Inventing Ireland Read Online Free PDF Page A

it would so many of his contemporaries and successors. One English scholar has marvelled at the way in whichSir Walter Ralegh's sophisticated tolerance, "so notable when he spoke about the native inhabitants of the Orinoco or Virginia, dried up very rapidly at the edge of the Pale". 6
    The struggle for self-definition is conducted within language; and the English, coming from the stronger society, knew that they would be

the lords of language. Few of their writers considered, even for a passing moment, that the Irish might have a case for their resistance. Henceforth, Ireland would be a sort of absence in English texts, aUtopian "no place" into which the deepest fears and fondest ideals might be read. The two major Irishstereotypes on the English national stage embody those polarities of feeling: on the one hand, the threatening, vainglorious soldier, and, on the other, the feckless but cheerily reassuring servant. They have survived into the modern period in such identifiable forms asO'Casey's Captain Boyle and Joxer, orSamuel Beckett's Didi and Gogo: but they were cleverly and soothingly conflated by Shakespeare in the sketch of Captain Macmorris in Henry the Fifth.
    The scene is a clear instance of English wish-fulfilment in a play written not long after the defeat of the Queen's men at the Battle of the Yellow Ford. Anti-Irish feeling was high in Elizabethan London, as the danger of an Irish-Spanish alliance grew weekly; so Shakespeare causes his Irishman to allay all fears of treachery. When a Welsh comrade-at-arms seems to question Irish fidelity to the crown, Macmorris explodes:
Flauellen:
Captain Macmorris I thinke, looke you, under your correction, there is not many of your Nation –
Macmorris:
Of my Nation? What ish my Nation? Ish a Villaine, and a Bastard, and a Knave, and a Rascal. What is my Nation? Who talks of my Nation? 7
    In other words, the captain says that there is no Irish nation. The word is mentioned for the good reason thatHugh O'Neill, the earl of Tyrone, had just called and led the first nationwide army of resistance against the English in the field of battle. He had welded rival princes into a coherent force, by appealing to them with such sentences as "it is lawful to die in the quarrel and defence of the native soil". "We Irishmen", he told them, "are exiled and made bond-slaves and servitors to a strange and foreign prince". 8
    The captain's name indicates that he is a descendant of the Norman settlers of the Fitzmaurice clan, some of whom changed their surnames to the Gaelic prefix "Mac": they remained politically loyal to the crown, despite their identification with Irish culture. Macmorris chides his colleagues for retreating when "there is throats to be cut", but his very emphasis has its roots in his pained awareness that a figure of such

hybrid status will forever be suspect in English eyes. InShakespeare's rudimentary portrait are to be found those traits of garrulity, pugnacity and a rather unfocused ethnic pride which would later signalize thestage Irishman – along with a faintly patronizing amusement on the part of the portraitist that the Irish should be so touchy on questions of identity. Even more telling, however, is the fact that some of the Irishman's first notable words in English literature are spoken as a denial of his own otherness. On Shakespeare's stage only fresh-faced country colleens are permitted to lisp charmingly in the patois "Cailín ó cois tSiúire me" (I am a girl from the banks of the Suir). Macmorris is the first known exponent on English soil of a now-familiar literary mode: the extracted confession. So he is made to say what his audiences want to hear.
    If colonialism is a system, so also is resistance. Postcolonial writing, in a strict sense, began in Ireland when an artist like Seathrún Céitinn took pen in hand to rebut the occupier's claims. He had been reading those texts which misrepresented him, and he resolved to answer back. He represented the