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 today. As you arrived this afternoon,3 some Irish music was playing in the back- ground. 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 whis- tling "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 deter- mined 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 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, 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]. The enemy were about 3000 strong in the town. [...] I believe we put to the sword the whole number. [...] This hath been a marvelous great mercy. [...] I wish that all honest hearts may give the glory of this to God alone, to whom indeed the praise of this mercy belongs. (Cromwell 464, my emphasis)

In Wexford, three hundred women and children are said to have taken refuge around the cross in the market place, hoping that the sight of the Christian symbol would appease their Puritan assailants. Not one of them was left alive. In the eight months he spent in Ireland, Oliver Cromwell laid the country, and its people, to waste. Act One of The Clearing is set in the autumn of 1652, when the war is coming to an end: only a few pockets of resistance remain. The figures are staggering. In 1641, the population of Ireland was in the neighborhood of 1.5 to 2 million. Between 1641 and 1652, military action alone had resulted in over 100,000 casualties. Famine and disease, closely linked to the war, had raised the death toll to over 600,000. "There's half the country dead," declares Pierce Kinsellagh, an Irish nationalist, in the first scene of Edmundson's play. "Wet creatures, the Irish, wouldn't you agree? Full of tears and rain," the English governor Sturman remarks with cold and utter contempt at the beginning of Act Two. To this, Solomon Winter, an English farmer who has called Ireland his home for nearly thirty years now responds: "They've had plenty to cry about" (Act 2, sc. 1). No words have ever rung so true. By 1652, after "the longest, the most appallingly dreadful and inhumane and the most exhausting war with which Ireland was ever visited" (MacManus 427), the country had been brought to her knees. But the worst, the unimaginable, was yet to come. Conquered by the Iron fist of Oliver Cromwell, the island now lay at the mercy of the new English government. Soon thousands of men, women and children would be cast out of their homes, their lands confiscated by the Commonwealth, and redistributed amongst the English sol- diers who fought for Oliver Cromwell or those who financed the expedition. Boats filled with native Irish would sail to the slave markets of the West Indies; those who remained behind would be sent across the Shannon to the bleak province of Connaught, where there was "not wood enough on which to hang a man, water enough to drown him, nor earth enough to bury him" (MacManus 431-32). The great transplantation— the ethnic cleansing of Ireland—was about to begin. "One can only imagine," remarks a modern historian, "the thousands of tragic individual tales that [lie] behind the stark statistics of people [...] subjected to forcible emigration, transportation or dispos- sessed of their homes and estates" (Coward 146-47). In The Clearing, Helen Edmundson brings those stories to life.4 The Interminable War 45 Two Irreconcilable Poles

At the beginning of Act One, Madeleine is giving birth to a son, "a promis- ing boy" (Act 1, sc. 2). But there is nothing promising about the grim and bleak atmosphere which sets the tone for the entire play. The curtain opens on the woods, in the midst of the night. It is dark and the wind is blowing relentlessly. Wolves howl in the background. "They know it's nothing natural being born in there tonight," Pierce, the rebel, tells Killaine, a young Irish woman: "an Irish mother and an English sire [...] and poison in its veins. It's a mixture to poison any creature" (Act 1, sc. 1). Through these words, we have no difficulty recognizing the forces that fuel the Anglo-Irish conflict and, indeed, most wars: hatred and intolerance. Pierce is para- lyzed by the political conflict that has devastated Ireland during the last ten years. Although he is one of Madeleine's oldest friends (and he cares for her deeply), he cannot accept her marriage to Robert nor the child born of that union. Killaine's voice, in this scene, counterbalances Pierce's: "A little child. With arms and feet and fin- gers." But nothing that she says will release Pierce from the troubling memories and the sentiment of revenge that hold him deeply within their grasp. While "births," "weddings" and "sweet songs" may bring hope to some, Pierce's mind is firmly anchored within the grim and brutal reality of war. "There's half the country dead," he reminds us all. "There's a village not half a day's ride from here where the people are crawling from want of strength and scraping corpses from the soil to eat. There are priests hanging from every post..." For Pierce, to move on with life would be to forget; to forget the deaths of his father and of his brother, and of his countrymen who were killed "by [Robert] and his kind."5 Ironically, as we later learn, Robert never fought for Cromwell, nor did he side with King Charles. Throughout the war, he strove to remain politically neutral. But in seventeenth-century Ireland, there is no place for neutrality. Pierce hates Robert simply because he is an Englishman. And because he is an En- glishman, in Pierce's eyes, Robert personifies the enemy. In his unconditional condemnation of the English and inability to let go of the past, Pierce bears a striking similarity to the English governor, Charles Sturman. Although on the other side of the political divide, Sturman is also ruled by his own memories of the war. "I used to see darkness when I closed my eyes," he tells Solomon who, although English and Protestant, supported King Charles I during the Civil War. "Now I see the flash of a pistol being raised and aimed at me. Strange to think thatyour hand may have held it. It may have been your chest I lunged at first when I drew my sword at Kilkenny. I lunged at first when I drew my sword at Kilkenny. It may have been you who killed my father. Is that not so?" (Act 2, sc. 1). Just as Pierce attributes the death of his father and brother to the fault of Robert "and his kind" (Act 1, sc. 1), Sturman blames Solomon Winter for the death of his father. Pierce and Sturman expe- rience a profound need to blame someone for what has happened to them, and to those they held (and continue to hold) dear. In so doing, the characters reconstitute 46 K. Sarah-Jane Murray scenarios in their head and give human faces to the unidentifiable enemy. Like Helen Edmundson, the characters humanize history. But at the same time, Pierce and Sturman dehumanize the aftermath of the war: they reject those who live among and around them, condemning them without a trial. Solomon Winter and Madeleine's unborn child are identified not as human beings, but as members of a degenerate and dam- nable race. In The Clearing, to borrow the words of Jean-Paul Sartre, "l'enfer, c'est les autres" ("Hell is other people"). It comes as no surprise, therefore, that the governor, like Pierce, also disap- proves of Robert's marriage to Madeleine. "If you met her you would understand," Robert attempts to explain. "Nothing. Believe me," Sturman replies categorically, con- demning Madeleine because she is Irish, and for no other reason. "Should we inte- grate with drones?" he asks Robert, revealing his utter contempt for the inferior Irish race. "You surprise me, Preston" (Act 2, sc. 1). As we now understand, in The Clear- ing, the characters of Pierce and Sturman represent the two opposite and hopelessly irreconcilable extremes of the Anglo-Irish conflict that will continue to plague Ireland for centuries to come.

Robert and Madeleine's Marriage

In this deeply divided world, amidst such a climate of hatred and intolerance, can Madeleine and Robert's marriage survive? In Act One, Robert reveals to Madeleine that he must go to the governor's office in Kildare, in order to investigate the rumor of Cromwell's intent to confiscate lands in Ireland. When he refuses to take her with him on account of the danger, Madeleine asks: "From who? The English would greet you and let us pass and if the Tories rode down from the hills I'd ask after their mothers and they'd ride back again. We could travel safely to the tips of the land" (Act 1, sc. 3). Therein lies the intense irony, and the tragedy, of Madeleine and Robert's situation. In theory, one might expect them to benefit from the support and protection of their fellow countrymen. Instead they are outcasts, perceived as traitors by both sides. (Pierce, for example, accuses Madeleine of "climb[ing] into bed with the enemy" [Act 2, sc. 4].) Thus although Madeleine and Robert have "found each other in the middle of all this" (Act 2, sc. 3), they are marginalized. The world around them admits no place for their relationship, no matter how "deep and watery [a] love" they share, as Killaine puts it (Act 1, sc. 1). This explains why the couple strives to create a safe space, isolated from everything around them, within the confines of the manor house. There, it seems, the world outside is kept at bay and cannot touch them. And indeed, at the end of Act One, their love is strong: they lie together on the stage, wrapped in each other's arms, holding and admiring their newborn son (Act 1, sc. 3).6 But no one is safe from the reaches of the war raging outside. Solomon Winters, Robert's closest friend, angers Governor Sturman and receives a summons to transplant. Robert's own situation is equally precarious: Sturman warns him that only "constant good affection" (Act 2, sc. 1) will save him, Madeleine and their son Ralph from following their neighbors to Connaught. Robert has good reason to be anxious: he has attracted suspicion by marrying an Irish woman. (That act alone, we The Interminable War 47 recall, had once been considered a form of high treason according to the Statutes of Kilkenny.)7 "We need to be more careful," he tells his wife. "It's just too easy for us to be unaware, unaware of the way things are moving" (Act 2, sc. 2). Although Madeleine and Robert agree that they cannot "stop breathing," or living, they are beginning to realize that within a world gone mad, life cannot go on as usual. Robert sets new ground rules in order to protect his family: there will be no speaking Irish, no wandering around the village without an escort, especially not barefoot—proper English ladies wear shoes—and no leaving the house without per- mission. In Cromwellian Ireland, the old rules governing appearance, set down in 1367 by the Statute of Kilkenny, are being reinforced. Looking Irish (wearing Irish clothes, or letting one's hair and beard grow long, as does Solomon Winter), speaking Irish: no such things are tolerated in the world of The Clearing. Thus, the title of the play alludes not only to "clearing" the Irish out of their land in order to make room for new English settlers; it also reminds us that England's long-standing goal throughout the history of the colonization of Ireland has been to "clean" the country and its people up, to "clear out" Irish customs: to "make Ireland British" (see Canny) in every sense of the term. Within this context it is interesting to think about Madeleine's recurring attempts to integrate Robert's world and her jokes about becoming "a proper English lady." This is particularly evident in Act Three, when, in preparing for Christmas, she dresses up in a manner befitting a noble Englishwoman and asks her husband, "I'm playing the lady of the manor, am I convincing?" Throughout the play, Madeleine seems willing to sacrifice part of her Irish identity in order to make the marriage work; yet Robert never makes such a concession at any point of the plot narrative. During Christmas 1653, the couple faces the ultimate crisis: Killaine, Madeleine's closest friend, is taken prisoner by English soldiers while running an errand for Madeleine in the village. Maddy is so consumed and preoccupied by the news of Killaine's disappearance that she ignores her duties as a mother (the baby cries incessantly [Act 3, sc. 5]) and seems incapable of hearing the voice of reason. To go to Sturman means transplantation. To go to Sturman means that Madeleine, Robert and Ralph will lose their home. To go to Sturman means Connaught and Connaught, in all likelihood, means death. "What does it matter where we are, as long as we're together?" demands Maddy, "You and I, Ralph and Killaine?" In this crucial scene, which constitutes the exact midpoint of the five acts of the play, Madeleine and Robert confront each other brutally for the first time on-stage. Neither will accept a compromise. We might be tempted, at first, to deem Robert weak, afraid of Sturman. Yet the audience soon realizes that he too is fighting for something he believes in. While Madeleine cannot conceive of abandoning Killaine, who is like a sister to her, Robert cannot imagine giving up his estate: "I'll tell you what Connaught is. To me. Connaught is unthinkable. This is my land, my house and I will not give it up to go to some Godforsaken corner of this Godforsaken island. It was all my father left me. [...] We will not go to Sturman and we will not make a noise about this" (Act 3, sc. 5). It is easy to point a finger towards Robert and claim that his is not the noble fight, that he chooses land over human life, that he is driven by selfishness. But faced with such choices, 48 K. Sarah-Jane Murray what would we do? If we were to lose our home, our family, and possibly our life, would we sacrifice everything? And for what? In The Clearing, Edmundson pits idealism against realism, actively engaging her audience in the choices and questions faced by her protagonists—choices which, in light of the Second World War and the Nazi occupation of Continental Europe, become eerily universal and timeless. The Clearing offers no resolution to Madeleine and Robert's personal tur- moil; their differences, much like the Anglo-Irish conflict, are not and cannot be re- solved. In many ways, the two protagonists are beginning to embody the two sides of the war. In a climactic scene (Act 3, sc. 6), Madeleine goes to Sturman without fore- warning Robert and seals her family's fate. They will be forced to transplant. In Robert's eyes, her actions undeniably constitute an act of betrayal: "What kind of wife are you?" he asks her when she arrives back at the manor. Without hesitation, Madeleine replies, "an Irish wife." A deep wedge is being driven between the couple. Not only do they see the world differently, Robert and Maddy refuse to accept or even to consider the other's point-of-view. They are becoming more and more like Sturman and Pierce, blinded by the conflict. Driven by the overwhelming desire to save his land and his own life, Robert will ultimately betray Madeleine in the worst imaginable way: he publicly denounces her as an unfit Irish wife, who teaches their son to speak Gaelic, goes to Mass and consorts with Tories (Act 4, sc. 4). Warned by Susanneh Winters of her impending arrest, Madeleine escapes with her child to the hills. What place is there, then, in the bi-polar world of The Clearing, for a mar- riage between an Irish girl and an English gentleman? Helen Edmundson's answer seems to be as grim as the historical facts upon which her play is based: none. "How have we arrived here?" the audience asks, unable to prevent the whirlwind unfolding before their very eyes on the stage. What has happened to the joyful and carefree couple we once knew? Robert and Madeleine have chosen opposite sides in the conflict they tried to ignore for so long; they live now in different and opposing worlds. Madeleine, reunited with Pierce Kinsellagh, fights with the Tories; Robert works for Sturman. Madeleine and Robert's marriage does not, and cannot, survive. When they meet for the last time on the stage, face-to-face, we realize that all hope for any future they might once have had together is gone. "Madeleine Preston? Are you there?" Robert asks, as he enters a clearing in the wood. The answer comes from the opposite side of the stage: "My name is Maddy O'Hart." Maddy has reclaimed her Irish and maiden names. In so doing, she rejects her former union to Robert and distances herself from him now as much as possible. Nothing is left between them; even their son Ralph is dead. There was no place for him in this word. "It is over. He is dead. [...] He came and saw the way things were and went away again" (Act 5, sc. 1). Ralph does not die of "poison in his veins," but of the poison in the world around him. At the end of The Clearing, the characters have nowhere to go; they have lost everything.8 Standing firmly on opposite sides of the stage, Maddy and Robert's personal conflict has been absorbed into the war that will continue in Ireland for the next three hundred and fifty years.9 Outside of the forest clearing, just beyond the audience's gaze, the English forces and the rebels patiently await a signal. Once lovers, the Irish woman and Englishman now stand like enemy captains, in front of The Interminable War 49 their troops, preparing for the final battle. The lights go out, and a hundred guns are cocked in the night. So what happens now? What has been achieved? "There's half the country dead," Pierce told us at the very beginning of the play. In the final scene, not much has changed; although there are certainly a few more dead bodies to add to the death toll. But where do we, the audience, stand? Perhaps some of us have sided with Maddy, unable to forgive Robert for betraying his wife. Others may sympathize with Robert because he did what he felt he had to do, for himself and for his son. A few will realize what only Solomon Winter seems able to see: in the end, no-one is to blame. Madeleine and Robert, like countless others, are just "poor creatures. It's a terrible world to be adrift in" (Act 4, sc. 7). Edmundson's Clearing is a complex work. The present discussion, limited by considerations of time and space, has not exhausted its possibilities. In the words of Chris Craigin Day, director of the Baylor University production of The Clearing, "while it's set in a unique time period, the truths presented in this play are universal: How can we live peacefully and comfortably when the world around us is full of terror and suffering? What would we do if everything we loved was taken from us?" Indeed, what decisions would we make? As audience members, we are faced with one such decision when the play ends. We are in a position to do precisely what none of the characters were ever able to do: we can walk away. In fact, as we leave the theatre and go back out into the twenty-first century world, we are forced to do just that, literally. We leave the world of The Clearing and of seventeenth-century Ireland behind us. But this does not mean that we forget. Rather, in understanding the past, we are now ready to break free of the cycle of violence and look towards the future, full of hope. For while The Clearing is an historical play, it is also a play about here and now. Only after the old fights are put to rest does Ireland truly stand a chance for peace. (Remember the old man on the Falls Road in Belfast? Doesn't he remind you of Pierce Kinsellagh, unable to let go of the past?) In Ireland today—and this lesson applies universally, I think, to any community divided by conflict—we must achieve what Madeleine and Robert could not. We must "hold [each other] by the hand and walk forward [...] to take our lives," focusing on what unites us instead of the profound divisions that attempt to drive us apart. The time has come, Helen Edmundson suggests, for change. The time has come to write new lyrics for those old rebel songs. Notes 1. The Clearing was first performed at the Bush Theatre, London. It was joint winner of the John Whiting Award.

2. I am grateful to Chris Cragin Day for introducing me to Edmundson's fascinating and inspiring work.

3. This lecture was originally presented as part of the Baylor Theatre Lecture Series during the Fall of 2004. Although certain revisions have been made in preparation for 50 K. Sarah-Jane Murray publication,I have made an effort to preserve the original format of the lecture, as well as its oral quality, at the request of the editor.

4. At this point in the lecture, the actors performed Act 1, sc. 1 of The Clearing.

5. "When I walk into a room," he later tells Maddy, "I have my father here, and my brother here. When I am asked a question, I hear their voices, loud in my ear before I answer. My life belongs to them and to my country, not to me" (Act 2, sc. 4).

6. In her staging of The Clearing, Chris Craigin Day chose to depict the characters lying on the stage, holding Ralph in their arms, instead of standing around the cradle (as suggested by Edmundson).

7. In 1651 warned the English troops against marrying papists: "any officer who marries any such shall hereby be held incapable of command or trust in this army" (see Esson 178).

8. "Everything I thought I knew is gone. Everything I held to," exclaims Maddy at the end of Act Four. To this, Robert's broken voice responds in the final scene of the play, "What have I lost? What have I lost?"

9. As Carolyn Roark has remarked, during our conversations about The Clearing, it would be interesting-and effective-to stage this final scene in twentieth-century dress in order to suggest the modernity of the seventeenth-century setting. Works Cited Primary Sources Bloody Newes from Ireland, or the barbarous crueltie by papists used in that kingdome by putting men to the sword, deflouring women... and cruelly murdering them. London, 1641.

Cromwell, Oliver. The Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell with Elucidations by Thomas Carlyle. Ed. S. C. Lomas. 3 vols. New York: Putnam, 1904.

Edmundson, Helen. The Clearing. With a historical note by Peter B. Ellis. London: Nick Hern, 1994.

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Lecky, W.E.H. A History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century. 5 vols. London, 1892. The Interminable War 51

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Canny, N. Making Ireland British 1550-1650. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000.

Coward, Barry. The Cromwellian Protectorate. New Frontiers in History. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2002

Curl, J.S. The Londonderry Plantation 1609-1914. Chichester: Phillimore & Co., 1986.

Ellis, Peter B. Hell or Connaught: The Cromwellian Colonization of Ireland 1652- 1660. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1975.

Esson, Denis Main Ross. The Curse of Cromwell; A History of the Ironside Conquest of Ireland 1649-53. Totowa NJ: Rowan and Littlefield, 1971.

Fitzpatrick, Thomas. The Bloody Bridge and Other Papers Relating to the Insurrection of 1641. 1903. New York: Kennikat, 1970.

MacManus, Seumas. The Story of the Irish Race. A Popular History of Ireland. Revised Edition. Old Saybrook, CT: Konecky & Konecky, 1921.

Perceveal-Maxwell, M. "The Ulster Rising of 1641 and the Depositions." Irish Historical Studies 21 (1987), 144-67.

Tanner, Marcus. Ireland's Holy War. The Struggle for a Nation's Soul, 1500-2000. New Haven: Yale UP, 2001.