stage-Irishman, a term for stereotypical Irish characters on the English-language stage from the 17th cent., also applied to characters in fiction in whom Irish national characteristics are emphasized or distorted. As a product of colonialism, the first stage-Irishman reflected a desire to stigmatize the native Irish as savages or anathematize them as traitors, while later versions sought more commonly to provide amusement to English audiences by exaggerating the traits which differentiated the Irish from the English. His chief identifying marks were disorderly manners and insalubrious habits, together with the Hiberno-English dialect or brogue and a concomitant propensity for illogical utterance increasingly identified as his exclusive property and called ‘the Irish bull’. The Irish Hudibras (1689) by James Farewell and its companion piece, Hesperi-Neso-Graphia (1716), are key texts in the evolution of the stereotype. To these ludicrous features was added an intense and seemingly inapposite pride in his native country. A small number of Irishmen are to be found in plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, the best known of these being Captain Macmorris in Henry V. The stage-Irish stereotype first emerged after the Restoration of the English-monarchy with Teg in Sir Robert Howard's Committee (1662). In late 17th- and 18th-cent, plays by authors such as Thomas D'Urfey, George Powell, John Durant Brevel, and Moses Mendez, the names of stage-Irishmen such as MacBuffle, Mactawdry, Mackafartey, and Machone, as well as Phaelim O'Blunder and a beggarwoman called Bet Botheram O'Balderdash, all indicate the chronic deprecation of Irish identity in metro-politan Britain during the period following the Williamite War. Numerous stage-Irishmen were created by play-wrights from Ireland such as Isaac Bickerstaffe, Hugh Kelly, John O'Keeffe, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan, often inventing obsequious and ridiculous characters in order to ingratiate themselves with London audiences. In Love á la Mode (1759) Charles Macklin added Sir Callaghan O'Brallaghan to the repertoire of loyalist Hibernians. He followed this with The True-Born Irishman, or The Irish Fine Lady (1762), a play which demonstrated the possibility of taking pride in Irish origins. Cultural patriotism was again attempted in Variety (1782) by Richard Griffith. As political and economic conditions in Ireland deteriorated throughout the 19th cent. a stereotype evolved in which the apparent vagaries of the Irish peasant were served up in a racist concoction known as ‘Irish drama’. In the Victorian period several authors successfully exploited their Irish background to produce such regional characters as Samuel Lover's Rory O'More (1837) and Handy Andy (1842). From Charles Lever to Somerville and Ross, sketches of rural buffoonery made up a recurrent element in Irish writing. Not all successful images of the Irish peasant were so demeaning. Boucicault created Arrah-na-Pogue (1864) around an Irish peasant whom audiences would laugh with rather than at. In John Bull's Other Island (1904) George Bernard Shaw pronounced authoritatively on the extravagances of the stereotype. With the growth of the independence movement at the turn of the century, the stage-Irishman came under vehement attack. Synge's The Playboy of the Western World (1907) was sufficiently offensive to nationalism to cause riots in Dublin. The course of Irish drama in the 20th cent. was significantly influenced by the determination of playwrights and actors to avoid the appearance of trivializing Irish character.
Bibliography
G. C. Duggan, The Stage Irishman (1937).
