Challenging Englishness from the racial margins: William Macready's Irishman in London; Or; The Happy African

Abstract

William Charles Macready's farce The Irishman in London; Or; The Happy African (1792) can be read as an exploration of Englishness in its relationship to Irishness as presented on the London stage in the period following the French Revolution. This article examines Macready's play as a critique of the common identification of Irishness with blackness that uses stock characters and attitudes to examine English identity. Through a marriage plot displaced from the traditional romantic heroes onto their Irish and black servants, we see English as a commercial identity rather than a cultural one. Linking race to culture and culture to nationality, Macready's play presents Irishness and blackness as culturally rich while calling into question the content of Englishness.

Keywords:

• Irishness
• race
• slavery
• class
• gender
• minstrelsy
• stage Irishman
• farce
• Macready

Notes

 1. Doyle, The Commitments, 9.

 2. For an interesting account of cross-cultural influence between the Irish and blacks in the USA, see Tracy Mishkin's The Harlem and Irish Renaissances.

 3. See Noel Ignatiev's How the Irish Became White for the process that Irish emigrants to the USA went through in order to change from the oppressed to, at times, the oppressor of African Americans.

 4. Here I'm thinking of a constellation of cultural identifications, in Ireland, Britain and the USA. White rap and hip hop artists who mimic an underclass aesthetic, earlier generations of musicians influenced by African American rhythm and blues like U2 and Van Morrison, and yet earlier bands like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, all drew from black culture to create a working-class aesthetic that has long been linked with racial consciousness directly stemming from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century permutations of master–slave relations in the English colonies and the USA. In the nineteenth century the connection that Daniel O'Connell saw to the cause of emancipation in the USA is related to this phenomenon.

 5. Gikandi, Maps of Englishness, xv.

 6. Gallagher and Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism, 13.

 7. Graham, ‘“… maybe that's just Blarney’, 8.

 8. Gikandi, Maps of Englishness, 8.

 9. Corbett, Allegories of Union in Irish and English Writing, 1790–1870, 44.

10. Hogan, The London Stage, 1660–1800, 1482; Genest, Some Account of the English Stage; Mullin, Victorian Plays, 169.

11. The Public Advertiser, or, Political and Literary Diary, 16 April 1793 (British Library Shelfmark 823.c.1.(7.)).

12. On 1 October 1792 the farce played after Othello, with Macready playing Cassio first, and Mrs Fawcett playing both Emilia in Shakespeare's play, then putting on blackface to play the African slave Cubba in The Irishman in London. Possibly the first double billing of plays with interracial marriage plots. Hogan, The London Stage, 1490.

13. Duggan, The Stage Irishman, 176.

14. The Irishman in London. Cumberland's British Theatre, with Remarks, Biographical and Critical, by D–G., vol. 22 (London: John Cumberland, 1828), 8.

15. The Irishman in London. Lacy's Home Plays, vol. 79 (London: Thomas Hailes Lacy, 1859). List of dramatis personae.

16. The Irishman in London; or, The Happy African (London: Longman, 1793, 1796, 1799, 1806); (Dublin: G. Perrin, 1793); The Irishman in London; or, The Happy African. A Collection of Farces and other Afterpieces, ed. Elizabeth Inchbald, vol. 2 (London: Longman, 1815); The Irishman in London (Dublin: R. Grace, 1818); The Irishman in London. Cumberland's British Theatre, with Remarks, Biographical and Critical, by D–G., vol. 22 (London: John Cumberland, 1828); The Irishman in London. Lacy's Home Plays, vol. 79 (London: Thomas Hailes Lacy, 1859).

17. Allen, The Invention of the White Race, 22.

18. Ibid., 32.

19. Hudson, ‘From “Nation” to “Race”, 250.

20. Malik, The Meaning of Race, 253.

21. Williams, Capitalism and Slavery.

22. Solow, ‘Capitalism and Slavery in the Exceedingly Long Run’, 72.

23. Inikori, ‘Slavery and the Development of Industrial Capitalism in England’, 91–2.

24. Parenthetical references are to the 1793 London edition of The Irishman in London unless otherwise noted.

25. Some critics challenge this notion of Irishness as a divided identity, or a set of clashing identities. Malcolm Kelsall, for example, writing about a group of Anglo-Irish and English authors and their representations of Irish country house culture, sees the very terms ‘Anglo-Irish’ and ‘Protestant Ascendancy’ as ‘hackneyed’, and declares that ‘the “racial” origin of these writers is not relevant’. Literary Representations of the Irish Country House, 22. How one can make that argument in a book about how architecture on a grand scale facilitated the move from ‘barbarism’ to ‘civilisation’ is more than a bit mind-boggling, especially when the barbarians all tend to be Catholic and forcibly rooted to Ireland, and the civilised tend to be Protestant and cosmopolitan.

26. Macready, The Irishman in London: A Farce in Two Acts. Larpent Collection, LA 942, in the Huntingon Library, San Marino, California, 1792, 9. Hereafter referred to as Larpent. All plays produced in London in the last third of the eighteenth century through to the first two decades of the nineteenth century went through the office of John Larpent, official censor to George III. Most of Larpent's deletions from The Irishman in London soften or eliminate implications that the English were racist. The original copies of all the plays Larpent censored, with his markings (or the markings of his assistants), are in the Huntington Library.

27. Eagleton, Crazy John and the Bishop and Other Essays on Irish Culture, 25.

28. A ‘planxty’ is ‘A harp tune of a sportive and animated character, moving in triplets. It is not intended for or often adaptable to words, and is slower in pace than the jig’, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. The term also means ‘general goodwill’, according to the Grove Dictionary of Music & Musicians. The term is apparently English, appropriated by the Irish. See de Bhaldraithe, English–Irish Dictionary; Ó Dónaill, Foclóir Gaeilge-Béarla.

29. Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism, 11.

30. Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, particularly Part I, ‘The Field of Cultural Production’, 29–144; Foucault, The History of Sexuality.

31. Corbett, Allegories of Union, 21ff.

32. Macready, The Irishman in London. Cumberland's British Theatre, 8.

33. Hogan, The London Stage, 1575–6.

34. Larpent, 17.

35. Ibid., 18.

36. Ibid.

37. Deane, Strange Country, 18.

38. Ibid., 17.