View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Lehigh University: Lehigh Preserve Lehigh University Lehigh Preserve Theses and Dissertations 2014 From the Political to the Personal:Interrogation, Imprisonment, and Sanction In the Prison Drama of Seamus Byrne and Brendan Behan Charles F. French Lehigh University Follow this and additional works at: http://preserve.lehigh.edu/etd Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation French, Charles F., "From the Political to the Personal:Interrogation, Imprisonment, and Sanction In the Prison Drama of Seamus Byrne and Brendan Behan" (2014). Theses and Dissertations. Paper 1487. This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by Lehigh Preserve. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Lehigh Preserve. For more information, please contact [email protected]. From the Political to the Personal: Interrogation, Imprisonment, and Sanction In the Prison Drama of Seamus Byrne and Brendan Behan. by Charles F. French A Dissertation Presented to the Graduate and Research Committee of Lehigh University in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Lehigh University May 2014 © 2014 Copyright Charles F. French ii Approved and recommended for acceptance as a dissertation in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Charles French From the Political to the Personal: Interrogation, Imprisonment, and Sanction In the Prison Drama of Seamus Byrne and Brendan Behan. Dissertation Director Professor Elizabeth Fifer Approved Date Committee Members: Professor Elizabeth Fifer Professor Ed Lotto Professor Amardeep Singh Professor Pam Pepper (Name of Committee Member) iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS There are several people to whom I must give my thanks for assistance and guidance in the writing of this project. Dr. Elizabeth Fifer, Dr. Ed Lotto, Dr. Deep Singh, and Professor Pepper all provided deep guidance and valuable feedback without which, I could not have completed this work. To all, I give my thanks. To Dr. McKnight of DeSales University, I give thanks for the translation help which you provided in working with Irish Gaelic. To Vivy Steele and Mary Ann Haller, without your ongoing support, I would not have been able to complete this project. To Dr. Dawn Keetley, thank you for your support and encouragement. To my wife, Liz, you are my guiding light, my love, and my muse—for all this and much more, I thank you. This work is dedicated to you. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Chronology of Irish History vi Abstract 1 Introduction 2 Chapter One 16 Design For A Headstone: Religion/Politics,Understanding/Confusion, & Innocence/Guilt Chapter Two 92 The Quare Fellow: Alienation, Absurdity, Heteroglossia, Imprisonment, the Carnivalesque, and Execution Chapter Three 158 Carnivalesque, Heteroglossia, Syncretic Structure, Audience Implication, and Satire within the context of Imprisonment, Interrogation and Sanction in The Hostage Conclusion 222 Works Cited 230 Notes 240 Vita 252 v Chronology of Irish History 432 A.D. St. Patrick 1171 Henry II invades and conquers Ireland. 1845-1848 The Great Famine ~1900-~1926 Irish Literary Renaissance 1904 Seamus Byrne is born 1918 Easter Uprising 1919-1921 Irish War of Independence 1922-1923 Irish Civil War 1923 Brendan Behan is born. 1949 The Republic of Ireland is established 1950 Bryne, Seamus. Design For A Headstone 1954 Behan, Brendan. The Quare Fellow. 1958. Behan, Brendan. The Hostage. 1964 Brendan Behan dies. 1968 Seamus Byrne dies. vi ABSTRACT In my dissertation, I examine the multi-leveled metaphor of interrogation, imprisonment, and sanction in the 1950s Irish prison dramas of Seamus Byrne Design For A Headstone and Brendan Behan’s The Quare Fellow and The Hostage. In these plays, I explore the development of that metaphor and how it relates directly to the prison situation in the Republic of Ireland in the 1950s. During that revolutionary, socially, and politically stagnant decade in Ireland, these two playwrights examine the way that the Irish government adopted similar tactics in its treatment of prisoners as had England when it had ruled the island. Not only does a post-colonial subaltern circumstance exist in the legal and carceral realm, but also these plays show a connection of the Church and state and the implications of such a society on its penal system. In Chapter One, I examine Seamus Byrne’s Design For A Headstone. I argue that it is in the naturalistic, representational tradition of Ibsen and that through this direct portrayal of prison life, Byrne captures the irony of life and death struggles within a penal system. I argue that this play is important in the Irish canon of drama, even though Byrne is essentially a forgotten playwright. In Chapters Two and Three, I examine Brendan Behan’s The Quare Fellow and The Hostage. I explicate Behan’s movement away from representationalism to a form more closely resembling theater of the absurd. In The Quare Fellow he makes subtle movement away from realism, and in The Hostage plunges into a fluid and abstract form. In these plays, Behan satirizes the Irish government as well as that I.R.A. 1 INTRODUCTION “Tir gan teanga, tir gan anum.” (A land without a language is a land without a soul.) -- Irish saying. “But sure, thanks to God, the Free State didn’t change anything more than the badge on the warders’ caps.” -- Brendan Behan The Quare Fellow The contemporary world is often a dangerous place in which wars are fought almost without interruption, genocide is committed without significant interference or outrage from the community of nations, and people, in staggering numbers, are imprisoned in many countries, often for political reasons. While some inmates are incarcerated as criminals of a particular society that views jails as the simple and pervasive solution to complex social problems, all too often many people are jailed as political prisoners, or as Amnesty International calls them, “prisoners of conscience—that is, people imprisoned solely because of their beliefs, sex, ethnic origin, language, or religion” (6). It is a salient, disturbing, and informing fact of the twentieth century that an extraordinary number of people are in prisons throughout the world, with many awaiting execution. Upheavals, both social and political, abound throughout the world, and in some countries, art reflects that turmoil. In Ireland political violence has been constanti. In Ireland, a nation with an approximately eight hundred year span of subjugation to England, a relatively recent history of achieved independence, a civil war in the North that is currently under a shaky, but hopeful, truce, and economic despair for most of its existence replaced by an all too brief period of economic prosperity, its drama illustrates and engages that national strife. 2 While the subjugation of Ireland to Britain is centuries old and has influenced the drama of Ireland, ranging in concern from the Famine to the Troubles, I focus my study on Irish drama during the decade of the 1950s. The Irish nature, imbued with words and drama, moves both ways in influence: from the society to theatre and from theatre to society. Bill McDonnell, in Theatres of the Troubles: Theatre, Resistance And Liberation In Ireland, speaks of this connection: “Before it was enacted the 1916 Easter Rising in Ireland was first imagined, in poetry, prose and, above all, in drama. Declan Kiberd writes that ‘no previous Irish insurrection had been imagined in such avowedly theatrical terms.”ii (3) The Irish dramatic awareness, heightened by the Irish Renaissance which was still occurring, imbued the learned leaders of the uprising with a sense of drama and audience as they used the post office on O’Connell Street as their staging area. They saw all of Ireland as their audience, indeed, perhaps the entire world. Irish Literature, as a whole, is political. Heinz Kosok, in “Doomed Volunteers: Two Great Political Plays From Ireland” quotes Frank O’ Connoriii who says “I know no other literature so closely connected to the immediate reality of Politics” (77). In the broader overview, Irish Literature is intimately connected in a myriad of ways with politics. Irish drama, in particular, is the most immediate of that political expression. Dawn Duncan, in Postcolonial Theory in Irish Drama From 1800-2000, speaks to that immediate connection and argues that drama is the form most useful in that theoretic discussion (1).iv I suggest drama is the literary form most useful in Irish political expression. Irish dramav, especially in the 20th century, often deals with political turmoil, sometimes expressed as internal or personal strife. It often uses prison as a setting as well as the actions of interrogation and sanction within that drama, creating a dramatic sub-genre of 3 the larger genre within Irish political theater. The actions of interrogation and sanction, often including executions, are central parts of this dramatic sub-genre. These actions extend into the world of political imprisonment, including both that of the government and of the revolutionaries, encompassing many aspects of the Irish existence. The stage represents Ireland and its turmoil as a quasi-police state in which people are under threat from the government of the Republic of Ireland, from the United Kingdom in the North of Ireland and from the revolutionaries who oppose the British presence in Northern Ireland. This potential to be captured or arrested, questioned and perhaps tortured, imprisoned and even executed was, unfortunately, an ever-present possibility for many people in Ireland in the second half of the twentieth century, and that threat is reflected in much of its drama.vi The entirety of the nearly 800 years of British domination of Ireland is omnipresent in Irish history, myth, culture, literature, and drama. These plays, set in the politically and culturally static 1950s, represent the continuing experience and consequences of that eight century long domination.