irish Army Corps” to encourage Irish recruitment to the war effort, so that they can maintain their national “identity” while simultaneously helping England with the war effort and draining off manpower from Ireland’s Nationalist cause (109).

The Narrator ponders from time to time on the meaning of loaded words: hatred, Home Rule, freedom. This character represents the second thoughts of all but the most committed ideologues: “Weren’t we all right the way we were? And we don’t really hate the English, do we? Wasn’t Home Rule on the way? Whatever that is. Wouldn’t we be free sometime? Whatever that is” (139). Anything, according to the Narrator at this point in his or her ideological evolution, would be better than what has just happened: the random killing of a nurse who had arrived to help the injured. The Narrator at this point rejects all political beliefs in favor of basic survival: “I hate nationalism…. I love life” (129). No sooner does the Rising begin than the Dublin populace resorts to looting, issuing their own proclamation justifying it: “It’s a free country!” (142). Characters interrupt and contradict each other, demonstrating the lack of clear channels of command; pauses and hesitations connote insecurity; and “one central scene consists in a cacophonic speech contest between Asquith, Redmond, MacNeill, Pearse, and Connolly, all speaking at the same time and trying to recruit for the British army, the Volunteers, the IRB or the ICA.”13

At various points in the play, it is tempting to see the cast of participants in the 1916 Rising from Connolly’s exasperated viewpoint, as “comic-opera revolutionaries” (116). But in the last scene of the play, as the prisoners make their final speeches and are executed, the play achieves a “balance between human sympathy for the rebels and refusal of hero-worship.”14 Their nobility moves even the cynical, worldly wise Narrator, who, it must be remembered, is a character from the 1990s who began the play with contempt for the idealism of 1916. The incantatory, quasi-liturgical recitation of the names, which contributes the “air of a religious rite, a search for redemption through sacrifice,”¹⁵ echoes both the Proclamation and Yeats’s “Easter, 1916.” The play ends with the Narrator reciting a poem by John Stephens (1882–1950) that mourns but also celebrates the “last journeying” of the rebels (149). Contrary to the historical record, Pearse is not executed as his real-life counterpart was. Instead he waits by the exit for the Narrator, as if ready to guide that person from the future on the path set down by the revolutionaries. For all the questioning of Pearse’s motives, his expertise, his management of the Rising, the play ends with him still alive, his place in history secure as, after all the linguistic confusion, he calls not just the Narrator but all Irishmen and Irishwomen to a simple goal simply expressed: “Come on home” (149).

“Nets of history”: Sebastian Barry’s The Steward of Christendom

Whether the rebels were heroes or not is, in The Patriot Game, debatable; but those who supported the Loyalist cause during the Rising certainly seem to have been on the wrong side of history. Such a one is Thomas Dunne, in The Steward of Christendom by Sebastian Barry (b. 1955). Based on Barry’s own great-grandfather, Dunne, though a Catholic, remained loyal to the British Empire during the Easter Rising and through the period of political violence that followed the Rising and peaked after the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921. Barry’s play explores the consequences of not seizing the day, not rising to the occasion, not being part of a transformational moment in history.

Much of Barry’s work explores the lives of such men as these, whose lives call into question what is “perhaps nationalism’s most sacrosanct myth … its idea that Irish history can be read as an uninterrupted chronicle of pannationalist resistance against British rule.”¹⁶ When Pearse read the Proclamation of the Republic, he described a consistent pattern of Nationalist uprisings: “In every generation the Irish people have asserted their right to national freedom and sovereignty: six times during the past three hundred years they have asserted it in arms.” Pearse could have added some modifications to this ringing declaration: in some generations, some of the Irish people asserted their rights in arms about every fifty years or so. In between many of them, perhaps even most of them, lived as British subjects. But qualifiers make for bad oratory, and so some people, maybe most people, get left out of the historical record. Like William Trevor, whose novel The Story of Lucy Gault centers on the Anglo-Irish, a group that does not fit neatly into the “sacrosanct myth,” Barry dramatizes the lives of another such group: Catholic Loyalists. Such people “find themselves without a place or a narrative of identity” in the Republic.17 Men and women without a country, they have been “edged out of the Irish mainstream because certain histories of Ireland have been accepted and others have been rejected.”¹⁸ A man such as Dunne represents “a complexity that Irish nationalist histories quickly eliminated, preferring instead a past in which Catholics were Nationalists, Protestants were Unionists, and few confusions over loyalties had or would ever exist.”¹⁹ The “binary narratives” of Ireland are disturbed by such anomalies.²⁰

For the reader of Barry’s work who is not Irish, and perhaps even for some who are, one of the main challenges is to unscramble the time sequence of events in Irish history, so as to correlate the public events mentioned in the play with the private lives of Dunne and his family. Like many modern literary works, The Steward of Christendom operates according to the nature of human memory. Dunne’s memories explore the past, his own and his family’s. But events are not remembered in neat chronological order, and the nonlinearity of memory is only one factor distorting time. The play premiered in 1995; the present-time action of the play takes place in 1932. While Thomas can know nothing that happened after 1932, the Irish audience can fill in the gaps in the historical record up to 1995. They know on what points he was less than prescient and judge him accordingly. The audience remembers events that are still in the future for Thomas, and this adds another dimension to the chronology/memory component of Barry’s play.

Thomas is based on Barry’s great-grandfather, the last man to hold the position of chief superintendent of the Dublin Metropolitan Police (DMP) under the British government. Ten years after the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, in the present-time action of the play, Thomas is in a mental institution, his present life as bare as the stage set. His glory days with the DMP—when Queen Victoria, then her son Edward, reigned, when Thomas’s beloved wife, Cissy, was alive—are all in the past. Thomas is not ready for the new regime ushered in by the coming of the Republic; his way of thinking is rooted in a trio of interrelated hierarchical values passed down to him from his forefathers: service, loyalty, and stewardship.

The concept of stewardship is intrinsically hierarchical in that it implies serving a master, being a caretaker of the master’s possessions; so it is depicted time and again in the Bible, as Thomas seems to recognize.²¹ His father was a steward, and his great-great-grandfather was a steward, both of Humewood, the Big House of an Anglo-Irish family. When Thomas says this, he is boasting that his father was a servant. He believes that to be in service is an honor. The extent of a master’s possessions, the size of his house in particular, is a status indicator for the servant as well as those served; and so being the steward of so large an establishment, as opposed to being in service in a small one, means basking in the reflected glory of the Ascendancy, even several generations later. But the high status of masters would not be possible without the low status of servants; the servants must be complicit in a structure of subordination for the hierarchy to endure. When in 1913 labor leader James Larkin questioned the assumptions on which the master/servant relationship was based, his words threatened to upend a whole social system, to render it, in Thomas’s words, “all topsy-turvy.”22

Although Thomas does not follow his father as steward of Humewood, he does follow the same principles of service, loyalty, and stewardship. As a member of the DMP, he sees himself as protecting the queen’s property much as his father cared for the grand estate, in a similar aura of reflected glory. Thomas, born in 1857, grew up thinking of himself as an Englishman. Queen Victoria had been on the throne since 1837 and would be until he was forty-four years old. Thus when he is employed by the government, he understands it to be his own government, and he is not alone in that sentiment: “Until 1916 … crown employment was a fact of life rather than a cause for patriotic self-doubt. Numerous poor Catholic men also took the Saxon Shilling.”²³ Thomas’s pride in his work comes from his loyalty to the queen, “the principle of order” presiding over “a perfect chain of being.”²⁴ His job is to keep Victoria’s realm safe and orderly: “the great world that she owned was a shipshape as a ship…. men like me were there to make everything peaceable, to keep order in her kingdoms” (15). Thomas’s loyalty to Victoria is rooted in his own love for order: “The world was a wedding of loyalty, of steward to Queen, she was the very flower and perfecter of Christendom” (15). He is the queen’s steward, not just of Dublin but of the empire.

So strong was his loyalty to Victoria that he found it “difficult to go from her to the men that came after her, Edward and George” (15). Edward VII, Victoria’s son, took the throne upon his mother’s death in 1910; then, only nine years later, he died, to be succeeded by his son, George V. If Thomas could not shift his loyalties at the stately pace with which monarchs succeeded one another on the British throne, how likely is it that he could question the idea of monarchy itself, much less adjust to a Republican revolution? As historian John Wilson Foster points out, the loyalty of people such as Thomas is “at first glance foolish and justifies their apparent status as time’s laughingstocks,” but as the play progresses, the audience is asked to “re-evaluate the once deplored loyalty” of the Dunne family, which is not an aberration but rather “represent[s] those tens of thousands of Irish who shared their values.”²⁵ Later events will place Dunne and his fellow Catholic Loyalists on the wrong side of history; but for him history ends in 1932. Barry’s play asks for understanding, if not necessarily approval, for people who had to work with the values, not to mention the information, available to them at the time.

Through wearing the uniform of the DMP, as did Thomas, or of the British army, fighting in World War I like his son Willie, Irishmen like them demonstrated affiliation and loyalty. Clothing, and changes of clothing, are always of major importance in theater; and in this play the significant costume is Thomas’s police uniform. As is the point of uniforms, this one makes its wearer a part of something larger than himself, something with dignity, even grandeur. The uniform is the centerpiece of one of his favorite memories, of his daughters tending to him and showing pride in him via their maintenance of his uniform: “And Dolly my daughter … polished my policeman’s boots, and Annie and Maud brought me my clothes brushed and starched in the mornings, as the castle of soldiers and constables woke” (12). As he serves the Crown, they serve him, reinforcing their place and his in an orderly world.

But the gold trim missing from his uniform highlights by its absence the paradox of Thomas’s life as what was contemptuously termed a “Castle Catholic.” Because historically the ruling class in Ireland under the Ascendancy was largely Protestant and the ruled class largely Catholic, a crossover alliance between Catholics and the British Empire was thought by those of a Republican bent to be a betrayal of Nationalist principles as well as Catholicism itself. By working for the DMP, Thomas protects Dublin Castle, the seat of British power in Dublin, thus exposing himself to discrimination. Nevertheless he is proud of his success within a Protestant-dominated force; he brags of rising as high as a Catholic could, apparently insensible to the irony that even a competent and loyal steward would hit a low glass ceiling because of his faith: “If I had made commissioner I might have had gold, but that wasn’t a task for a Catholic, you understand, in the way of things, in those days” (10). Dunne is not one to question “the way of things,” discrimination against Catholics by the British government; he assumes that his hearers will understand it too and makes his way in the system as it is, accepting its limitations as if they were divinely ordained. Even when he thinks that he should have “a beautiful pension for [his] forty-five years of service” and finds out from Annie that he does not (32), he does not question the system that got him and his family to this point. Instead he pledges allegiance to the past: “My father was the steward of Humewood, and I was the steward of Christendom” (33).

By 1932 all that Dunne’s uniform once represented had been rejected by the Irish people; the DMP was disbanded in 1925. This erased his entire work history. In the present-time action of the play, not only does he not have the gold, he does not have the uniform either; early on he is stripped naked by the orderly Smith, and the seamstress Mrs. O’Dea measures him for the black suit linking him not to his beloved monarch but to the madhouse. While the seamstress, in the condescending way people have with invalids, describes it as a “fine suit, as good as my own attire,” Thomas knows that it is not as good as his uniform and begs for “a bit of gold or suchlike for the thread” as a consolation prize (7). Reinforcing the clothing symbolism, all Thomas has of Willie is the muddy uniform in which he died as a soldier of the British army on the Western Front.

In his DMP uniform, in his heyday, Thomas was charged with maintaining public order. But maintenance of order to some is suppression of freedom to others. His role in the 1913 Dublin Lockout earned him the resentment of those on the labor side of this labor vs. management dispute, and that long-ago conflict has consequences even in Thomas’s life in the asylum. The hospital orderly Smith holds him responsible for the violence with which the lockout was suppressed. Smith’s “verbal and physical abuse of Dunne casts him as a brutal personification of nationalist fanaticism and bigotry”:26 “Chief superintendent, this big gobshite was, Mrs. O’Dea, that killed four good men and true in O’Connell Street in the days of the lock-out. Larkin. Hah? His men it was struck down the strikers. (A gentle hit with the drying cloth.) Baton-charging. A big loyal Catholic gobshite killing poor hungry Irishmen. If you weren’t an old madman we’d flay you” (9).

Thomas, of course, sees the Lockout as a highlight of his career: “When I went out that day to stop Larkin in Sackville Street, all the world of my youth, the world of Ireland that I knew, was still in place, loyal, united and true. I had three lovely daughters, and a little son as glad as a rose. And I had risen as high as a Catholic could in the Dublin Metropolitan Police. And we were drawn up, ready to dispel them” (53). The Larkin of whom the two men speak is the same labor organizer who worked closely with 1916 revolutionary James Connolly. The incident in Sackville Street (the fact that Smith calls it by its post-Republic name, O’Connell Street, and Thomas by its pre-Republic name is significant in itself) pitted Larkin’s union against one William Martin Murphy, a business leader. When Murphy fired the members of Larkin’s union, the union declared a general strike; businesses responded by locking out twenty thousand workers. On August 31, 1913, “Bloody Sunday,” violence broke out; Thomas’s historical counterpart “is remembered in Barry’s family for ordering the vicious baton charge that dispersed a largely peaceable crowd of strikers.”²⁷ The four men of whom the orderly speaks were killed, and the union quashed. Does Smith mean that Thomas personally killed the four men or that the DMP did? Prolabor citizens would see little distinction: the DMP’s de facto role was protecting management, and the its public image suffered. Three years later the DMP would be called upon again to preserve order in the midst of an even more violent event.

The Easter Rising is the point of connection between the two plays discussed here. As has been discussed with regard to The Patriot Game, the Rising faced an uphill struggle against the perception of men such as Thomas Dunne that they were Englishmen, part of a great and glorious empire. In the early 1900s, “Ireland, like the rest of the United Kingdom, experienced a period when pride in empire reached unparalleled heights.”28 For years various movements and organizations were developed with the goal of retraining Irish men and women to think of themselves as other than British. The Gaelic League, for example, founded in 1893 by language scholar Douglas Hyde (1860–1949), encouraged the Irish to “de-Anglicise” through language, music, sports, and nomenclature. The Abbey Theatre, founded in 1899, put on plays such as John Millington Synge’s Riders to the Sea (1904), Lady Augusta Gregory’s Rising of the Moon (1907), and William Butler Yeats’s Cathleen Ni Houlihan (1902), all of them on Nationalist topics. In fact Barry’s own mother acted the part of the old woman, symbol of Ireland, in Cathleen, and Barry remembers the impact the play had on him as a child in the audience at the Abbey.²⁹ Reading the literature of the Irish Literary Revival teaches the modern reader how intent literary Nationalists were on revising the Irish people’s idea of themselves not as citizens of the British Empire but as heirs to a proud Celtic heritage. That identification with England would not have needed revision had it not been firmly embedded in the minds of many.

But the audience for the literary Nationalists’ translations of folklore, for their poetry and drama, would be people interested in poetry, fiction, and drama and open to new ideas, not such a man as Thomas Dunne. Thomas, presumably like many others, is not interested in what he perceives as a highbrow “Irish Ireland” movement. When the Easter Rising finally does come, he is one of the many who, when they heard of the capture of the General Post Office by a small band of rebels, did not rush to swell their numbers; indeed they supported the other side. The Patriot Game provides insights into why the popular uprising for which Pearse and Connolly had hoped did not materialize; The Steward of Christendom provides others. In addition to Dunne, his son Willie is a reminder that “many more Irishmen chose to serve in the British Army during the Great War than those who took part in the Easter Rebellion.”³⁰ If Pearse and Connolly imagined themselves as embodying the spirit of Ireland, perhaps, at least in 1916, such men as Thomas and Willie Dunne did as well.

To Thomas the Rising is not a turning point in Irish history, much less in the history of Christendom, but merely “that rebellion at Easter time, that they make so much of now” (10). His dismissive remark suggests that, in his mind at least, it was not the rebellion itself, but the “making much” of it by later Nationalists, that was significant. If the Rising was not a pivotal event in Irish history, then the role of his own organization in suppressing it was just an ordinary day’s work. According to him the DMP consisted of “mostly country men, and Catholics to boot, and we loved our King and we loved our country” (10). Questioning the legitimacy of the status quo was not on their job description, but keeping order in the Dublin streets surely was: “We did our best and followed our orders,” being “just ordinary country men keen to do well” (11). A married man with three children, then a widower with four, Thomas was nothing like the political idealists who, in Yeats’s “Easter, 1916,” “dreamed and are dead” (l.71). In the present-time action of the play, dreamers are replaced by survivors, and the Irish people—even those who, like Thomas, did not support the Rising—are being asked to transfer their loyalty to Michael Collins and Éamon de Valera.

Collins (1890–1922) fought in the Rising but survived to become “de facto leader of the entire revolutionary movement.”31 In his role as chairman of the provisional government, he was a signatory to the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921–22; he was assassinated shortly thereafter by opponents of the treaty. Because “Collins was perhaps the outstanding talent of the Irish revolution, combining formidable powers as administrator, soldier, negotiator, counter-intelligence chief, and ruthless terrorist,” the movement’s loss of him at the age of thirty-two was a major blow.³² His fellow revolutionary Éamon de Valera was sentenced to death for his role in the Rising, but in the time interval between the first execution and that intended for de Valera, “a revulsion in public opinion” saved him.³³ The fact that de Valera was born in New York and so held American citizenship also contributed to his being spared. His political career took him to many of the highest positions in the new Irish Republic; but his complicated relationship with his fellow revolutionaries, including Collins, made him some enemies. By virtue of his long political career (he lived to age ninety-three), de Valera played a mighty role in the development of the new republic. But in 1932, at fifty, he had some of his best years ahead of him. In 1932, when the present-time action of The Steward of Christendom takes place, Collins was ten years dead, and de Valera was in the process of undoing his old rival’s final accomplishment, the Anglo-Irish Treaty.

As in 1913 and 1916, during the events surrounding the Anglo-Irish Treaty, Thomas is again on the wrong side of history. As he explains his role as chief superintendent of B Division of the DMP after the 1922 treaty signing, his task was to defend Dublin Castle, “to protect the city while the whole world was at each other’s throats” (11). Keeping order in the face of such disorder was neither an easy nor a gratifying job, but Thomas is satisfied that he and his colleagues did it with the minimum of violence. Men such as he, conscious of their “proper duty,” are, he thinks, “part of a vanished world” (11). Thomas struggles with the idea of transferring loyalty to the new leaders. After the establishment of the Republic, the men he would have been expected to serve do not measure up to what he sees as the greatness of the past. His loyalties are to Victoria and Edward. His daughter Annie reminds him that now, if he is a servant at all, he is a servant of Michael Collins, not King Edward: “Collins is no king either…. With a tally of carnage, intrigue and disloyalty that would shame a tinker” (37). Thomas is too deep into his melancholy to do anything more than reiterate the credo by which he has lived his life: “I served that King, Annie, and that will suffice me” (37). The king to whom he refers is Edward.

But when Thomas discusses Collins with his other daughter, Dolly, a more nuanced and ambivalent reaction to Collins emerges. Thomas is impressed with Collins, with his graceful yet athletic way of carrying himself, with his height and good looks, “like one of those picture stars that came on the big ship from New York.” He allows as how Collins might have been successful in the police force and moreover that he even “would have been proud to have him as my son” (44). Comparing himself to Collins, Thomas feels again the sting of his limited opportunities as a “Castle Catholic.” Collins offers a glimpse of a new world in which a man would not be held back by his religion, and Thomas is beginning to understand why he commanded such loyalty, suggesting that had he lived, he might have earned Thomas’s loyalty in time. Thomas appears to have been present at the 1922 ceremony conveying Dublin Castle to Collins as representative of the new Irish government: “And for an instant, when the Castle was signed over to him, I felt a shadow of that loyalty pass across my heart. But I closed my heart instantly against it.” Whether that shadow of loyalty might have developed further is a moot point. Had Collins been able to maintain order as Victoria did, Thomas might have reopened his heart. But urban chaos ensues, with the streets that Thomas sees as his own becoming “places for murder and fire” (44).

Then Collins is assassinated, and Thomas has to start all over again to try to develop loyalty to his sometime rival de Valera; all this is more revolution than evolution to Thomas, and he cannot cope with the rapid pace of change. To him Edward is the “true king,” far superior to the man who Mrs. O’Dea calls “King De Valera” (24). Such men as de Valera will never be able to raise the status of such as Thomas. Thomas is not alone in his contempt for the sort of man who has risen to power. Annie also questions the right of Collins to rule: “Why Collins of all people to give the Castle to? Couldn’t they find a gentleman?” (16). Neither Thomas nor Annie understands that the whole hierarchical principle has been cast aside: hereditary nobility need not apply. He is right when he thinks that there is no place in Ireland for a Loyalist like himself, “a man that loves his King” (24).

“It is difficult to write about anyone without finding them enmeshed in the nets of history, poor fish of circumstance that we are.”34 Barry’s insight applies particularly to The Steward of Christendom, “a history play about the future,”³⁵ with “the future” meaning anything that happened after 1932. With every new production of the play, that future expands, as do the audience’s perceptions of Thomas Dunne. At the time he was a member of the DMP, Thomas boasts that he could “name every lane, alleyway, road, terrace and street” in Dublin (31). By 1995, when the play was first staged, the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising had come and gone, and if Dunne walked the streets of Dublin, he would have to learn many new names before he could again take pride in knowing his city. The General Post Office is still there, but not on Sackville Street; the street has been renamed O’Connell Street, after nineteenth-century Nationalist Daniel O’Connell. Inside the GPO a statue of Patrick Pearse’s mythological role model, Cúchulainn, commemorates the Rising. If Dunne continued to walk along O’Connell Street, he would find a statue of James Larkin, the very labor organizer against whom he rallied his officers during the 1913 Lockout. Railroad stations are named after Connolly and Pearse. Kilmainham Gaol, where they and twelve others died, is now a major tourist destination, and visitors and Dubliners alike can pay their respects to the long line of Irish rebels at the Garden of Remembrance, which opened in 1966. An army barracks named after Collins is now a museum. Conversely many relics of the British Empire that existed in Dunne’s time are now gone. Nelson’s Pillar, opened in 1809 to honor the then-revered British admiral, was blown up in 1966, presumably by activists eager to rid Dublin of imperialist relics.

These changes in the streetscape of Dublin are not as drastic, however, as the ideological shift regarding the Easter Rising. What Willie Dunne calls, dismissively, “the ruckus at home” (50) has now risen itself to historical archetype: “Our notions of the legitimacy of nationalist struggle, of the acceptability of violence in the pursuit of democratic goals, of the role of heroism and sacrifice in political conflict, and of the dignity of small nations in the face of superior force, have all been decisively influenced by what occurred during Easter week in Dublin.”36 Conversely the worldwide empire that Dunne served has shrunk to one small island, hanging on desperately to a small portion of its neighbor.

Even Dunne’s loyalty, his most admirable trait, seems like another relic of the bad old days. By 1995 citizens of the Irish Republic would be likely to see loyalty in a very different light, since “we know today what we think of those who follow orders at all costs.”³⁷ By 1995 Collins was considered “a founding father of Irish democratic independence”;³⁸ a year later an adulatory film drama about his life was a box office and critical success. Éamon de Valera, for all the controversial decisions and therefore enemies that he made in his long political career, mattered greatly to his country.

At the same time, as can be seen in these two plays, artists such as Murphy and Barry are doing what artists have always done: challenging the received wisdom of their time. Could it be that the rebels of 1916 made every possible strategic error, were wholly unequipped for the military role to which they assigned themselves, suffered from internal divisions and ideological confusion, yet prodded their country along a historic path nonetheless? And that those who refused to join them, whose inaction and misplaced loyalties surely contributed to the revolutionaries’ death, nevertheless played their own chosen roles with dignity and integrity? Colm Toíbín says, in a review essay concerning the Rising and its meaning for Ireland in the present, “I know that ambiguity is what is needed in Ireland now.”39 If so then the complex vision provided by these dramatists is also needed.

After the separation from England was achieved, all was still not well. The compromise arrangement, the two-country solution that separated Northern Ireland from the Republic, generated its own set of problems. The small island was still divided. Language was affected, especially in terms of place-names, which in the Republic were often de-Anglicized (reversing the process described in Brian Friel’s Translations); eventually street names in Dublin would be renamed after the heroes of the Rising. In the Republic these processes left in an anomalous position those descendants of Edmund Spenser’s compatriots, the Anglo-Irish. Residents of Ireland, sometimes for hundreds of years, but of British heritage, these Anglo-Irish, as they were called, still owned land, and the houses upon that land, to the chagrin of those who believed themselves to have been treated ill in the past.