Accounts of Irish romanticism have emphasised the centrality of primitivism and antiquarianism. This chapter argues that such accounts should be supplemented by considerations of the urban scene of Irish culture. With a particular emphasis on London, the chapter shows that Irish dramatists, particularly those associated with patriot thought, were keen to embrace urban culture and display their adroit capacity to write in that milieu. It pays particular attention to a 1780s generation of Irish playwrights, well connected to the burgeoning newspaper industry and to Foxite Whiggism, who built on the success of antecedents such as Oliver Goldsmith, Charles Macklin, and others. The chapter considers plays authored by John O’Keeffe, Frederick Pilon, Dennis O’Bryen, James Sheridan Knowles, and Alicia Lefanu.

When Mary Wollstonecraft became a professional writer in 1786 with the publication of Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, London debating societies were routinely discussing issues related to female manners such as “Can that Wife be truly said to love a Husband, who frequently disobeys him?” (yes, but only carried by a small majority) and “Whether it was not false Delicacy which forbid the fair sex making the first advances to the man they love?” (a great majority were against the lady doing so).1 While such societies had previously had a distinct atmosphere of alehouse masculinity, women had been admitted to public debating societies since the late 1770s and began to contribute to debates in 1780, as Mary Thale and Donna T. Andrews have observed.2 As one might imagine, debate topics with a feminine slant often related to questions around marital decorum and female manners, but were not absolutely limited to these issues. Debates on whether women should have a say in general elections, the compatibility of female nature with politics, and the nature of female education also took place. Women were not only allowed to attend and to participate in most debating societies in the early 1780s, they also established female-only societies such as La Belle Assemblée and the Female Parliament. Progress appeared to be considerable since the failure of Charles Macklin’s experiment in the 1750s when he tried to commercialize female participation in his short-lived British Inquisition venture.3 However, the years 1780–81 were the apex of female involvement in these debate forums as public taste declined for such events (perhaps because of the anxieties about social stability provoked by the Gordon riots) and by the end of the decade attitudes toward displays of female rhetorical agency remained decidedly ambivalent: The Times of October 29, 1788 opined that “the debating ladies would be better employed at their needle and thread, a good sempstress being a more amiable character than a female orator.”4 There was considerable resistance to female participation in rational-critical debate, but issues of interest to women were now nonetheless firmly part of public discourse and, as Thale has observed, these debating societies helped create the environment in which Mary Wollstonecraft and her ideas could be taken seriously.5

One of the works of the 1764 season at Covent Garden was a new burletta called Midas. Midas was, though, not ‘new’; it was only new to London: an early version of the work had its first staging privately in 1760 in Lurgan near Belfast, and the first professional version was at Dublin’s Crow Street Theatre in 1762. The professional version was prepared in response to the appearance in Dublin of an Italian burletta company, a company that had previously performed in London and would do so again after its Dublin engagement. This interplay of repertory between the two cities - of which Midas was the most obvious product - resulted both in a new genre and a tangling with Italian opera troupes. Midas was the product of a group of Irishmen, of whom Kane O’Hara, the librettist, was the most important and the most enigmatic; this chapter explores his role in the cross-currents of drama between the two cities. In so doing, Burden’s chapter re-contextualises the history of the burletta and offers a powerful demonstration that theatre historians cannot and should not write about London’s theatre in isolation: regional influences were important tributaries to the Georgian capital’s culture.

Macklin’s Henry the VII (1746) has received little critical attention. This chapter reads the play as part of a tradition of Irish history plays that were influenced by Joseph Addison’s Cato (1713). Addison’s themes of personal self-sacrifice, love of country and resistance to tyranny proved inspirational for Irish dramatists in the wake of the Declaratory Act (1720) as can be seen in William Philips’s Hibernia Freed (1722) and Henry Brooke’s Gustavus Vasa (1739). History plays then might offer an alternative genealogy of eighteenth-century Irish theatre which is often focused on comedies.

Macklin’s Henry the VII (1746) has received little critical attention. This chapter reads the play as part of a tradition of Irish history plays that were influenced by Joseph Addison’s Cato (1713). Addison’s themes of personal self-sacrifice, love of country and resistance to tyranny proved inspirational for Irish dramatists in the wake of the Declaratory Act (1720) as can be seen in William Philips’s Hibernia Freed (1722) and Henry Brooke’s Gustavus Vasa (1739). History plays then might offer an alternative genealogy of eighteenth-century Irish theatre which is often focused on comedies.

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.

This introduction begins with a survey of eighteenth-century Irish theatre practitioners and argues that their contribution was considerable and sustained by ethnic support networks. Theatre has often been elided from discussions of Enlightenment, but the Irish example shows how the theatre can be a powerful agent of Enlightenment. Theatre was a forum within which the Irish had tremendous success and which they used to represent Irish civility during a period when British audiences were more receptive to such ideas. The 1740s in particular, fuelled by patriot resentment after the Declaratory Act, revisionist historiography and Irish patriot activity in Ireland and England, saw the emergence of a robust and assertive theatrical Enlightenment, embodied in and symbolized by the life and career of Charles Macklin.