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The Interminable War? Cycles of Violence in Helen Edmundson's The Clearing K. Sarah-Jane Murray Baylor University The Clearing, Helen Edmundson's award-winning 1993 historical drama, explores the roots of the Anglo-Irish conflict by portraying the difficulties faced by a small farming community in County Kildare. Set over a period of three years—from 1652 to 1655—in the midst of Cromwellian Ireland (see Barnard), the narrative follows the gradual breakdown and disintegration of the marriage of Madeleine O'Hart, a spirited Irish girl, and Robert Preston, a Cambridge-educated gentleman. Robert, we learn, inherited an Irish estate from his deceased father a few years ago. Upon his arrival in Ireland, he and Madeleine fell in love despite the ferocious war raging between their two countries. But in The Clearing, it seems, love cannot conquer all. As the play progresses, Robert and Madeleine are forced to confront the political turmoil facing their countrymen and their relationship becomes more and more strained. The characters are literally torn apart by the deeply rooted political divisions fostered by Cromwell's "To Hell or Connaught" policy. Stagings of The Clearing, throughout its international production history, have been well received.1 However no study, to date, has explored the structure and implications of the play.2 Through the careful construction of her characters, Edmundson establishes the image of a deeply divided society, torn between two irreconcilable political extremes. The audience watches, helpless, as Robert and Madeleine become politically invested in a conflict which sets the tone for the ongo- ing tensions between Ireland and England today. As you arrived this afternoon,3 some Irish music was playing in the background. I used to play many of those songs on my tin whistle when I was a little girl. I did not think much about the fact that they were Irish rebel songs, songs of war. I do, however, recall that on several occasions my uncle Jim came to find me and asked, "Do you realize you're playing Fennian [i.e., Republican] songs there?" (with a big smile on his face). What uncle Jim would not tell you, however, is that he was sitting in the room next door with his newspaper, fervently enjoying my childhood attempts 41 42 K. Sarah-Jane Murray to make music and sometimes whistling along himself. After all, Protestants from Northern Ireland do not sing, play, or allow themselves to enjoy Republican music. It simply is not done! You are British (and therefore, in all likelihood Protestant), or you are Republican (and probably Catholic). But there is no room for middle ground. The irony is that all of my family eagerly listens to the songs in private. Today, everyone in Ireland probably owns one of these CDs. The tunes are, after all, catchy. And they are very Irish. For me, at least, the songs transcend the conflicts they seek to commemorate, the memories of the violent rebellions and great Risings that have recurred, incessantly, throughout Irish history. As I sit on the Baylor cam- pus, singing along in my office to the Dubliners or the Clancy Brothers (to the horror of my colleagues and some of my students, who would certainly tell you that, al- though the tunes are good, my singing voice has the innate and awesome ability to deform and significantly detract from their beauty), I am not making a political state- ment; I am just thinking of home. Yet in their very nature, their very essence, the songs are political. Moving, stirring, sometimes sarcastic, they were, and still are, sung all over Ireland. It is hard to imagine that singing, or whistling some of them, was a punishable offense up to 1922 or even later: you could be thrown in jail and flogged! The history of rebel songs is fascinating, and merits a discussion in itself. But I will mention only briefly the evolu- tion of one particular piece, "The Foggy Dew." This tune began as an old Irish love ballad, but later, new words were set to the music, transforming it into a vehicle of political dissent. In other words, the tune which once allowed for the telling of a love story was co-opted, politicized and made to serve the cause of the Irish nationalists. In Ireland, it seems, even the old love songs get sucked into the political arena. Yet this transformation also served another purpose: people could get away with whistling "The Foggy Dew" because it was, originally, a love song. In many ways, the storyline of Edmundson's play reminds me of the co- opted and politicized "Foggy Dew." The play begins, as we have seen, as a love story. Yet by the time the curtain goes down, the love story—the life Robert and Madeleine once had—has been co-opted, politicized and rewritten. In The Clearing, all of Edmundson's characters are exposed to the madness raging around them. No one escapes the cycle of violence. Historical Background Some knowledge of Irish history is essential to an understanding of Edmundson's play. In the early 1970s, an English reporter was caught in gunfire between British soldiers and members of the IRA on the notorious Falls Road in Belfast. Eager to get the story, the reporter asked an old man standing nearby: "When did it start?" "When Strongbow invaded Ireland," the latter promptly replied. Some- what confused, the reporter tried again: "When do you think it will finish?" The old Irishman looked him straight in the eye and said: "When Cromwell gets out of Hell!" (Ellis in Edmundson 1994 vii). This conversation, now famous, reminds us that the "troubles" in Ireland (as they are often called)—between Irish and British, or Catho- The Interminable War 43 lics and Protestants—did not surface yesterday. The English colonization of Ireland began over eight hundred years ago, when the Anglo-Norman lord Richard Fitzgilbert de Clare, known as Strongbow, sailed to Dublin in 1169. The invaders soon established a permanent settlement around the Dublin area and, in 1171, Henry II declared himself King of Ireland. Over time the Anglo-Normans integrated Irish culture and society: many married the daughters of prominent Irish chieftains and were reputed to have become ipsis Hibernicis Hiberniores (more Irish than the Irish themselves). Fearing they would lose control over Ireland, the English monarchy grew increasingly uncomfortable. In 1367, the Statute of Kilkenny marked the beginning of intentional racial persecution in Ireland. The marriage of an Englishman and an Irish woman was declared high treason; it was considered both "lawful" and "advisable" to murder anyone caught riding in the Irish fashion, donning Irish dress or not covering one's head with "a civil English cap." In 1447, another Act of Parliament prohibited the wearing of a moustache. The punish- ment seems grossly out-of-proportion to the crime: offenders were to be swiftly put to death, and their estates forfeited to the Crown. The reign of Henry VIII imposed new and serious difficulties on the Catholic Irish. In 1541, the monarch, who had severed all ties with Rome and established a new form of religion in England, declared himself head of the Irish church. The resulting situation in Ireland was complex: both the Irish natives and the descendants of the old Anglo-Norman settlers were Catholic. Ties between these "Old" and "New" Irish, as they were called, were thus solidified. United by their common faith, they were determined to oppose the spread of Protestantism in Ireland. Henry's response was simple and gruesome: eradicate all opposition. His policies were continued relentlessly dur- ing the reign of Elizabeth I; dissidents were burned alive or brutally tortured to death. "The slaughter of Irishmen," remarks one eighteenth-century historian, "was looked upon as literally the slaughter of wild beasts" (see Lecky). In the early seventeenth century, under James I, the Irish were removed from the fertile lands in the Northern Province of Ulster to make room for a new group of English and Scottish settlers (see Curl). But in 1641, the Irish Catholics of Ulster fought back (see Fitzpatrick, Perceveal-Maxwell). This Rising is remembered, even today, as "the great Popish massacre." Thousands of Protestant settlers—men, women and children—were brutally murdered. By the mid-1640s, the English Civil War was raging across the Irish Sea between Royalists loyal to Charles I and Parliamentarians, who were gradually gaining the upper-hand. This too was bad news for the Irish, who, after the Rising of 1641, had proclaimed themselves the enemies of the dominantly Puritan Parliament in founding the Confederacy of Kilkenny (1642). The Confederacy believed that King Charles, whose wife was Catholic, would reward their loyalty by allowing for the freedom of religious practices in Ireland. But on January 30, 1649, just three and a half years before Edmundson's Clearing begins, Charles I was beheaded. "The leaders of the [Parliamentarian] army, and Cromwell in particular, had long re- garded the news from Ireland with disgust. Now that the Civil War was over, they were determined to settle accounts with these turbulent people" (Esson 89). On 15 August 1649, Oliver Cromwell landed in Ireland and was greeted enthusiastically by the Prot- 44 K. Sarah-Jane Murray estants of Dublin. As one historian puts it, "the crowd cheered themselves hoarse" (Essson 102). Words fail to account for the atrocities committed by Cromwell and his men— the notorious "Ironsides"—in the name of God and of the Church. In a letter to the House of Commons after the fall of Drogheda in 1650, Cromwell writes: It has pleased God to bless our endeavor here at Tredah [Drogheda].

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