Contesting Canons

Abstract

Long before the creation of the nation state of Ireland, there has been a symbolic use of masculinity both in the military contestation of colonialism as well as in the construction of a nativist cultural capital, no more so than in the theatre. The theatrical canon that emerged later at the beginning of the twentieth century has a very contested history, however. The Yeats-Gregory project of a national theatre in revisionist terms was an attempt by an Anglo-cultural elite to carve out a position for itself in an emerging national and nationalist culture. Their legacy perhaps is summed up specifically in the work of two of their popular playwrights, J. M. Synge and Sean O’Casey, both of them Protestant, though from contrasting positions on the economic and social scales. Synge offered slices of peasant cultural life in an imagined rural idyll marred by immorality, gender conflict, attempted parricide, and greed. And yet those themes that incurred the wrath of those competing for the mantel of national cultural iconicity were influenced heavily by both naturalist and symbolist concerns that carved a modernist agenda onto an emerging national theatre. Similarly O’Casey’s Dublin trilogy bowed to the influences of naturalist/symbolist Henrik Ibsen and expressionist Ernst Toller. From Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World to O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars these now canonical plays both worked against a nationalist agenda for an unqualified and rose-tinted republican cause for blameless nativist traditions and cultures, and yet conversely, because of their modernist credentials, came to be extolled as canonical literary masterpieces.