Hugh O'neill As ‘Hamlet-plus’

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Notes

 1. Fintan O'Toole argues that Making History, far from being a play that sets out to analyse society or history, is a play which denies ‘the power of rational analysis at all’ (‘Marking Time’, 205); ‘Making History is a play about the fictional nature of truth’ (Pine, The Diviner, 207); ‘Friel keeps this notion of the relativity of truth constantly before us’ (Andrews, The Art of Brian Friel, 203; ‘there can be no doubt about the coincidence of viewpoint’ between Friel's Making History and Paul Ricoeur's History and Truth which not only argues that historians, being subjective, can never succeed in recreating an objective truth, but that ‘truth itself is subjective’ (Murray, ‘Brian Friel's Making History’, 65).

 2. ‘Making History […] reverberates with the postcolonial context of this view of history as lie. The play exhibits an intimate awareness of the vested interests in colonial constructions of history and in the inevitably hybrid nature of those constructions. In this sense the historiography of Making History is distinctly postcolonial’ (McGrath, Brian Friel's (post) Colonial Drama, 231). Martine Pelletier suggest that Friel's Making History is ‘an effort on the part of the playwright to free himself from the continuing grip of history on his work’ (Pelletier, ‘Telling Stories and Making History’, 195) and that Friel is effectively in agreement with revisionist historians that Ireland is now ready to hear versions of the past that differ from the myth (p. 197); ‘O'Neill becomes a vehicle for reflecting upon the changing aspects of nationalism in contemporary Irish society’ (Fogarty, ‘The Romance of History’, 19).

 3. Richard Pine takes this position to its most extreme: ‘there is both a literal and intellectual nihilism in Making History [which …] moves the story so wholeheartedly from the physical into the metaphysical that it no longer belongs to traditional drama’ (The Diviner, 235).

 4. McGrath, Brian Friel's (post) Colonial Drama, 210.

 5. McGrath, Brian Friel's (post) Colonial Drama, 230–31.

 6. McGrath: ‘The play is a staged treatise on poststructuralism. In this sense it is like The Communication Cord, which dramatises a linguistic thesis, but Making History is much less successful as a dramatisation of an abstraction than The Communication Cord because Friel never devised effective dramatic metaphors for his abstract arguments’ (McGrath, Brian Friel's (post) Colonial Drama, 210. 230).

 7. ‘Making History is once again a problem play: a problem for audiences because it lacks “dramatic impact”, and for critics because it lacks not only form but, ostensibly, content or matter’ (Pine, The Diviner, 234).

 8. The reviews of the play's production adumbrated subsequent critical assessments of the play. Thus Julie Phillips stated that the play ‘although well constructed and articulate it is a little static’ (Village Voice, 23 April 1991, 94); Michael Sheridan: ‘the ideas are presented badly and undramatically’ (Irish Press, 22 September 1988); Desmond Rusde expressed reservations about the play's ‘dramatic cogency’ (Irish Independent, 22 September 1988, 8). Brian Brennan described Making History as ‘a wordy, declamatory play’ (Sunday Independent, 25 September 1988, 15).

 9. O'Toole, ‘Marking Time’, 211–12.

10. Andrews, The Art of Brian Friel, 207.

11. O'Toole, ‘Marking Time’, 202.

12. The notion of encapsulation which identifies O'Neill with Ireland goes against the grain of majority critical opinion which tends to emphasise the divide between the individual ‘privacies’ (the hermetic, incommunicable self) and the general, ‘the overall thing’ (the public experience, the history and the fate of a nation). See Heaney, ‘For Liberation’, 230; Murray, ‘Brian Friel's Making History’, 75; Pine, The Diviner, 235–37; O'Brien, Brian Friel, 118; and Fogarty, ‘The Romance of History’, 29, for various examples of this position.

13. For generally positive overviews of Ireland's Celtic Tiger economy see MacSharry and White, The Making of the Celtic Tiger; Hufbauer, ‘Tax Policy in a Global Economy’; O'Grada, ‘Is the Celtic Tiger a Paper Tiger?’; Clinch et al., After the Celtic Tiger ; Barry, ‘Tax Policy, FDI and the Irish Economic Boom’; Powell, ‘Economic Freedom and Growth’.

14. According to the A.T. Kearney/Foreign Policy Magazine Globalisation Index 2005, which gives a comprehensive empirical measure of a country's integration into the global economy, Ireland now consistently ranks as one of the most globalised economies (it was second behind Singapore in the report).

15. Ireland's average GDP growth rate in the 1990s was 7.6 per cent, three times the 2.5 per cent which was the average of all high-income countries (World Development Report, 2003). Ireland's average annual per capita growth rate in the 1990s was 6.8 per cent, well above the 1.2 per cent which was the average for all high-income countries (Human Development Report, 2003). In 2003, Ireland was the third richest country in the world in terms of GDP per capita, behind the USA and Luxemburg.

16. For overviews of the economic and social costs of the growth strategies pursued since the early 1990s, see Allen, The Celtic Tiger: the myth of Social Partnership; Coulter and Coleman, The End of Irish History? ; CORI Justice Commission, Achieving Inclusion; Fagan, ‘Globalised Ireland’; Kirby, The Celtic Tiger in Distress; Kirby et al., Reinventing Ireland; Ni Mhaille Battel, ‘Ireland's “Celtic Tiger” Economy’; Nolan, ‘Income Equality’.

17. Just as Ireland's corporate tax rate of 12.5 per cent is the lowest in Europe, so also is its tax take as a percentage of GDP: 27.7 per cent as compared to an EU average of 41.44 per cent in 2003. Healey and Reynolds, ‘Ireland and the Future of Europe’, 75–76.

18. For data regarding the widening inequality in disposable incomes see Nolan, ‘Income Inequality during Ireland's Boom’, Healey and Reynolds, ‘Ireland and the Future of Europe’, and Cullen, ‘Unprecedented Growth’. For data regarding the declining wage share in Ireland's national income in favour of the profit share see , ‘Globalisation, the Celtic Tiger and Social Outcome’ and idem ‘Development Theory and the Celtic Tiger’. Paul Cullen in the Irish Times reports that the UN Human Development Report once again ‘shows that Irish society is one of the most unequal in the Western world’ (‘Statistical Snapshot of a World Divided by Poverty’, 13 October 2004, 3).

19. See O'Riain and O'Connell, ‘The Role of the State in Growth and Welfare’, 313.

20. In 1993 Irish government expenditure on social protection amounted to 20.2 per cent of GDP compared to an EU average of 28.8 per cent; by 2000 that figure had fallen to 14.1 per cent of GDP compared to an EU average of 27.3 per cent. See Kirby, ‘The Irish State and the Celtic Tiger’, 15. See also Healy and Reynolds, ‘Ireland and the Future of Europe’, 74.

21. For measures of the extent to which poverty rates have risen in Ireland to the point where these are amongst the highest in the EU, see Nolan, ‘Income Equality’, Healy and Reynolds, ‘Ireland and the Future of Europe’, and Cullen, ‘Unprecedented Growth’. In its review of the Combat Poverty report on 25 April 2005, ‘Social Spending Criticised’, the Irish Times stated that ‘despite strong economic growth, Ireland continues to be among the nations with the lowest social spending and so continues to have one of the highest poverty rates’ (p. 8).

22. Fagan: ‘Ireland can still arguably be seen as a “third world” country in terms of its conditions of structural dependency on the central locus of power in the era of globalisation (‘Globalised Ireland’, 116). A similar point is made by O'Hearn in The Atlantic Economy, 49.

23. O'Faolain's influential biography The Great O'Neill, on which Friel draws heavily for material, states that O'Neill came closer than any other Irishman in history to the ‘cold pragmatism of the Renaissance mind’ (p. 129). The historian Micheline Walsh also refers to O'Neill as a ‘Renaissance Prince’ (An Exile of Ireland, 2).

24. The historical Hugh O'Neill had four wives but Friel chooses to focus on Mabel Bagenal, the only wife who was connected with the system with which O'Neill was in conflict.

25. Fogarty, citing Micheline Walsh, points out that Friel's account of O'Neill is at variance with the historical record. O'Neill did not die a broken man but continued to work actively for the Irish cause. Fogarty suggests that the ‘deviation’ from history is Friel's method of deheroicising O'Neill, but it could be that the deviation is designed to bring O'Neill closer to a Hamlet-like tragic heroic figure (‘The Romance of History’, p. 27).

26. Friel, Making History, 34. Subsequent references will appear in parentheses in the text.

27. Reviews of the play's first production tended to point to the deheroicisation of O'Neill; see, for example, Desmond Rusde, ‘Great O'Neill Cut to Size’, Irish Independent, 22 September 1988, p.8. McGrath disapproves of Friel's portrayal of O'Neill which, in his view, compares unfavourably with O'Faolain's: ‘Despite Friel's modelling on O'Faolain, his own O'Neill is more two dimensional. In general O'Faolain's The Great O'Neill portrays a much more complex, less sentimentalised O'Neill than Friel's Making History’ (Brian Friel's (post) Colonial Drama, 219). O'Neill ‘appears as a distracted romantic who agonizes over his divided loyalties more like a brooking adolescent rather than as a hard-bitten, ironic Renaissance man of the world’ (p. 230).

28. See Murray, ‘Brian Friel's Making History’, 63–64.

29. O'Toole, ‘a play [Making History] which is, at its centre, about the impossibility of writing, is also a play which doesn't get written, which argues itself into submission’ (‘Marking Time’, 211).