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‘Enter Revenge’: Henry Burkhead and Cola's Furie

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2009

Patricia Coughlan
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Extract

There are very few texts written from the viewpoint of the Catholics in Ireland in the 1640s; among these, A Tragedy of Cold's Furie, OR, Lirenda's Miserie (Kilkenny, 1646), a five-act verse tragedy or tragicomedy, is striking in being a specifically literary, as well as a political, work.

Almost nothing is known about Henry Burkhead, whose name appears in various forms and who has been mistakenly conflated with another similar-sounding writer. Anthony a Wood rather slightingly calls Burkhead ‘no Academian, only a Merchant of Bristol’, and Langbaine also notices Cola's Furie, repeating this description and saying the play was never performed. A search of the Bristol city archives has failed to discover any mention of him, which may indicate that he resided in Kilkenny and traded with Bristol; various forms of his surname do, however, occur there, and it seems to be an English, rather than an Irish or ‘Old English’ one. The authors of the three sets of fulsome commendatory verses printed with the play – William Smyth, Paul Aylward, and Daniel Breede – seem even more obscure than Burkhead himself; all that is clear biographically is Burkhead's strong support of the Catholic cause, inferred from the play itself. As for its printing, it is not known whether the Jesuit press which then existed in the city was used, or that run by the Supreme Council of the Catholic confederates; it is highly unusual in being a literary text amidst the political, religious and administrative documents, pamphlets and proclamations which make up the remainder of the output from Kilkenny.

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Research International , Volume 15 , Issue 1 , Spring 1990 , pp. 1 - 17
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 1990

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References

Notes

1. The project of this paper arose during my study of writings in English in and about Ireland in the whole period of the English Civil Wars and Interregnum (see my ‘Cheap and Common Animals: The English Anatomy of Ireland in the Seventeenth Century’, in Healy, T. and Sawday, J. (ed.), ‘Now Wane is All the World About’: Literature and the English Civil War (forthcoming, Cambridge, 1990).Google Scholar I am indebted for helpful information and discussion about Cola to David Norbrook, Steven Gale, Sue Wiseman, and especially Trevor Joyce who first drew my attention to the play; other specific debts are recorded in the notes. My research for this article was financed with the assistance of a grant from the Arts Faculty, University College, Cork.

2. It is noticed in Harbage, A., Annals of English Drama 975–1700 (revised by S. Schoenbaum, London, 1964)Google Scholar, in Langbaine, G., Outline of the English Dramatic Poets (Oxford, 1691), pp. 41–2Google Scholar and Bentley, G. E., The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, Vol. III (Oxford, 1956), pp. 94–5.Google Scholar There are longer discussions in Stockwell, La Tourette, ‘Lirenda's Miserie’, Dublin Magazine n.s. Vol. V (1930), 19–26Google Scholar, which, however, is largely a plot summary; Kavanagh, Peter, The Irish Theatre (Tralee, 1946)Google Scholar, which is intemperately negative, and, most useful, Duggan, G. C., The Stage Irishman (Dublin, 1937), pp. 65–73.Google Scholar The play was also usefully discussed as part of a paper on early Irish theatre by Professor Dorothea Siegmund-Schultze of the University of Halle-Wittenberg, at the 1987 Conference in Caen of the International Association for the Study of Anglo-Irish Literature.

3. Wood is followed by G. E. Bentley in listing Burkhead as the author also of The Female Rebellion (c. 1658), a political tragi-comedy surviving in MS., and identified as in fact the work of Henry Birkhead (1617?–1696). I am grateful to Joan Pittock Wesson for kindly communicating to me her convincing disentanglement of Burkhead from this Birkhead, Fellow of All Souls and founder of the Oxford Chair of Poetry and from his relative Sir John Birkenhead – the form in which W. S. Clark gives Burkhead's surname in The Early Irish Stage (Oxford, 1955, p. 40).Google Scholar

4. Joan Burkhead and Sarah and Thomas Burkett occur in The Inhabitants of Bristol, in 1696, and Thomas Birket in the City Chamberlain's Accounts, in 1557. I am grateful for this information to Professor K. G. Davies, who very kindly investigated the matter in Bristol. I also wish to thank Mr John S. Williams of the Bristol Record Office, who searched that office's records for a mention of Burkhead, without success.

5. See Dix, E. R. McClintock, ‘Printing in the City of Kilkenny in the Seventeenth Century’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, Vol. 32, c. (1914), 125–137.Google Scholar Dix remarks that Cola is one of the earliest pieces of dramatic printing in Ireland. It was just preceded by Burnell's, HenryLandgartha (Dublin, 1641)Google Scholar, a historical romance with a Danish setting and Irish touches performed in Dublin in 1640. Burnell was a member of the confederate Assembly.

6. There is a useful explanation of their worsening position, which had been becoming ever more difficult as the sense of an ‘elect nation’ of Protestants, defined in contradistinction to Catholic Europe, grew in England from the Elizabethan period onwards, in Ellis, Steven, Tudor Ireland (London, 1985), p. 319.Google Scholar On Strafford, see Clarke, Aidan, Strafford in Ireland (London, 1959).Google Scholar

7. For the allegations of intemperate threats by Sir Charles Coote, governor of Dublin (Burkhead's Cola), of a general massacre of Catholics, see Richard Bellings' account, in Gilbert, John T. (ed.), History of the Irish Confederation and the War in Ireland, 1641–1649, 7 vols. (Dublin, 1882–1891), Vol. I, pp. 39–40.Google Scholar Accounts of the racking of Sir John Read (the character Rufus), represented in the play at Act III, p. 28, are at pp. 78–9, 81–2: ‘the torture Sir John Read suffered and the leading interrogatoryes put to him, while he lay on the racke, concerning the King's being privy to the raysing of the Rebellion, did compleat men's aversion to the State’. The aged Sir Patrick Barnewall, Burkhead's Cephalon, was also tortured.

8. The most illuminating modern account of the position of the Old English and of the confederacy in general is by Patrick J. Corish, in ‘The Rising of 1641 and the Catholic Confederacy, 1641–5’, and ‘Ormond, Rinuccini and the Confederates, 1645–9’, in Moody, T. W. (ed.), A New History of Ireland, Vol. III (Oxford, 1976), pp. 289–335.Google Scholar On the conflict of loyalties, see especially p. 312. See also Cregan, D. F., ‘The Confederation of Kilkenny’, unpublished Ph.D thesis, National University of Ireland (1947)Google Scholar, and Beckett, J. C., ‘The Confederation of Kilkenny Reviewed’, in Roberts, M. (ed.), Historical Studies, Vol. II (London, 1959), pp. 29–41.Google Scholar

9. Copies of Cola's Furie are very rare, possibly only two in number, one in the British Library and one in the Huntington Library. I have used the B.L. copy (C.21.C.54). The extra identifications were made by G. C. Duggan in The Stage Irishman.

10. I have discussed the massacre pamphlets in the essay cited above, n. 1; for a balanced modern account of the depositions taken from victims, on which that atrocity literature is based, see Clarke, Aidan, ‘The 1641 Depositions’, in Fox, P. (ed.), Treasure of the Library (Dublin, 1986), pp. 111–20.Google Scholar A representative early example of this literature, which was devastatingly effective in hardening English opinion against the Irish Catholics, is Jones's, HenryA Remonstrance (London, 1642).Google Scholar

11. Compare Martin Butler's comments about the old-fashioned characteristics of the plays, often patriotic and political, put on at the London popular theatres in the decade up to 1642 (Theatre and Crisis 1632–1642 (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 181–93).Google Scholar

12. Bentley, , Jacobean and Caroline Stage, Vol. III, pp. 94–5Google Scholar; Kavanagh, , The Irish Theatre, pp. 46–8.Google Scholar

13. See Butler, Martin, Theatre and CrisisGoogle Scholar, Belsey, Catherine, The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama (London, 1985)Google Scholar, and Dollimore, Jonathan, Radical Tragedy (Brighton, 1984).Google Scholar

14. See Clark, , Early Irish Stage, pp. 26–43Google Scholar; Fitzgibbon, T. G., ‘Purpose and Theme in the Drama of James Shirley’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, National University of Ireland (1982), pp. 13–16Google Scholar; Stevenson, A. H., ‘James Shirley and the Actors at the First Irish Theatre’, Modern Philology 40 (1942), 149–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and ‘Shirley's Years in Ireland’, Review of English Studies 20 (1944), 19–28Google Scholar; Turner, J. P. (ed.), St. Patrick for Ireland (New York, 1979).Google Scholar I am grateful to Dr Fitzgibbon for useful discussion of Cola and its period.

15. Breede's verses invoke the names of major contemporary artists:

Had Rubens and Vandike liv'd and at strife,

Who should pourtray best, Cola to the life,

Their curious Art, the way could never find

To paint his body, as thy Muse, his minde.

16. See Hammerstein, Helga, ‘Aspects of the Continental Education of Irish Students in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth I’, Historical Studies, 8 (1971)Google Scholar, ed. Williams, T. D., 137–53Google Scholar, Corish, P. J., The Irish Catholic Experience (Dublin, 1985)Google Scholar, and Barnard, T. C., Cromwellian Ireland (Oxford, 1975), p. 52Google Scholar, which provides evidence of the numbers and strength of Catholic merchants in the towns before the Interregnum. I am also indebted to Celestine Murphy for useful discussions of the Catholic merchant class in Leinster in the seventeenth century. See her forthcoming article ‘The Life and Times of Luke Wadding, Bishop of Ferns’, Journal of the Wexford Historical Society, No. 12 (1988–1989).Google Scholar

17. These plays were based on the stories of the Resurrection, the Temptation, and the Nine Worthies, and their characters included not only Christ, Mary, and Michael the Archangel, but Hector, Charlemagne, Satan, and another demon called Belphegor, a comic devil or vice-figure. The performances may have originated with the Protestant proselytizing drama of bishop John Bale in the 1550s (Clark, , Early Irish Stage, pp. 22–3).Google Scholar

18. Kavanagh's is the fullest account I have found of this play and of Jesuit educational drama in Ireland (Irish Theatre, pp. 47–55Google Scholar). The playbill is in the Bradshaw collection of Cambridge University Library.

19. He was met by a formal procession among which were a group of fifty mounted students from the Jesuit college who ‘after caracoling round me conveyed their compliments to me though one of their number, a youth crowned with laurel and in a richer habit than the rest, and who recited some verses to me’. (Aiazza, G. (ed.), The Embassy in Ireland of Monsignor G.B. Rinuccini, tr. Hutton, Annie (Dublin, 1873), p. 90).Google Scholar Grandeur in liturgy and vestments and a stress on outward and visible religious performance were hallmarks of post-Tridentine Counter-Reformation Catholicism, then an important influence on Irish practice. See Corish, , Irish Catholic ExperienceGoogle Scholar, and Bossy, John, ‘The Counter-Reformation and the People of Catholic Ireland’, in Historical Studies, VIII (Dublin, 1971), pp. 155–69.Google Scholar

20. Anon., Aphorismical Discovery of Treasonable FactionGoogle Scholar, ed. Gilbert, John T., in A Contemporary History of Affairs in Ireland from 1641 to 1652, Vol. I, Pt. 1 (Dublin, 1879), p. 46.Google Scholar As is perhaps apparent in the extract, this eloquent and interesting text is a hostile account: its author supported Owen Roe O'Neill and the native Irish faction in the Confederacy, and was bitterly opposed to the Old English domination of the proceedings and scornful of Preston's abilities. Here he equates the plays with the palate-enticing dishes; elsewhere he attacks the literary pretensions of Richard Sellings, Secretary to the Supreme Council (p. 52), who while a student at Lincoln's Inn in the 1620s had composed a sixth book for Sidney's Arcadia, and who also wrote an extended contemporary account of the confederacy, from the other viewpoint.

21. This may refer not just to the general hazards of travel between England and Ireland (coasting Parliament vessels made communications difficult) but to the fact that Glamorgan was shipwrecked on his way to Ireland (Corish, , ‘The Rising of 1641 and the Catholic Confederacy, 1641–5’Google Scholar, in Moody, (ed.), New History of Ireland, p. 315).Google Scholar

22. I have gathered the information in these notes largely from the following sources, which give much more fully than the writings of recent historians the details of contemporary military and other events which are necessary to elucidate the play's relation to fact: Gilbert, John T. (ed.), History of the Confederacy and the War in Ireland, 1641–1653, 7 vols. (Dublin, 1882–1891)Google Scholar, which prints the account of Sir Richard Bellings as well as many contemporary documents, and also Gilbert's edition of the anonymous contemporary Aphorismical Discovery of Treasonable Faction (see above, n. 17); Meehan, C. P., The Confederation of Kilkenny (Dublin, 1905).Google Scholar There is a very useful summary account of the wars in Lowe, John, ‘Some Aspects of the Wars in Ireland, 1641–1649’, The Irish Sword 4 (1959), 82–7.Google Scholar

23. These references are to the corresponding passages in the play.

24. See Meehan, C. P., The Confederation of Kilkenny (Dublin, 1873), pp. 65, 81.Google Scholar

25. There does seem to be a bit of wishful thinking in Act V, p. 53, when Abner (Preston) is represented as taking Osirus (Ormond) prisoner.

26. She is tortured by Tygranes to make her reveal information about ‘Brinfort’ – an unidentified name which may well stand for that of some castle or fortified town.

27. Aphorismical Discovery, Vol. I, p. 31.Google Scholar

28. This is emblematic rather than illusionist psychology (I am borrowing Catherine Belsey's terms), having a family resemblance, for instance, to Jonson's characterizations based on the theory of humours.

29. IV, pp. 40 ff. Abner enters reading a letter giving bad news about his sons; this probably refers to the capture at Rathconnell of his son, known as Don Diego.

30. I Samuel 17.55, 26.7–15, II Samuel 2.14–32, 3.28–39.

31. See Butler, Martin, Theatre and Crisis, pp. 181, 189Google Scholar: ‘“the red bull phrase”, said John Cleveland mockingly, “was enter three devils solus”’ (the Red Bull being one of the popular theatres) – which recalls Burkhead's ‘Enter Revenge, followed by three spirits in sheets’ to haunt Cola. See also Hattaway, Michael, Elizabethan Popular Theatre (London, 1987), pp. 32–3, 114–15.Google Scholar In A Looking Glass for London and England (1590)Google Scholar ‘A hand from out a cloud threatens with a burning sword’ (p. 32); Burkhead's Revenge says to Cola: ‘This bloodie sword and flaming torch are them / true Emblems of thy furious stratageme…’

32. I am grateful for this information, and for a useful extended discussion of Cola's Furie, to David Bond, of the University of Exeter.

33. The first Interlude in Titus: ‘A Country Clowne hearing that a proclamation was to issue against the Christians, is mightily merry, and attempts to rob a passenger’ (quoted in Kavanagh, , Irish Theatre, p. 51Google Scholar; see discussion, Section II above). The scene in St. Patrick for Ireland is V.i.

34. The phrase quoted is from Dollimore, Jonathan, Radical Tragedy, p. 63.Google Scholar Dollimore's later remark, paraphrasing Benjamin on Brecht, also illuminates Cola's Furie: ‘Contradiction is incorporated in the very structure of the epic play rather than simply being ignored or, alternatively, acknowledged but ultimately transcended … Different genres are juxtaposed, sometimes jarringly so’ (p. 64).