Beneath Iërne’s Banners

The Dublin stage of the Restoration and the eighteenth century has largely been dismissed as “West British” and its plays for the most part have been forgotten. Christopher J. Wheatley’s Beneath Iërne’s Banners: Irish Protestant Drama of the Restoration and Eighteenth Century examines the works by Protestant dramatists that reveal the complex alliances and fissures of Anglo-Irish society during the age of the Penal Laws.

From Richard Head’s Hic et Ubique (1663) to Mary O’Brien’s The Fallen Patriot (1790), Wheatley shows how selected plays demonstrate that the Irish Protestants were far from a monolithic caste united by the shared interest of maintaining control over the Catholic majority. He traces the slow transition by which the English of Ireland came to think of themselves as Irish—without necessarily being prepared to allow Irish emancipation. Precisely because drama is the product of a complex interaction between text, company, and audience, these plays reveal the many divergent factions and conflicting impulses that shaped Ireland between about 1660 and 1800, the traces of which remain in Irish society today.

Beneath Iërne’s Banners: Irish Protestant Drama of the Restoration and Eighteenth Century offers an important picture of how these Protestant playwrights thought about the world, and is a valuable resource for Irish Studies and drama scholars.