Chapter 4 investigates the social and political possibilities opened up by the (re)emergence of counter-modern modes of embodiment in the midst of a prominent institution of modernity: a national theatre. It argues that the apparently illegible behavioural patterns of the characters ‒ in The Playboy of the Western World, especially ‒ may be read as tangible traces of forms of embodiment that are incommensurate to modernity. While Synge’s dramatic writing sometimes flirts with stereotypical representations of the Irish body, it does so in order to better submit such representations to critical reappraisal. These forms of embodiment actualize alternative ways of being that both the colonial state and the proponents of middle-class, anti-colonial nationalism strove to suppress. The wild physicality associated with cultural practices, such as keening or faction fighting, stands in sharp contrast to the hegemonic and early twentieth century conception of the modern body. In Synge’s plays, these other expressions of corporeality offer traces of an alternative to the modernity of the (Abbey) theatre as an institution. They register the enduring recalcitrance of peasant popular culture and of ways of being that exist athwart modernity. In this, they allow for a vestigial survival and dissemination of alternative social and cultural possibilities.

This chapter focuses on the ‘Irish’ plays of Dion Boucicault who dominated the world of nineteenth-century anglophone theatre with commercial and critical successes in London, New York and Dublin. His crowd-pleasing melodramas rejected the crude stereotype of the Stage Irishman and provided positive protagonists for his global Irish audiences, while always remaining alert to the commercial imperative. However, in the period of the Literary Revival Boucicault’s plays were seen as perpetuating an image of Ireland as ‘the home of buffoonery and easy sentiment’. Brian Friel’s later equation of Boucicault’s plays with pantomime continued this dismissal of the playwright and none of his work was performed at the Abbey until 1967. Since the publication of David Krause’s Dolmen Press Boucicault in 1964, he has been regarded in more positive, if complex terms and, as Fintan O’Toole argues, if you exclude Boucicault ‘you begin to seriously distort the nature of what the theatrical canon might be’.

John Henry Johnstone (1749–1828), sometime cavalryman, promiscuous lover and Dublin tenor, spent the best part of forty years on the legitimate London stage, playing everything from Lucy in a cross-cast Beggars’ Opera to both ‘genuine’ and comic Stage Irish roles. Though deemed ‘most unmusical’ by Haydn, his greatest cultural influence was as a singer, particularly of ‘Irish’ songs. This chapter examines the figure of Johnstone as a cross-media production of Irishness, focusing upon these songs and their dissemination.

Cox Jensen’s essay is a rejoinder to Davis’s positive reading of Johnstone’s career and contends that the gradual fixing of this identity largely represented a diminution of Johnstone, subsumed within a role determined beyond the sphere of his own agency. Linking the growing consensus that Johnstone was the Stage Irishman to factors ranging from vocal technique to an association with the ‘poor Irish’ of London’s Seven Dials, Cox Jensen nuances recent accounts of the positive appropriation of Irishness, exploring the intermedial means by which the English cultural economy muffled and managed this most sonorous of Irish voices. Read in tandem with Davis’s piece, the essay gestures towards the spectrum of interpretative positions available when considering the resilience and authority of theatrical stereotypes.

Actresses performing as Irish characters on the eighteenth-century London stage embodied the contradictions of national identity during the Irish Enlightenment. Playwright and actress Kitty Clive was the first to claim an ‘Irish-English’ identity and to turn topsy-turvy the notion of Irish inferiority. The chapter argues that more than their male counterparts, these actresses and the characters they played often served as intermediaries across gender, class, national and religious divides. The various parts for Irish women, largely comic, ranged from peasants and labourers to boisterous widows and would-be aristocrats. The most notable recurrent Irish characters are the cross-dressed and travestied women who perform roles that reveal fixed assumptions about gender and national identity and often expose English hypocrisy. Examples include Ann Barry in Garrick’s Irish Widow cross-dressed as her soldier brother; Margaret Doyle as Patrick in Holcroft’s Seduction; and Maria Macklin’s several roles playing a man or dressed as one, especially in her father Charles Macklin’s The School for Husbands. These women employed popular stereotypes but also attempted on occasion to empty them of their power. They are thus exemplary of the plight of immigrants who seek to assimilate while maintaining a distinct identity.