DESCRIPTION : In
this book Nicholas Grene explores political contexts for some of the
outstanding Irish plays from the nineteenth century to the contemporary
period. The politics of Irish drama have previously been considered
primarily the politics of national self-expression.
Here it is argued that Irish
plays, in their self-conscious representation of the otherness of
Ireland, are outwardly directed towards audiences both at home and
abroad. The political dynamics of such relations between plays and
audiences is the book's multiple subject : the stage
interpretation of Ireland from « The
Shaughraun » [Dion Boucicault] to
« Translations » [Brian
Friel] ; the contentious stage images of Yeats, Gregory and
Synge ; reactions to revolution from O'Casey to
Behan ; the post-colonial worlds of
« Purgatory » [Yeats] and
« All that
Fall » [Beckett] ; the imagined
Irelands of Friel and Murphy, McGuinness and Barry. With its
fundamental reconception of the politics of Irish drama, this book
represents a new view of the phenomenon of Irish drama itself.
| ❙ | Nicholas
Grene is professor of English literature at Trinity College,
Dublin ; he has lectured widely on Irish literature and is the
author of Synge: A Critical Study of the Plays (1975), Shakespeare, Jonson, Molière: The Comic Contract (1980), Bernard Shaw: A Critical View (1984) and Shakespeare's Tragic Imagination (1992). |
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