Shakespeare, Ireland, Dreamland

Shakespeare, Ireland, DreamlandAuthor(s): Philip EdwardsSource: Irish University Review, Vol. 28, No. 2 (Autumn - Winter, 1998), pp. 227-239Published by: Edinburgh University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25484782 .

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Philip Edwards

Shakespeare, Ireland, Dreamland1

It seems very likely that in the early fifteen nineties Shakespeare was

one of a group of dramatists struggling to refashion a play about Sir

Thomas More in order to get it past the Master of the Revels, who had

objected to the portrayal of an insurrection. The scene that is generally

accepted as Shakespeare's, and is thought to be in his own handwriting, shows More quelling by the force of his personality and his rhetoric the

"ill May Day" riot of 1517, when Londoners rose to attack a colony of

immigrants, referred to as Lombards, who they claimed had been granted

too-generous privileges, and were taking their jobs from them, not to

speak of their women. More's argument to the citizens is twofold, political and moral, though both are presented as Christian. First, he argues that in their disobedience to authority they are disobeying God; in fact, they are in arms against God. The second argument is a great appeal that

they should do as they would be done by. Suppose that their rebellion is

quelled by force...

Say now the king, As he is clement if th' offender mourn, Should so much come too short of your great trespass

As but to banish you: whither would you go? What country, by the nature of your error,

Should give you harbour? Go you to France or Flanders, To any German province, Spain

or Portugal,

Nay, anywhere that not adheres to England ?

Why, you must needs be strangers. Would you be pleased To find a nation of such barbarous temper That breaking out in hideous violence

Would not afford you an abode on earth, Whet their detested knives against your throats,

Spurn you like dogs, and like as if that God Owed not nor made not you, nor that the elements

Were not all appropriate to your comforts But chartered unto them ? what would you think To be thus used? This is the stranger's case,

And this your momtanish inhumanity.2

1. This essay is based on a lecture given at a conference on "Shakespeare and Ireland"

at Trinity College, Dublin, March 1997.

2. Sir Thomas More, Addition IID, lines 122-40. As with all my Shakespeare quotations this text derives from The Riverside Shakespeare, with my own punctuation. What

"momtanish" means no one knows. Editors usually print "mountanish", which

hardly seems appropriate.

227



IRISH UNIVERSITY REVIEW

The difficulty of the subject "Shakespeare and Ireland" is that there is so little about Ireland in Shakespeare's plays. It is a remarkable absence,

considering the prominence and intensity of England's engagement with

Ireland throughout his lifetime, and considering Shakespeare's gift for

fixing on issues in the relationship between peoples which have remained

of burning importance since his time ? in The Merchant of Venice, in

Othello, in The Tempest. I have chosen to begin with this passage from Sir

Thomas More for two reasons. The first is because this fervent plea for

compassion and understanding for the foreigner, the stranger, this plea

against "momtanish inhumanity", cannot be irrelevant in discussing the

relationship between peoples in Shakespeare. The second is because of a link with the decisive direct reference to Irish affairs in the prologue

spoken by the Chorus to Act V of Henry V:

Were now the general of our gracious empress,

As in good time he may, from Ireland coming, Bringing rebellion broached on his sword, How many would the peaceful city quit To welcome him!

The general is, of course, the Earl of Essex, despatched in 1599 to quell the all-too-successful Irish insurrection. His opponent, wrapped up

within the abstract noun "rebellion", was Hugh O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone,

proclaimed a traitor by the Crown in 1595. This Earl of Tyrone is at the

centre of my discussion.

We are no longer permitted to think that O'Neill was brought up in

England by Sir Henry Sidney. When he spoke of his "education among the English" he meant the English of the Pale. O'Neill had been made a

ward of the Crown, and had been fostered by Giles and Elizabeth

Hovenden in Laois. The Hovendens were "amongst the earliest and

therefore the least Protestant of the New English settlers".3 O'Neill was

brought up with the Hovendens' sons, and as usual, fostering brought about the closest of relationships. Richard, Henry, Walter and Piers

Hovenden became indeed the agents and loyal henchmen of their Irish

foster-brother.

As O'Neill pursued his own ambitions in Ulster, this Anglicised Irishman was considered by the Crown as a safe person to support and

encourage, and they looked to him to defend the Pale against the inroads

of his fellow Ulstermen. He served briefly in Munster, assisting Lord

Grey de Wilton to quell the Desmond rising. The Crown honoured him

with the English title which his grandfather Conn had accepted from

Henry VIII: Earl of Tyrone. In 1587 O'Neill travelled to the English court

3. Hiram Morgan, Tyrone's Rebellion: The Outbreak of the Nine Years War in Tudor Ireland

(Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1993), p. 214. See also pp. 92-3, My information on O'Neill's upbringing is derived from Morgan's book.

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SHAKESPEARE, IRELAND, DREAMLAND

to affirm his position. Queen Elizabeth had spoken of him as one "whom

Her Majesty would not willingly deny any favour, knowing his devotion to her."4 But there were many in the English administration in Ireland

who did not trust him, including the retiring Lord Deputy, Sir John Perrot.

In the autumn of 1588, the battered Spanish Armada was making its

long and painful passage home, and many of the ships were thrown up on the Irish coast. In the North, Sir Richard Bingham killed as many as

he could of the survivors who got ashore. On 7 October, Sir Geoffrey Fenton, secretary to the Council, who was in Sligo, wrote to the new

Lord Deputy, Sir William Fitzwilliam, about rumours then circulating to which he did not in fact attach too much credence:

It is credibly advertised here that the two thousand Spaniards in

Tyrconnel are marching hitherward, and very near the Erne if the

report be true; that they have taken pledge of MacSweeney ne Doe and divers other in that country; that they hold a principal castle of his, wherein they have laid up their treasure and store of munitions, and put in a strong ward to defend it; that O'Neill is combined with them; that O'Donnell is returned from Dublin greatly discontented; and lastly that the Earl of Tyrone hath bitterly reproved O'Donnell for doing service upon the Spaniards, saying he and his posterity

may yet seek them a dwelling in another country; for that they have

betrayed the Spaniards, who were their best friends, and their only refuge in all extremities. This is the substance of the advertisement, and it is grounded as far as I can discover upon an old friar lately come from Tyrconnel into O'Rourke country, where it is given out

that he laboureth O'Rourke to be of the confederacy.5

Obviously what interests me in this letter is the statement that "the

Earl of Tyrone hath bitterly reproved O'Donnell for doing service upon the Spaniards, saying he and his posterity may yet seek them a dwelling in another country." It seems that O'Donnell, whose son Hugh Roe

O'Donnell had been kidnapped by the English and imprisoned in Dublin, had rounded up thirty of the Spanish castaways and was trying to barter

them for the release of his son.6 Now, did O'Neill "bitterly reprove" him

for this piece of "momtanish inhumanity"? Is the letter a complete fabrication, designed to smear O'Neill by suggesting that he not only

sympathised with the plight of England's enemies, but actually thought of them as the ultimate allies of the Irish? Or is it based on something that O'Neill has actually said, which has been distorted for political

purposes? It is an argument against its having been fabricated by the

4. Hiram Morgan, p. 102.

5. PRO London, SP 63-107, no. lO.iv. Spelling modernised.

6. Niall Fallon, The Armada in Ireland (London: Stanford Maritime, 1978), pp. 84,137; S&in O'Faolain, The Great O'Neill: Biography of Hugh O'Ndll Earl of Tyrone 1550-1616 (London: Longmans Green, 1942), p. 105; Hiram Morgan, p. 131.

229




English that Fenton himself did not put much faith in it and that Fitzwilliam (who was distrustful enough of O'Neill) refused to believe that O'Neill was conspiring with Spain.7

I think there is a very good chance th^t this reproof of O'Donnell by O'Neill for taking part in the attack on the Spanish refugees was

authentic. I also think Fenton misunderstood the report. "He and his

posterity may yet seek them a dwelling in another country, for that they have betrayed the Spaniards..." Fenton makes it a consequence of betraying the Spaniards that O'Donnell and his posterity should themselves

become refugees. He makes Tyrone imply it would be a punishment,

presumably a divine punishment, to become refugees. But I think O'Neill was using the same do-as-you-would-be-done-by argument that

Shakespeare was to give to Sir Thomas More: if Irishmen were ever to

find themselves in the situation of the Spaniards, they would not wish to be abused as the Irish are abusing the Spaniards. The inhumanity of

harassing homeless refugees is made worse by the fact that the Spaniards are their best friends, and if O'Donnell and his family were driven out of

their homeland, Spain would be the one country to give them shelter. If this report is authentic, it shows O'Neill in 1588 with an uncanny

prescience of the future: that to secure his position in Ireland he would have to rely upon Spanish help, that in the end he might be defeated

and be driven out of his own country, and have to seek refuge in Spain. O'Neill himself was sheltering some of the Spanish castaways, not

only noblemen, but common men who were sick, and he took one of

them into his service. He helped Don Antonio Manrique to escape to

Scotland.8 Ah, if that were all! His foster-brothers, Richard and Henry Hovenden, at the head of troops which belonged to O'Neill but were

paid by the English, were busy in Inishowen rounding up survivors

from the wrecked galleon La Trinidad Valencera. Noblemen were taken

for ransom; many of the rest were put to the sword.9 O'Neill himself

wrote to the Lord Deputy asking for more troops to attack the Spaniards;10 and some years later was still complaining that he had not received any of the ransom money for the Spaniards the Hovendens had captured on

Inishowen!11

So what about this "momtanish inhumanity" that O'Neill was

protesting about to O'Donnell? It looks as though O'Neill was speaking with a forked tongue. But then, so was Shakespeare, who also has an

7. Hiram Morgan, p. 106.

8. Ibid. 9. Niall Fallon, pp. 135-37; Cyril Fails, Elizabeth's Irish Wars (London: Methuen, 1950),

pp. 165-66.

10. Fitzwilliam thought this just a ruse to get reinforcements to help O'Neill against his

opponents in Ulster; Hiram Morgan, p. 106.

11. Ibid., p. 162.

230




embarrassing habit of turning up in the ranks of both armies. I shall try to show what a deep sympathy there is between the earl and the

dramatist, going beyond their appeals to do as you would be done by, and how O'Neill was perhaps acting out a dream that Shakespeare was

dreaming.

I think Shakespeare accepted 'imperialism' as a fact of life. The growth of the Roman empire

? a subject so often surfacing in his plays - was

not a matter of right and wrong; it was just the course of nature. Strong nations grew stronger by devouring weak ones. It was a biological

metaphor of wide application. In Pericles, a young fisherman says to his

boss, "Master, I marvel how the fishes live in the sea." To which the

master replies: "Why, as men do a-land. The great ones eat up the little

ones" (2.1.26-9). And the metaphor continued: the imperial body grew swollen, bloated, corrupt, and it began to disintegrate. The little nations

begin to assert themselves, as we hear in Cymbeline: "The Pannonians

and Dalmations for/ Their liberties are now in arms" (3.1.73-4). Sonnet 15 begins:

When I consider every things that grows Holds in perfection but a little moment...

In the "little moment" of perfection on the imperial scale, nations live in

peace and harmony with each other, in their common obedience to the

overarching order of the imperial power. They recognise and accept their

tributary status as a lesser evil than international anarchy, disorder and war. The idea of peace in obedience on an international scale is precisely

analogous to the idea of obedience to authority on the national scale: an

idea given formidable prominence in parts of More's speech to the

citizens which I have not quoted. Individual self-assertion leads to

anarchy, and the war of all against all.

These ideas of the beauty of submissive peace, both in society and on

the international scale, were the delight of those who wished to impose their will on others ? as that cynic Christopher Marlowe knew only too

well. They are the constant concomitant of and justification for

aggression, tyranny and subjugation. Shakespeare understood the

Machiavellian use of these ideas.12 He recognised the brutality and the

misery which was entailed in the achievement of empire. Nevertheless, the beauty of submissive peace on an international scale was a dreamland

he loved to wander in, knowing perfectly well that it was a dreamland.

Take Othello. How happy the Cypriots are under Venetian rule! How

12. Expediency more than principle seems to be behind the philosophy of obedience

expounded by Ulysses in Troilus and Cressida.

231




easily the Turks are defeated in their attempt to wrest power from Venice, and how delighted the Cypriots are to welcome the new Venetian

governor, Othello! These are international relations as Shakespeare liked

them. A happy tributary state under the rule of a kindly imperial power. He was well aware, from Richard Knolles's History of the Turks, a book

he knew and used, that the real state of affairs was utterly different.

Cyprus had for centuries been the helpless victim of the ambitions

of contending powers; since 1470 the Venetians and the Turks. The

Venetians actually paid tribute to the Turks for the island until the Turks

kicked them out in 1570. Even the battle of Lepanto (1571) failed to alter

this, and in a treaty which the Venetians made with the Turks in 1574

they acknowledged Turkish possession of the island. So much for

Shakespeare's fairy-tale of the imperial power rushing their general out

to save their colony from the infidel, and Othello's simple proclamation, "News, friends: our wars are done; the Turks are drowned" (2.1.202). Of

course, Shakespeare only wanted a background, a soft cushion on which to lay his horrifying story of malignity, suspicion and violent death.

Nevertheless, to create a seemingly historical background by trans

forming international violence into dreamland peace is to my mind very

significant.13

Suppose we look at another background or frame, which (strangely)

Shakespeare used for two plays, A Midsummer Night's Dream and The

Two Noble Kinsmen.

In both plays the opening scene shows Theseus about to marry the

Amazonian queen Hippolyta, whom he has conquered in battle. In both

plays the nuptials are deferred or interrupted while a conflict (which is

the main subject of the plays) is acted out. The plays end with the

wedding still not accomplished but just about to take place. Shakespeare took his material about Theseus from Chaucer, and also from Plutarch's

Lives. One of the most important things that Theseus did, wrote Plutarch, was to settle the scattered people of Attica into a commonwealth and

make them citizens of Athens. Before that "they were at variance together, and by the ears, making wars one upon another." There were some

doubters, but Theseus promised them a say in the government, and "for

fear of his displeasure and power ... they thought it better to consent

with good will... than to tarry his forcible compulsion."14 All were to

have equal privileges in a kingless democracy. Thereafter Theseus made

his expedition to the Euxine sea, fought the Amazons and captured

13. The fictional nature of Shakespeare's history was stressed by Emrys Jones in "Othello,

Lepanto, and the Cyprus Wars", Shakespeare Survey>, 21 (1970), pp. 47-52. Jones argued that the sea-battle was meant to remind the audience of the victory of Lepanto

?

about which James I had written a poem. 14. W.E. Henley (editor), The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, trans. Thomas North

(1579), Tudor Translations, vol. vii (London: David Nutt, 1895), p. 52.

232




Antiope, or as some say Hippolyta. As a memorial to a young follower

who had the misfortune to fall in love with Hippolyta and for that reason

committed suicide, Theseus established a city there, Pythopolis, and left a governor to rule it.

The founding of this Athenian city in Amazonian lands was the direct cause of further wars with the Amazons,15 who invaded Athens and

gave the Athenians a very hard time. But after four months there was a

negotiated peace. And who was the leading figure in these negotiations?

Why, Hippolyta, of course, whom Theseus had taken captive, and whom

he made his wife.

I think it is extraordinarily important that twice in his career as a

dramatist, once quite near the beginning and once at the end, Shakespeare should take this moment of suspension when his benevolent imperialist

was about to seal his relationship with his tributary peoples by marrying their queen but has not actually done so, as a frame for the action of a

play. In the Pauline tradition, which the Elizabethans happily accepted,

marriage was not a contract of equality but of partnership based on the

concept of male superiority and female obedience. It was nevertheless a

partnership, the closest possible partnership between human beings. "Man and wife is one flesh". And even the Elizabethans had some notion

of love and mutual respect. It is the ideal of this kind of partnership that

Shakespeare plays with in A Midsummer Night's Dream, making Theseus

offer it to Hippolyta as a concrete symbol of the relationship between

their two nations. Theseus calls it an "everlasting bond of fellowship" (1.1.85). Neither personally nor politically is there any suggestion that

Theseus is offering equality. It is particularly important that Hippolyta has been a queen of the Amazons. Well over thirty years ago I pointed out that in The Two Noble Kinsmen Theseus's marriage is seen as restoring a proper order of nature affronted by the Amazonian role for women.

The new role is seen as restriction for women even if it is the order of

nature, but Hippolyta acknowledges and accepts it.

Much can be said, and has been made of Theseus's words: "I wooed

thee with my sword" (1.1.16), in which sexual intercourse seems equated with aggression and domination, and we think of the regular image in

England at this time of colonial adventure as the sexual possession of

virgin lands. However, "I wooed thee with my sword, ... but I will wed

thee in another key." Conquest here is seen as an instrument to obtain

partnership; violence ceases with union.

15. Although Shakespeare normally used North's translation of Amyot's French version

of Plutarch, I think he knew other versions as well, because at this point North

failed to notice the vital causal link between the founding of Pythopolis and the

renewed war.

233




This is what I call Shakespeare's dreamland. Of course he knew

otherwise. There is the dynastic marriage of the victorious English king to the princess of defeated France at the end of Henry V. The acquisitive

pragmatism of the English king is fleetingly tempered by the blessing of

the French queen: "Combine your hearts in one, your realms in one!"

But there is no lingering in that mode. Along comes the embarrassing Chorus to remind us that Henry and Katherine did marry, and that the

fruit of their union "lost France" which "oft our stage hath shown". There

is also the opportunistic dynastic marriage in King John between the

Dauphin of France and John's niece, the princess Blanche, which appalls the Bastard Faulconbridge as a prime example of 'commodity' or the

betrayal of principle in order to secure an immediate advantage. Dynastic

marriage is more often in the realm of cynical expediency than of true

love.

But it is different in the two Theseus plays. Here, there is a glimpse of

the possibility of a true harmonious union succeeding to an act of

conquest. In The Two Noble Kinsmen Theseus speaks of the interrupted ceremony as "this grand act of our life, this daring deed/ Of fate in

wedlock" (1.1.164-5). In both plays it is the hesitation, the promise, the

expectation, the delay, the fulfilment which does not quite come about

which is so important. The possibility is never brought to the test of

experience. That which in dreamland is left hovering in suspension, just like the characters frozen on Keats's Grecian urn, must in real life pay the penalty of all growth. But even in dreamland there is the strong hint

of that waking knowledge. In the background to Theseus's hopes of his

marriage are the many well-known tragic tales of love associated with

the Theseus legend.16 The point is made strongly in the well-known essay

by Louis Montrose, who writes of the sub-text of "Theseus's rapes and

disastrous marriages, his habitual victimisation of women." He also

points out the "ironic prognosis" for the new marriage in the marital

squabbling of Titania and Oberon.17 Nevertheless, what holds sway in

the play is an ideal of partnership within empire, symbolised by an ideal

of partnership within marriage. Both partnerships accept gradations of

superiority and inferiority which irritate us a good deal, but that is not

where their vulnerability lies. Their vulnerability is in the words of Puck

which conclude A Midsummer Night's Dream:

If we shadows have offended, Think but this, and all is mended: That you have but slumbered here,

16. See Philip Edwards, "On the Design of The Two Noble Kinsmen", Review of English Literature, 5 (1964), p. 104.

17. L. A. Montrose, '"Shaping Fantasies': Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan

Culture", Representations, 2 (1983), pp. 61-94.

234




While these visions did appear. And this weak and idle theme, No more yielding but a dream, Gentles, do not reprehend

...

The play in which the dream-idea of benign imperialism is most fully

played out is Cymbeline, one of that group of late 'Romances', in which

every dream is allowed a growth appropriate to dream, so that wicked

men and women repent them of the evil that they have done, and

errant sons and daughters are reunited with their grieving parents. In

Cymbeline, Britain is the colonial state. She fought gloriously to preserve her independence but she lost. The picture of the Roman empire to

which Britain now belonged is of an international society of civilised, honourable and courteous people, moving freely between countries. The

British king Cymbeline spent much of his youth under Caesar, who

knighted him. Posthumus's father fought in the Roman army.18 But now

the spirit of national independence has risen again, and Britain defies

the imperial power, Rome. But the rhetoric of proud patriotic defiance is

given to the two villains of the play, the Queen and her dissolute son

Cloten. The Romans bring a punitive invasion force, but incredibly they are defeated by the plucky Britons. And, even more incredibly, the play ends with the victorious king Cymbeline submitting his country to the

defeated Romans, claiming that his insubordination had been forced

upon him by his wicked queen. "Publish we this peace/ To all our

subjects. Set we forward: let/ A Roman and a British ensign wave/

Friendly together!" To consider the implications of this extraordinary conclusion, we might

begin by looking at what the young Shakespeare had made of this same

Roman empire when he was most emphatically not writing in dream

mode; in one of his earliest plays, Titus Andronicus. Although the cor

ruption and wickedness of the decadent later Empire was common food

for schoolboys, Shakespeare seems to have invented the whole of this

repulsive story which carries the lust and violence of the rulers of Rome

to quite horrible extremes of treachery, deception and sadistic cruelty. The sudden volte-face by which the emperor Saturninus rejects Lavinia, whom he has just wrested from his brother, and chooses as his consort

Tamora, the Queen of the Goths, who has just been led captive on to the

stage, looks like a subversive parody of that ideal of the wedding of

emperor and tributary queen which we have seen informing later plays. Much of the point of the play seems to be in the contrast between the

festering corruption at the heart of the empire and the simple code of

honour which informs the general whose loyal efforts maintain that

18. I paraphrase from my account of the play in Threshold of a Nation: A Study in English and Irish Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 87-94.

235




empire. Titus has to learn that the Rome which he serves with such

passionate conviction is "a wilderness of tigers", but it is his misinter

pretation of the reality of the Empire, his attempt to impose an identity of worth upon a wholly worthless political centre, that triggers off the

hideous succession of events which we are invited to witness.

This ironic juxtaposition of the rotten heart of empire with the simple

loyalty of the soldier who serves it is a theme which, in many variations,

stays with Shakespeare. One thinks of Othello, of Alcibiades in Timon of Athens, of Coriolanus. Do these fictional creatures have anything to do

with people like Sir Humphrey Gilbert and Sir Walter Raleigh, both of

whom were doing their best not only to subdue the Irish in the field

but to also open up an empire across the Atlantic ocean? What does

Shakespeare's picture of the metropolitan heart of empire as a seething mass of maggots have to do with the vision of Richard Hakluyt and a

dozen others of the extension of Christian civility to the Indians of North

America? It would seem to me very difficult for the person who wrote

Titus Andronicus to have enthusiastic hopes for the future of a British

empire. It also seems to me that the existence of Titus Andronicus makes

it very difficult to take the benign presentation of the Roman empire in

Cymbeline as other than a message from dreamland.

I said earlier that Shakespeare, like Tyrone, spoke with a forked tongue. When I wrote about Shakespeare's English history plays in Threshold of a

Nation in 1979,1 entitled the chapter "The Hidden King". The argument was that Shakespeare's devotion to the idea of kingship, and the insistent

patriotism and nationalism that went with that devotion, belonged to a

king who, like Godot, never turned up. Everyone who seemed to fill the

bill proved in the end an impostor; and that went for Henry V as well as

Richard II and King John. "The nation which is sometimes seen marching towards its deliverance and realisation under the Tudors is most often

seen as a threatened or a suffering land looking for a spiritual kingship which it can never find" (p. 129). And will never find, I might have added.

Is it possible that a similar kind of doubleness ? or is it duplicity? ?

is to be found in Shakespeare's treatment of empire? The tone of much

of the writing about Shakespeare and Ireland in recent years has been

accusatory and contemptuous. Shakespeare has been tried in his absence, and convicted of sharing in the racist denigration which lubricated the

ruthless Elizabethan programme of conquest, suppression and occu

pation.19 But it is the most obvious and elementary fact about Shakespeare's 'vision' that every affirmation contains its own negation, shimmers with an antithetical glow. He is always outdistancing us in our plodding

attempts to fix him. Any serious attempt to deconstruct Shakespeare

19. This is true even of the major essay by Michael Neill, "Broken English and Broken

Irish", Shakespeare Quarterly, 45 (1994), pp. 1-32, though it seems he would like an

escape-route for Shakespeare if he could only find one.

236




has to admit that he was there before us, deconstructing himself.

Of course, you can put this differently That he contradicts himself.

That he sits on the fence. That he runs with the hare and hunts with the

hounds. That he tries to keep too many balls in the air at once. That he is

crippled by indecision. That he speaks with a forked tongue. One way or another, you have to recognise the co-existence of irreconcilables, and

I think you should respect that co-existence. There is no difficulty in

isolating in Shakespeare his pride in his country, and his contempt for its

leaders; his belief in national independence, and his belief in international

peace achieved by national submission. What is hard to do is to recognise the co-existence of these elements, and to resist the urge to reconcile

them. What I suggest is useful is to acknowledge a continuous interplay ? for which I must say I think the theatre an eminently suitable venue ? between reality and dreamland. At any rate I should like to suggest

that there is hardly a single representation of imperialist hegemony in

Shakespeare that does not in some way contrast the ideal of submissive

peace with the harsh reality of subjugation. What would happen if we were to translate the ending of Cymbeline

into Irish terms? Cymbeline defeats the Romans and immediately submits himself to the benevolence of Roman rule. So ? after his

staggering victory over Sir Henry Bagenal and the destruction of the

English army at the battle of the Yellow Ford in August 1598, Hugh O'Neill, the Earl of Tyrone, would have to submit himself to Queen

Elizabeth, acknowledge her overlordship but secure his independence, and by that means England and Ireland would live in contented peace ever afterwards.

The curious thing is that the victorious Tyrone would not necessarily have laughed such a scenario to scorn. His terms for the defeated enemy were extraordinarily generous, and he forbore to take advantage of the

open road to Dublin which lay before him. The demoralised Council in

Dublin began to negotiate with Tyrone, urging him not to pursue the

survivors of the battle, and putting him in mind "how far you may move

Her Majesty to renew a favourable conceit of you by using favour to

these men." When she heard of this attempt at appeasement, the Queen was outraged:

We may not pass over this foul error to our dishonour, when you of

our Council framed such a letter to the traitor, after the defeat, as

never was read the like, either in form or substance, for baseness,

being such as we persuade ourself, if you shall peruse it again, when

you are yourselves, that you will be ashamed of your own absurdities

and grieved that any fear or rashness should ever make you authors

of an action so much to your Sovereign's dishonour and to the

increasing of the traitor's insolency.20

20. Cyril Falls, pp. 220-22.

237




So thousands of troops were got together, and Essex was sent in to lead them. But when, at the culmination of his incompetent campaign, he

confronted Tyrone on the banks of the Lagan, it was not to fight but to

discuss terms of composition with the rebel. Essex was disgraced, and

when Tyrone's conditions, which Sean O'Faolain said resembled what came to be known as Home Rule, were received in London, Cecil con

temptuously wrote "Utopia" across them.21 It was not the victorious

Cymbeline but the intransigent Romans who in this Irish case refused to

negotiate. Elizabeth's uncompromising policy of outright defeat was

eventually vindicated at the battle of Kinsale in 1601.

It is clear that for many years, including the early years of the Nine

Years War, Tyrone would have been content to acknowledge the presence and power of the English in Ireland, provided that his own authority in

Ulster, and his right to his religion, were also acknowledged. All his

actions, so baffling in their apparent contradiction and duplicity, right up to his defeat at Kinsale and his submission to Mountjoy at Melli

font Abbey in 1603, can be explained by the conflict in his own mind on whether a compromise between his independence and English

sovereignty was or was not possible. What are we to think of his third marriage, in 1591, to Mabel Bagenal,

sister to Sir Henry Bagenal, Knight Marshal of the English occupation, and inveterate enemy to O'Neill and everything Irish? (Brian Friel made

this the centre of his play Making History in 1988. Sympathetic though I am to the role which Friel provides for Mabel, we have to remember

that Making History is fiction.) When O'Neill, then aged forty-one,

proposed this marriage to the twenty year old Mabel, Sir Henry exploded: "I can but accurse myself and fortune that my blood which in my father

and myself hath often been spilled in repressing this rebellious race, should now be mingled with so traitorous a stock and kindred."22

However, Mabel, who perhaps had fallen in love with O'Neill, eloped with him, and they were married by the Bishop of Meath, who took care

to make sure before the ceremony that Mabel was acting of her own free

will. Mabel became a Catholic; not surprising, seeing that four of her

sisters had married into Catholic 'Old English' families. Mabel (pace Brian

Friel) died in 1596. It is impossible to say whether she found any

happiness in the marriage. She is reputed to have objected to her husband's infidelities, and to have complained to the Council about

them,23 but she died in the family home at Dungannon. This marriage seems to me an enormously romantic gesture

?

politically speaking, that is. We have seen the conqueror making a

21. Sean O'Faolam, p. 222.

22. P.H. Bagenal, Vicissitudes of an Anglo-Irish Family 1530-1800,1925, p. 54.

23. Sean O'Faolain, p. 221.

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compact with the defeated by marrying a queen or a princess: Theseus

marrying Hippolyta, King Henry marrying Katherine. But here it is the

enemy signifying alliance with the conqueror. Tyrone accepts the

presence of England in Ireland. He takes the Englishness of the new

Ireland into the closest possible partnership, but on his own terms, which are those of marriage as it was understood. In his own land, he is the

husband. England is admitted as wife: the non-dominating partner. If the marriage was a political gesture, then like most of Tyrone's

political gestures it did not work. His perennial willingness to seek com

position with the Crown, even when he clearly had the upper hand, infuriated the English, who had no faith in his sincerity, and baffled his

followers. Tyrone would have been content with Palatinate status in

Ulster, with liberty of conscience. When the complex and confusing drift

to all-out war was taking place in Ulster in 1593 and 1594, Tyrone was

always in the shadows, in the background, even then hoping to obtain

devolved authority from the Crown. Even in 1595 he was prepared to

seek pardon, and go so far as give up his coveted Gaelic title of the

O'Neill. And this is from a man who did not accept the right of the English in Ireland. Accused of ingratitude, he replied: "Her Majesty never gave

me anything but what belonged to me."24 But the Crown wanted

unacceptable total submission. The Virgin Queen absolutely refused the

partnership with Ireland symbolically offered to her by Tyrone, the part

nership in which she would be the non-dominating member. On the

contrary: she reasserted her Amazonian rights. So the war went on, with

O'Neill wholly committing himself to reliance on Spain. The war was

no longer to assert Gaelic rights, but to throw off English government in Ireland. In his recent book on O'Neill, Hiram Morgan contends that

the Renaissance conception of sovereignty sought by the Tudors in

Ireland had no room whatsoever for the medieval idea of the Gaelic

lords of 'overlapping sovereignty' or a division of rule. What you might call the Cymbeline model.

After his final surrender in 1603, Tyrone was honourably treated by

Mountjoy, and honourably received by James I in London. But James

pursued a relentless policy of Anglicisation in Ireland, particularly as

regards religion, and in 1607 Tyrone gave up, fleeing the country with

O'Donnell, thus creating the space for the Plantation of Ulster. The play of Cymbeline was probably written in 1609-10, after the flight of the earls.

The contrast between its breathtaking attempt to reconcile national

independence within imperial order and what was actually happening in Ireland confirms that politically the play was "no more yielding but a

dream" and Shakespeare knew it.

24. Ibid., p. 193.

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Shakespeare, Ireland, Dreamland

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