Irish Renaissance: A Gathering of Essays, Letters, and Memoirs from "The Massachusetts Review."

William Pitt's decision to seek the abolition of the independent Irish parliament and the union of the established churches in Ireland and England ended a quarter century experiment in Irish legislative independence. During this brief period the penal system had been substantially modified, and the traditional Protestant ascendancy partially dismantled by liberal Protestants themselves. The Church of Ireland, however, had not shared in the enthusiasm of this Irish “renaissance”; parliamentary spokesmen had demanded abolition of the tithe, enforcement of clerical residence, endowment of the Roman Catholic clergy and elimination of abuses in ecclesiastical patronage. Anticlericalism had increased, tithe resistance had infected even Protestant tenants, and pamphlets condemning the Church of Ireland as the unholy wonder of Christendom were penned by Protestants themselves. The alarm of Irish churchmen only too aware of the fundamental weaknesses of the established church, the clamor of British peers with large Irish landholdings and the outbreak of rebellion in 1797, finally convinced British statesmen that the crisis could be relieved only by the abolition of the Irish legislature.

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After the Irish Renaissance: A Critical History of the Irish Drama since "The Plough and the Stars."

Books Abroad ◽

10.2307/40122453 ◽

1968 ◽

Vol 42 (2) ◽

pp. 275

Author(s):

Jerome Zuckerman ◽

Robert Hogan

Keyword(s):

Critical History ◽

Irish Drama ◽

History Of ◽

Irish Renaissance

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Synge's Unfinished Deirdre

PMLA ◽

10.2307/459618 ◽

1948 ◽

Vol 63 (4) ◽

pp. 1314-1321

Author(s):

David H. Greene

Keyword(s):

Lady Gregory ◽

George Moore ◽

Irish Renaissance

One of the greatest difficulties which faced the dramatists of the Irish Renaissance was how to write heroic plays in peasant dialect. Although the language of the Irish countryman was ideal for the little farces which mirrored the living Ireland, it turned out to be the severest of limitations when used to exploit the ancient Ireland of the sagas. “But Grania is a King's daughter”, protested George Moore when Yeats insisted that Diarmuid and Grania be written in peasant dialect. And if we are to believe the story that Moore tells in Hail and Farewell, Yeats even went so far as to ask Moore, who knew not a word of dialect, to write the play in French. Lady Gregory would then turn it into English, an Irish translator would render it in Irish, and Lady Gregory would then turn the Irish literally into English. Although Yeats never got a peasant Grania from Moore, he very nearly realized his ideal when he induced Synge, the acknowledged master of peasant dialect, to attempt a peasant Deirdre. Synge, like Moore, might well have protested against the difficult task his master had set him. “I am not sure whether I shall be able to make a satisfactory play out of it”, he wrote to an American friend. But he plunged on, creating his Deirdre in the image of a Wicklow peasant girl. We can surmise that she gave him considerable trouble, for he rewrote the play more than fifteen times, working on it more energetically than on any other of his plays. We have Moore's testimony that Synge finally began to feel that peasant speech was impossible and started to weed it out of his play. However, the mass of MSS which represent Synge's work on the play up to his death indicate that no such weeding process had begun.

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THE IRISH RENAISSANCE IN FACES

Vestnik Chuvashskogo universiteta ◽

10.47026/1810-1909-2021-2-133-141 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 133-141

Author(s):

Larisa L. Norden ◽

Valeria S. Miller

Keyword(s):

National Identity ◽

English Language ◽

English Literature ◽

Irish Literature ◽

Way Of Life ◽

Musical Culture ◽

Political Situation ◽

Irish Renaissance ◽

Grammatical Structures ◽

Made In

The end of the XIX – beginning of the XX centuries is the efflorescence period of national culture in Ireland. In historiography, this time was named the Irish Renaissance. Its bright representatives and organizations promoted national ideas, tried to restrain verbal aggression from the English language, to revive self-consciousness of their compatriots, developed sports, literature, theater, musical culture, and opposed the British way of life. The Irish Renaissance was not homogeneous. Some of its representatives tried to be politically neutral, tried to show their non-involvement in the existing political situation. The other held positions of active cultural nationalism. They believed that the Irish should revive their culture, cultivate their national identity, using a solid language base. They promoted the advantages of the Gaelic lifestyle as opposed to the English one. Still others proceeded from realistic attitudes, they saw narrow-mindedness of the Irish society, they were not afraid to point out its vices, and convinced in the need to include their homeland in the cultural space of the West. In addition to the multiplicity of options, the Irish Renaissance was an elitist phenomenon, since most of the society lived in poverty, did not have the opportunity to get a good education, and cared more about «daily bread». The most vivid appeals to the spiritual Revival of the nation were made in the theater and literature, the flourishing of which is associated with the names of W.B. Yeats, Lady Augusta Gregory, D. Joyce, D.M. Sing and others. To a large extent, the Irish Renaissance was a kind of reaction to modernism. It is quite possible to say that in Ireland there was a strong confrontation between the archaic and the modern. The important features of cultural Irish Renaissance were its anti-British orientation, the desire to emphasize national identity. The Hiberno-English version of English had similarities to Irish in some grammatical idioms, the inhabitants of the Emerald Isle, perhaps subconsciously, used the grammatical structures of their native language when speaking English. This linguistic tradition also influenced the Irish literature, which differed in various ways from the English literature.

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