‘Wel gelun a gud?’: Thomas Sheridan's Brave Irishman and the failure of English

Abstract

Scholarship on Thomas Sheridan's popular farce The Brave Irishman has to date focused on its engagement with the figure of the ‘stage Irishman’, testing the title character's thick accent and Irish idiom against a standard English that rarely appears in the play itself. This essay considers the farce on broader terms, addressing both regional variations in the play's performance and the other idioms of the play, in order to argue that the farce overturns the devaluing of the Irish idiom and instead dramatises the shortcomings of English on terms consistent with Sheridan's large body of writing on the English language as spoken in the British Isles.

Keywords:

• English language
• Irish language
• dialect
• Thomas Sheridan
• Edgeworths
• national identity

Acknowledgements

I am grateful for the remarkable resources and helpful staff of the British Library as well as the generous support of the Canada Research Chairs program and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I would also like to thank Jason Haslam and the anonymous readers for their helpful remarks on an earlier version of this paper, and audiences at the 2006 meeting of the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English and at the ‘Imagining Readers, Imagining Nations, 1750–1850’ conference for their generative responses.

Notes

 1. On O'Blunder as a challenge to the stock type of the ‘stage Irishman’, see, for instance, Morash, A History of Irish Theatre, 46; Leerssen, Mere Irish and the Fior-Gael, 116–18; Schneller, ‘No “Brave Irishman” Need Apply’, 175; and Harris, ‘Mixed Marriage’, 189–212.

 2. Siegel, ‘Transforming Conventions’, 231.

 3. Croghan, ‘Swift, Thomas Sheridan, Maria Edgeworth’, 19, 22.

 4. On the ‘stage Irishman’ in broad historical terms, see, for example, Cullingford, ‘National Identities in Performance’, 287–300; Kiberd, ‘The Fall of the Stage Irishman’, 451–72; Nelson, ‘From Rory and Paddy to Boucicault's Myles, Shaun and Conn’, 79–105; and Truninger, Paddy and the Paycock. For more specific discussions of the representation of Irishness on the stage in the second half of the eighteenth century, see, for instance, Goring, ‘“John Bull, Pit, Box, and Gallery, Said No!”, 61–81; Leerssen, Mere Irish and the Fior-Gael, 113–50; and Harris, ‘Mixed Marriage’.

 5. See Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, 85–126.

 6. See Hume, ‘Of National Characters’. On Maria Edgeworth and Enlightenment thought, see, for instance, McCann, ‘Conjugal Love and the Enlightenment Subject’; Ó Gallchoir, Maria Edgeworth; and Omasreiter, ‘Maria Edgeworth's Tales’. For a brief discussion of Sheridan's work on language in the context of Enlightenment thought, see Clark, ‘Technology Inside’, 60–1.

 7. See, for instance, Myers, ‘Goring John Bull’, 367–94; and Wohlgemut, ‘Maria Edgeworth and the Question of National Identity’, 645–58.

 8. Butler, ‘Edgeworth's Ireland’, 276.

 9. Edgeworth and Edgeworth, Essay on Irish Bulls, 208. Hereafter cited parenthetically as Essay.

10. Butler, ‘Edgeworth's Ireland’, 276.

11. The reference here is to Deinology by ‘Hortensius’, a work which, like Sheridan's, lamented the state of English as it was spoken in England but focuses on members of the bar. Hortensius laments English lawyers’ ‘bad stile and an ungraceful elocution’, and compares them to ‘the French bar’ and ‘the Scotch advocates’ who are ‘so superior to the very best performances (two or three excepted) of the English bar, that I blush for my countrymen’ (ii–iii).

12. O'Connell, ‘Improved English’, 13.

13. Grant, Observations, 77. Grant's text is discussed in postcolonial scholarship; see, for instance, Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest, 25; and Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 86–7.

14. Croghan, ‘Swift, Thomas Sheridan, Maria Edgeworth’, 25.

15. Sheridan, Course of Lectures on Elocution, 234n. For a useful introduction to Sheridan's considerable body of work on language and language use, see Benzie, The Dublin Orator.

16. Croghan, ‘Swift, Thomas Sheridan, Maria Edgeworth’, 25; the ellipses here are Croghan's (Croghan cites the same 1762 edition of Course of Lectures on Elocution as the present essay).

17. Croghan, ‘Swift, Thomas Sheridan, Maria Edgeworth’, 26.

18. Sheridan, Course of Lectures on Elocution, 233.

19. David Hume answers this prejudice specifically; see ‘Of National Characters’, 86.

20. Sheridan, General Dictionary, vol. II, n.p. (except for the substantial ‘Grammar’ which precedes the dictionary proper, the Dictionary is unpaginated).

21. Sheridan, British Education, 211–12.

22. Sheridan, British Education, 212–13.

23. Sheridan, General Dictionary, vol. II, n.p.

24. As such studies as Kelly's Swift and the English Language and Wyrick's Jonathan Swift and the Vested Word demonstrate, Swift's ideas on proper language use and the problems which arise from its misuse are rich and complex. While my focus here is Sheridan's quotation of Swift on post-Cromwellian language, Swift's statements on the subject are much more wide ranging than this short passage or Croghan's cursory examination would suggest. In general, I would suggest that Swift and Sheridan had overlapping, if not entirely consonant, concerns, Swift being generally more concerned with ‘proper words in their proper places’, as he famously described good prose, and Sheridan often stressing effective communication in speech, particularly, of course, through his extensive work on elocution.

25. Sheridan, British Education, 213–14.

26. Sheridan, British Education, 214.

27. See, for example, Sheridan, A Complete Dictionary. The guide, ‘Directions to Foreigners’, is unpaginated and runs five-and-a-half double-columned pages.

28. As Olivia Smith notes, one of the peculiarities of Sheridan's arguments lies in ‘Sheridan's apparent preference for spoken English and his critique of the written language’ (The Politics of Language, 99).

29. The Edgeworths' list proceeds in rough chronological order, and lists only one ‘T. Sheridan’ immediately after ‘Parnel; Swift’ (Essay, 314). In close sequence with Thomas Parnell (1679–1718) and Jonathan Swift (1667–1745), this must be Swift's friend the elder Thomas Sheridan (1687–1738); Swift was godfather to the Thomas Sheridan (1719–88) at issue in this essay. (The original version of the essay gives R.B. Sheridan only as ‘Sheridan’, but later versions clarify the reference as ‘Brinsley Sheridan’.)

30. Sheridan's Course of Lectures on Elocution appeared first in 1762 and was repeatedly republished, with new editions, for instance, in 1781, 1796, and 1798. Sheridan's Dictionary was perhaps most frequently republished, with editions (sometimes under variant titles) appearing, for instance, in 1780, 1784, and in each of six of the years between 1789 and 1800. New dictionaries in the early 1800s invoked Sheridan's authority, being presented as building on or ‘correct[ing]’ Sheridan's; see, for instance, The Union Dictionary, Containing all that is Truly Useful in the Dictionaries of Johnson, Sheridan, and Walker, with its inaugural edition in 1800 and subsequent editions over the next quarter century. Editions of Sheridan's Lectures on the Art of Reading appeared at least once in each of the 1770s, 1780s, 1790s, and the first decade of the 1800s. The more controversial and less instruction-oriented British Education does not seem to have been republished after the 1770s.

31. Flood, ‘Thomas Sheridan's Brave Irishman’, 346. See Harris's ‘Mixed Marriage’ for further information on the play's early history.

32. See Hodges, ‘The Authorship of Squire Trelooby’, 404–13.

33. Sheldon, Thomas Sheridan of Smock-Alley, 20, 402.

34. Unless otherwise indicated, the edition in Irish Literature, 1750–1900 (based on the 1759 Dublin edition) is used here, and is cited parenthetically.

35. For this line, see the 1771 London edition (9) and the 1755 Edinburgh edition (12).

36. Harris, ‘Mixed Marriage’. As Leerssen notes, ‘In the conventions of the times, the Irish suitor must invariably be a fortune-hunter … This convention is here neatly inverted’ (Mere Irish and the Fior-Gael, 117).

37. Leerssen, Mere Irish and the Fior-Gael, 116.

38. As Harris notes, in an early manuscript version of the play ‘Cheatwell outs himself dramatically’ as Irish by birth, even though he ‘has never been marked as Irish before this point’ (196). This reversal situates Cheatwell as performing rather than being essentially English – or perhaps as performing Irishness at the end of the play to ingratiate himself with the now-valuable O'Blunder. It does not, however, seem to appear in any eighteenth-century edition based on performances.

39. Home, Sketches of the History of Man, vol. I, 450.

40. See the 1791 Belfast edition of Brave Irishman (23).

41. Hume, ‘Of National Characters’, 78.

42. Hume, ‘Of National Characters’, 85–6.

43. Murray also provides the modern Irish orthography: ‘an bhfuil Gaelainn agat?’ (Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, vol. I, 535n).

44. See the 1771 London edition (9) and the 1755 Edinburgh edition (12).

45. The 1754 edition has the error but not the 1759 Dublin or the 1791 Belfast editions – in fact, the 1791 version further improves the Irish spelling by changing ‘Wel’ to ‘Wil’ (14).

46. Smith, Politics of Language, 99.