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6 - Living on

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 September 2009

Nicholas Grene
Affiliation:
Trinity College, Dublin
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Summary

The plays in the previous chapter were concerned with reactions to revolution by those disenchanted with its outcome, disillusioned with its failure to deliver a promised metamorphosis, with its protracted aftermath of violence. The viewpoint of the plays was of those who might have hoped for a revolution capable of transforming lives in need of transformation, who saw with dismay the fragmented shards of a nation in place of a dreamed-of unity. But what of the people who had nothing to gain, everything to lose from revolution, the colonial class of past dispossessors who stood to be themselves dispossessed? How did the Ascendancy look when it was no longer in the ascendant, the minority Protestant community in a time when power had been ceded to a Catholic nationalist majority? Yeats's Purgatory, Beckett's All that Fall, provide two very different dramatic versions of that situation. They are both in the most literal sense postcolonial plays, concerned with the period after Independence and the outcome for those who had held power and position before 1922. Purgatory, written in 1938 in Yeats's mood of extreme revulsion from contemporary Irish society, broods on the ruined house that stands for the lost class of the landed Anglo-Irish. In All that Fall, nearly twenty years later, Beckett recreates the suburban Foxrock which he recalled from the 1920s, where a general atmosphere of entropy and decay is associated with the dwindling condition of shabby-genteel Protestantism in an Irish Free State.

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Chapter
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The Politics of Irish Drama
Plays in Context from Boucicault to Friel
, pp. 170 - 193
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2000

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  • Living on
  • Nicholas Grene, Trinity College, Dublin
  • Book: The Politics of Irish Drama
  • Online publication: 22 September 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511486029.008
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  • Living on
  • Nicholas Grene, Trinity College, Dublin
  • Book: The Politics of Irish Drama
  • Online publication: 22 September 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511486029.008
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Living on
  • Nicholas Grene, Trinity College, Dublin
  • Book: The Politics of Irish Drama
  • Online publication: 22 September 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511486029.008
Available formats
×