The Story Of The Stage Irishman
It's one of the delicious twists of fate which seem to beset Irish literary history that the country's most important early dramatist only took up writing by mistake. One evening a young Derry actor named George Farquhar was playing a bit part in the duel scene of Dryden's Indian Emperor at the Dublin Smock Alley theatre when, in a moment of tragic enthusiasm, he accidentally stabbed a fellow actor, almost killing him. Understandaly shaken, Farquhar gave up he stage for good and went off to London to write plays instead. Farquhar (1677-1707) is often credited with the invention of the stage Irishman, the descendants of whom can still be seen in many soap operas and situation comedies on British television to this day. Effusive in his own way, but basically sly, stupid and violent, this stock character stumbled through the dramas of Steele (1672-1729), Chaigneau (1709-81), Goldsmith (1728-74) and Sheridan (1751-1816), tugging his forelock, bumping into the furniture and going "bejayzus" at every available moment. In fact Irish stereotypes had existed in the British tradition for many centuries before these dramatists had at least the good sense to make some money out of them. The stage Irishman was brought to his ultimate idiocy by Dion Boucicault (1820-90), whose lepprechaunic characters seeme to have staggered straight out of the Big House novel and onto the London stage. Boucicault, however, has undergone something of a revival in recent years, with a few critics arguing that his unstable and unpredictable dramas were subversiv attacks against the version of colonial reality imposed upon Ireland in the nineteenth centruy. Boucicault's chum, George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), turned out ot be the kind of stage Irishman the English couldn't patronize out of existence. A radical socialist and feminist, he championed all kinds of cranky causes and some very admirable ones, and lived long enough to be a founder member of CND. His cerbral and often polemical plays - of which Saint Joan is perhaps the best - have remained a mainstay of theatre repertoire. Yet even Shaw paled in comparison to the ultimate king of the one-line put-down, Oscar Wilde (1856-1900). After a brilliant career at Oxford - during which he lost his virginity and his Irish accent - Wilde went on to set literary London alight, creating the smiling resentment that would finally destroy him. In The Picture of Dorian Gray he expanded on the Gothic tradition os Stoker and Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-73) to explore the fundamental duality of the romantic hero. But it was in his satirical plays, particularly The Importance of Being Earnest , that he was at his most acerbic. A brilliant and gentle man, he poured scorn on his critics, openly espoused home rule for Ireland and lived with consummate style until the debacle of his affair with Lord Alfred Douglas. This self-obsessed bimbo persuaded Wilde into a foolish libel action against his thuggish father, the Marquess of Queensbury, which Wilde lost. Immediately afterwards he was arrested for homesexuality, publicly disgaced and privately condemned by his many fair-weather friends. He served two years in prison where he wrote his finest works, The Ballad of Reading Gaol and De Profundis (published after his death in 1905). In early 1900 one of Ireland's greatest, and most tragic, writers, died alone and distraught in Paris. "I will never live into the new century", he declared. "The English would just not allow it."
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