WHETHER or not you concur with the ‘truism’ outlined above, it certainly seems to have become commonplace to claim that tragicomedy and Ireland are thoroughly enmeshed. Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, as the full title announces, is A Tragicomedy in Two Acts; many of Brian Friel's plays, not to mention recent international theatre hits such as Marie Jones's Stones in his Pockets or Martin McDonagh's The Beauty Queen of Leenane, have been described, in both critical study and newspaper review, as tragicomic; Verna Foster's recent study of the genre includes discussion of eight examples of modern tragicomedy, three of which – Playboy of the Western World, The Plough and the Stars, Waiting for Godot – are by Irish writers.

In what follows, I want to try to resist a very strong temptation: that of making a historical necessity of a modern critical commonplace, offering a national history of this particular genre, and tracing the links between Ireland and tragicomedy back to a seventeenth-century point of origin. Such a point could be plotted as being located somewhere at the intersection of the two small, productive, though very differently constituted, literary circles which formed around John Ogilby and his Dublin theatres: first the Werburgh Street Theatre, established with the approval of the Viceroy, Wentworth, in the 1630s; and second, the later Smock Alley Theatre, established at the Restoration when Charles II appointed Ogilby his official Master of the Irish Revels.