5 - Reactions to revolution

Summary

‘then and not till then, let my epitaph be written’. The Irish nationalist imagination was a prolonged waiting upon the ‘then’ of Robert Emmet's speech from the dock, the revolutionary Year One when Ireland would once again take her place among the nations of the earth. The many failed rebellions, of which Emmet's was one of the more pathetic, were dress-rehearsals for the real thing which would eventually arrive. When it came it would be dramatic, transformatory, as the ending of Kathleen ni Houlihan was: the puella senilis would be senilis no longer but would appear as the young girl with the walk of a queen, rejuvenated by the selfless sacrifice of her patriots. With the Easter Rising of 1916 such a moment seemed to have come at last. It was an event planned with conscious theatricality, and if the initial Dublin audience reaction was derisive, within years it grew to be regarded by Irish nationalists as the great drama which Pearse and the other leaders had planned it to be. How was the theatre to stage a staged real event, the revolution which Kathleen ni Houlihan had imagined as myth? Still more problematically, how was the theatre to deal with the aftermath of that six-day dramatic scene of revolution, the prolonged, bitter and messy guerilla war of 1919–21, or – worse still – the infinitely more embittering and messier civil war of 1922–3, in a country divided between those who maintained that the revolution was over and others who passionately held that the struggle had to continue?