Drama out of a crisis: James Connolly’s Under Which Flag (1916) and Teresa Deevy’s The Wild Goose (1936)

ABSTRACT

A distinctive strategy of remembrance in Irish historical drama is the depiction of a current crisis through allusion to another traumatic passage in the deep or recent past. In this essay we examine two relatively neglected Irish plays staged twenty years apart which were produced at key moments of reversal and reflection, and which concentrate on female agency, the cyclical Irish curse of betrayal, anxieties of masculinity, and the clash of morality and law. James Connolly’s Under Which Flag? (1916) and Teresa Deevy’s The Wild Goose (1936) are exemplary instances of how Irish historical drama approaches crisis and commemoration. In each case, by returning respectively to the Fenian Rising of 1867 and events surrounding the Treaty of Limerick of 1691, Connolly and Deevy are able to argue for the continuity of crisis in ways that avoid the fatalism that characterises less nuanced forms of dwelling on and in the past.

KEYWORDS:

• James Connolly
• Teresa Deevy
• Easter 1916
• Treaty of Limerick
• historical drama
• colonialism

Deevy’s wild goose chase: sauce for the gander?

Was it for this the wild geese spread

The grey wing upon every tide;

For this that all that blood was shed … ?¹

It is impossible to read “September 1913” and “Easter, 1916” separately. They are caught up in a cycle of incitement and invocation. Yet in thinking of crisis and commemoration as inseparable we may miss some nuance. As the Decade of Centenaries draws to a close it is worth recalling that for one contemporary commentator the crisis that Unionists faced in 1913 was the prospect of “Gladstonian semi-Separatism […] or some newer doctrine of Federalism.”² According to Guy Beiner, “historical investigations of modern memory need to take into account deep memories embedded in traditions that predate remembered events.”³ In Irish dramatic history, the theatre of remembrance is complicated by the inevitable tendency to engage with past occasions of national crisis, and with the close ties between the Irish theatre and politics, in which the events of the stage spill onto the streets, and vice versa. Irish writers have a habit of reaching back behind a particular crisis to remind readers that we have been here before, often on the eve of yet another crisis. Earlier events offer a model and a means to understand more recent episodes. They can provide an aspect of distance for clearer perspective, but they can also encourage the sense of “nothing but the same old story.” In the case of Irish literature, there is a long tradition of setting the historical scene at a moment of danger that resonates, however obliquely or allegorically, with other crisis-points. Seamus Heaney’s “Requiem for the Croppies” is a case in point.⁴ Written, as the poet recalled “when most poets in Ireland were straining to celebrate the anniversary of the 1916 Rising […] the harvest of seeds sown in 1798,” it is an example of a writer addressing one anniversary – the fiftieth of the Easter Rising – by looking back at earlier events.⁵ In a different way, Eavan Boland looks back to the Great Hunger to comprehend the personal female crisis of barrenness in “The Famine Road” (1975), in an instance of another poet taking an unexpected approach to commemoration. However, playwrights have proven particularly adept at combining the backward glance with a sidelong look. If Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars (1926) is an example of the type of theatre that can arise from the dramatisation of a contested commemoration then a distinctive strand or strategy of remembrance in Irish historical drama is the decision to represent a current crisis through allusion to a former and formative passage in history. The near or distant past serves as a foil for the dramatic depiction of a present crisis. Earlier efforts at historical drama include Standish O’Grady’s Hugh Roe O’Donnell (1902), Henry Connell Mangan’s Robert Emmet (1903), and the group of Jacobite plays to which Deevy’s The Wild Goose belongs that encompasses Douglas Hyde’s King James/Rí Séamus (1903), Lady Gregory’s The White Cockade (1905), and Christine Longford’s Patrick Sarsfield, which premiered at the Gate Theatre on 25 May 1943.⁶ More recent efforts include Thomas Kilroy’s The O’Neill (written 1966, first staged 1969, published 1995), Brian Friel’s Making History (1989), Frank McGuinness’s Mutabilitie (1997), and Stewart Parker, Northern Star or (McCracken’s Night Thoughts) (performed 1984, published 2000), all examples of writers ruminating on present predicaments through the crisis of the late Elizabethan period or, in Parker’s case, revisiting 1798, drawing parallels between actions and events in that era and their own. Frank McGuinness, in Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme (1986), and Christina Reid with Tea in a China Cup (1983) draw upon the more recent past and the reflection of international crisis points on the individual, and the intrusiveness of past on present, in the male and female spheres of influence respectively. Shaw’s Saint Joan (1923) might seem something of an outlier, but it speaks to the time as powerfully as any other historical drama, while Mary Devenport O’Neill’s verse-play Bluebeard (1933) answered Yeats’s call for a lyrical theatre. For playwrights, the act of stepping outside their period in a time of crisis is fraught with difficulties. Does distance offer safety or render the truth of experience harder to attain? Ruud van den Beuken has shown how Micheál MacLiammóir’s pageant The Ford of the Hurdles (1929) and “A National Morality Play” (1932), an audacious proposal for a large-scale piece of street theatre in the form of a re-enactment of the Easter Rising by Denis Johnston (writing as E. W. Tocher), offer different snapshots of the challenge of depicting recent history in the wake of Sean O’Casey’s controversial The Plough and the Stars (1926).⁷

In this essay, we propose to look at two relatively neglected Irish plays staged twenty years apart which were produced at key moments of crisis and reflection, and which concentrate on female agency, the cyclical Irish curse of betrayal, anxieties of masculinity and the clash of morality and law. James Connolly’s Under Which Flag (1916) and Teresa Deevy’s The Wild Goose (1936) are exemplary dramas of crisis and commemoration. In each case, by returning respectively to the Fenian Rising of 1867 and the Treaty of Limerick of 1691, Connolly and Deevy are able to argue for the continuity of crisis in ways that avoid the fatalism that characterises less nuanced forms of dwelling on and in the past. In a recent contribution to Irish studies David Lloyd homed in on imaginary encounters on significant dates in order to challenge and disrupt our sense of history and/as commemoration.⁸ Here we are doing something different – looking at how two historical plays revisited and revised key events in Irish history.

Teresa Deevy provides a link between the foundational drama of Lady Gregory and the work of Marina Carr.⁹ More immediately, her work is part of a contemporary flowering of female playwrights.¹⁰ The emergence of women dramatists on the national scene was heralded by Lady Gregory and by innovative work like Eva Gore-Booth’s The Buried Life of Deirdre (1908, published in 1930). The Wild Goose, Deevy’s final play at the Abbey, is set in the wake of the Battle of the Boyne and the Treaty of Limerick, signed on 3^rd October 1691, which marked the cessation of the Williamite Wars and the flight of the wild geese.¹¹ The crisis facing Irish Catholics is one that manifests itself, for the would-be wild geese at least, as a choice between stay and suffer or leave and fight abroad.¹² Produced by Hugh Hunt, Deevy’s play opened on Monday 9 November 1936 and ran for six nights. It was to be the last play by a woman to be staged at that theatre until Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats … (1998).¹³

In The Wild Goose Martin Shea has to choose between three institutions – church, army and marriage – at a time of crisis. This three-way struggle is played out across the three acts. The first option, the priesthood, means becoming a fugitive, like Father Ryan. The second, an option urged by his Aunt Mary, encompasses exile and fighting in France with the Irish Brigade. The third, marriage to local woman Eileen Connolly, entails domesticity but more than that it makes Martin subject to the English crown and to the armed forces garrisoned in his neighbourhood. He has to present himself regularly at the barracks, a prospect that fills him with loathing, as do the occupying forces: “I never knew good to come from speech with an Englishman” (179). None of these avenues appeals to Martin. The themes of this historical drama are familiar from Deevy’s other work – entrapment, isolation and disempowerment – but this time the main protagonist is male.¹⁴ Deevy is also, like other modern Irish playwrights, using history as allegory to say something about the present-day. As Eibhear Walshe notes:

Deevy was engaged in certain of her plays with finding parallels in Irish history for contemporary cultural debates. In particular, the clash between the philosophical basis for European Catholicism and the insular nature of Irish nationalism interested her.¹⁵

The Treaty of Limerick is alluded to early in the play when Martin tells Eileen that a friend, Sean O’Neill, “was there when they signed the treaty.” Eileen responds angrily: “They were fools to sign! Sure they might know the English wouldn’t keep their word” (156). It is impossible to read this exchange without thinking of another treaty, that of 1921 which enshrined partition and the “carnival of reaction” that James Connolly had feared when such a separation of the island was first proposed.¹⁶ Eileen is equally sceptical about the wild geese. When Martin declares that “Out of fourteen hundred, seven men only chose the English banner,” Eileen retorts, “Great good it will do us – fourteen hundred dying out there in France” (157). Martin counters: “The first thing we must do is to break the power of England – whether here or in France … We must lift ourselves up” (157). Eileen, like her namesakes, trusts neither treaties nor foreign wars. She is sharp, too, on the gendered nature of colonialism, the way it structures masculinity through violence and repression, and the way it squeezes women out of the frame, as when she speaks to her friend Hannah Power:

EILEEN. We count for nothing at all with them. They think only of what they’ll do with their lives.HANNAH. And a lot they can do. There’s no life for a man in Ireland now. (204)

There’s no life for Martin; that becomes clear as his options narrow and he threatens violence against the English officer, De Lacey, who embodies the oppressor and rejects Eileen’s caution that it won’t stop the English from burning Irish homes: “It’ll show that a bully gets his due! And if the law’s against us we’ll take the law into our own hands” (207). But the dilemma around stay and suffer or flee and fight is challenged by Stephen’s wife Hannah:

Stephen says ‘tis the next generation will thank the men that go to-day. (Silence.) What do I care for the next generation?

(210)

This is ironic insofar as Hannah and Stephen have a child, Sean Beg, and are thus literally raising the next generation.

Martin, according to Cathy Leeney, “chooses to abandon family and community,” but this overlooks the fact that France has become an alternative scene of family and community, as well as a site of resistance.¹⁷ The Wild Goose was broadcast by BBC Northern Ireland on 5 January 1939, by which time the context of the Irish fighting in foreign fields was about to change yet again.¹⁸ In Deevy’s play, Martin mocks himself when the story of a beating he takes at the hands of the English soldiers is reframed as an act of heroism: “Sarsfield wasn’t in it! … They were falling back from me in terror!” (196). Told he should be proud for taking a stand, Martin sneers at his friends’ efforts at mythologising: “I have great reason. They take a man and beat him up: they leave him in a heap. He should be proud” (197). Later, Martin reacts violently to Aunt Mary’s suggestion that he would “do great deeds” in France, exclaiming “Like Sarsfield maybe!,” to which Mary replies, “Aye – and why not? and greater than Sarsfield too” (230). Martin’s dilemma now is reduced to home or exile, and when Captain De Lacey turns up to declare the constraints upon his staying in Ireland – to report to barracks and be confined to his immediate neighbourhood – the options narrow.

The story of Patrick Sarsfield is a familiar one of resistance followed by flight, as a state of siege in Limerick gave way to a treaty and then to exile:

Important though the effects of this settlement have been on the history of Ireland, it is enough to say here, without entering into a detailed account, that the victor granted to these last remnants of the Irish army not only the honours of war but also the choice of their fate: they might return home, enter the ranks of the English, or go to France to join their legitimate sovereign, who had taken refuge there after the battle of the Boyne. For Sarsfield, whom James II had just made Earl of Lucan, there could be no hesitation: his sword, pledged to the Stuarts, would continue to serve them in exile.¹⁹

Sarsfield remained a key figure in Irish nationalist ideology throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, often in contexts of conflict, as when the Ancient Order of Hibernians clashed with Orangemen on 4^th of July:

In the summer of 1853, in New York, the Hibernians marched carrying a banner portraying Daniel O’Connell shaking hands with George Washington on one side, and on the other the Irish Catholic Jacobite Patrick Sarsfield along with former US President Andrew Jackson. The parade was attacked by Orangemen at Abingdon Square, leading to a particularly violent riot.²⁰

John Gibney has argued Sarsfield’s status as a symbol of nationalist resistance in modern times, “not as an unbroken tradition, but as an image continuously revived and reshaped at the behest of the present.”²¹ Deevy’s drama is conceivably one such reshaping, and it is one that builds on Connolly’s scepticism about the wild geese. Sarsfield’s star may have been waning under the new lights in the nationalist firmament by the 1930s, which makes Deevy’s revival particularly significant. According to his biographer:

By the time of his death Sarsfield was by far the best known and most loved of all Irishmen. With the exception of the early saints, none of his predecessors or his contemporaries have been written about as much as he has been, and no Irish leader until the times of Wolfe Tone a century later.²²

By choosing to invoke Sarsfield twenty years after the Easter Rising, Deevy was doing what Heaney would later do with “Requiem for the Croppies,” reaching back to an earlier episode in order to interpret a more recent event. As Emily Kader observes, the play’s main protagonist, Martin Shea, has to choose between the “impossible notions of masculinity” implicit in the appeal of the wild geese and “a kind of progressive resistance at home.”²³ The name of the woman whom Martin must choose over exile – Eileen Connolly – is surely a nod to James Connolly. Eileen – like James – sees the struggle at home as paramount. It is likely that Deevy knew of Alice Curtayne’s 1934 study of Sarsfield.²⁴ Her only historical drama is also arguably her most complex play. As one critic remarked, “at least three plays could have been written out of the material in The Wild Goose.”²⁵

According to one estimate over 200,000 “Wild Geese” served in the French armies of Louis XIV and Louis XV.²⁶ This was the largest movement of people into France, and, before the famine, the largest movement of people out of Ireland. As one military historian observed at this moment of crisis:

Under the Treaty of Limerick, signed on October 3rd, 1691, [General Godert De] Ginckel guaranteed full religious liberty and the restoration of their confiscated property to all who should swear allegiance to King William, while recusants had the option of withdrawing to France. More than 11,000 spurned most tempting offers from the Dutch general, and left Ireland for ever in a French Squadron, which arrived in the Shannon just too late to raise the siege. Many of the leaders sacrificed brilliant worldly prospects to their loyalty and faith.²⁷

The extent of the Irish contribution to the French wars can be judged by one statistic: “Between 1670 and 1790, some 130,000 disabled and handicapped veterans of the French service were admitted to the HRI [Hôtel Royal des Invalides]. Of these, more than 2,200 were Irish.”²⁸ Martin’s neighbour, Stephen, reflects bitterly: “It do seem to me and I looking round that the best men are going … They’re for leaving the country, the best men are … ” (199). Stephen’s conclusion is echoed by Martin as flight and fight are fused in his mind and service with the Irish Brigade on the continent beckons: “It is only out there we can fight the English” (214).

Deevy may have found a different drama had she delved into the story of the Irish women who followed the men to France:

As wives, single parents, guardians of orphaned relatives and elderly parents, and godmothers, young girls and women played an important role in maintaining a high level of cohesion within the first- and second-generation Irish jacobite émigré community in Saint-Germain and Paris especially. More significantly, by ensuring that they made the best provision possible for the education of the children in their care, the wives, daughters and mothers of Irish jacobite soldiers were instrumental in facilitating the gradual assimilation of this émigré population in French society.²⁹

Deevy’s title is certainly not neutral, because “the wild geese is a phrase used to make ideological capital out of late seventeenth century and eighteenth century Irish history.”³⁰ But it is also political in another way, “a deliberate singularising of the familiar historical term ‘wild geese’ to suggest the dilemma of individual identity at this turbulent time.”³¹

Emily Kader has suggested that Deevy’s play “reveals her disparaging assessment of contemporary 1930s Irish politics,” but does not push this further than a general comment on clerical conservatism.³² If one context for The Wild Goose is the twentieth anniversary of the Easter Rising and James Connolly’s insistence on prioritising the struggle at home, another context for Deevy’s play can be found in the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War which gave rise to wild geese on different wings and “set off a series of dynamic and emotive ideological struggles in Irish politics.”³³ Despite the Fianna Fáil Government’s non-intervention strategy, pro-Franco and anti-fascist volunteers headed for Spain, Eoin O’Duffy’s Irish Brigade on one side, Frank Ryan and the Connolly Column on the other. According to Fearghal McGarry, for the Irish Independent newspaper a “favoured tactic” at the time “was the publication of features on subjects such as the ‘wild geese’ and the Irish College in Salamanca which emphasised the historic Catholic relationship between both countries. The involvement of Eoin O’Duffy’s Irish Brigade in Franco’s army was presented as part of this tradition.”³⁴ Exploiting the “wild geese” mythos to support pro-Franco recruitment could prove an albatross as well as an inspiration: “During the early autumn recruiting continued amid a blaze of publicity, not always favourable even by the insurgents’ Irish advocates who found no romance in the legend of the wild geese dying in exile for alien causes.”³⁵ It was a time of strange bedfellows and odd alliances, as one commentator observes: “As an example of the universal attraction of the Irish Brigade, Brendan Kielty of Belfast, a long time member of the militant Republican movement and an I.R.A. man, joined O’Duffy, went to Spain, and returned to Ireland to rejoin the I.R.A.”³⁶ As Pete Jackson points out:

While the Fianna Fáil government remained neutral, the opposition and virtually all the press were vociferously pro-Franco. Only the radical left offered any cohesive support for the government in Spain. A Spanish Aid Committee was formed by leading members of the republican, socialist and Communist movements. Hanna Sheehy Skeffington was chairwoman, and other members included John Swift, Nora Connolly O’Brien, Dorothy Macardle, Ernie O’Malley and Fr Michael O Flanagan.³⁷

The stakes were high on both sides:

An estimated nine hundred Irishmen fought in this ideologically-charged conflict, and they could be found on both sides of the bitter divide. In fact, one scholar has claimed that the Spanish Civil War even served as a prolongation, or proxy, or extension of an ongoing Irish civil war; to underscore this point, he notes that one Irish company in the service of the republicans in Spain named itself after James Connolly […] The Irish Christian Front used conditions in Spain as a bludgeon to attack Prime Minister Eamon de Valera‘s government’s neutrality and to score points with the populist right-wing at home; oddly, the Irish Catholic church advocated much more strongly for Franco than did its Spanish counterpart.³⁸

Eileen’s cry in The Wild Goose must have resonated with contemporary pro-Franco propaganda: “They shot Father Ryan! The shot him dead!” (217). Her sobbing figure crouched over the dead priest brings the curtain down on the second act. The third act opens fourteen months later with word of Martin’s failed attempt to follow in Father Ryan’s footsteps, his flawed reasoning skewered by Stephen: “Going off to be a priest for that they shot Father Ryan!” (219). Aunt Mary prays that he is leaving the priesthood for the Irish Brigade: “You’ll be taking wing for France. Is that so, Martin?” (229). Having tried the priesthood Martin now attempts marriage, but the colonial conditions of his home life press upon his mind until he resolves to go to France having concluded: “What’s being done for this land is being done abroad” (238). Now Mary finds herself on the other side of the argument: “You can’t go now: you haven’t the freedom: you must give some thought to your wife […] You took your choice – abide by it now” (239). Tim O’Dowd, the suitor Eileen rejected for Martin, would have stayed at home to love, rather than go abroad to fight: “She’d have done better to have me so. It isn’t with other people I’d spend my evenings. I wouldn’t be thinking of going to France … Let all the world join the Brigade” (242). Once Martin decides to join the Brigade he turns on Eileen and threatens Eileen with violence, prompting Hannah to cry out: “Martin! you that were gentle!” (245). The final scene between Martin and Eileen recalls Jack Clitheroe and Nora in O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars ten years earlier. As Eileen clings to him and pleads for him to stay Martin tries to break free, saying “What is there before my sons if I stop here? But if I go –,” and Eileen interrupts: “If you go you won’t have any sons by me! I won’t live to bear them! I’ll drown myself!” (247). Despite her pleading Martin’s mind is made up. Eileen tries one last time before her husband stops her with a kiss: “Martin, it is lies they tell you with their talk of France! Don’t you believe them. You’d be no better off out there” (249). There are echoes here of Nora’s plea to Jack in The Plough and the Stars (John Ford’s film adaptation would appear at the end of 1936). As Martin goes marching off with the Brigade it is Hannah who has the last word, an echo of the ending of Playboy of the Western World: “They’re gone! They’re gone!” Written at a time when a new generation of wild geese were heading off to Spain to fight on opposing sides, The Wild Goose is a play that riffs on Synge and O’Casey as well as Connolly and Yeats. The story of the wild geese was given a further twist with the staging of Christine Longford’s play about Sarsfield in 1943, to mark the 250^th anniversary of his death.³⁹ Set in Dublin Castle in April 1690 and in Limerick Castle, August 1690-August 1691, Longford’s wartime effort ought to be read alongside Deevy’s as distinctive examples of female playwrights engaging with the historical play.

James Connolly provides a direct link with Deevy’s depiction of the Jacobite-Williamite struggles played out in Ireland, as his Labour in Irish History opens by lamenting the fact that the Irish have been caught up in foreign wars when they should have been fighting for their own freedom. Connolly’s view of the Williamite wars and their aftermath was that Irish fighters were merely enabling competing Anglo-Dutch and Anglo-Scottish claims to Ireland: “Connolly […] regarded it as one of the greatest tragedies of Irish history that Irish men and women, who fought in opposing armies, would die in order to seat a foreign King on the throne.”⁴⁰ Eileen Connolly’s argument at the close of The Wild Goose echoes that of her namesake, for as James Connolly maintained in Labour in Irish History, foreign wars were not the road to Irish freedom but the means by which Ireland’s aspirations to liberty were derailed:

Modern Irish History properly understood may be said to start with the close of the Williamite Wars in the year 1691. All the political life of Ireland during the next 200 years draws its colouring from, and can only be understood in the light of that conflict between King James of England and William, Prince of Orange. Our Irish politics, even to this day and generation, have been and are largely determined by the light in which the different sections of the Irish people regarded the prolonged conflict which closed with the surrender of Sarsfield and the garrison of Limerick to the investing forces of the Williamite party. Yet never, in all the history of Ireland, has there been a war in which the people of Ireland had less reason to be interested either on one side or the other.⁴¹

And there are other connections. Like Deevy, Connolly was directly influenced by Yeats and Lady Gregory’s Cathleen Ni Houlihan. Both Connolly and Deevy presented a particular dilemma around standing one’s ground at home versus fighting a foreign war. Deevy’s take on martyrdom is different from that espoused in Cathleen Ni Houlihan:

Where Yeats’s play is about heroic self-annihilation, Deevy’s concerns an attempt at self-definition and exploration. Throughout The Wild Goose, Deevy places the Yeatsian idea of masculine heroism under siege and illustrates it as a negative, absurd, and anachronistic notion that weighs on Martin and contributes to his sense of claustrophobia.⁴²

As Cathy Leeney observes, there is a triple play at work in Deevy’s drama: “In The Wild Goose the terms of the conflict are much more overtly between the public or political, and the personal, although it is a triangular grid upon which the possible futures of religion, patriotism and marriage are drawn.”⁴³ Martin Shea’s choice is not between home and abroad, but between patriotism (the Irish Brigade in France), the priesthood (following in the footsteps of the play’s fiery Father Ryan), or marriage (to Eileen Connolly). In this respect Deevy surpasses both Yeats and O’Casey with their binaries of domesticity versus conflict.⁴⁴ Martin is by turns wooed by and worried by the church: “I don’t know are the priests worse for us than the English. They’d have us meek: they’d keep us down” (197). For Claire Gleitman, the best Irish history play occupies the ground “between the reassuring power of a static and self-affirming view of the past, and the more various, conflicting, confounding and endlessly contestable stories which combine to form that fluid phenomenon we call ‘history.’”⁴⁵ Teresa Deevy’s The Wild Goose belongs in that class.

Nailing Connolly’s colours to the mast

Gone! They are gone where countless thousands of the Irish race went before them, where it may be countless more will go after them. They are gone to fight for Ireland, gone to give their hearts’ blood if need be that poor Mother Erin might be a nation among the nations of the earth. The Irish Republican Brotherhood has sent out the call and all over Ireland in this March night the true sons of Erin are once more marching out to battle. They are gone. The boys are all gone!⁴⁶

On 8^th January 1897, James Connolly contributed an article entitled “Nationalism and Socialism” to the nationalist monthly magazine The Shan Van Vocht, voicing his belief that “Nationalism without Socialism – without a reorganisation of society on the basis of a broader and more developed form of that common property which underlay the social structure of Ancient Erin – is only national recreancy,” alongside his fear that the “neglect of vital living issues” would bring about “a worship of the past, or crystallising nationalism into a tradition – glorious and heroic indeed, but still only tradition,” or worse, “a morbid idealising of the past.”⁴⁷ In a weighted warning, Connolly resisted the potential for commemoration to act as a distraction from contemporary issues and instead invoked history as impetus to provoke material change. Such was the purpose of Under Which Flag?, set in March 1867, the month and year of the Fenian Rising, a play written in the knowledge of the upcoming rebellion, with its rousing cry to the audience to respond to the call and fight for Ireland. While some pre-1916 working-class plays like Andrew Patrick Wilson’s Victims and The Slough, and the post-Rising work of Sean O’Casey addressed the present in scathing terms, Connolly joined those dramatists who dipped into the past for precedents and lessons.⁴⁸ Ben Levitas sees Connolly’s play as part of an emerging social realist tradition with an agitprop edge:

Under Which Flag? […] offered nothing red in a clear choice of national colours. Connolly predictably showed a gift for humorous dialogue, and pointedly warned off any potential informers in the audience. But what is interesting about this play, set in ’67, is that though it finished as an upbeat example of propaganda […] it was in fact suddenly thoroughly realist, with an almost ironic topicality: history itself was about to become propaganda.⁴⁹

First performed on 26^th March 1916 at Liberty Hall, Dublin, by the Irish Workers Dramatic Company, Under Which Flag? functioned as an anti-recruiting play, a commemorative drama, and a call to arms at a crisis point in Irish history and in Connolly’s own endeavours, epitomised by the speech by Dan McMahon which heads this section. Not only had Connolly come to an agreement with the Irish Republican Brotherhood regarding plans for rebellion, but the Irish Citizen Army had been forced into a defensive manoeuvre to protect against the seizure of their printing press.⁵⁰ As the actors spoke their lines onstage, the ICA mobilised, and as James Moran notes, “with guards on the roof of Liberty Hall, the audience found immediate relevance in the actors’ promises of resistance to British rule.”⁵¹ For this drama in particular, the line between street and stage was blurred from the beginning and contrary to Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel’s argument that “Under Which Flag? represents the changes in ideology that James Connolly underwent from 1898 to 1916,” the crisis of commemoration, and the intertwining of these two strands of thought, can be traced back to the publication of “Nationalism and Socialism.”⁵² More recently, Ritschel detects a Shavian shadow cast over Under Which Flag?, with Connolly drawing on John Bull’s Other Island (1904) and O’Flaherty, V. C. (1915).⁵³

In the same edition of The Shan Van Vocht, the political verse “Soldiers for Ireland: (A Song of ‘67’)” by “Ned of the Hill” was published, commemorating the Fenian Rising.⁵⁴ The appeal of 1867 as a setting for Under Which Flag? is evident, as is Connolly’s decision to make the character of Dan McMahon a veteran of an earlier insurrection in 1848.⁵⁵ Every crisis brings commemoration in its wake. The Fenian Rising was chronologically the most recent rebellion in Irish history, to which Easter 1916 would prove the successor. It functioned as a cautionary tale, having failed through disorganisation and infiltration. It could be argued that its aims as outlined in the “Proclamation of the Irish Republic 1867” chimed closely with Connolly’s own values. In Labour in Irish History, Connolly argues that “Fenianism was a responsive throb in the Irish heart to those pulsations in the heart of the European working class which elsewhere produced the International Working Men’s Association.”⁵⁶ How persuasive Connolly’s argument is remains a matter of debate. David Howell concluded that “Connolly’s attempts to relate Fenianism to expanding working class organisation, both within Ireland and internationally, provide only suggestive but misleading signposts.”⁵⁷ Howell acknowledges that “it is easy to show that the movement’s support came from urban workers, rural labourers, poor farmers plus some who had risen into the lower middle class,” but insists that “it does not follow that their support was based on more than a desire for national independence.”⁵⁸ The desire for material change could be fuelled by social and economic concerns and find expression in the national struggle. There are distinct parallels between song and story in Connolly’s play. “Soldiers of Ireland: (A Song of ’67)” is set to the older Irish tune “Carrigdhoun,” also known as “The Lament of the Irish Maiden,” written by Denny Lane (1818–1895), who was interned after the Young Irelander of 1848, much like Connolly’s Dan McMahon who, we are told, “Lost his eyesight in prison whilst serving a sentence for being ‘out’ in 1848.”⁵⁹ The layers of commemoration stretch further back into history however as the song “Carrigdhoun” itself deals with the late seventeenth-century flight of the Wild Geese from Ireland, told from the standpoint of a woman left behind who laments “For I’m alone and he is gone” but reiterates her commitment to her love, claiming “I’ll follow you, ma Donal dhu” in the final lines.⁶⁰ “Soldiers of Ireland” continues this sense of a palimpsest of resistance, through lyrics as well as tune:

We read her wrongs a hundred times,

Upon her heath in boyhood’s years;

Of blood, of hate, of Cromwell’s crimes,

And won applause from our compeers.

Of Sarsfield brave, of Owen we read,

With throbbing pulse and cheeks aglow;

Of Brian who for Erin bled

In the bright golden long ago.⁶¹

This knowledge of the past precedes the turn from passive listener to active soldier, moving beyond commemoration to the continuation of the struggle. From the very beginning of Under Which Flag? the sense of the weight of history is present, though it is more recent than “the bright golden long ago.”⁶² The portrait of Robert Emmet on the wall of the O’Donnell cottage (105) invokes the 1798 and 1803 rebellions, and these are reiterated in the choice of nationalist songs in the final act, with stage directions recommending either “The Forging of the Pike” or “John Mitchel” (126), commemorating each rebellion respectively. This difference from the more traditional turn to the distant past invokes a sense of gradual continuity in their place on the stage, from the ephemera of 1798 and 1803, to Dan McMahon, veteran of 1848, who describes his experiences on the eve of the 1867 rebellion in a play that is itself a rehearsal for the Easter Rising. The third verse of “Soldiers of Ireland” reflects on this same period:

And when we grew to manhood proud,

We drilled with comrades in the glen;

Our highest hope – Our Flag for shroud,

Or Freedom – won by armed men.

Think they we heed the craven’s rant –

“Old Ireland’s glories all are o’er,”

We’ll them yet what ‘tis we want,

Our hills bear true men mait-go-leor.⁶³

Under Which Flag? inverts the traditional perspective of the soldier and the certainty of their convictions by utilising the character of Mary O’Neill, a young orphan adopted into the O’Donnell family in rural Ireland who shares a romantic attachment with Frank O’Donnell. Ostensibly, the central conflict is the choice to be made by Frank between the British and Irish flag as he considers enlisting in the British Army for economic reasons. Frank does eventually enlist, only to desert on the eve of the Rising to fight for Ireland at Mary’s urging. Similarly, Mary is faced with the decision of whether to inform on the Fenians but is convinced against this by Dan McMahon. When the boys are called out to fight, she convinces Frank to join them. The structure of the play demonstrates the influence of family, community and experience on the eventual decisions made by Mary and Frank, which is worth noting given the similar position the audience to the play occupied, and this is most overtly voiced in the second act.

Mary, alone and waiting for Frank, begins the scene with a monologue acknowledging the decisions that Frank and his older brother, John, are weighing up for their futures – enlisting in the British army and emigration to America respectively. In doing so, she shows her awareness of the limitations placed upon her by society because of her gender and her frustration with them. Mary’s nonconformity has already been signalled to the audience in the first act. According to James Moran:

Mary is far from a symbol of feminine passivity, obedience, or domesticity. For one thing, she often flirts with Frank, prompting Frank’s parents to worry that they may not be “doing right to let you both in the one house together” […] Whilst Mary’s desire for Frank simmers throughout the play, she never allows herself to be dominated by him, and resists with determination when he tugs at her and insists “come, Mary, dance, let us have this dance together.” Mary also contradicts conservative male expectations by disdaining housework: at the start of the play she proves uninterested in chores and is scolded for being unable to wind wool into a ball.⁶⁴

The ball of wool itself hints at a desire to control her own destiny with its allusion to the threads of fate. There is certainly no passivity in Mary’s speech as she acknowledges: “sure, small blame to him for wanting to see the world. Wish I was a man so that I could do something to make a stir in the world” (116). Her frustration at being left behind is figured through her repeated references to waiting – “keeping me waiting,” “I wish Frank would come” – and her wistful reflection: “Amn’t I the strange girl? If Frank goes to take the Queen’s shilling I may have to wait years for him and here I am grudging to wait a few minutes” (116). The very act of speech is a refusal to wait in silent acceptance and while the songs that intersperse her monologue may initially appear whimsical, closer examination can provide a clearer sense of Mary’s reaction to Frank’s potential enlistment and her own circumstances.

“Cailín deas crúite na mbó” or “the pretty girl milking her cow” deals with the interplay between the girl and the speaker who approaches her, with them decrying all else in favour of her as she lists the reasons against, with the eventual resolution of her doubts – mimicking the interplay between Mary and Frank in the first act and perhaps hinting at a return of her doubts and a wish for certainty about Frank’s commitment.⁶⁵ The second song excerpt is from “The Gallant Hussar,” described by Moran as “an English folk song about a soldier who abandons war for his sweetheart.”⁶⁶ Initially Edward, the soldier, refuses to marry his sweetheart because he is to go to war, but through her persistence is persuaded to forsake war and marry her instead. This is however aided by her financial position, as she has “gold of my uncle’s in store.”⁶⁷ Mary has no such store to draw on, and she begins the tune only to conclude “Ah, well, I’ll not wait any longer” before reaching this verse (116). Unbeknown to Mary and the audience, the British army is the reason for Frank’s absence as he enlists offstage during this time (127). Thus, the drama foreshadows the potential consequences of his decision on his relationship should he continue down that path. Similarly, Mary’s wistful turn to song foreshadows the end of the play, though not exactly as might be expected. The resistance that Moran notes to Frank’s appeal to dance is not just the emotional weight of her new knowledge of the rising but also a rejection of his plea for “this last dance with your bould soger boy” (127). While Frank’s decision to enlist with the British Army separates them, conversely his decision to fight for Ireland brings them together, and is the commitment and proof of love that Mary has hoped for. This is reflected in the stage directions as “Frank grasps Mary’s hands, and then releases them, and holds his own hands up to his eyes. She advances and smoothes his hair with her hands” (129). The progression from Mary’s earlier songs to her decisive action at the conclusion of the play demonstrates the growth of her character as a result of her own trials. It also functions as a progression in Irish theatrical tradition and balladry. Mary is not left to deal with the decision after the fact like the maiden in “Carrigdhoun,” or abandoned and grief stricken like Delia in Cathleen ni Houlihan,⁶⁸ instead she is the one to encourage action despite the potential personal sacrifice on both their parts.

The beginning of Act 2 therefore conveys Mary’s concerns and desires to the audience, laying the groundwork for the critical decisions she must make throughout the rest of the play. While waiting for Frank, she discovers the Fenians secretly practicing their manoeuvres in preparation for the upcoming rising. That the discovery of this secret initially presents itself as a positive opportunity to Mary is a direct result of her restricted circumstances caused by the societal expectations associated with her gender and her economic position, combined with her naivety over the potential consequences of her actions. Unlike Frank or John, Mary is afforded no way “to make a stir in the world” (116). Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel comments on Mary’s perceived lack of agency:

While at first glance this sentence does not testify to it, Connolly was one of the strongest supporters of women’s rights among male militant nationalists. Perhaps the sentence is meant to underscore the sense of entrapment that women faced within the male-dominated society of the time – whether under British rule, or within nationalist or socialist circles.⁶⁹

Rather than a “sense of entrapment” this sentence underpins the reality of the restricted circumstances in which these women lived and the limited opportunities to rise above them, though storytelling is in some respects one of these. More recently, Aidan Beatty detects a disjuncture between Connolly’s prose and his play. In The Reconquest of Ireland, “[t]here was clearly a radical critique of masculinity at work:”

Conversely, […] Under Which Flag […] featured standard conventions of male devotion to the nation and a female character, Mary, who encourages her paramour, Frank, to fight for Ireland thusly: “for love of me and for love of Ireland go out with the boys.” The stage direction describes Frank “straightening himself up” and proclaiming, “I will and you will never need to blush for the boy you sent to fight for Ireland.” Connolly is here accepting masculinist conceptions of the nation’s gendered division of labour, even if he also has Mary state quite openly: “I wish I was a man so that I could do something to put a stir in the world.”⁷⁰

There is much to be said for Moran’s analysis of Mary’s decision-making process through this lens and his conclusion that Mary’s “decision to spy on the rebels is her most significant attempt to escape the usual powerlessness of the Irish female, even though she later comes to regret the fecklessness of this plan.”⁷¹ It may also “grant her some redress for the humiliations that she has previously encountered as a result of her class and gender.”⁷² Moran further argues that Mary’s agency in contemplating treachery can be contrasted with stereotypical characterisations of side-lined female figures offering passive support:

By considering a career as a British informer Mary subverts the gender roles that had been popularised in ballads, cartoons, and melodramas, in which women encouraged men to fight but lacked the ability to affect a military struggle by their own unaided efforts.⁷³

This makes Mary’s eventual determination to keep the secret all the more powerful but the phrasing of this argument raises a particular point that comes across in the characterisation of Mary. At no point does she seem to be actively “considering a career as a British informer” or even aware that her actions would be informing. The character lacks the mercurialness this description implies. Instead her youth and innocence appear to blind her to the wider consequences of her actions and restrict her from envisioning the potential damage to both her community and country. “I’ll run home and tell everybody. By the hokey, this is the great day for me,” is her immediate excited response followed by a childishness to her actions as she “Laughs and skips about” whilst telling Dan, the first person she comes across:

I’ll be the most talked of girl in Ireland after tonight. ‘Tis I will have the whole countryside wild to talk to me. You own little Mary will have all the gentry, and all the polis, and all the people high and low running to see me. (Laughs and skips). Such fun as I will have after tonight.

(117)

This initial reaction suggests gossip or a game, a playfulness at direct odds with the seriousness of the situation that must surely have proved jarring to the audience considering their immediate circumstances. Nevertheless, the point is put forward that naivety or indiscretion can cause grave consequences as much as an informed decision to betray a cause. Thus the intervention of Dan McMahon is critical in providing her (and through her the audience) with an emphatic image of the implications of exactly what it is she intends to do. The commemorative aspect of the play is vital here for its interplay between three different rebellions. The lessons of 1848 are brought to bear on 1867 within the play, but the informed audience member will know that lessons were not learned as historically the 1867 rising repeated them and fell apart through infiltration. The implication is there that the time is past to learn from prior mistakes.

This is perhaps the reason that the dialogue in this section relies heavily on questions on the part of both characters. From Dan, these are often challenging, even aggressive, destroying Mary’s preconceived notions of the result of her actions and stressing this through repetition, his cry, “Do you know? Do you know? Do you know?” (122) carrying the implied answer that she does not. In contrast, Mary echoes his dialogue, his certainty replaced by confusion and fear, reflecting his words back as questions, asking “How should I know?” and “What I was going to do, Dan?” (122). The acquisition of knowledge brings Mary to a new maturity, though it is a painful one wreathed in grief and responsibility, and the scene concludes with her crying out “I won’t. I won’t. I won’t. I’ll die first. I wish I was dead now. (Buries her face in her hands.)” (124). As with Frank in Act 3, on realising the potential consequence of her decision, Mary covers her eyes, as if symbolising that what she perceived was not the reality of the situation.

Mary, like Frank, does not come to this conclusion of her own accord. Both are guided by family to make what the play defines as the right decisions. This factors through from the O’Donnells and Dan McMahon, to Mary, and finally to Frank, demonstrating how this support or persuasion can carry through a community, again of relevance to the audience. The conversation brings experience to bear against innocence, tapping into the Irish melodramatic tradition of the blind man as a figure of knowledge but where in On Baile’s Strand the Blind Man is scared to speak – “I won’t say. I would be afraid to say”⁷⁴ – and places personal gain over collective benefit, his blindness brought about by supernatural means, Dan’s character inverts this. Dan’s blindness is a consequence of his imprisonment for his part in the 1848 Rising – “I was put in prison and it was in prison I got blind” (112) – and results directly from the actions of the informer, rather than any supernatural cause. Samson-like, Dan finds the strength to thwart his enemies. By sharing his experience, he averts a crisis, asking Mary, “Will you send your neighbours’ sons to the English gallows, or to rot in English prisons […] as Finnegan sent me?” (123). When history threatens to repeat itself, the intervention of an informed knowledge of that history halts the cycle from carrying through to a disastrous conclusion. This is the commemoration that Connolly espouses, with education viewed as vital to improved circumstances and the avoidance of repeating old mistakes.

This may be why the interaction between Mary and Dan functions on three different levels – individual, community and country. The scene builds upon Dan’s earlier response when the audience learn of his imprisonment:

“Tis the way of Ireland. We are always worked up over the wrongs of a man or a woman, here an” there, never thinking that the whole country is being wronged, and that until the country has its rights we will all of us suffer wrong.

(112)

Here the narrative distance between dramatist and character feels closest. David Howell reminds us that in Labour in Irish History, Connolly’s analysis of the events of 1848 raises an ongoing difficulty: “Once again, the essential failure is presented as avoidable. He notes the few leaders who saw the need to link broader national demands to the immediate plight of the people.”⁷⁵ This suggests all three aspects must come together. Mary comes to understand the personal damage that would be suffered as her actions would be decried rather than celebrated. “Why would anyone hate me, or curse me, or pray to be rid of me?” (122), she asks, only to learn that it would be the result of her betrayal of the community that raised her, as Dan paints for her a picture of those she would inform on: “hand-cuffed they would be, lying in jail, all the sons and brothers and grandsons of the men and women that you say were kind to you, and loved you, and prayed for you when you were sick, and would have given their hearts’ blood to make you well” (122). The act of informing is further condemned as these men will be “On trial for their life because they tried to learn how to fight to free Ireland. To free Ireland!” (123). Here too the consequences are felt personally and collectively, for if in Cathleen ni Houlihan those who fight “shall be remembered for ever” then in Under Which Flag? Dan warns that the informer’s “memory would be cursed for generations after she was dead” (123). The compassion of the community is rewarded through Mary’s loyalty and affection but the implication is that the three strands are woven together, equally capable of impacting each other for better or worse at a crisis point and while this plays out on a March night in 1867 on the stage, it is brought to an audience on a March night in 1916. Commemoration acts as a coda by which to understand contemporary events, their similarities and differences to that which has come before. Through the fictionalised imagining and its intersection with history as it occurred, Connolly responds to the past and the present by providing a rallying cry and guidance on avoiding prior mistakes on the eve of the Easter Rising of 1916.

Though Mary remains behind, the commemorative setting of the play contrasts with the political activism underway in the ICA, highlighting once more the differences between 1916 and prior risings. Understandably, the fact that the character of Dan McMahon was played by Séan Connolly, an Abbey theatre actor who was the first rebel casualty of 1916, is often raised in criticism of Under Which Flag? but James Moran reminds us of another family connection:

Séan’s sister, Katie Barrett, had also appeared alongside him in the Liberty Hall production of Under Which Flag?, where, despite looking too young for the part, she gave a competent performance as Ellen O’Donnell. When the real-life revolt for Irish independence began in Dublin, Barrett again stood alongside her brother, joining the insurgents at the City Hall garrison.⁷⁶

Barrett joined the Irish Citizen Army at the age of seventeen, and in some respects her taking the step from stage, as a Liberty Player, to street as a revolutionary was a more radical act than that of her brother. As Margaret Ward reminds us: “While women were undoubtedly valuable and valiant fighters within the nationalist movement, one important qualification needs to be kept in mind when reading about their activities: the high points of women’s participation were also moments of exceptional political crisis.”⁷⁷ Such participation proved unsustainable, as Sikata Banerjee observes: “this disruption is temporary and does not really translate into sustained ideas of equality.” For Banerjee

the possibility of using the words and actions of the women of the CB [Cumann na mBan] and the IE [Inghinidhe na hÉireann/Daughters of Erin] to construct a powerful and independent vision of national womanhood was closed off by the Irish Free State’s focus on the chaste and virginal female body, with all its attendant expectations of proper heteronormative female behaviour.⁷⁸

When in Connolly’s drama Ellen O’Donnell remarks of Dan McMahon, “Sure there ‘ud be no living in Ireland if we were all as bitter as him!,” she anticipates Hannah Power’s despairing comment in Deevy’s play twenty years later: “There’s no life for a man in Ireland now” (204). But whereas in Deevy’s play Hannah cannot bring herself to see “us that are married” left behind – “How can they go?,” she says of the husbands – Connolly has Pat O’Donnell, Ellen’s husband, have the last word in this scene: “There ‘ud be no living for the English, anyway,” reinforcing Dan’s lament for “the poor foolish race that we are. Fighting for ever country but our own” (115).

Responding to the outbreak of war in 1914, James Connolly contributed an article entitled “Our Duty in this Crisis” to the Irish Worker (8 August 1914) in which he ranged in a few hundred words across a history of empire and famine and national struggle right up to the events of 1913, arguing that Ireland’s enemies were closer to home:

When it is said that we ought to unite to protect our shores against the “foreign enemy” I confess to be unable to follow that line of reasoning, as I know of no foreign enemy of this country except the British Government and know that it is not the British Government that is meant.⁷⁹

The Decade of Centenaries has, in the wake of decades of censorship and silence, reawakened a fascination with the past in all its richness and complexity, leading to a thorough examination of the politics of commemoration. Of particular relevance to Under Which Flag? is the way in which the centenary of the Easter Rising was marked in a manner more public and politically nuanced than was possible for earlier staging posts such as the 50^th or 75^th anniversaries. As Colin Kidd observed in 2016: “The claims of Easter 1916 – for self-government, for national dignity – are not simply ghostly residues from a bygone age, but retain their purchase on the present.”⁸⁰ Yet the present comes with its own cost-counting, as new drama on refugees and asylum seekers shows. Charlotte McIvor argues that new theatre in Ireland focusing on asylum seekers and migrants, like Sonya Kelly’s How to Keep an Alien: A True Story about Falling in Love and Proving it to the Government (2014), is vital to understanding the relationship between a suppressed past and an equally submerged present, and are part of “the ongoing redefinition of Irish national memory and political community, a process thrown into sharp relief by the present commemorative mode […] They insist that a turn to the past is inseparable from querying the lived political structures of the present.”⁸¹ This emphasis on gender, exclusion, and the politics of the present is something that the plays of Deevy and Connolly discussed here can be seen to address, albeit in ways that are tied to the times of their scripting, setting and staging. Tina O’Toole, in a telling contribution to recent debate, states:

In Ireland, to engage with national conflicts in the early twentieth century was to grapple with gendered norms and expectations, through which modes of patriotic action could be validated or naturalised, but also reinterpreted or condemned. Despite, or perhaps because of this, received ideas about the period tend to reaffirm traditional gender binaries.⁸²

The revaluation that O’Toole calls for is well underway – she cites new or renewed interest in the women of 1916. Certainly, the aim of any critically engaged study of crisis and commemoration must be to ensure that nothing is set in stone in mute memorialising but that past events are rehearsed and debated in order, as O’Toole urges, “to trouble […] complacent versions of our histories.”⁸³

History casts a long shadow, and has a habit of throwing up surprises in response to current preoccupations. Two years before the centenary of the Easter Rising, “[t]he largest recorded re-enactment” in Irish history was staged to mark the millennial centenary of the Battle of Clontarf which had taken place on 23 April 1014: “It was watched by an estimated 60,000 or more spectators on the same weekend that less than 5,000 turned out to witness the annual official state commemoration of Easter 1916.”⁸⁴ The centenary of the Easter Rising helped raise awareness, but there remains a need for the role of women onstage and offstage to be placed centre-stage. Miriam Haughton asked recently “why do the names Pearse and Connolly roll off the tongue of the everyday non-historian in Ireland and not the names [Elizabeth] O’Farrell, [Winifred] Carney, [Julia] Grenan?”⁸⁵ To that trio we might add the name of Margaret Skinnider. There was a thin line between theatre and history. According to Skinnider, the house of the Constance Markiewicz “looked like the wardrobe in a theatre,” and served a double function: “These theatrical costumes were sometimes used for plays put on at the Abbey Theatre, nearby. They served, too, as disguises for suffragettes or labour leaders wanted by the police.”⁸⁶

Skinnider knew the subversive power of theatricality – she famously dressed as a boy to pass as one of the Glasgow Fianna.⁸⁷ With the revival of interest in the women of 1916, and in the active part played by women in Irish history more broadly, including writers like Teresa Deevy, the question of historical drama – history as drama, and drama as history – becomes ever more pressing. Skinnider’s comment on Connolly’s play captures beautifully the close connection between political theatre of history:

Presently news came from Dublin that James Connolly had written a play entitled, Under Which Flag?. We heard also that when it was produced, it had a great effect upon the public. In this play the hero, during the last act, chooses the flag of the republic and the final curtain falls. Some one told Mr Connolly he ought to write another act to show what happened afterwards. His reply was that another act would have to be written by “all of us together.”⁸⁸

When it comes to historical drama, and the ongoing crisis of politics, there is no final curtain, only the briefest of interludes.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Yeats, “September 1913,” 121.

2. See Woods, “The Irish Crisis,” 807.

3. Beiner, “Between Trauma and Triumphalism,” 370.

4. Heaney, Door Into the Dark, 12.

5. Heaney, Preoccupations, 56.

6. For an excellent discussion of the Irish history play see Satake, “The Case for the 1940s-50s Irish Theatre.”

7. van den Beuken, “MacLiammóir’s Minstrel and Johnston’s Morality.”

8. Lloyd, David. “1913–1916–1919.”

9. See Keating, “Fired from the Canon;” Keating, “Marina Carr.”

10. See Lisa Fitzpatrick and Shonagh Hill, Plays by Women in Ireland (1926–33).

11. Deevy, The Wild Goose. Further references by page number in the text.

12. Paradoxically – or perhaps not – this was a time of crisis too for Protestants, a dominant minority in a predominantly Catholic country. Barnard, “Crises of Identity among Irish Protestants 1641–1685.”

13. O’Gorman, “Irish Theatre,” 351.

14. See Maley, “She done Coriolanus at the Convent.”

15. Walshe, “Lost Dominions,” 135.

16. Connolly, “Labour and the Proposed Partition of Ireland.” See also Donnelly, “Ireland in the Imperial Imagination.”

17. Leeney, “Teresa Deevy,” 93.

18. O’Doherty, “Deevy: A Bibliography,” 166.

19. Hume-Weygand, “The Epic of the Wild Geese,” 25.

20. Ó Luain, “The Majority of Our People belong to the Working Classes,” 63.

21. Gibney, “Sarsfield Is the Word,” 77.

22. Wauchope, Patrick Sarsfield and the Williamite War, 1.

23. Kader, “The Critique of Exile in Teresa Deevy’s The Wild Goose,” 128.

24. Curtayne, Patrick Sarsfield. One aspect of Curtayne’s account that would have caught the eye is the claim that women played a key role in the flight of the wild geese and the struggle that preceded it: “Many afterwards averred that it was the intervention of the women turned the tide against the besiegers, and the personal valour of the women of Limerick passed into proverb” (99). But disappointment awaited those women who had been assured of their passage to France with their menfolk: “They had been told that adequate arrangements would be made on the transports for the women-folk and children […] Towards the end of the embarkation, it became obvious that all the women waiting could not be taken on the last ships” (171–2).

25. Jordan, “Teresa Deevy,” 21.

26. Ó Hannracháin, “Who Were the ‘Wild Geese’?,” 105.

27. Skrine, “The Irish Brigade in the Service of France, 1691–1701,” 479.

28. Ó Hannracháin, “Some Wild Geese of the West,” 1.

29. Lyons, “Digne De Compassion,” 75.

30. Murphy, “The Wild Geese,” 27.

31. Walshe, “Lost Dominions,” 141. According to Cathy Leeney, “The play was originally entitled by Deevy Parts Set,” an allusion to the historically determined roles laid out for her protagonist. Leeney, “Themes of Ritual,” 108.

32. Kader, “The Critique of Exile in Teresa Deevy’s The Wild Goose,” 128 n4.

33. McNally, “Fianna Fáil and the Spanish Civil War 1936–1939,” 69.

34. McGarry, “Irish Newspapers and the Spanish Civil War,” 71.

35. Bell, “Ireland and the Spanish Civil War,” 148.

36. Ibid., 148 n27.

37. Jackson, “A Rather One Sided Fight,” 79.

38. Racine, “Irish Soldiers in Spain and Latin America,” 300.

39. Longford, Patrick Sarsfield. Like all Irish history plays there is topicality, as Longford’s wartime drama opens with a woman remarking “there’s always a war somewhere” (1). Later, Sarsfield assures James II: “It’s true our enemies hold the North. But the rest of the country is ours. The Protestants of Dublin have been disarmed, and we have them well in hand” (22). Dion Boucicault and John William Whitbread had addressed the events of this period in earlier dramatic works. See Boucicault, The Rapparee; Whitbread, Sarsfield. On Whitbread’s Sarsfield, see Watt, “Late Nineteenth-century Irish Theatre,” 24–5. History plays set at a safe distance from the present were not free from censorship, and Boucicault’s The Rapparee drew the licenser’s pen: “Also banned was an Irish character’s view of France as a country that was especially attractive ‘for them that found fightin’ to be congenial and life not worth havin,’ unless for the sake of throwin’ it away’.” Stottlar, “A Victorian Stage Censor,” 271.

40. Gallagher, “Irish Partisans,” 72.

41. Connolly, Labour in Irish History, 8.

42. Kader, “The Critique of Exile in Teresa Deevy’s The Wild Goose,” 125.

43. Leeney, “Themes of Ritual,” 107.

44. Cathy Leeney compares The Plough and the Stars and The Wild Goose in “Themes of Ritual,” 111–112.

45. Gleitman, “Reconstructing History in the Irish History Play.”

46. Connolly, “Under Which Flag?,” in Four Irish Rebel Plays, 128.

47. Connolly, “Nationalism and Socialism,” 7. As Catherine Morris notes, this article was commissioned by its editor, Alice Milligan and “Milligan was one of the first women to join Connolly’s Irish Republican Socialist Party and she encouraged her medical student brother Ernest to found the first Belfast branch of this organisation in 1897.” Morris, “A Contested Life,” 111.

48. On the present-minded proletarian drama of the period see Levitas, “Plumbing the Depths.”

49. Levitas, The Theatre of Nation, 225. This would chime with the ghostly imprint of Connolly’s earlier dramatic effort in the form of a dialogue-driven short story. See Dick, Lusk, and Maley. “‘The Agitator’s Wife’ (1894).”

50. For Connolly’s account of the mobilisation see “The Call to Arms.”

51. Moran, “Introduction,” Four Irish Rebel Plays, 22.

52. Ritschel, “James Connolly’s Under Which Flag, 1916,” 68.

53. Ritschel, “Revolutions 1916/1917: Lynd, War Issues, the ITGWU,” in Bernard Shaw, Sean O’Casey, and the Dead James Connolly, 59–104.

54. “Ned of the Hill,” “Soldiers for Ireland: (A Song of ’67),” 19.

55. For an excellent discussion of the disputed links between 1798, 1848, 1867, 1916 and beyond see Maume, “Young Ireland, Arthur Griffith, and Republican Ideology.” Maume’s exploration of the genealogy of “the Irish separatist self-image” (155) is itself now dated, although his closing invitation to keep an open mind on connections across the centuries still holds: “The vast mountain of material produced by the nationalist print culture of the nineteenth century still awaits systematic exploration. Only when we have come to terms with it shall we understand the role of the separatist tradition deriving from Young Ireland in creating a republican citizenry” (174).

56. Connolly, Labour in Irish History, 178.

57. Howell, A Lost Left, 86.

58. Ibid.

59. Connolly, “Under Which Flag?,” in Four Irish Rebel Plays, 105.

60. “Carrigdhoun,” 45.

61. “Soldiers for Ireland,” 19.

62. Ibid.

63. “Soldiers for Ireland,” 19. “Mait-go-léor” means “in abundance.”

64. Moran, Staging the Easter Rising, 23.

65. Moran, Four Irish Rebel Plays, 131 n48.

66. Ibid., 130 n50.

67. “Gallant Hussar,” in Wyatt-Edgell, A Collection of Soldiers Songs, 39.

68. For more on Under Which Flag? and Cathleen ni Houlihan, see Lusk, “Did that play of mine … ?.”

69. Ritschel, “James Connolly’s Under Which Flag, 1916,” 61 n31.

70. Beatty, “Counter-revolutionary Masculinities,” 238. Beatty cites a secondary source but not an edition of the play, although there are two available. See Moran (2007) and Lloyd (2008).

71. Moran, Staging the Easter Rising, 23.

72. Ibid.

73. Ibid., 23–4.

74. Yeats, On Baile’s Strand, 250.

75. Howell, A Lost Left, 84.

76. Moran, Four Irish Rebel Plays, 25.

77. Ward, Unmanageable Revolutionaries, 2.

78. Banerjee, Muscular Nationalism, 91.

79. Berresford Ellis, James Connolly, 237.

80. Kidd, “1916 And All That,” 268.

81. McIvor, “Historical Duty,” 50.

82. Bryan et al, “Ireland’s Decade of Commemorations,” 65.

83. Ibid., 66.

84. Cauvin and O’Neill, “Negotiating Public History in the Republic of Ireland,” 826.

85. Haughton, “Them the Breaks,” 350.

86. Skinnider, Doing My Bit For Ireland, 46.

87. Ibid., 50.

88. Ibid., 74.