Swift Studies, 23 (2008), 156-66. SWIFT PLAYS OF THE ABBEY THEATRE Elizabeth Mannion, Temple University, Philadelphia Few authors’ reputations have fluctuated as violently as Swift’s. From the beginning, commentators arranged themselves in rival camps. For some he was a champion of liberty, the hero of an oppressed nation; for others, a sadistic misanthrope, the mysterious tormentor of mankind in general and of two unfortunate women in particular. 1 David Nokes Jonathan Swift has been the subject of more biodramas on the stage of Dublin’s Abbey Theatre than any other figure of Irish history. The critical and popular success of these plays has been mixed, but they are worth examining as one measure of how Swift has been presented by Irish dramatists and received by Dublin audiences. To date, the Abbey’s Swift repertoire consists of G. Sidney Paternoster’s The Dean of St Patrick’s (1913), Arthur Power’s The Drapier Letters (1927), W. B. Yeats’s The Words upon the Window-Pane (1930), John O’Donovan’s Dearly Beloved Roger (1967), Eugene McCabe’s Swift (1969), Eamon Morrissey’s Patrick Gulliver (1978) and Mr Gulliver’s Bags (1984), and Tom MacIntyre’s The Bearded Lady (1984). While none of these plays provides any new insight into Swift’s biography, they do corroborate Robert Mahony’s observation that by the late nineteenth century, there was “growing favour for the Dean among popular writers [and] even the story of Stella and Vanessa … had begun to attract more positive sentimental attention.” 2 Most of the plays touch upon the Stella and Vanessa sagas, but they all also draw attention to Swift’s nationalist status and attempt to locate the Dean firmly in the city of Dublin. In doing so, they ‘stabilize’ the problematic nature of Swift’s relationship with the city. The Early Plays (1913-1930) 1 David Nokes, Jonathan Swift, a Hypocrite Reversed: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. vii. 2 Robert Mahony, Jonathan Swift: The Irish Identity (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 128. 2 Apart from Swift, the only subject of multiple biodramas within the Abbey’s Dublin-set repertoire during its early years was Irish revolutionary Robert Emmett (1778-1803). Presenting highly romanticized versions of the man, the two Emmett plays – Conal O’Riordan’s An Imaginary Conversation (1909) and Lennox Robinson’s The Dreamers (1915) – are fiercely nationalistic. By contrast, the two that portray Swift – Paternoster’s The Dean of St Patrick’s (1913) and Yeats’s The Words upon the Window-Pane (1930) – only minimally present him in a nationalistic light, although they also rely on romanticizing biography. Power’s The Drapier Letters (1927), the sole play to present Swift as an overtly nationalist figure, does not actually include the character of Swift on stage. Instead, Swift’s nationalism is reflected in the reactions of Dubliners towards him and his writings. On the early Abbey stage, then, Swift only appears as an Irish nationalist hero in absentia. The first play, G. Sidney Paternoster’s melodrama The Dean of St Patrick’s: A Play in Four Acts premiered on 23 January 1913 for a four-night run 3 and was revived three times in the same year. 4 Whereas each act features incidental political references, these moments are overshadowed by the play’s overt emphasis on Swift’s relationships with Stella and Vanessa. Stella frames the play, energetic in Act I and dying in Act IV; and Vanessa is a disruptive presence in the middle acts. Act III is the only one in which both women are present. Set in St Patrick’s Cathedral in 1716, Swift is about to marry Stella when Vanessa interrupts the proceedings. Furiously, Swift banishes Vanessa, but Stella cancels the wedding. The play, as Mahony notes, received relatively positive notices from Dublin critics, suggesting “that Dublin playgoers were receptive to the presentation of [Paternoster’s] tragic Swift.”5 Paternoster’s Dean is a man forever distracted by the two women, and their removal is required before his political, social, and literary accomplishments can be acknowledged. The final act finds the Dean in the company of Archbishop William King of Dublin and Bolingbroke. With the 3 If a letter Yeats wrote to Lady Gregory from London on 15 January 1913 is anything to go by, the play was met with eager anticipation: “I am going to Dublin next week for Swift [G. Sidney Paternoster’s The Dean of St Patrick’s] as I think it is too important a play for both of us to miss” (Donald T. Torchiana and Glenn O’Malley, “Some New Letters from W. B. Yeats to Lady Gregory,” Review of English Literature, 4, no 3 [1963], 16-18). Yeats’s wording suggests that he read the play before its performance. 4 The revivals included four performances beginning on 27 February 1913; two performances beginning on 26 March 1913; and another four performances beginning on 20 October 1913. The Paternoster play remains unpublished; the text cited here is BL MS/LCP 1923/32. 5 Mahony, Jonathan Swift: The Irish Identity, p. 130. 3 women absent, the Archbishop praises Swift’s contributions to Ireland and the city of Dublin: The Dean is greater in his retirement [from court life] than in the days when the Queen’s ministers were proud to do him honour. Then he but directed a party. Now a nation does him reverence. (p. 64) Swift then mentions the donations to Dublin’s poor he will make in his will. Responding to Bolingbroke’s query, “Why trouble about the knaves?” Swift exclaims: A true Englishman’s question. Why trouble about the dogs? Poverty’s their natural state. In laziness and ignorance they were begotten, knaves and brutes they have become. So grind ’em down and keep ’em down. They are even foolish enough to believe in their dean. (p. 65) This pronouncement of England’s responsibility for having created the very conditions cited as evidence of Irish inferiority is the first positioning of Swift as a destabilizing nationalist figure. The Dean’s sarcasm highlights this responsibility for having turned the streets surrounding his parish into slums and its inhabitants into beaten citizens. Taking the role of the oppressor, Swift demonstrates how easy it is for him to manipulate the poor: crowds are gathered outside to witness a lunar eclipse but disperse when informed that it “has been postponed by order of the Dean” (p. 66). In claiming that Dubliners are “foolish…to believe [in him],” Swift proclaims his own ambiguity as leader of the downtrodden. His nationalist credentials are resolutely (re-)established, however, by the quotation of a passage from his Character, Panegyric, and Description of the Legion Club (1736),6 in which he famously paralleled the Irish Parliament with a lunatic asylum (see ll. 35-62, for example). Offering Swift’s writings as evidence of his pro-Dublin, pro-republican position was to become a constant feature of all future Swift plays at the Abbey. Arthur R. Power’s The Drapier Letters, the first Swift play in the repertoire to be set entirely in Dublin, is the most nationalist of the early plays. In a prefatory note, Power claimed that his play was “an attempt to invent a reason why [Swift] changed from calling [Ireland] a ‘land of slaves where all are fools and all are knaves’ to … the noble sentiment”7 enunciated in A Letter to the Whole People of Ireland: “By the Laws of GOD, of NATURE, of NATIONS, and of your own Country, you ARE and OUGHT be as FREE a People as your 6 This quoting of The Legion Club (1736) in an act set in 1728 is one of many examples to disrupt chronology for dramatic effect. 7 Arthur R. Power, The Drapier Letters and Her Ladyship, the Poet, and the Dog (Dublin and Cork: Talbot Press, 1927), p. 5. 4 Brethren in England.” 8 This fourth Letter, which Yeats identified as the instalment that “passed from the talk of study and parlour to that of road and market,”9 most directly speaks of Swift’s nationalist ethos. In the drama, set in a slum tenement near St Patrick’s Cathedral in 1724, a young woman, Mary-Bridget, is accidentally shot by the authorities as they are searching her flat for the author of A Letter to the Whole People of Ireland. In her subsequent delirium, Mary-Bridget recalls her invocation of Ireland’s glorious Celtic past as an encouragement for the Dean to recognize that it was the loss of such glory which led to Dublin’s ever-expanding slum conditions; at the same time, the Dean’s own “pride,” she laments, amounts to a rejection of his Irish heritage: To be warring against your own Kind … is to bring disease … Sure weren’t we all great once; great – aye, and had bracelets and crowns, and robes, and all manner of geegars, like any old prince or queen … I don’t think we were always like this – living in slums the way we are … Oh! if we could only throw off this old heaviness of us … (pp. 30-31) Mary-Bridget’s vision harkens back to Stella’s dream in Paternoster’s Dean of St Patrick’s, in which Ireland is presented as a stark “wilderness” and England a “kingdom”: I dreamed of you [Swift], revered Father. You were standing alone in a wilderness and of a sudden there came one to you … he was clad in glowing colours … he offered you all the kingdoms of the world. I was beside you holding you back. But you broke away from me, and in my despair I awoke. (p. 8) This contrast between ancient royalty – Mary-Bridget’s Ireland – and modern sovereignty – Stella’s England – parallels the advancement of Swift’s nationalist credentials on the Abbey stage. After conferring with Swift’s servant, who has come to check on her condition, Mary-Bridget confesses to her mother that “it was I who made him write those letters … He was beginning to understand, I tell you … I would have made him love us, and he would have changed the face of the whole nation” (p. 32). In its somber conclusion, with Mary-Bridget dead and her 8 Prose Works, X, 63. Power’s note ignores of course that Swift wrote of “fools” and “knaves” only in 1727 (see Poems, ed. Williams, II, 421, ll. 1-2), that is, after penning the Letter to the Whole People of Ireland, his only lapse in chronology. The play itself sets the action in 1724, the year the Drapier’s Letters were actually published. 9 W.B. Yeats, “Introduction to Words upon the Window-Pane,” Fair Liberty Was All His Cry: A Tercentenary Tribute to Jonathan Swift, 1667-1745, ed. A. Norman Jeffares (London: Macmillan; New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1967), p. 188. 5 mother keening as the curtain falls, this one-act play presents a vision of constructed history. Although such a constructed Swift fitted in well with the Abbey’s early nationalist tenets, the play failed to appeal to its audiences. It was staged only twice: during its premiere one-week run opening on 22 August 1927, on a double bill with Shaw’s Arms and the Man, and in February 1928, on a double bill with Edward McNulty’s The Lord Mayor (1914). The Shaw plays, which were championed by Abbey Theatre co-founder Lady Gregory, were popular at the Abbey during the 1920s, 10 and opening The Drapier Letters with Arms and the Man suggests that its directors originally had high hopes for the Power play. McNulty’s The Lord Mayor was likewise popular with Dublin audiences, and pairing it with The Drapier Letters seems to imply continued support for the Power play and an attempt to help it find a larger audience. However, it failed to do so and was pulled from the Abbey rotation after its 1928 run.11 Yeats’s The Words upon the Window-Pane premiered on 17 November 1930 and was staged seven additional times through August 1947, making it the most frequently performed Swift play in the Abbey repertoire. Yeats’s Swift is a man consumed by fear, “afraid of solitude, afraid of outliving [his] friends – and [himself].” 12 Nonetheless, Swift overcomes his fear long enough to meditate on the contrast between the affairs of the heart and those of reason. As Richard Allen Cave has observed: Swift’s Rome-inspired philosophy argues for a resoluteness that rises above human needs; the very gift of love is consequently a threat to his mind’s rule. Swift’s cursing like Job the day of his birth is an attempt to deny those human needs, all part of the hope that he will commit to posterity nothing but the fruits of his intellect. But as the play shows it is Swift, the man, that exerts a powerful fascination over future ages. 13 10 See, for example, Shaw, Lady Gregory and the Abbey: A Correspondence and a Record, eds Dan H. Laurence and Nicholas Grene (Gerrards Cross, Bucks: Colin Smythe, 1993). 11 This conclusion is based on Abbey performance records. 12 Quotations are from William Butler Yeats, The Words upon the Window-Pane: A Play in One Act, with Notes upon the Play and its Subject (Dublin: The Cuala Press, 1934), p. 54. Again, references are given in parentheses within the text. 13 Richard Allen Cave, “Dramatising the Life of Swift,” Irish Writers and the Theatre, ed. Masuru Sekine (Gerrards Cross, Bucks: Colin Smythe, and Totowa, New Jersey: Barnes and Noble, 1986), pp. 24-25. 6 Yeats demonstrates the way in which Swift “exerts a powerful fascination” by having his spirit take over the play. 14 All the people gathered for the séance in a Dublin boarding house are attending for private reasons of their own – from Mrs Mallet’s desire to contact her dead husband for advice (p. 41) to Cornelius Patterson’s desire to find out whether he will enjoy the earthly pleasures of food and drink and the company of his favourite dog in the afterlife (p. 41). Only the Cambridge student, John Corbet, is interested in reaching Swift (pp. 39-40, 5657). But the Dean’s spirit thoroughly disrupts the gathering. His disruptive presence recalls the eighteenth-century satirist who both entertained and upset the status quo. It also reflects the divisive controversies among nineteenthcentury historians and critics who had been unable to agree on where to position Swift in the canon of Irish nationalism. The Later Plays (1967-1984) In the years between The Words upon the Window-Pane and the staging of the next new Swift play, John O’Donovan’s Dearly Beloved Roger (1967), Ernest Blythe was appointed as the Abbey’s managing director, a position he held from 1941 to 1967. Blythe was, by far, the most nationalistic of all the Abbey’s managing directors and the man who held that position for the longest period of time. It is noteworthy that no new Swift play should have been produced during his tenure, which kept him involved in season-to-season staging decisions. 15 In addition to Dearly Beloved Roger, of which no script remains, 16 four other Swift-related productions have premiered since 1967: Eugene McCabe’s 14 The most thorough survey of the whole issue of Yeats’s relationship with Swift is Donald T. Torchiana’s “Imitate Him if You Dare,” W. B. Yeats & Georgian Ireland (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, London: Oxford University Press, 1966), pp. 120-67. See also, for The Words upon the Window-Pane, Ronald G. Rollins, “Enigmatic Ghosts of Swift in Yeats and Johnston,” Eire-Ireland, 18 (1983), 103-15. 15 There were, however, three summer revivals of The Words upon the Window-Pane (July 1944, July 1947, and August 1947). Each production was part of a retrospective of the works of the founding directors. Thus, it is reasonable to deduce that The Words upon the WindowPane was included because it was one of Yeats’s more accessible plays rather than because of its attention to Swift. Summer seasons at the Abbey were, and remain, tourist-targeted. 16 The only known manuscript is among the missing at the National Library of Ireland. The NLI manuscript catalogued as Dearly Beloved Roger by John O’Donovan (MS 29,422) is actually a play about Oliver Goldsmith; title, author, and venue of production unknown. While the Abbey Theatre does not hold a script either, its original programme (26 April 1967) identifies the play as “an historical piece following the life of Jonathan Swift from the cradle to the grave,” which appeared on the main stage. In “A Word about the Play by the Author,” O’Donovan acknowledged his obligation to “Denis Johnston-Yahoo’s glorious book In Search of Swift and with Handelian aplomb has appropriated for his own use one of 7 Swift (1969), Eamon Morrissey’s Patrick Gulliver (1976) and Mr Gulliver’s Bags (1984), and Tom MacIntyre’s The Bearded Lady (1984). Although Morrissey and then Abbey artistic director Ben Barnes met in 2004/5 to discuss reviving Patrick Gulliver, the plan never came to fruition. So once again, the Abbey is experiencing a long absence of plays about Swift. McCabe’s (still unpublished) Swift ventures into previously unexplored territory. In a lengthy dream prologue set in 1741 Dublin, a mentally deteriorating Swift is seeking comfort from his servant. The Dean drifts in and out of a fitful sleep, visited by the “ghosts of those I ever loved or lashed [coming] back to weep and gape and mouth at me and make my present life a burlesque of all my life from infancy till now.” 17 The first ghost, his mother Abigail, is made to defend herself against her four-year-old son for not retrieving him from his nurse in Whitehaven sooner and for leaving him abruptly again when going to England in search of a new husband. Admitting by implication to an affair with Sir John Temple, Sir William Temple’s father, she sees it as guaranteed that her son will procure a position with Temple. When Swift presses for clarity of her insinuations, Abigail calls Swift “a cruel, unnatural pup” for pushing the issue, and he retaliates by denouncing her as “a cold, unnatural bitch.” 18 Abigail is at the root of Swift’s adult demons, and the ghosts of Temple and Stella as well as those of Vanessa and Bolingbroke are victims of her legacy, too. While in Paternoster’s earlier Dean of St Patrick’s Swift falls victim both to his own passions and an aggressive Vanessa, and while in The Words upon the Window-Pane he becomes the victim of his own high ideals, McCabe’s prologue foregrounds the Dean’s abandonment, which is unique to the repertoire and which recurs throughout the play. Swift’s leaving Stella behind at Laracor and Vanessa behind in London had been shown on the stage previously, but never, as in Swift, the Dean abandoning his own child. This idea is borrowed from Sybil Le Brocquy’s Cadenus, which had premiered in England some seven years earlier but had never been staged at the Abbey. 19 McCabe’s play presents Vanessa as pregnant Johnston-Yahoo’s discoveries” (p. 1). The play was part of the Swift bicentenary week. The Irish Times gave it a lukewarm review, and in Jonathan, Jack, and GBS: Four Plays about Irish History and Literature (Newark: University of Delaware Press, and London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1993), Robert Hogan described the play as “a sort of documentary cum poetry recital” (p. 17), suggesting that the piece was more a summary of Swift writings than an interrogation of the man. 17 Eugene McCabe, Swift (NLI MS 29,311), p. 2. 18 McCabe, Swift, p. 8. 19 Le Brocquy’s A View on Vanessa: A Correspondence with Interludes for the Stage (Dublin: The Dolmen Press, 1967), however, was staged at Dublin’s Lantern Theatre Club in 8 with Swift’s child when he leaves England for Dublin in 1714, referring to her condition as the reason for her following him to Ireland. The boy, Brian, appears before Swift on his birthday and is given a coin in honour of the occasion: a mere gesture void of any emotion. It is only in the play’s final scene, in which Swift presents Vanessa with a toy horse for the boy (echoing a story Swift told the boy on a prior visit), that an emotional bond is established. Touched by the gesture, Vanessa “presses his hand on her breast,” 20 only to be rebuked by Swift, who is shown to be capable of reaching out to others, but on his own terms and in limited measure only. This limitation is reminiscent of his abandonment by his mother in the play’s prologue. In Swift, the Dean is presented as a passive-aggressive personality marred by a mode of manipulation and control that relies on a disruptive nature. Even the one scene of political concern in the play contains overtones of abandonment. As in the earlier plays, the nationalist credential for Swift is The Drapier’s Letters. Archbishop King refers to their call for monetary justice as “tinder ... that always sparks off patriotism,” 21 and he is quick to agree with their premise. But then, taking exception to comments which he claims to be “inflammatory” and bordering on treason, the Archbishop accuses Swift of playing both sides of a populist fence: appearing the noble patriot while the printer has to pay the price for Swift’s bravado. His comment on the Drapier’s Letters that the most significant penalty of treason is that “a people long used to hardship lose by degrees the very notion of liberty” 22 is countered by Swift’s argument that the people already know “that Government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery.” 23 Articulating what the Irish know in their hearts, Swift appears as a noble, if sentimental, patriot. Morrissey’s Patrick Gulliver (1976) and Mr Gulliver’s Bags (1984) were performed on the Abbey’s Peacock stage. One-man shows, played by the author, they contain “essentially the same material in a different setting: [Mr 1967. For a recent reading of A View on Vanessa, see Sabine Wendel, “Sybil Le Brocquy’s A View on Vanessa: An Exercise in Historiographical Meta-Drama,” Reading Swift: Papers from The Fifth Münster Symposium on Jonathan Swift, ed. Hermann J. Real (München: Wilhelm Fink, 2008), pp. 483-90. 20 McCabe, Swift, p. 65. 21 McCabe, Swift, p. 49. 22 McCabe, Swift, p. 52. 23 McCabe, Swift, p. 52. This echoes Prose Works, X, 87, of course. See, for the whole issue, Alan Downie, “Swift and Locke’s Two Treatises of Government,” Swift, the Enigmatic Dean: Festschrift for Hermann Josef Real, eds Rudolf Freiburg, Arno Löffler, and Wolfgang Zach (Tübingen: Stauffenburg Verlag, 1998), pp. 27-34; and, more recently, Joseph McMinn, “The Prosecution of Power: Swift’s Defence of Ireland,” Reading Swift: Papers from The Fifth Münster Symposium on Jonathan Swift (München: Wilhelm Fink, 2008), pp. 365-73. 9 Gulliver’s Bags being set on] the stage of a run-down inn, with Gulliver trying to make a few shillings showing off his souvenirs,” 24 and Patrick Gulliver set in the Deanery. The two plays have since been compiled into one script under the title Patrick Gulliver: From the Works of Jonathan Swift.25 Narrated by the opportunistic Patrick (a stage version of the Travels’ Lemuel), Morrissey’s humorous play significantly departs from the Abbey’s Swift repertoire and is the most accessible. Borrowing from Captain Gulliver’s “Letter to his Cousin Sympson,” Patrick informs the audience that he served as the Dean’s groom and occasional house servant. He also announces that Swift (or, Sympson) did him a great wrong: “They were my travels, not his! By his great and frequent urgency he prevailed upon me to allow him to write down and publish a very loose and unaccurate (sic) account of my travels, so that he made me say the thing that was not.”26 This premise of the play – a disgruntled former servant looting through the Dean’s belongings after his death in an attempt to right a moral wrong financially – provides a parallel between Swift’s own writings and dramatic representations of the man. Not since The Words upon the WindowPane has the form and content of a play about Swift at the Abbey so closely mirrored the sensibility of its subject. The meta-dramatic elements of The Words upon the Window-Pane and Patrick Gulliver embed Swift’s writings in a portrait of the man. While The Words upon the Window-Pane is the more accomplished in form, Patrick Gulliver is the more successful in spirit. Throughout, Patrick sets out to convince the audience that his travels were real by documenting the places where Gulliver’s travels deviate from his own. Patrick’s demeanor changes as the various episodes of the Travels are relayed: a clumsy royal sycophant in Lilliput, an arrogant sailor in Brobdingnag, and a distracted pseudo-intellectual in Laputa, he is at his most physical when relaying the time spent among the Houyhnhnms. Patrick’s scrappy, opportunistic persona embodies the very audience Swift successfully reached in the Travels (not to mention A Modest Proposal and the Drapier’s Letters). While the Travels is the primary conduit through which Morrissey’s play connects with the audience, Patrick’s sentimental readings of A Modest Proposal and the Drapier’s Letters propel it into a nationalistic context. The play concludes with Patrick rebounding from these readings, delighting in 24 Eamon Morrissey in a personal e-mail communication to Elizabeth Mannion, 8 August 2006. 25 Quotations follow this version. 26 Morrissey, Patrick Gulliver, p. 8. 10 having found the souvenirs of his travels: portraits, locks of hair, and a giant’s tooth. He hastens to assure the audience that the Dean was honourable in keeping his word that the exact locations of his far-off lands should never be revealed. The explanation for this promise is of an anti-colonialist nature: “Have no fear Patrick, for I have no wish to enlarge her Majesties dominions, having scruples about the justice of Princes on these occasions.” 27 MacIntyre’s The Bearded Lady is also framed by the Travels, but its similarities with Morrissey end here. With a pair of giant breasts serving as the key entrance and exit point and its circus freak-show set, The Bearded Lady was not only the most surreal of the Abbey’s Swift sets but also the most surreal of the theatre’s Swift plays. 28 By the time it premiered in September 1984, MacIntyre had already staged several experimental works to critical acclaim in Dublin, most notably The Great Hunger (1983) at the Abbey’s Peacock Theatre. Like that earlier work, The Bearded Lady is full of sexual tension. As one critic has noted, the play “put[s] on stage the madness that can arise from an over-insistence on the rational at the expense of the sexual in human relations.”29 In this regard, there is a connection to the plays of Yeats and McCabe, but the sexual overtones of The Bearded Lady are simply screens for the presentation of an adult Swift who is in fear of both sexes and who fails to govern himself in the presence of any adult figure. On the surface, Swift’s conduct in The Bearded Lady is the result of his preoccupation with sexual suppression. MacIntyre had already offered the suppression of sexual drive as a metaphor for Ireland’s emasculation in The Great Hunger, and The Bearded Lady, at first sight, looks like an alternate dish in this course. However, the suggestion that Swift’s adult dealings are rooted in his suppression of sexual desire and that this suppression is tied unto a specifically Irish religiosity (evidenced by the play’s casting of bawdy female bishops) is negated. Whereas the sexual frustration of the aging bachelor farmer in The Great Hunger dramatized the stranglehold of the Catholic Church and Irish land-inheritance practices, the sexual frustration of The Bearded Lady is not put into context. Neither Swift’s church nor his social status required celibacy, and The Bearded Lady never offers an explanation for Swift’s decision to remain chaste where Stella is concerned. Neither is there any narrative support for his behaviour in general, and thus MacIntyre’s audience 27 Morrissey, Patrick Gulliver, p. 28. Like some of the other plays, The Bearded Lady has never been published but is available at NLI MS 36,099/5/9-10. 29 Christopher Murray, Twentieth-Century Irish Drama: Mirror up to Nation (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1997), p. 233. 28 11 remains at a loss as to the ‘rationale’ of Swift’s fear of female power. In many ways, The Bearded Lady is more about a particular psychosis (evoked by the play’s title, “the bearded lady” being a euphemism for schizophrenia) than it is about Swift. What The Bearded Lady does share with all of the later plays testifies to the correctness of Mahony’s claim that the Dean passes in memory from patriot to personality as the century moves forward. 30 Nationalist references increase, but the method by which these references are delivered on the Abbey stage becomes increasingly commercial. In McCabe’s Swift, the Dean’s personality is foremost, but it is presented in the context of female dominance (through the presentation of Abigail). This supports Mahony’s view that female characters are conducive to making Swift more of a ‘character’ because of his quirks. With Morrissey’s Patrick serving as a familiar marker to consumers of Irish cultural tourism, the commodification is complete. If, as Susan Bennett has observed, it is true that the Abbey Theatre is “a venue of distinctive symbolic weight,” 31 it is also true that it is a venue of distinctive economic weight, having allocated its summer stagings to tourist consumption as far back as the 1930s. As the twentieth century progressed, the figure of a Dublinesque stage narrator became familiar to consumers of Abbey fare. Morrissey’s Patrick provided such a tour guide to literary tourists who were filling the seats of the Abbey during the summer months. 32 Although more surreal in tone and setting, MacIntyre’s play seems a natural conclusion to the evolution of Swift as cultural commodity. As cultural tourism from abroad began to reach new heights in the mid 1980s, it appears that the Abbey was willing to risk staging Swift in a more sensational manner. It would appear, however, that Abbey audiences were not too keen on this Swift: it has never been re-staged at the national theatre. The Abbey’s Swift repertoire reflects the evolution that the Dean’s status as a nationalist icon underwent in Ireland during the course of the twentieth century. Of those plays which premiered in the first half-century – The Dean of St. Patrick’s, The Drapier Letters, and The Words upon the Window-Pane – only The Drapier Letters presents an overtly nationalistic Swift, and this is done without Swift on stage. Set in a tenement, it is the only play of this period that connects Swift and the poor. When juxtaposed with the Paternoster and Yeats plays, both of which go to great lengths to portray the intellectual and moral 30 Mahony, Jonathan Swift: The Irish Identity, passim. Susan Bennett, “Performing Ireland: Tourism and the Abbey Theatre,” Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 30, no 2 (2004), p. 30. 32 Morrissey’s plays premiered between June and August, which is the height of the tourist season. 31 12 stature of the man, The Drapier Letters highlights that class of Irish society that emerged during the 1913 Lockout and that gave the twentieth-century nationalist movement the popular support it needed to rise in 1916. As such, the early plays reflect Swift’s foundation in the republican movement. The later plays – Dearly Beloved Roger, Swift, Patrick Gulliver, Mr Gulliver’s Bags, and The Bearded Lady – all premiere long after the establishment of the Free State and Republic. By the late 1960s, when Dearly Beloved Roger arrived, political fare on the Abbey stage was focused on issues of partition – with a particular interest in sectarianism in the north. At the same time, Dublin’s burgeoning tourist trade focused on republican figures of its literary past.33 Swift fitted either bill, and thus it is not surprising to see him delivered on the Abbey stage by chatty narrators like Patrick in Patrick Gulliver and Mr Gulliver’s Bags. This Swift, like his narrator, is very much the Dublin ‘character’ described by Mahony as quick of wit, superior and flawed in equal measure. More character than controversial figure, Swift is presented in a way that promises maximum accessibility. In the end, with The Bearded Lady, all traces of politics are gone: Swift has become fodder for psychological scrutiny. 33 It is in the 1960s that walking tours of the Easter Rising and literary pub crawls begin to emerge. In the 1970s, there is the beginning of summer schools; in the 1980s, these are common fare and in great numbers.